“You shouldn’t take it so personal,” argued Jenny with respect to the havoc the quake had unleashed. She was dusting herself off at the edge of the crevasse they had just hauled themselves out of, inspecting her various contusions. So casually did she examine herself that you’d have thought she’d only taken a minor pratfall rather than dropped out of the sky into an abyss. But Muni, bruised, abraded, and shaken to the core, couldn’t help but believe that their treetop liaison had touched off the calamitous consequences.
“We should have first to been married,” he proclaimed.
Jenny gaped at him in disbelief. “From where did you get such a big head?” she asked him sharply, while beyond her their panicked neighbors scurried here and there in the altered landscape. “You think it matters to God what you did?”
“But Jenny—” he began, and was silenced by the disappointment he read in her face. When he found his tongue again he submitted glumly, “Your question that the rabbis have debated it for centuries.” Then instantly he was sorry for his betrayal; he was ashamed that the event, its earthshaking proportions notwithstanding, had supplanted the unfathomable delight he’d experienced in their intimacy. Still he couldn’t let go of the guilt he felt for having set the planet awry. Having done so, were they now supposed to bask in some dewy-eyed postcoital glow? Scarcely able to control the trembling of his hand, Muni attempted to dab with his shirttail the sickle-shaped scar on Jenny’s chin, then gave it up. “How can I join with you in the fraylikheit, the gladness, after what we just been through?”
For the oak, in toppling, had not fallen onto level ground. Had that happened, its limbs might have absorbed the shock and the couple, still suspended in its branches, climbed down handily. Instead the entire tree, at the end of its long decline, had pitched top foremost into the chasm that opened beneath it and had caused it to fall over in the first place. Market Square Park had shifted like the head of an awakening colossus and yawned, its acorn-strewn turf developing jaws that gobbled up the oak in all its leafy luxuriance. Then with such gathered velocity had the tree tipped groaning into the hole that it was virtually upended; its broad limbs, thus inverted, were stuffed into the maw of the gaping cavity so that its unearthed roots now protruded above the ground. They approximated in their height and breadth, those tangled roots, the original tree. And perched among them were a company of improbable creatures who, uncomfortable with their sudden exposure, leaped onto the grass and scattered in their various directions.
Muni and Jenny had managed to hold on, riding the bough they clung to all the way down into its subterranean berth. Dazed and disoriented after the tree had come to its jolting rest—wedged upside down in the crevasse—they were amazed to find themselves still in one piece. Then came the task of climbing out of a stygian shaft that may have had no bottom, a chill sepulchral breeze wafting out of its depths. Clambering up the downed tree proved much harder than mounting the oak when it stood erect. The climb was especially difficult for Muni, who lacked Jenny’s agility in the first place and was moreover in shock. But the girl, apparently as skillful at spelunking as at scaling heights, endeavored despite her bum leg to aid her young man at each stage of their ascent. She grabbed him by the wrist, hauled him by the shirt collar and the seat of his pants, even as the earth continued to hiccup and rumble, threatening to dislodge them from every hard-earned purchase. In this way they were able to grapple by degrees along the knotty trunk, sometimes squeezing between the branches and the bedrock laid bare by the eruption. Surfacing at last into an ocher-red evening, they discovered the park transformed, its previously horizontal lawn bunched like a rug. Hysterical neighbors tottered over the rolling paths while dogs stood frozen in their tracks. But instead of the exhilaration the couple might have shared at having survived their ordeal, they exchanged cross words. Then before Muni could speak again and add further fuel to the fire, Jenny put a finger to his lips, took his arm, and led him out of the park.
The neighborhood was practically unrecognizable. Wooden buildings, flimsy to begin with, leaned against each other at precarious angles, if they hadn’t already fallen down. The sturdier structures, jogged from their foundations and further disturbed by mysterious flickerings from within, had shrugged layers of bricks and mortar onto the pavement, their cornices and moldings dropping off like rotten limbs. Most of the citizens had vacated their apartments and fled toward open spaces, but one or two were left hanging from windowsills while friends and relations hopped about underneath them with open arms. Taking in the scene from the raised sidewalk in front of Schloss’s Grocery, Jenny and Muni squeezed each other’s hands. Chimneys had collapsed and gas mains burst, releasing flames that rose from the streets like fumaroles illuminating a sulfur sky. Ruptured pipes spewed boiling water up through the asphalt, the water rushing forth to meet the stream that coursed from the breach that had opened at Catfish Bayou. The alluvial soil around the bayou, loosened by the quake, had slid into the frothing water causing the pond to overflow its banks. A channel was then created that forked around a stalled trolley and merged again to gush into North Main Street. Show racks and furniture were washed from their displays in front of the shops and carried before the flood, which swept all manner of detritus along with it: baby buggies, herring barrels, a loveseat, a bass viol. Rats, possums, and raccoons were also caught up in the surge, paddling desperately to stay afloat. Some had managed to scramble aboard the casket of a yellow fever victim disinterred from the sandy loam around the bayou. The whole floating menagerie poured past Commerce, Winchester, Market, and Exchange Streets, debouching into the basin of Poplar Avenue, where it swerved and cascaded downhill toward the levee.
One notable feature amid the general chaos was the portly Rabbi ben Yahya, flanked by his disciples and sporting his best beaver shtreimel as he waded into the flood. He was blowing discordant tekiot on an undulant ebony ear trumpet weeks before the holidays, while his Hasidim, dodging debris, danced an ecstatic hora in midstream.
Later, legend would have it that the current of the Mississippi River had reversed itself and flowed backward for hours, that tremors could be felt as far away as Nashville and New Orleans. People would claim to have witnessed portents: swarms of passenger pigeons had set upon cornfields devouring acres of crops; apple-green parrots, never before seen in these parts, had populated whole stands of catalpa trees. Cattle lowed in chorus and huddled together, as did other animals—bears, foxes, panthers, coyotes—not known for their camaraderie. The moon was pink; a forest had seen a mass exodus of squirrels; there were glades carpeted in a ropy weave of snakes. But for all these ill-omened sightings, the earthquake was not a far-reaching cataclysm: the rest of the city seemed to have been passed over, the damage confined almost exclusively to the Pinch.
