Once upon a bone-dry July afternoon, a solitary pack peddler by the name of Pinchas Pinsker came down the road. Pushing a wooden handcart, which he leaned against at an angle almost parallel to the ground, he turned into an avenue of oaks that led toward a colonnaded plantation house. His cart was a low, two-wheeled affair that had recently belonged to a greengrocer in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, and for it Pinchas had swapped a quantity of sateen ticking that the man’s wife had admired. He pushed the contraption by a pair of spindled handstaffs that he hoped one day to hitch to a horse’s flanks. The cart contained the tarp-covered contents of a small racket store: razors, carpet slippers, snuffboxes, and tobacco; there were spectacles, kitchen utensils, candles, oilcloth, dress patterns, and yard goods; dolls for the children, kickshaws for the ladies. Though he wasn’t born to this profession, when he removed the tarp from his merchandise, Pinchas—a short, bespectacled man with a nap of sandy hair under his bowler hat—felt like a conjuror revealing treasures.
As he neared the broad-porticoed house, he anticipated the servants and children coming out to greet him. That’s what he was accustomed to. The occupants of sharecroppers’ shacks and planters’ mansions alike would trickle forth from their habitations to welcome the Jew peddler and sample his wares. It was why he’d been drawn to the South in the first place, having heard that the population viewed the Hebrew with reverence as a person of the Book. Never mind that in the years since his bar mitzvah, rather than holy writ, the book Pinchas had most cherished was a Yiddish translation of the first volume of Das Kapital, a copy of which was secreted in his cart.
It was his political sympathies that had compelled him to leave his family and the Russian Pale of Settlement one step ahead of the czar’s police. But despite arriving in the New World with his ideals intact, Pinchas had since conceived a healthy tolerance for free enterprise. His pulse was quickened by the babel of the hagglers and shmeikelers along the jostling thoroughfares of the Lower East Side of New York. No stranger to labor himself, having served apprenticeships as a draper and grain broker back in Blod, Pinchas began peddling flour sifters and mousetraps from a stall on Ludlow Street. Restless with how his ignorance of the native language confined him to the ghetto, however, he took to straying into outlying quarters. He wandered among the arrant residents of the Five Points and the complacent burghers of Kleindeutschland above Fourteenth Street, picking up snatches of the American tongue along the way. Here was a mobility he’d been denied in the Old Country, and while he remained disapproving of their acquisitive values, Pinchas was nonetheless infected by the yeasty energies of these Yankee citizens. Addicted now to the habit of movement, he secured a small loan from Yarmolovsky’s Bank on Canal Street; he purchased forty dollars’ worth of goods from a nearby supply house and set off to broaden his orbit, taking a train as far as Cincinnati, whence he proceeded on foot along the sun-baked highways into Kentucky and farther south.
As he neared the big house, he wondered why no one had yet to appear. The hedges were neatly trimmed in elaborate topiary shapes, the kitchen garden weeded and pruned, but the house and grounds seemed otherwise abandoned. A gaunt hound with a panting pink tongue approached him, nuzzling his leg and whimpering pitifully; a lowing cow dragged her swollen udders through the tea roses. The air around the mansion, already oppressive in the afternoon heat, had a forbidding odor, miasmic like rotting silage. Pinchas marveled that he should have goosebumps despite his streaming perspiration. The whole day had in fact had a portentous quality about it, all the traffic along the rutted highway headed away from the city of Memphis toward which he was bound. The passengers in their traps and wagons piled with trunks and household furnishings looked distressed, some with sponges tied clownishly over their noses.
Curiosity overcoming his trepidation, he climbed the front steps and pressed his nose against the pane of a tall, rippled-glass window. The gallery overhead shaded the porch and shielded the glass from glare so that Pinchas was able to spy the sumptuous parlor inside. Empty of occupants, the parlor was appointed with a marble hearth, brass firedogs, and a portrait of a saber-wielding officer in Confederate butternut above the mantelpiece. The porch planks creaked under his hobnails as Pinchas slunk around the corner of the house and peered through the window of another room. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dim interior of what turned out to be a high-ceilinged bedroom containing a nightmare tableau; for beneath the canopy of a disordered bed lay a man and woman, their silk-robed bodies snarled in an unnatural configuration—their eyes stark-staring, faces frozen in the rigor of their final agony, as if their souls had wrenched themselves free of their gawking mouths. On the floor below the bed was another pair of lifeless bodies, similarly entangled: two ring-letted little girls in their alice-blue nighties. The twin daughters along with their parents were wreathed in flies and blanketed in what appeared to be a lava of black caviar, some of which was also sprayed across the wainscoting’d walls.
Pinchas’s first thought was irrational: the serfs had murdered their masters and children and fled the estate. Then he remembered that the serfs—the slaves? had there really been slaves?—were freed more than a decade before. “Vey iz mir,” he gasped aloud, lurching headlong back toward his cart. He took up the handles and steered it blindly through a cloud of mosquitoes so thick it left a peddler-shaped hole where he’d passed through, and without looking back turned again into the open road.
Now he was alert to the signs that told him he had stumbled into the Valley of the Shadow. Shacks along the way featured men with shotguns sitting sentinel in their yards, flinty wives standing fiercely behind them in their Sunday bonnets. The current of traffic moving always in the opposite direction grew denser, occasional passengers calling out to him from their carriages what might have been warnings. But if Pinchas didn’t exactly ignore them, neither did he take their words to heart—one of which (“yellow jack”) was repeated with some frequency. He imagined Yellow Jack as a Goliath terrorizing the city whose outskirts he had entered, a giant with whom he was destined to contend. At the same time he understood that this was nonsense. What Jew heads deliberately upstream during an exodus? But Pinchas had been so often discouraged from crossing borders and thresholds due to this interdiction or that imperial ukase that he proceeded on the strength of sheer dogged forward momentum.
He was halted at a bridge over a powder-dry stream by a pair of militiamen in partial uniform.