Aftershocks continued to rattle the ground and ring the chimes of nearby churches, their clanging competing with the bells of fire stations all over town. A motorized steam pumper churned upstream into North Main and was briefly amphibious before becoming swamped. Firemen in steel helmets leaped into the waist-deep water and spread a net beneath the rotund Mrs. Gruber, who dropped from her fire escape like an overfed baby from the beak of a stork. The better part of the fire brigade, however, had been dispatched to the Phoenix Boxing Arena over on Front. That great barn-like structure, which was hosting the long-awaited rematch between Sailor Merkle and Eddie Kid Wolf, was in full conflagration. Its fractured gas lines, unintentionally ignited by an attendee’s cigar, had caused the place to go up like a signal flare. At the first cries of alarm the spectators had abandoned the premises in a stampede that trampled several unfortunates under foot. The heat from the arena’s flames cracked the windows of adjacent buildings, their glass panes breaking with the pff-pff of air rifle reports. In the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand a geyser of mud and brimstone had erupted, and riding its crest (in his short pants and middy blouse) was Benjy the ancient child. From the window of their apartment above Dlugach’s, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, his presumptive parents, leaned out in a vain attempt to rescue the boy.
This was not the world in which Muni and Jenny had initiated their romance. Witnessing such pandemonium on the heels of an unconsecrated union left them both feeling woefully unbalanced—which was doubly disturbing in the case of the equilibrist Jenny Bashrig.
“It looks like curtains for the Pinch,” she concluded, and when her companion didn’t catch the expression, offered a sad “Kaput.”
For reasons he couldn’t identify, Muni resented her assessment. “So this is by you wishful thinking?” he wondered.
Jenny narrowed her eyes like gun ports but did not answer. Then they agreed that it was anyway time they should try to check on their people.
They made their way toward the river bluff, whose higher ground they’d been told the displaced population had retreated to, but along the way found themselves fighting a current of pedestrians headed in the opposite direction. The planet had not yet ceased its rumblings and already their neighbors were returning whence they’d fled. If they couldn’t reclaim their tenements, whose listing walls and fallen masonry the police had cordoned off, then they would at least reassemble within the ghetto’s Sabbath boundaries. Jenny and Muni about-faced with the crowd as it forded the torrent of North Main Street to regroup in the previously evacuated Market Square Park. Some, having salvaged oil lamps, groceries, and feather beds from their apartments, began claiming family-sized parcels of lawn. The favored spots were those closest to the crater from which sprouted the monstrous network of roots; because upright or topsy-turvy, the tree was still the focal point of the park that had so often served as a neighborhood dormitory. Where else should they take refuge on such a night?
Under a flapping marquee an advance guard of uniformed foot soldiers from the Salvation Army was already ladling soup, but a dispute among the local rabbis as to whether the stuff was trayf discouraged their congregants from partaking. The issue was anyway moot, since the refugees much preferred the day-old bagels the Ridblatts had begun to distribute. The butcher Makowsky, still wearing his blood-stained apron, passed out slices of pickled beef tongue, while Mr. and Mrs. Rosen were uncommonly generous with their Danishes. Children gamboled among the scattered lanterns like so many Jack-Be-Nimbles hurtling fairy lights, their parents greeting one another like long-lost relations. Despite their sudden grievously reduced circumstances, the mood of those gathered in the park bordered on festive.
With the exception of the Padauers’ doddering child, who’d sustained second-degree burns from the fountain of sludge, and Mrs. Gruber, who broke a hip after falling through the firemen’s net—other than them and the gentiles crushed at the boxing arena and the blacksmith Tarnopol, rumored to have been swallowed by quicksand at the bayou—all of North Main Street and its immediate environs looked to be present and accounted for. Miraculously there were no other casualties to report. Of course a few citizens had superficial injuries that needed attending to, but Doc Seligman and the starchy Miss Reudelhuber, his acting nurse, were sufficient to the task. (A Red Cross chapter would later arrive on the scene to find nothing to do.) Everyone was chatty and ebullient, which may have been merely a symptom of shock, though they seemed to have swapped their earlier dread for the hum of collective unconstraint. One and all behaved like passengers washed up on an island after a shipwreck, stunned but thankful to be still among the living.
Sam Alabaster’s doting wife surrounded him with cushions like a pasha and elevated his gouty leg on an ottoman, while he assured her, “In heaven you will be my footstool.” Their kids, having sprinted up and down a wavy patch of turf until they were seasick, upchucked in concert over the edge of the crevasse. Mrs. Alabaster shepherded them away from the precipice, only to find her husband risen from his bivouac and hobbling forward in his dressing gown to peer into the pit as well. As his wife drew him back from the brink, he was replaced by Mr. Bluestein, who’d toddled up in his nightshirt holding a candle like a ghetto Diogenes. He squinted down the long shaft of the inverted oak, which disappeared in darkness, and remarked to the Widow Teitelbaum standing next to him, “Maybe is now rightside-up, the tree, and it’s we are heads over heels.” It was an uncharacteristic remark from such a sober-minded man, but the widow, embracing her rescued gramophone, nevertheless nodded reflectively in accord. So did Nutty Iskowitz and his property, the palooka Eddie Kid Wolf, saved by the catastrophe from having been KO’d by Sailor Merkle once again. He was still wearing his shot-silk trunks and flowing robe, whose hem some prankish kids carried like a train. Mr. Sebranig had also advanced to the lip of the chasm, where he toyed with his fleshly wife, the two of them executing a light-footed foxtrot toward and away from the magnetic hole. They were accompanied by the bleating of the deaf-aid shofar from the Hasidic camp. Tired of blowing it, Rabbi ben Yahya had ceded the task to a follower. The shofar was dolefully complemented by the strings of Asbestos’s fiddle, though the fiddler himself was nowhere to be seen.
Following his bittersweet parting from Jenny, Muni located his aunt and uncle, who were also among those standing at the rim of the abyss. After a warm reunion, at least on the part of his uncle—his aunt Katie only listlessly participating—Pinchas wasted no time in informing his nephew that, appearances aside, this was not a natural disaster.
“They did it,” he declared, pointing in the direction of the clustered Hasids. “The knucklehead Shpinkers, they finally did it.”
“Did what, Uncle?”
“They engineered from heaven and earth the nuptials.”