“What bidness you got in Mefiss?” asked the apple-cheeked younger, his weapon at the ready.
Pinchas was forthright. “Iss to make a livink, mayn beezniz.”
Said the slovenly older soldier with a sneer, “Seem like livin’ ain’t what folks’re about round here.” He spat. “Cross this bridge, Mister, and you might never come back.”
But since they were posted there to stop the infected from leaving the city, a function they’d shown themselves wholly inadequate to perform, they made no effort to block Pinchas’s progress. He soon wished they had.
The road was flanked by dismal shanties that gave way before long to two-story clapboard facades, decaying plank pavements, and a depraved citizenry. Individuals staggering in the lime-dusted roadway and assemblages spilling out the doors of saloons appeared to be simultaneously involved in acts of celebration and mourning; nor could you determine where one left off and the other began. A drunk with a shock of corn-tassel hair tottered up to Pinchas with a clay jug dangling from his pinky finger, saying, “Used to, the milkman’d shout, ‘Wide awake, all alive!’ Now it’s ‘Bring out your dead!’” He laughed like a loon as he offered the peddler a draft, which Pinchas kindly declined. He forged ahead past some bystanders watching idly as a man with a canary complexion looked to be running in circles while lying in the dirt. They watched until one of the bystanders, removing a tiny pistol from a breast pocket, shot the man like a rabid dog, after which they all moved away. On a stoop a buxom lady lay collapsed in a nest of calico; a preacher with graying temples like the wings on Mercury’s helmet mounted a barrel to declare that the plague was God’s vengeance for the pagan festival of Mardi Gras. In an upstairs window a woman was singing in a plaintive contralto: “Dream, dream, grah mo chree / here on your mama’s knee …,” while the air, riven with a general keening, provided a jarring disharmony.
The groceries and snack houses were largely boarded up—some with yellow cards and black crepe nailed to their doors—but the grog shops were thriving. Their clientele, as they exited, paused to inspect the fresh caskets that a company of kerchiefed Negroes were unloading from a furniture van. The empty caskets were then exchanged for the tenanted ones left on the doorsteps of stricken families. Some of the groggery patrons scrutinized the pine boxes as if shopping for their next berth, while others, pallid and less steady on their pins, looked as if they’d just crawled out of them. One box lay open on the curb as if for viewing: its occupant, marinating in a stew of tar and carbolic acid, was dressed in his full lodge regalia, his black tongue lolling like a slug.
There were drums of boiling creosote stationed along the curbs and burning bedclothes saturated in regurgitation. Asafetida bags tied around the necks of frightened citizens vied with the pungency of decomposing flesh. It was the stench that had preceded the city limits by several furlongs, and was suffocating in its intensity here. Making a mighty effort to place one foot in front of the other, Pinchas steered his cart around a bare-boned mule struggling to climb out of a sinkhole. The hole was the result of an overflowing basement privy, and rats as large as terriers rode the mule.
It was coming on dusk and Pinchas was near to falling down from exhaustion. Having slept these past weeks in haybarns and pastures, he’d looked forward to a night’s lodging under a proper roof, where he could wash off the shmutz from the road and refresh himself. He’d been told that Memphis was a city of cheap rooming houses run by maternal widows, but here the peddler had straggled into a charnel house instead. Then he’d passed out of the ramshackle quarter into a soberer district of Federal-style buildings, fashionable shops, and electric trolley lines. But the street, for all its elegant window displays, was as desolate at this end as it was anarchic at the other. There was no traffic save the clattering coffin wagons and the carts from which ragged men, like devils pitching brimstone, shoveled heaps of disinfectant powder. The only pedestrians were the scurrying gent in a cutaway holding a rosewater pomander to his nose and a pair of nuns dragging the hems of their habits in the greenish dust. Cannons boomed, church bells rang, and Pinchas came to a full stop in order to scratch the angry mosquito bites that stippled his neck and arms.
It was then he was approached from both sides of the avenue by children or midgets: he couldn’t tell which as all were in nightshirts and uniformly short of stature, their faces hidden by red bandannas. About the bandannas Pinchas wasn’t so concerned, since half the population wore masks like ganefs; only these turned out to be ganefs indeed. For in a matter of seconds, before the spent peddler could even react, they had whipped the tarp from his merchandise and gathered up the entirety of his stock-in-trade from the cart. Spiriting away armloads piled as high as their heads with tinware, piece goods, garters, and pewter buttons, the thieves vanished as swiftly as they’d appeared; though one returned to snatch up the canvas tarpaulin and, as an afterthought, the volume of Marx.
Wanting despite his inertia to give chase, Pinchas was stymied by his inability to choose which of their several directions to pursue them in. “A plague befall you!” he called after them reflexively, chilled by his apprehension that the curse may already have been fulfilled. He patted himself to make sure that the roll of bills, his savings, was still pinned to the inside of his dank flannel drawers. Then, as he pondered his empty cart with a sigh like a stab, he was distracted by the sight of a young man choking sobs, lugging a body in a winding sheet down a flight of stone steps. Mechanically Pinchas wheeled his cart toward the curb, and without exchanging a word with the weeping man, took up one end of the body by the feet that protruded from the shroud. They were a woman’s bare, spatulate feet with callused toes. Together Pinchas and the man lifted the corpse onto the cart, and tipping the sweaty rim of his bowler hat, the heartsick peddler continued on his way.
He wandered gaslit sidestreets past tall Italianate houses with turrets and ornate iron gates. Most were completely dark, though in one or two lights flickered like foxfire behind the hooded windows. Some of the more modest abodes had signs at the gate advertising rooms, but their haunted aspect told the peddler that strangers need not apply. Once or twice he sought to inquire of a rare pedestrian, who only quickened his pace at the peddler’s approach. Even though evening had descended, there was no relief from the sticky heat, and Pinchas’s legs, despite their habitual forward motion, were close to giving out. He was staggering before a boxy two-story house that, unlike its neighbors, was brightly lit from within. Watermelon vines spiraled the porch columns and a magnolia stood in the yard, its fragrance cutting somewhat the pervasive stench. On the porch sat a porcine woman in a rocker fanning herself with what looked like a raptor’s wing. She was wearing a flounced silk wrapper and smoking a long-stemmed pipe, her platinum hair piled in a towering pompadour.