“Nupshuls?” Muni understood the word if not its context. How did that old Talmudic adage go? “The world is a wedding.” Funny that the word wedding should have had so little resonance for him till now.
“From heaven and earth,” repeated Pinchas, lifting and inclining his chin toward each destination. “Or if not heaven, then sitra achra, what they call the Other Side. Now we got with the aftermath to contend.” But although he didn’t sound thrilled by this monumental turn of events, neither did Pinchas, for all his disquiet, seem unduly alarmed. While for his part Muni was relieved to hear that his responsibility for what had happened was shared by others.
It was already getting on toward morning, and the North Main Streeters, wilting from a surfeit of excitement, had settled down on their respective plots of ground to catch some winks. The sky was already beginning to brighten from indigo to salmon-pink, like the interior of an abalone shell, but the park was still relatively cool. People were strewn about on pallets as if they’d been haphazardly deposited there by the recent upheaval, though the prevailing attitude remained that of survivors rather than victims. Having shrugged his suspenders from his shoulders, Muni too lay back in the soft grass. He cradled his head in his intertwined fingers, giving ear to the earth’s increasingly infrequent eructations, like belches after a hearty meal. Like his neighbors Muni felt a certain satisfaction at having endured such a major tumult, though for him the experience had broader implications than tonight’s big event. He realized that, during all his time in America, he’d neglected to celebrate the staggering fact that he was still alive: not even his ardor for Jenny had roused him to that.
Jenny. She was bedded down somewhere nearby, he assumed, and while the very idea of her stirred in his belly a maelstrom of emotions, he reminded himself that she was not an idea but a girl. He thought he could smell the lilac-and-kosher-dill scent of her on the breeze, which lulled him; the park had become an inviolable zone of tranquility. Then even as he entertained the notion that he must have been spared for a reason, Muni imagined how Jenny would tease him for the thought. “Where’d you get such a big head?” he wondered, chuckling aloud as he tucked himself comfortably under a patchwork of dreams.
He awoke minutes (or was it hours?) later to muggy sunshine, refreshed but somewhat disconcerted upon finding that his pocket watch had stopped. It was a recent purchase, a coin-silver hunting watch that Novak the pawnbroker claimed had a sixteen-jewel movement and would last till Messiah arrived. Muni had thought it might last until he could afford a better one. Then he observed that the walleyed Mr. Shapiro, ensconced on a crazy quilt a few yards away, was looking befuddled as he presented the open face of his watch to his equally puzzled wife. And Sam Alabaster was shaking the gunmetal case of his own moon calendar watch as if time could be bullied back into motion.
“Maybe they don’t remember to wind them up,” ventured Pinchas from his dew-drenched blanket; and winding the stem of his turnip with a show of confidence, he then began thumping it with his knuckles when the hands refused to move. Comparing watches, nephew and uncle noted that both had stopped at 7:36, which was approximately the time the temblors had begun the night before.
All about them the North Main Streeters were rising from their improvised bedding to greet the new day. They swiveled their heads like periscopes as if to get their bearings, orienting themselves by the compass points of familiar faces. Over there, as lean as the lamppost beneath which he swayed, was the pious bootlegger Lazar der Royte at his morning prayers. The pursy Mrs. Padauer shared a park bench with her weak-chinned husband in his felt crusher hat; sandwiched between them was their aged tyke, knee pants bulging from the diaper-thick bandages that swaddled his scalded tush. There was the merchant Pinchas Pin and his vinegary wife, and a headless figure molded from clay, with stumps in place of arms and legs, that came trundling precipitously along the gravel path. It tumbled over railings and flailed in its attempt to pick itself up, only to plunge thereafter, to the delight of all who saw, straight into a bench or shrub.
Muni turned to his uncle, the answer man: “Vos iz?” And Pinchas, rolling his eyes: “It’s the golem that he didn’t finish making it, the rebbe.”
The laughter of their neighbors pervading the air seemed to clear it of the early morning haze. Many rubbed their eyes with the heels of their hands, trying to square the world they were looking at with the one they had woke to the day before. The difference wasn’t so much that North Main Street was under water, the flood having submerged their businesses and made tributaries of the side streets. That much they could observe from the park, which was still above sea level. But the real difference was the way the devastated district had everything and nothing in common with the Pinch. The atmosphere was somehow tonic despite the heat, every object sharply defined but with a michutz, a little something extra. The roots of the upended tree writhed like tentacles; they waved like the batons of a hundred concert conductors; the fire plug in front of the stucco synagogue spun like a bobbin. The blackbirds that perched on the telegraph wires were notes in a musical staff whose melody even the most tone-deaf could read.
Watching his neighbors in the act of evaluating their situation, Pinchas offered this studied aside to his nephew: “I think we don’t see things as they are so much as we see them as we are.” Muni tried to digest the statement, whatever it meant, though it clearly did nothing to alleviate Katie’s sour mood, and it frankly failed to rise to the level of the general intoxication to which Muni himself had succumbed.
People were performing their ablutions in the granite fountain, empty for years but filled now with a hot ground water that spurted up in sporadic jets through a crack. Children were using the fountain for a sailboat basin, their fleet of twigs rehearsing in miniature the flotilla their parents were beginning to launch for the purpose of reaching their front doors. For no sooner had they freshened themselves after their open-air nap, itself invigorating, than the North Main Streeters set out to reclaim their abodes. In this, they flew in the face of the injunctions the civic authorities had put in place overnight. There were sawhorse barriers, fire and police ordinances plastered to every doorpost declaring their habitations unsafe. The papers promised disaster relief: a distribution center would be established and necessities dispensed, arrangements made for temporary housing until reconstruction could render the tenements habitable again. But so far no such services had materialized. The city of Memphis made all the appropriate noises: the authorities intended to behave responsibly toward their citizens of Hebrew extraction. But other than the couple of independent organizations that had already come and gone, noise was what the city delivered; emergency measures seemed to have evaporated with the dew. And while the community didn’t like to appear ungrateful, they nevertheless dismissed the municipal response.
They dismissed the prohibitions that would have kept them from their homes, and set out to take up residence again above their flooded shops. No one interfered with them; having fulfilled their duty toward the ghetto, at least in print, the municipality under the auspices of Mayor Crump (called, for his ruddy complexion, the Red Snapper) washed its hands of North Main Street. After all, the city proper was perfectly intact; the banks, theaters, and retail stores that composed the heart of downtown Memphis were unharmed by the misfortune that had visited the Pinch. That district had always been a flyblown excrescence anyway. Moreover, there seemed a common reluctance on the part of outsiders to enter the self-styled Pale north of Poplar Avenue. It was as if, since yesterday, an invisible wall had been erected; and after giving short shrift to the disturbance and boasting of the city’s unstinting aid efforts, the local press for the most part forgot about the quake.
The water was not so deep that they couldn’t have waded, but Muni’s uncle, in order to spare his wife the immersion, ferried her along with their nephew back to North Main from the boat launch at Market Square Park. They held a course against the current toward Pin’s General Merchandise by means of a flat-bottomed pirogue hauled up for a price from the levee. Their neighbors employed similar conveyances, navigating skiffs, dories, a jury-rigged raft buoyed on oil drum pontoons, which they paddled with tea trays, dustpans, and the occasional oar. Most of the vessels had been bought for peanuts or procured in exchange for stopped pocket watches from the fisherfolk down at the Happy Hollow shantytown. They were hauled up the bluff to the park by energetic North Main Streeters who then shoved them off in a body, like an armada setting sail on a voyage of conquest.
The Pins arrived at the sunken portals of their store to find that its front doors had made an ineffective floodgate. They disembarked into waist-deep water, Pinchas lifting his wife in his arms, though she complained all the while that she was capable of managing on her own. Their nephew yanked open one of the glass-paned double doors, admitting a surge that instantly increased the level of the water inside. A flotsam of wallowing fabrics, fly swatters, toy soldiers, hampers, and fans bobbed all about them. Rolling hogsheads spilled straw and china cruets onto the surface of the mercantile soup. Submersed to the navel in that sloppy element, Muni looked toward his uncle to gauge his reaction, and saw that Pinchas had gone ghostly pale. He wasn’t taking stock of the shambles of his business, however, but peering over the spectacles that had slipped to the tip of his nose, he was studying the tight features of his wife’s faded face. He was cursing himself for having previously failed to notice her frailty, realizing upon lifting her above the risen water that she now weighed little more than her bones.
“Uncle?” said Muni, too distracted by the aquatic disorder to detect the particular nature of his uncle’s dismay. Unanswering, Pinchas was already sloshing through the swill toward the stairs at the rear of the shop, up which he carried his querulous bride.
Muni forged his way back through the cracked-open door and once again took in the ruined Pinch. It was a tragedy, was it not? But for the life of him he couldn’t see it that way. From Muni’s saturated vantage the world floated inside and out, and whatever wasn’t waterlogged rode the surface of the flooded neighborhood like the buoyant sensations that floated free in his breast and skull.
Over the gunwales of their ad hoc argosy the families were assessing their sunken shops and homes. Fathers briefly left their wives and children to wade into their businesses and inspect the losses, only to slosh back out—heads shaking—to the comparative serenity of the boats. The pharmacist Blen sat in a rocking dinghy beside his pie-faced wife, gazing at the wreckage of his drugstore. The window had given way, allowing the water to liberate the large glass show globes, which in turn had discolored the flood with their red and green dyes. Mr. and Mrs. Elster in their leaky cockleshell watched a parlor suite (swarming with cats) that had escaped their discount emporium drifting by. Mose Dlugach and his shiftless sons, Sam Alabaster and his brood in their half-submerged skiff, old Ephraim Schneour wearing his bowler at an unusually rakish angle—all appraised their damaged livelihoods and weighed their options. Muni could hear their voices carrying across the narrows.
Sam Alabaster: “Commercial insurance we got, but only we paid for theft and fire, no?”
Mendel Blen: “That way, God forbid, we could get from our parnosseh a little something back in hard times.”
Sam: “Tahkeh, but who didn’t waive the clause that included coverage for floods?”
Nobody didn’t. The Mississippi River, for all the deluges it had wrought north and south of the city, could never climb the bluff to their doorsteps—that was the conventional wisdom. And as for earthquakes, who ever heard of such a thing in this part of the world? Nearly everyone, as it turned out, except the residents of the Pinch, as the New Madrid fault line upon which the city of Memphis sat rivaled the most fretful on earth.
Afloat in their knocking vessels, the neighbors frowned in fitting apprehension, but no one was fooled; the frowns were forced. The harbor they were anchored in was an eminently safe one. So what if their buildings were crippled, some with toppled walls exposing entire cross sections of interior—such as the one in which an unveiled Widow Teitelbaum could be seen seated in her bath, turning faucets from which no water flowed? There was no gas and the coal cellars were swamped, nor was there any unspoiled meat or produce to be had in the inundated groceries and butcher shops. But never mind, a new dispensation was afoot. The feeling was infectious: they were participants in a grand regatta, and while ordinary life might be turned on its noodle—“mit kop arop,” as the old folks said—the transformation of their neighborhood was an astronomically bracing sea change.
All heads turned to watch a downed sycamore sailing past at a respectable clip. It was straddled by Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya’s band of fanatics making for their Commerce Avenue shtibl. The rabbi himself, seated like a bosun astride the roots at the stern, exhorted his disciples manning brick trowels to put their backs into it. No sooner had they passed than a thickset creature caked in mud and brandishing a rod and reel came splashing along the street from the northern end. Children squealed: how many golems had the quake set free? But their parents assured them that this one was only the blacksmith Tarnopol emerged from the quicksand around Catfish Bayou.
All that afternoon and into the evening the Pinch was a hive of industry to which Muni gladly lent a hand. Boats sailed into the inlet at Auction Street, where the farmers sold live chickens and potatoes by the bushel in the muddy wagonyard; then laden with fresh cargo, the boats sailed back to the busy port of North Main. A bucket brigade transferred water from a working pump above a horse trough in front of the No. 7 firehouse. Wriggling fish were snatched from the ooze of the largely drained bayou and brought to Mr. Saccharin and his minions to be pickled and smoked. In lieu of coal the wood from fallen lintels and windowsills was broken up and fed to cookstoves cobwebbed in soot. The population organized by lantern light, like a squadron of will-o’-the-wisps, a kind of triage with regard to the crooked structures themselves. With whipsaws donated by Hekkie’s Hardware they cut down the cottonwoods growing in the backyards and alleys, some of whose trunks were already split from the quake. They hewed the scrub locusts that the tremors had caused to twine like cadeucei. With them they boarded up and buttressed the walls of the canted buildings, left them leaning on crutches like wounded soldiers.