“You got maybe a room?” asked the peddler, before his knees buckled under him and he knelt on the broken board paving. He heard the woman bellow, “Dinah! Eulalie! A customer.”
Ladies in rustling skirts, their cologne so acrid it brought tears to his eyes, grabbed Pinchas under the arms. As they dragged him up the front steps and through the front door, he couldn’t tell whether he was being rescued or abducted. He was aware of passing through a furbelowed parlor, complete with pier glass, fainting couch, and the portrait of a naked female attended by putti. He was hauled up a steep, carpeted staircase and taken into a room off a narrow hallway. Unfolded across a brass bed, Pinchas felt cool hands caressing him even as they shoved a mercury thermometer between his lips and took his pulse. They unbuttoned his garments and toiveled his sunken chest with damp cloths. At length one of the ladies—Pinchas could tell she was only a girl despite the heavy rouge—pronounced authoritatively, “He ain’t fevered, just tuckered out.”
One of the girls had fetched a bowl of beef bouillon and begun to spoon-feed him, while another offered him a tot of brandy from a cupping glass. A third, arms folded across her blotchy décolletage, made a considered judgment: “I believe this here is a Jew feller.” At that the two others resumed their clinical attitudes. “How can you tell?” asked the girl with the broth, inclining her sausage-curled head for a closer inspection. “Well,” replied the one across the bed from her, setting aside the brandy, “he has got what you call the map a Jerusalem writ on his face.” But the standing girl with the dappled bosom asserted somewhat listlessly that that wasn’t sufficient proof. “Ain’t but one way to be sure,” she said, which sent the others into a fit of titters, upon which two pairs of hands made for the flies of Pinchas’s underwear.
His energies in some measure restored by their ministrations, the peddler’s first impulse was to protect his modesty and extricate himself from the room. The rabbis of his youth would have been scandalized. On the other hand, Pinchas had as good as abandoned his heritage, Isaiah and Jeremiah having been replaced in his hierarchy of prophets by Proudhon and Kropotkin. In his travels, once he’d neglected to keep the Sabbath, he never bothered to keep it again, nor did he make any effort to observe the dietary laws. Where women were concerned he had resisted temptation only because temptation had been scarce in his experience. And while these daughters of Lilith would be reckoned unclean by every category of the halakhic code, Pinchas realized with a wan smile that he wasn’t picky. He was after all a Narodnik, a freethinker, despite his late commercial proclivities, and the despotic faith of his forefathers could not reach him here.
For all that, he was ashamed of his thoughts, which he might attribute to his weakened condition, though how to explain the rebellious stirring in his loins? Meanwhile the ladies had opened his drawers and uncovered his upstanding organ, which they leered at, having never before beheld the sign of the Covenant. “Thang’s nekkider than nekkid,” observed the girl on the peddler’s left side, damask-cheeked and saucer-eyed. The one at his right, risen to her knees on the mattress, clapped her hands, which jiggled her curls like pendants on a chandelier. “I want a go,” she resolved. “I ain’t never rid one a these.” She was lifting her crinoline when the other girl shoved her roughly out of the way, then positioned herself astride Pinchas’s outstretched legs. A hilarious tussling ensued, during which the spectator girl, her maculate bodice glazed in sweat, began to slide down the wall in a swoon. The two on the bed ceased their frolic to stare at their fallen companion. The one straddling Pinchas looked in perplexity from her fellow on the floor to the peddler’s peeled member. “It ain’t all that peculiar,” she reckoned. Then the fallen girl began to convulse, projecting a stream of bile like molten coffee grounds across the valance below the bedstead.
Pinchas watched in horror as the two girls, with amazingly unruffled efficiency, left the bed to attend to their companion slumped against the wall. They pressed a lace hankie to her mouth and watched as a crimson stain slowly spread. Galvanized by the scene and the fetor that made the air in the room unbreathable, Pinchas tucked his wilted manhood back into his long johns and slid from the mattress. Trailing the sheet he’d wrapped carelessly about his person, he shuffled back into the hallway, where he encountered two more painted ladies, who parted to let him pass.
Turning about, the addled peddler asked them, “Where am I?”
“Annie Cook’s,” they said in unison over their shoulders, then commenced to contradict each other, one cheerfully alleging that the establishment was a “bawdy,” the other a “pest” house. Unenlightened, Pinchas proceeded down the corridor, passing closed doors behind which could be heard a medley of moans and shrieks; but whether from amorous exertions or the laments of the infirm, who could say? A door at the end of the hall, however, stood open, and through it Pinchas spied the ladies nursing a chap whose fallow flesh appeared to have been parboiled from the inside out. This house, he concluded, was a kind of sanctuary where the nafkehs doubled as sisters of mercy—and sometimes martyrs. Good on them, he thought, but an upright man such as he (in health if not virtue) had no business here. Woozy though he was, Pinchas had seen enough. He made his way down the back stairs and was in the street again before he realized that, still togaed in the bedsheet, he’d forgotten his clothes.
What’s more, the money he’d pinned to the inside of his union suit was no longer there. “Mutzlekh!” Pinchas congratulated himself. “You got now nothing left to lose.” He trudged on, thinking he might find an officer to accompany him back to the brothel and demand that his funds be returned. But after he’d turned a corner or two without spotting a cop, Pinchas doubted he would even be able to retrace his steps. Besides, he still retained his Old Country distrust of police; and given the state of the infected city, infernal in the light of the fever fires, he figured the police would have better things to do than to retrieve an indigent immigrant’s purloined purse.
He’d found his way back to Main Street, which was desolate as an outpost. One step ahead of the fatigue that was threatening to overtake him again, he plodded on, crossing a street between palisades of rotting cotton and entering a park that overlooked the river’s traveling expanse. A leaden sky marbled with moonlight illumined a cluster of paddle wheelers (perhaps in quarantine) riding at anchor below the levee, their smokestacks contributing to the fouled atmosphere.
Pinchas coveted the few benches that crowned the bluff, but they were already occupied by silhouettes in various stages of tribulation. One hugged himself as he sat rocking furiously back and forth; another recited verses in Latin, and the peddler knew enough of gentile customs to assume the poor soul was administering some type of sacrament to himself. The petrified attitude of another invited an enterprising young thief, employing a hook and line to avoid contamination, to fish in his pockets for spoils. It occurred to Pinchas that, if he were willing to risk the contagion, he might secure a suit of clothes from a stiff, but his main objective at the moment was simply to lie down. His weariness had acquired a nauseous component; his head ached and his stomach had begun to cramp. This was possibly due to the onset of heatstroke, he reasoned, though that affliction did not commonly occur after dark. Still, he felt that his very skin was on fire, even as he’d begun to be racked with chills.
He steered his unsteady steps toward a mulberry hedge, behind which he hoped to find some privacy. Rounding the hedge he came upon a young woman lying supine on the ground, her features marmoreal, her gorged blue breast bared to the living infant that fiercely sucked at it. “Gott in himmel,” gasped Pinchas, who believed in neither God nor heaven. In fact he was by then more prepared to expect the kind of intervention that directly took place: when a yipping, half-naked bedlamite, death riding the flapping tails of his gown, appeared out of nowhere to shove Pinchas to the ground; then scarcely breaking stride, he stooped to pluck the tyke from the dead mother’s breast and carry it away.
His cheek pressed against the prickly grass, Pinchas understood that what he’d witnessed had no place in a sensible world—or was it the peddler himself who no longer belonged? He was almost grateful when he felt his griping gut uncoil, giving up along with his insides a vital spark at the quick of his being in a muddy emulsion of pitch-black blood. His last conscious thought was how convenient it was that his remains should already be swaddled in their graveclothes.
When reading aloud to Rachel from The Pinch, I would glance at her from time to time, watching for signs that she thought the words were more than stories. Certainly she was receptive, often changing positions on the mattress to make herself more comfortable: she hugged her knees, stretched her legs to loll on her side, tilted her head to catch a peculiar turn of phrase; sometimes she admitted an inward smile, sometimes laughed outright. But I could tell that the book remained for her merely a book, the stories only stories, a whimsical gloss on the factual history of North Main. Occasionally her attitude infected mine, reducing Muni’s chronicles to diversions for the gullible, fabrications that had little in common with the real life of the street. And honestly, there were times when it was a relief to share that perspective. Meanwhile I never let on that at some point in the narrative we would run into yours truly; then fact and fancy would collide or maybe blend into one and the same.
Her unwilling suspension of disbelief aside: naked, Rachel was herself a catalog of enchantments. She was tickled when I undressed her, not from the undue exposure so much as from her amusement at my shaking hands and chattering teeth. “Such an enfant terrible!”she would tease me. “Scared of a naked lady.” And it was true that no bogey I’d encountered during my pharmaceutical escapades had instilled in me such awe as Rachel’s close-pored flesh. Her breasts, when I lay my cheek against them, were soft as spongecake, her belly like the trough of a salt lick I traced with my tongue. Her burnished thighs fluctuated like waves, parting to reveal a floating garden I swam toward from over the crest of a hip. Entering her I tried not to lose myself, and looked to her human face to gauge the rectitude of my progress; but the moods of her face kept changing till I didn’t know whether I clung to a heroine or a whore or an impish child.
Okay, so the multitudes she contained gave me a fright—and then they didn’t; because letting go (and I could let go tumultuously since Rachel was on the pill) I would find myself again in familiar surroundings. For there sat tailor Bluestein at the machine in the window of his shop, sewing garments with odd apertures for the mutant creatures that sheltered in the outhouse behind his building. The merchant Shapiro was advising Mrs. Grunewald that the fabric she fingered was a sample from the pargod, the curtain that surrounded the Lord’s holy throne. “Note the irregularities that they’re unborn souls stitched into the material like pinned butterflies.” The butcher Makowsky sank his cleaver into marbled meat carved from a flank (or so he claimed) of the Messiah Ox, and the pot at Ike Taubenblatts’ pinochle game was stuffed with forfeited shadows. Ridblatt delivered fresh challah to Rosen’s Deli, where the alter kockers tore off pieces and stuffed their faces, the bread foaming like a benign hydrophobia in their toothless mouths. But Rachel lived elsewhere, and after I’d tarried a spell on North Main Street I made the journey back to my bed, where we would twine, my girl and me, like those vines that grew over the graves of legendary lovers.
And so I had for a time the best of both worlds.
He opened his eyes to darkest eternity. Of course Pinchas Pinsker had never supposed there would be an afterlife, and it humbled him to find himself in one, though this straitened confinement hardly qualified as any kind of a life. It angered him as well, his cramped situation, or at least he registered an emotion that might have risen to the status of anger had he had the strength for it. Because an afterlife gave the lie to the strict rationalist view he’d adhered to since rejecting the Torah of his student days; it vindicated all the narishkeit he thought he’d left behind him in the shtetl. His nose twitched against the stink of the effluvium that saturated his winding sheet. This must be Sheol, the inky perdition to which Jewish no-goodniks were everlastingly sentenced; though it seemed to Pinchas he’d scarcely had time in his brief life to earn such a bleak retribution. Granted, his few virtues might not have merited Paradise—but Sheol? Had he really been so great a sinner?