Though working after dark had its hazardous element, the neighbors were not fearful in the least. For one thing, they were aware of being aided in some of the riskier tasks by shadowy figures holding ladders and even driving home nails—that is, when those same bantam creatures weren’t removing the ladders from under them and hammering their thumbs. They were also aware of an access to unusual energies and, despite their swag bellies and duodenal ulcers, a shared capacity for physical exertion forgotten since their distant youth. In the morning they would review their handiwork and find that it lent the street an extemporaneous aspect, like the crazy town constructed by the legendary fools of Chelm. But tonight they were conscious only of the theatricality of their labors, as if they were at once the perpetrators and spectators of their actions. It was a consciousness they took with them to their beds—which slid along the sloping floors of foundered apartments—where they slept a righteous sleep above the moonlit lagoon.
Having spent himself in strenuous activity along with the others, Muni had also surrendered to a well-earned slumber, though he’d lain awake for hours on his cot. From his off-kilter room over the store he was still able to hear the hammers and saws (though their noise had altogether ceased) and the fiddle. Retiring for the night, he had himself witnessed the fiddler Asbestos emerging from the security of a floating steamer trunk, whose lid sprang open to release a mordant music. Not without a nod to melody, the blind man’s fiddling remained a grave counterpoint to the evening’s chimerical atmosphere. But while it might once have taunted him, tonight Muni thought the music was rather catchy; it bore him up the way it had Jenny in her rope-dancing days. Strange that he’d scarcely thought of the girl during his labors, as he dangled light-headedly from the shaky scaffolding he was helping to erect. Only at the brink of sleep had he recalled that he was a young man in love, dwelling in an extraordinary land. It was a condition he perceived as a memory even as the experience unfolded.
He was awakened by her tapping at what was left of the window sash. Opening his bleary eyes, he rubbed them until he was certain that he saw what he saw: Jenny standing again in midair. Her onyx-black hair was slipping out of its twist, her white cotton shift slightly billowing, her dark eyes possessing depths beyond sounding. But rather than bouncing on a rope, this morning she swayed a bit jerkily from side to side. When Muni had bundled himself in his sheet and shuffled still half-asleep to the window, he saw that her coltish legs appeared to have grown overnight to an inordinate length. There were many things he supposed he would have to get used to in this curious new order.
“Kiss me?” she invited, and though he hesitated an irresolute beat—for when had he waked to such a proposition?—it never occurred to him that he could do other than oblige. Poking his head out the window, Muni tasted her lips, hungrily as it happened, their saltiness reinvigorating the living current between them. Catching his breath, he looked down to see the twin tupelo poles extending from beneath her shift into the sodden alley below. Stilts. Resourceful girl, she must have manufactured them during the night. “Funny thing,” she said, reeling a little herself from the embrace. “It’s a new day but also the same one as yesterday. How can that be?”
Muni nodded at the assertion and knew it was true. That it was also impossible seemed somehow irrelevant. He made a mental note to ask his uncle to explain the phenomenon, as Jenny beckoned him to climb on board. “You nuts?” he wanted to know, which she confirmed. So he asked her not to look (though she did anyway) as he dropped the sheet in order to pull on his shirt and pants over his drawers. Then he clambered gingerly across the jagged window ledge onto the lyre-like curve of Jenny’s back. With his feet he discovered the pegs on which her own bare feet rested and clasped his hands around her firm waist, amazed that such an unprecedented act should feel so natural.
“Shouldn’t we be afraid?” he wondered.
“What’s to be afraid?” Then she took a giant step pretending to stumble, which made Muni yip with fright.
En route she offered him a poppyseed pastry dug from the pocket of her shift, which he scarfed up with gusto though it was stale. All his appetites, it seemed, were wide awake. The street from their tottering elevation had the quality of appearing both authentic and illusory, the familiar buildings in their unplumb incarnations utterly strange. Old North Main Street was at the same time itself and a fanciful stage version of itself, its properties bolstered up and likely to fall apart at any moment. But the players, as they went about the business of attempting to salvage their goods, most of which were unredeemable, appeared unconcerned with the imminent collapse of their shops and homes. Several sailed the coppery lagoon in their makeshift vessels to no particular purpose, all of them clearly in a holiday mood.
The Days of Awe were still weeks away, but the quake and its dramatic aftermath had enforced, for better or worse, an interlude from the ordinary run of things—and there seemed to be the conviction at large in those irrigated streets that time was stalled. Of course there was as yet no real evidence beyond the stopped clocks that such a situation obtained. Yesterday morning had advanced into afternoon, afternoon ebbed into evening, and there was every expectation the same pattern would recur today. In fact, the exquisite clarity of this morning’s robin’s egg sky was the looking-glass image of the day before. It was safe to assume that the world beyond Poplar Avenue persisted as usual, commerce along the river was uninterrupted, and society east of Alabama Street adhered to its seasonal calendar. But the Pinch, no longer landlocked, was quarantined (it was generally agreed) by a species of time that had relinquished its linear progress.
Today (which was Monday?) could also be said to contain other Mondays, and Wednesdays, other years. Uncle Pinchas had early on advised his nephew that time was prone to a certain elasticity in the Pinch, due to the cabalistic meddling of the crackbrained fanatics in their midst. And this morning, as Muni and Jenny tramped on stilts through the altered landscape, they passed into and out of odd patches—beneath the shadow of a bridge ramp that trembled from vehicles passing overhead, past saddled horses tethered at a trough in front of a galleried saloon—that did not conform to the current scene. That scene involved whole families filling striped pillowslips with sand from the boils that had erupted around the bottomless pit in the park; these they piled in front of the shops to make embankments that would confine the lagoon to a canal no wider than the street itself. Some of the sandbags they transported by raft to the bayou to construct a dike across the initial breach. They worked, Muni’s neighbors, with the steadfast diligence of pyramid builders, though their labors seemed also to partake of equal parts make-believe.
“Jenny,” said Muni who needed her compliance, “we’re having fun, no?”