He felt himself momentarily in motion, floating for a spell in a shifting, desultory manner until he landed kerplump. The demons of the left side of darkness were toying with him, Pinchas assumed, the pain in his restricted limbs compounded by the unhappy realization that death had made him superstitious. He thought he heard voices and concluded that he wasn’t alone. Naturally there would be myriad others condemned to a similar solitude, fated to listen to one another’s mumblings and blubberings without a hope of ever understanding or being themselves understood. Then it came to him that there was an alternative he’d failed to consider: maybe he wasn’t actually dead. But that one seemed even less plausible than the other options. Again he heard muffled voices and decided it wouldn’t hurt to cry out, but the best he could muster in his feeble state was a pathetic inaudible groan. He discovered, however, that he still had the use of his fingers, and so began to rap on the ceiling of his horizontal cell. No sooner had he done so than he felt himself floating again, tilting to left and right then sliding downward with a velocity that left his stomach behind. He continued his desperate rapping, gathering what energy remained to him to deliver a full-blown, close-knuckled knock. Banging away on the lid of his captivity, Pinchas was aware of his mortal thirst, of wanting now beyond reason to be let out already from this airless purgatorial box!
The voices outside his stifling space grew louder. There was a sound like the squeal of a sphincter and a coffin-shaped seam of light appeared above him; then the lid was prized all the way off, and lustrous human faces—one with a broken nose and prognathous jaw, the other with a conflagration of ginger hair—hovered over him in the torrid afternoon. Drained of energy, Pinchas lay back unmoving in his enclosure.
“It’s a queer look that’s on him for a man that’s dead,” said the plug-ugly fellow.
“Dada,” exclaimed the redheaded girl, “he’s alive!”
“Faith, how can you tell, Katie darling?”
“Look how his sorrowful eyes are upon us.”
“Similar, I’m thinking, would be the eyes of any carcass.”
“But this one’s,” she said, poking an obtrusive index finger into Pinchas’s solar plexus, “are not past blinking.”
Her father allowed that that was the case but cautioned her not to touch his revolting person again. Then an argument commenced between father and daughter over whether the man deserved redeeming from his current circumstance. The father was of a mind to leave sleeping dogs lie. “After all, we don’t know where the filthy beggar has been.” This opinion was backed up by the pair of thick-ribbed lads lumbering on either side of the father, though the girl shut them both up with a word: “Eejits.” Then she protested that the man’s animate condition made it incumbent on every Christian to do his duty. “Besides, the very fact of his breathing gives the proof he survived the distemper and is no longer a danger.”
“But Katie mavourneen, we’ve our own grief to bear and it’s no affair we have to be shouldering an extra burden. Look about you, daughter, and your mother still unburied in this hidjiss place where no priest would attend us.”
For they were standing amid a congregation of knotty pine coffins in the broad gash of the open plague pit at the Elmwood Cemetery, where paupers were consigned to mass burial.
“My mother it was,” said the girl with a flash of temper, “that you drove into this early grave with your wanton ways. For her the distemper was a mercy and even this dreadful place a welcome rest. He”—pointing to the invalid in the box, who was trying without success to mouth some defense of his own—“is the Lord’s opportunity for you to do penance.”
“It’s a hard unforgiving lass you are altogether, Katie Keough, but when did your loving da ever refuse you? Neither the lame cur nor the mangy tom you were wont to drag to our humble door did I turn away.”
Which was how the peddler Pinchas Pinsker came to be lifted in his casket by the two lumpish brothers and loaded onto a rattling donkey cart. He was hauled from the burial ground under the skirts of the willow trees to the squishy banks of Catfish Bayou, just north of the district called the Pinch. This was the gangrenous sink that had greeted the peddler on his entry into the city: the bayou little more than an open sewer, a putrid channel around which refugees from the Great Hunger had pitched their miserable hovels. The Keoughs’ own dwelling consisted chiefly of the mud-plugged hull of an overturned johnboat, its kitchen a jerrybuilt postscript. Pinchas was installed in that kitchen on a rank pallet under a shelf that supported a flitch of dried pork, his presence forcing the eviction of the family hound that had so far escaped the city’s mass extermination of pets.
His first coherent thought with regard to his convalescent residence was that he may have been better off in the casket. Despite here and there a feminine touch—a lace doily under a growler, a crocheted cozy over a rifle stock—the place was a sty. It was little improved by the fumes from the sour mash whiskey still operated by father and sons. The still, Pinchas would learn, supplemented a meager income from their cottage fishing industry, since the fish they netted in the swill of the bayou were only marginally edible. If the house was in mourning, the peddler never saw any signs of it beyond the daughter’s fixed irritability toward her men. Nor did the family seem to heed the fever raging around them, which was carrying off their neighbors in droves. The smell of the bayou combined with the rancidness of their hovel did help to neutralize the universal putrescence that was a constant reminder of plague. But as he began, under Katie’s care, to regain a semblance of his former vitality, the peddler grew more accustomed to his surroundings and started to view them in a different light. He ate with gusto Katie’s spuds in their various incarnations, slurped the soup the girl called “fishyswaz,” and began to think he’d awakened into some snug household tale. Like the one he’d once read in a Yiddish translation in which a sea captain’s family lived in the rollicking warmth of a capsized vessel on a beach.
He was practically unaware of the hostility directed toward him by the patriarch, Cashel Keough, and his surly sons, Murtagh and Tighe. Bitterly they complained of the space Katie had appropriated for her charge in their already crowded quarters, never mind the amount of victuals he consumed. And to see the sapless intruder wearing his own bleached nightshirt, which ballooned about him like a baptismal gown, was almost more than the crapulent Cashel could bear. Adamant in her defense of the invalid, Katie alternated between cautioning her family not to interfere in her solicitations and assuring them their charity would be recorded in the annals of heaven. But Cashel was not as easily cowed by his daughter as were her brothers. He was suspicious of the way her patient mangled the Lord’s own English. And when he heard the man ask Katie in his lingering confusion, “Didn’t you paint it with lamb’s blood the doorpost of your house?,” Cashel knitted his bristling brow in contemplation.
“Pin-skerr? Is that by way of being the lad’s heathen name?” Leaning closer to examine the hump at the bridge of the invalid’s nose. “I do believe it’s an Israelite we’re after nurturing in our boozum.” Tighe and Murtagh nodded their ungainly heads in accord with their da’s sage judgment.
Smiling weakly, Pinchas himself concurred, anticipating more of the kind of hospitable reception he’d been used to receiving from the rural folk.
“And wasn’t it his people themselves that poisoned the wells back in the day of your allover Black Death?” mused Cashel, his voice rising an octave with every syllable. Then he and his boys might have laid hands on the peddler, tossing him into the mire at their doorstep, had not the daughter of the house stepped between them. Katie shooed them away from the sickbed and refused to hear a discouraging word concerning her charge.
Her father sulked, her brothers groused, and Pinchas began gradually to come back to himself. Gradually, because he was in no hurry. He marveled that the affliction of a single night could have taken such a ruinous toll on his constitution. But then it was not every day that one dropped dead and was rescued intact from the other side; and while he didn’t believe for a second that such a thing had actually happened, he felt nonetheless that he was somehow changed. After a few days he was able to stand with Katie’s assistance and take some steps about the shanty’s beaten earth floor. This was no easy feat given the clutter, the fishing gear and rat traps (some with the rats still in them) obstructing his path; for Katie was not a conscientious housekeeper. He was eventually able to sit at the table, enduring the dagger stares of the menfolk as they consumed their mounds of jacketed potatoes. The stares were doubly intense from young Tighe, in whose plaited shirt and trousers the girl had recently appareled her patient. But for all the tension his presence bred in the house, Pinchas was not anxious to leave. He knew well enough the grim necropolis that awaited a penniless peddler beyond their door.
But that wasn’t the only reason Pinchas was reluctant to reveal the full extent of his recovery. He luxuriated in Katie’s attentions, even when the measures she took to restore him verged on the heroic: for she administered regular doses of castor oil and calomel to reactivate kidney function and loosen the bowels, the effects of which Pinchas suffered in grateful humiliation. Reborn, he was content there should be a period during which he was reduced to the condition of a virtual babe in arms. When his body began to regain its previous vigor, his clearing brain acknowledged certain stirrings that had been—though unrecognized till now—a fundamental motivation all along. Because, beyond his need to escape the cloistered life of the shtetl and the incarceration his treasonous sympathies promised, Pinchas had yielded as well to a call to adventure. And adventure included an unspoken quest for romance. True, such a desire was not wholly compatible with his commitment to dialectical materialism, or to the cruder materialism he’d lately practiced. In fact, he was as vexed by this desire as he was by his inexperience. He derided his growing fondness for the girl even as he regarded her as the agent of his salvation, a notion her father affirmed in his cups.
“It’s a mockery of our Lord’s own resurrection you’ve made with this Jew man,” Cashel was heard to mutter.
And Katie: “Put a cake in it, Da!”
The brothers, less vocal, satisfied themselves with pissing discreetly in the peddler’s porridge and thumping him in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. Pinchas was stoic in suffering their abuse, having endured worse at the hands of the girl herself, whom he was coming to adore.
He knew it was an impossible infatuation, not the least because he was a Hebrew and she the daughter of a popish clan who viewed him as essentially vermin. But such obstacles the peddler, perhaps delusional in his re-invigorated state, believed he could overcome. Added to these deterrents, however, was the further inconvenience of a fiancé. For it seemed that Katie Keough had been pledged to one Phelim Mulrooney, a barkeep who operated a dram shop over in Catfish Alley. It happened that the Keough men, averse to their own rotgut (whose side effects rivaled the symptoms of the plague itself), had run up an exorbitant tab at Squire Mulrooney’s tavern. In point of fact, they were in default of a bill they could never hope to settle. The barkeep, though, had magnanimously agreed to waive their debt, and even to extend them a line of credit, in exchange for the hand of the fair but undowered Katie. The maid herself had not objected to the betrothal; its imminence was the trump card she held over her father and brothers, and played whenever the occasion called for it. To break off the engagement would have meant severing their lifeline, and by periodically threatening to do just that, Katie would have her way in most matters. Besides, the girl had been approached by worse suitors, and despite a face so infested with blackheads that he looked to have been peppered by buckshot, Phelim Mulrooney was a man of parts. The proprietor of a thriving business, he made a more or less honest, if disreputable, living. The Pinch had offered her no better prospects.
Pinchas had ascertained all this during the tavern keeper’s visits. The man would appear on the gentile Sabbath, doff his stiff bowler, and greet them—often with wilting flowers for Katie—with a “God save all in this house.” The Keoughs would respond with false enthusiasm, because it was clear none were overly fond of their benefactor. He would pay his shamefast respects to his intended, embarrassed by his own transparent carnality, and even inquire after the welfare of her patient, whom he regarded as the girl’s innocent pastime. Then he would sit down with the men and, casting the occasional cow’s eyes in Katie’s direction, discuss items concerning the wedding. Impatient though he was, however, Phelim agreed there was nothing for it but to postpone the affair until the ongoing crisis had abated. For death still held dominion over the district.
“A feller can’t unstopper a keg or raise a bucket from a well without he turns up a corpse,” the suitor would repine. “They’re after saying there ain’t enough living to bury the dead and it’s the niggers are having to do it.”
Of course there was always the question, never expressed, of their own survival. Phelim himself wore as a charm against misfortune a moonstone amulet sold to him by a fishwife who was later stoned for a witch. “The world’s gone plain medieval and no kicker.” Eavesdropping from where he lay on his pallet, Pinchas silently maintained there was no impediment so great that he couldn’t surmount it, as long as the girl felt about him as he did about her. But so far there was little evidence in support of that.