“You,” replied Jenny with feigned irritation, all the while manning her stilts like a natural extension of her legs, minus the limp, “you wouldn’t know fun if it bit your hiney. Anyhow, after a flood doesn’t usually come cholera and dysentery? So how is it we got instead a seagoing jamboree?”
Indeed, some of the neighbors navigating the channel could be heard shouting to one another in half-baked nautical terms. They cursed like sailors as they slung more bags atop the pillowcase parapet, behaving in their newfound swagger as prodigally as their offspring, whose summer vacation from school was now indefinitely extended. Some of the children, having captured the rebbe’s headless golem, were using its hollow corpus as a flotation device, though it continued to show signs of a twitching animation. Others gawked at the play of their reflections in the shop windows, which had acquired irregular features such as halos and donkey heads. In his exuberance Muni took the liberty of nibbling Jenny’s ear, prompting laughter that resulted in a dangerous wobbling. Self-conscious, he looked about to see who might have observed them, though a couple canoodling on stilts above standing water scarcely constituted a special attraction on such a morning.
They had taken a turn around the lagoon and arrived back at the entrance to Pin’s General Merchandise. There Muni slid down the twin poles onto the rampart, picked the splinters from his palms, and waded into the broth that engulfed the store. Above him Jenny abandoned the stilts to step through an upstairs window. Inside, Uncle Pinchas, pants rolled to the knees, was bailing water with a brass cuspidor. He seemed to be making headway, since the previously boggy depth was diminished to a shallow sludge.
“Nu, Uncle,” said Muni, but Pinchas scarcely acknowledged him. He tried again with a jovial Old Country greeting, “Uncle Pinchas, how fares a Yid?”
Pinchas paused in his activity to give his nephew a look through moisture-beaded spectacles. Apparently satisfied that the young man was as addled as the rest of his community, he said with a grim defiance, “How do you think?”
Muni took in the bowed walls and blistered counters already smutted with fungus, the warped glove cases and scrap albums fat with scalloped pages the proprietor was trying to flatten with C-clamps. Few commodities remained unspoiled: the dry goods were drenched, sacks of spuds sending runner-like eyes through their burlap—though (Muni found himself thinking) wasn’t a ravaged business finally incidental in the scheme of things? Why did his uncle seem so resistant to the general levity? Pinchas had exchanged the cuspidor for a box of lumpy corn starch, which he began sprinkling over his dripping inventory as a de-humidifyi ng agent. Muni gently grasped the arm that shook the box. “So, Uncle,” he said, “explain me again what happened.” For hadn’t he always relied on Pinchas to make sense of this singular neighborhood? And perhaps in explaining, his uncle would snap out of his mood.
“What can I tell you?” he said. “The Pinch is the place where things that don’t happen, happen. So maybe what happened, it ain’t exactly takink place.”
Which hardly qualified as an answer. When Muni continued to gaze at him expectantly, Pinchas sighed and said, “Come upstairs.”
Over weak tea at the kitchen table Pinchas gave his nephew a further account of the pernicious kibitzing of Rabbi ben Yahya and his zealots. “The Shpinkers, they don’t know from ruination and revelation the difference. They starve themselves and make their mikvah in ice water; flog themselves bloody and twist like pretzels their joints when they worship. They dress up in French underwear the holy scrolls and pray like demons in heat until what’s above spins out from its axis and collides with below.” He bumped his chafed knuckles together in illustration. “Then comes the cataclyzz: the earth opens and out pours the creatures from superstition, and time don’t flow anymore but sits still like a stagnant sump. This they call mashiach tseyt, Messiah time, which it will herald Messiah himself. Everything is prepared for his coming. That’s what they believe, the meshuggeners.”
“But what do you believe, Uncle?” asked Muni.
Pinchas removed his spectacles, squeezed the hump at the bridge of his nose. “I believe my Katie is ill.”
It was then that Jenny entered from the bedroom damp-eyed and distraught.
“I called in Doc Seligman,” continued Pinchas. “He didn’t even need to look at her; he knows already she’s sick. I’m crying hospital, but the doc says, ‘You tell her; to me she don’t listen.’ Anyway, he says, she’s better off now at home. What she’s got, a hospital can’t cure it.”
Muni asked if his uncle had sought a “second opinion,” a phrase he’d heard bandied about.
“I got already from Seligman a second opinion, and a third.”
It made a kind of cloudy sense that the hospital had been ruled out, now that the Pinch had become an essentially isolated province, but why had Pinchas so readily accepted Katie’s condition? “But Uncle,” his nephew protested, though before he could press the issue further, he was distracted by Jenny, who, standing at his shoulder, had begun softly to sob. Muni turned to her, perplexed, since this drama surrounding his aunt seemed so fundamentally out of tone with the character of a burnished new world.
Still he made a point of visiting his bedridden aunt. Her hair, bleached of its carroty essence, was the gray of rain-washed shingles, her pallid flesh interlaced with blue veins like marble. Her eyes, with their gas-green flame virtually extinguished, were a milky opalescence. Seeming embarrassed by the depredations of her accelerated aging and the cloying odor she exuded, Katie nevertheless rallied the strength to tease him with the neighborhood gossip.
“Nephew and Jenny sitting in a tree,” she intoned, “k-i-s-s …,” the letters dissipating in a throaty aspiration.
Unpleasant as it was, Muni was grateful that she gave him an audience, since almost all others, Pinchas included, were forbidden to enter the sickroom.
“Seligman says Katie is with me a shlecht vayb, a shrew, so that I won’t miss her when she’s gone,” confided Pinchas from the kitchen chair that had become the seat of his distress. “But I know better.”
“What do you know, Uncle?” asked Muni, who could barely stand to linger indoors while outside the people carried on like skylarkers in Eden. He was hardly paying attention when Pinchas replied, “I know that she punishes me.”
This gave his nephew pause. “Beg pardon,” he respectfully submitted, uneasy to find himself gainsaying his uncle, “but isn’t it Aunt Katie that’s the victim?”
“She punishes me,” continued Pinchas, oblivious of Muni’s challenge, “because I’m not anymore with her a man.” It wasn’t a confession that Muni would have invited, but his uncle wasn’t done. “What’s the point if we can’t make together a baby?”