Perhaps the barkeep Mulrooney was right and he was nothing to her but an ephemeral pet. Living among louts in the absence of her mother, she was in need of a creature on which she could expend some tenderness, and in lieu of a broken-winged bird a sick Yid peddler would have to do. As soon as he was mended, she would set him free without a second thought. So he continued to call forth the odd fit of coughing and dissemble a frailty he no longer felt. Then he would try to count the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks like spilled nutmeg as she passed a saucer of rum vapors under his nose. He held his breath to glimpse the shady contours of her camisole as she knelt to give him a mustard footbath, and spied her emerald eye peeking at him from behind a helix of strawberry hair. Her hands, as she dried them in her apron, darted like sparrows in a bath; her slight breast lifted suspensefully before a sigh. Sometimes she caught him ogling her and they both blushed in mutual discomfiture, though he might think he detected the hint of a smile. Then he could believe that, along with the turbid light that filtered into her hovel from the hellscape outside, she had allowed herself to bask an instant in his adoration.
“Katie,” he had resolutely confided in her, “the man I was before you have saved me I am no more.” To which the girl inquired, “Are you then no more a man at all?” Ignoring her retort, he stood by his statement: because the previous Pinchas had had no tolerance for magical thinking; the credulity of the Russian Pale with its deathless prophets and hidden saints was a world he’d long since left behind. But how to argue with the fact that he’d been raised from his coffin by an angel? And now he felt his identity as erstwhile revolutionary and peregrine merchant was a casualty of that event. All that once defined him had been displaced by his overriding passion for the girl. “Katie, I am gornisht vi a vantz,” he avowed, “nothing but a insect without you.”
They tickled her, his singular confessions, which she occasionally countered with melodic Irish equivalents: “We say amadán, a fool.” She seemed to enjoy listening to his fractured syntax, often correcting his speech, as if in healing his body she must also knit his broken tongue. Sometimes, however, his relentless expressions of gratitude seemed to get under her skin. Was it that she’d simply had enough of his malarkey, or had she come to feel the burden of a responsibility for his very existence? In his most hopeful moments Pinchas suspected that she knew he was malingering and was complicit in prolonging his convalescence.
He offered her tortured versions of biblical verses recalled from his cheder days, whose meaning he felt he’d only begun to understand: “Your eyes are toyvn … pretty doves / your hair a flock of goats—”
“A flock of goats!”
“Your teeth are ewes that they sheared already the fleece—”
“For the love of Jaysus!”
“Your breasts—”
“Shut your gob!”
But she hid her amusement in her apron.
Once, when the men were out peddling their poteen and he was alone with the girl, Pinchas dared to venture, “Katie, you are, I think, mayn bashert.” He lay sprawled across the tattered quilt, his back against the bowed wall of the kip, eyes moist behind their small oval lenses.
“The cheek!” she exclaimed, though her potato masher remained poised in midflail; then in a whisper, “What does it mean, bashert?”
“It means a destined one.”
Lowering the masher into the bowl, the girl became thoughtful. “We say m’anamchara, soul mate, or macushla machree, pulse of my heart.” Her roseate complexion deepened as she returned to mauling her spuds, and Pinchas thought she glowed like a synagogue’s everlasting lamp.
He wondered how he could want so much to worship and possess her at the same time, and how either option seemed to him equally holy. But no sooner had Pinchas realized that she was fond of him as well than he began to anguish over her well-being. Enslaved to a family of ingrates who conspired to sell her into the servitude of a loveless marriage, she was in dire need of being rescued from her fate. And that was to say nothing of the threat of the plague itself, which she might contract any day in her comings and goings—that is, if her wayward father and brothers didn’t bring it back home to her from their knockings-about. Unable to contain his anxiety on her behalf, Pinchas found himself risen to his feet, taking hold of Katie’s free hand. She again ceased pummeling her boiled tubers to level at him a dubious gaze.
“You saved me my life,” he said. “Now you will please to let me”—he recalled the cardinal utterance of his profession—“settle the account.”
She snickered, rolled her eyes, but made no effort to withdraw her hand from his. “Give an ear to who’s talking salvation,” she quipped.
“Katie, I got for you shpilkes,” he admitted, “which it means I am afraid.”
“Faith and didn’t the Gypsy assure me I’ve nothing to fear from the distemper? It’s other ills the years have in store for me.”
But she could see he was far from appeased.
“Pinchas”—his name on her lips was pure music—“say after me: From tinker and pooka …”
“From tinker and pooka …,” he solemnly repeated.
“… and black-hearted stranger …”
“…and black-hearted stranger …”
“God keep”—here she squeezed his hand—“God keep my treasure this day from danger.”
He completed the incantation and vowed to himself he would never leave her side.
It was a difficult vow to keep, given that his sham condition kept him from accompanying her into the perilous out-of-doors. He was torn, wanting at once to show himself as her protector and loath to reveal the extent of his fitness lest he be abruptly sent packing. Of course Katie would never turn him out, but the rest of her brood had become ever more voluble in expressing their discontent. Their neighbors were dying like flies, the virulence of the fever so great in their quarter that the remainder of the city claimed that it originated there. The Irish were a long-standing scapegoat, there being none lower on the social ladder but poor blacks, at least not until Pinchas had come along. But the Keough men had grown tired of the harmless persecutions—gluing his toes with molasses, painting his phiz with boot polish while he slept—they’d inflicted on the freeloader in Katie’s absence; they were weary of appearing repentant in the face of their sister’s wrath when she returned. They were ready to be rid of the Yid for good and all. His situation, Pinchas understood, was untenable and could not endure, but the love that steeled his resolve had also, he believed, made him cunning. It was time to devise a plan.