That the couple were well past their childbearing years seemed the least of what was wrong with Pinchas’s argument. “I don’t think that from spite nobody dies,” Muni offered with a great lump in his throat.
“You tell that to my Katie,” called Pinchas, for his nephew, who’d heard all he could bear to, was already halfway down the stairs.
Dr. Seligman came and went with his syringes and gentian blue vials, and Jenny was also much in attendance. She brought herbal infusions from the Widow Teitelbaum and soups from Mrs. Rosen, which the patient seldom touched. (The deli was operating out of the Rosens’ upstairs kitchen, Mrs. Rosen lowering baskets of borscht and sandwiches into the passing boats from her fire escape.) When Pinchas poked his head into the bedroom, however, Katie spat a string of Irish curses until he withdrew, though he hung on in the doorway suffering her abuse like a warm spring shower.
But despite his aunt’s progressive emaciation Muni still couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for her. This, he knew, was unconscionable: she was after all the wife of the man who’d rescued him from affliction, and didn’t he venerate her gentle person as well? Hadn’t they both been in his eyes—that is, until his uncle disabused him—the very model of domestic harmony? But the giddy climate of North Main Street was unfavorable to your common-variety pity; it was an atmosphere that argued against even the remorse you might feel for not feeling pity. And anyway Muni thought his aunt was beautiful in her languishing: wasting away became her like a cameo on an ageless sepulcher.
That’s how things stood in the old neighborhood: nobody and nothing was so base or inessential that they lacked some aspect of the sublime. Every gesture, from scrounging for foodstuffs to caulking rust buckets and emptying water closets with a sieve, seemed to take its place in the grand narrative. Viewing the scuttled street from an upstairs window, Muni would recall the concept of neshomah yeterah, the bonus soul the faithful are granted on Friday nights. He remembered how, back in his childhood cheder in Blod, even their sadistic old melammed would wax rhapsodic when speaking of Shabbos: how the Sabbath was a palace in time whose architecture contained both the immemorial past and the promised future. Now the Pinch seemed to occupy a perpetual Sabbath that encompassed a past as distant as Muni’s childhood and then some. Every action echoed a chiddush nifla (Muni remembered the phrase), some wondrous event.
Every ladder was a type of Jacob’s Ladder; every mired but still spinning bicycle wheel—a rainbow in its spokes—was a version of the wheel Ezekiel saw. The flood was a reprise of the Flood. During sanguine sunsets the canal of North Main Street became the River Sambatyon, beyond which dwelled the lost tribes of Israel. When Tillie Alperin’s little Esther burned her tongue on a hot knish, Isaiah’s lips were seared again by the angel’s lump of coal. Jakie Belz proudly presented his soiled linen as evidence that he’d been visited in the night by the demoness Lilith. Every gas pipe, base burner, and bedpan contained a trapped soul demanding release. Ike Petrofsky complained (or was he boasting?) of having to wade through several past lives in the morning in order to get back to the here and now—“And tomorrow I can step if I want into today.”
Muni supposed he might also get around to recognizing a future that infiltrated the present at every turn, but there was no rush. For the time being he was captivated by current events that were themselves still encrusted with the past, his own and others’. Memories once too painful to revive—of prison and the katorga and the hopeful time before—seemed as if refined into luminous tintypes in the alchemical air. When he’d read them as a child in cheder, the stories of the Torah were converted before his eyes into tangible experience. Now, though he was blindsided by the prospect, Muni’s experience of the Pinch seemed to clamor for a translation back into text. He remembered how the tales from holy writ, conveyed through the medium of Hebrew characters, could filter the grayest shtetl light into a Joseph’s coat of colors; so how much brighter would words make a light that was already resplendent. The neighborhood was tohu v’bohu, a mishmash of stories that needed only some designated scribe to apprehend and record them for all time.
“Somebody ought to write it all down,” Muni told Jenny one evening, when they were huddled together among the Medusa’s hair roots of the inverted oak.
Her reply was a suggestion she would regret till her dying day: “So why don’t you already?”
They had picked up their affair of the heart more or less where they’d left off before the quake. Of course the entire community was now stricken with a kind of pandemic infatuation, a free-floating euphoria that perhaps lent spice to the lovers’ feelings; though a gleeful Muni preferred to think it was the other way around: his passion for Jenny had enlivened the whole neighborhood. But whereas his spirits were practically lighter than air, Jenny, whose medium had been thin air itself, seemed to keep at least one foot on the ground. She almost resented that their affair was nothing special in a place where everything was special, and she worried about Katie Pin. She even admitted to feeling some guilt over being happy while Katie lay at death’s door. “It isn’t nice to be romantic under her nose,” she cautioned, sensing that their amorousness may have served to aggravate Katie’s lamentable state. Muni couldn’t have disagreed more.
“Does her good, I think, to see young people in love,” he insisted, unable to understand Jenny’s reservations.
Then one night in the tree, in a burst of spontaneous sentiment, he’d confessed to a youthful folly.
He was gazing at her barefoot countenance, her slender form in an embroidered smock backlit by a red-orange dusk that caused the twisted roots to do a fair impression of a burning bush. Other couples occupied those wavering boughs as well, flirting with each other more boldly than they’d have dared on dry land, dry land having become a scarce commodity. Above them Muni also caught sight of an ill-shaped little entity in a brass hat, which, when he squinted to sharpen his focus, was gone. A grin wreathed his face as he wondered if all this immoderate gladness was merely a function of his desire for Jenny.
“You know,” he was suddenly moved to confide in her, “I used to make poems.” There was one he remembered—remembered for the first time in an age—about the prophet Samuel in a foul mood after being recalled from death by the Witch of Endor; there was another about the sheydim, the elementals, who wove elflocks into Samson’s beeswaxed hair …
“And now you make what?” mused the girl, tickling his middle with an uplifted toe. “Whoopee?”
But instead of divulging another memory, as her touch had routinely prompted, Muni swatted away her foot like a housefly. “Be for a moment serious,” he scolded, shocked at his own thin-skinned response. But he was not done mulling over his recollection of the poems, which were admittedly callow and immature though not without a certain … he searched for the word.
The girl had screwed up her face and crossed her eyes in a burlesque of seriousness, defusing Muni’s mood. “We are not by you amused,” he pronounced, his peevishness already dissolved into parody.
“Okey-doke,” said Jenny, still playing along, commencing as if to climb down. “Drop me a line when you get a chance.”
“Jenny—” Muni grabbed her wrist to detain her. Maybe this was it, the ideal opportunity to propose to her, but the very thought flooded his head with an excess of emotion that robbed him of speech. The girl slid fluidly from her perch into his arms, as though in pronouncing her name he held an empty garment for her body to slip into. She leaned against him, pinning him to the crotch of a dirt-caked root with the pressure of her small breasts and hips. They had yet to repeat the deed that preceded the quake, when their fused bodies tolled like a clapper in a bell. But now the heat of their contact, for all its urgency, served only to enhance for Muni the delight he took in observing the very rich hours of North Main Street. It was an appallingly pure sensation, the kind that begged to be recorded the way sins and mitzvot are inscribed on the Jewish New Year in the Book of Life; because nothing in experience was real—this was his thunderous conviction—until it was wedded to the word. That was the marriage over which Muni, with Jenny’s blessing, felt a sudden blind compulsion to preside.
“Don’t go away,” he blurted, leaping clear of the abyss to hit the ground running. “I’ll be right back,” he shouted over his shoulder, though he was already out of earshot.
The grand canal of North Main was lit by lanterns, moths, and toy gondolas with guttering candles for masts, with silk tallises and celluloid shirtfronts for sails. The buildings that bordered the water, despite their hobbled condition, assumed such a look of stability that you’d have thought they’d always been so skewed, and the shops were open for business though there was little left to sell. As a result, commerce was more a performance than an actual exchange of goods and services, the citizens like children who played at being entrepreneurs. Only Pin’s General Merchandise, once the flagship enterprise of North Main Street, stood in darkness; for these days Pinchas Pin remained mostly sunk in despondency at the kitchen table. He roused himself only to inquire of his wife’s health from the visiting doctor or to receive the consolations of Jenny Bashrig, who came and went. But even the gloomy store, an aberration in that glimmering neighborhood, had for Muni an air of deepest mystery.
He foraged among the mildewed shelves, poked with matches into shadowed recesses until he found what he was looking for: a chirographic fountain pen with an automatic inkstand and a quire of white octavo stationery. The pen’s tapered handle was split and the paper moldy, its virgin leaves cockled and water-stained but nonetheless sufficient for his purpose. Muni tiptoed up the stairs past the kitchen in order not to disturb his brooding uncle. He could hear Pinchas lamenting aloud and even caught snatches of his blaming himself for Katie’s ailment, for the barrenness of his marriage. And while his uncle’s plaint made no immediate impression, it nevertheless penetrated Muni’s awareness, lodging in some remote corner of his brain from which it might work its way out like a splinter over time.
Muni took the pen and paper into his matchbox room, its only furniture the folding cot and squat deal dresser upon which stood a porcelain ewer and basin. He peeled off a single page from the stack and shoved the rest beneath the slopjar under his cot. From his uncle’s bookshelf in the hallway he selected a substantial volume, the Yiddish translation of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread as it turned out. He sat on his cot, placed the book on his knees, and spread the paper across its smooth cloth binding. Then with a galloping heart Muni took up the inkpen and prepared to begin: he had some vague idea of making notes for future reference, of quickly acquitting himself of his renegade impulse then hurrying back to Jenny; it was after all with her that the real inspiration resided. But he found himself paralyzed.
He hadn’t actually indited anything to paper since the doggerel verse of his yeshiva days, though lack of practice wasn’t the only reason for his hesitation. For one thing, he couldn’t decide what language to write in: his Hebrew was rusty from disuse and he regarded Yiddish as the holy tongue’s poor relation; nor had he yet taken full possession of his host country’s idiom. But even if he were able to choose a vernacular appropriate to his undertaking, what precisely was his subject? Everything he observed was replete with meaning, and he stood ready to make of himself a kind of conduit: the postapocalyptic Pinch would speak through Muni Pinsker as its primary means of expression. But how does one distill everything into a cogent narrative? His uncle, quoting a favorite Russian author, once told him that all happy families are alike, and there was certainly a democracy of elation among the families of North Main. Some were as possessed as Muni, literally so, claiming that the voices of dead folk lately spoke to and through them. But those voices were not wanting for interpreters.
There was also the matter of the time that composition demanded, time that could be better spent in the company of your beloved. But wasn’t there, given its apparent immutability, plenty of time to go around? Still Muni felt that what he contemplated amounted to a betrayal. What had come over him that he’d left his girl dangling alone among that mare’s nest of undulating roots? He should hasten back to her at once and offer his most fervent apologies. “Jenny, sweet kichel, forgive me! Be my bride!” Conjugal fever was anyway in the air, several couples having already succumbed to matrimony since the flood. Hadn’t the hidebound Rabbi Lapidus from the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue just been enlisted to perform a triple wedding? A barge had been outfitted with singing oarsmen and a pavilion-sized canopy for the ceremony. Muni decided on the spot that he and Jenny should be a part of the ongoing celebrations, which looked as if they might never end. A scribe! What had he been thinking?
He was at the point of running back to the girl when he heard his uncle’s groan from the kitchen. It was a full-throated animal groan that was answered by the corrosive strains of the fiddle from somewhere outside. Since the quake and the numinous period that followed, Asbestos’s playing had evoked more than ever a pathos at odds with the general gaiety. To be sure, other sour notes had been struck in the Pinch, other characters out of step with the prevailing high spirits. The blacksmith, for instance, still sat dejected with his bamboo rod on the bank of the bayou, which the dike had restored again to a shallow cove. And Mr and Mrs Padauer remained deeply unsettled by the resemblance of their child to the host of fey creatures that flitted in the margins of everyone’s vision. Muni’s uncle sat slumped in the kitchen like a husband banished from a room where a wife is giving birth; only, Pinchas understood it wasn’t shtik naches, it wasn’t a new life that Katie was being delivered of. Then there were the memories that persisted in bubbling up from Muni’s own sorrow-laden past. Such contrary elements stood out like loose threads that wanted weaving back into the otherwise harmonious tapestry of the street; they called attention to themselves, in fact, with a needling insistence that superseded every other affection on earth.