On an August evening—humidity so dense it curled the roof shingles—the brothers sat sharing a jar as they gutted a string of crappie. Fish innards slithered from the listing table, plopping onto the toes of their plow shoes and the floor. Across the room lay the peddler under a sodden sheet, pretending to sleep as he listened to their discussion of the topic that absorbed what little air was left in the room: for even her “gombeen siblings,” as Katie called them, had begun to recognize that their days might be numbered. Who knew but their da might return this very night bringing the infection from the tavern, or their sister from her foraging?
“They say,” reckoned Murtagh, his stubbled face flecked with bits of bloody intestine, “you can tell by his breath on a glass who’s a carrier. Put a microscope to the glass and it’s tiny bogeys you’ll see.”
His sheepdog eyes peering through a fringe of cornsilk hair, Tighe remarked, “Sure, and your carrier can make a gamecock go roupy by coughing upon it.”
“That, I think, is moonshine,” disparaged his older brother, “though your smaller bird will succumb.”
Sentimental when soused, they fell to brooding over their fellows who’d been recently taken by Mister Jack: Rory Kavanagh, Spanker O’Malone—the list went on. “Fine lads gone too soon to glory and it’s himself that survives,” said Murtagh, tilting his square head in the direction of the recumbent Pinchas. “There’s justice for you.”
“Bang on,” Tighe nodded in assent. “And there lies the Jew like a great-I-am in the place of old Finbar.” For he still nursed a bitterness that the swayback hound, whose treble yelps he’d so savored when lifting it by the ears, had been banished from its pallet to the out-of-doors. Still feigning sleep, Pinchas manufactured a raucous snore.
Then Murtagh, who was not above goading his little brother, suggested that he might perhaps introduce a red pepper to the dosser’s bony arse. Whereat Tighe, rising shakily to his feet, offered to go him one better and introduce the whole of the sheeny’s anatomy to the night.
“Whisht, boyo, our Katie would be having your guts for garters.”
“The biggety minx,” exclaimed Tighe in a burst of pot valor, “she can start with these,” plucking the entrails stuck to his trousers and flinging them at the wall. “The divil take Katie and her reasty rabbi!” Tottering forward, he leaned over the peddler and gave his shoulder a rough shake. “Here,” he shouted, “it’s time yer mushed along up the yard.” Then a cuff to the back of the counterfeit sleeper’s skull.
But Pinchas had provided for just such an eventuality. With the sheet pulled tightly over his head, he dredged with furtive fingers the reserve of ingredients he’d tucked into the deep pockets of Cashel’s nightshirt. From the right-hand compartment he scooped the saffron pollen he’d collected from the overripe irises that Phelim Mulrooney had bestowed on Katie during his visits. He rubbed the pollen rapidly over his face, then took from the other pocket the pulpy blackberries he’d filched from Katie’s larder and pressed them into his squinched-up eyes. He stuffed the fistful of tea leaves into his cheeks, so that before Tighe could tear the sheet from his head and haul him to his feet, Pinchas’s skin was turned a saffron yellow and purple tears leaked from his nostrils and eyes.
“He looks a bad dose,” judged Murtagh, giving a wide berth to both his little brother and the peddler, whom Tighe was attempting to march toward the door. Noises that seemed to have their source in Pinchas’s diaphragm had begun to emerge from his throat. “Leave off your hold on his oxter, brother,” Murtagh warned. “The man’s about to spew.” Then sure enough, announced by an animal caterwaul, a black substance began to issue from Pinchas’s mouth like feathers from a punctured pillow. Tighe leapt away from his captive to join his big brother as witness.
“The feller’s a fair volcano,” he observed.
At that moment the door opened and Katie appeared, her arms evenly burdened with her produce basket and the earthen slop bucket. Dropping both, she cried, “Lord save us, he’s that sick again!” She straightaway directed her brothers to help her get the afflicted back to bed, though neither would come near. Draping Pinchas’s arm over her shoulder, she returned him to his pallet, where he lay floundering like an eel, alternating his tormented moaning with a racking cough. In the midst of his travail he was heard to ask for a rabbi.
“I fear there’s no such creature in this town, my heart,” Katie assured him.
“Then get for me a priest!”
Lifting a brow in consternation, Katie nevertheless turned to her brothers, who remained stock still. “You heard him, you fluthered elephants, get him a priest!”
Murtagh wondered aloud what the sheeny might be wanting with a man of the cloth.
“Thimblewit,” barked his sister, “would you deny a dying man his last rites?”
Murtagh and Tighe exchanged looks, shrugged, then started for the door, clearly glad of an excuse to quit the wretched scene. As they exited the shanty, they were met by their pickled old man, who was stumbling in arm in arm with his future son-in-law, the barkeep Mulrooney. Florid-faced, Cashel Keough turned briefly to regard his departing sons, then back toward the misery on the pallet.
“What’s all this ruction then?” he inquired.
“As you see,” breathed Katie, with no will left to explain what should have been self-evident.
Pinchas yawped, yammered, and writhed, while Cashel winced and became defensive. “Sure it’s no fault of mine,” he said, though no one had accused him, “and didn’t I tell you from the start he was crow bait?”
Katie paid no attention. She was up again and at the distillery in the corner, dousing a loofah sponge with a beaker containing the dregs of their vile poteen.
“Hold, lass,” cautioned her father, “that’s good shellac yer after wasting on a dead man.” He made to interfere with his daughter, who pivoted in her fury and flung the tin beaker at his head. But her aim was wild and the receptacle sailed past her da’s shoulder to bounce off Phelim Mulrooney’s noggin. The barkeep touched the swelling node on his forehead, whose slope extended hairless to the crown of his meaty skull, and tasted the blood. It did not seem to meet with his approval. “This isn’t the complaisant girl I was promised,” he pouted, and turned to leave, but Cashel held him fast by the rubber collar, insisting, “We had a bargain.”
Again the door swung open and in lurched the brothers with a gosling-headed party wearing a Roman cassock and collar in tow. Other than his soiled vestments, there seemed little of the divine about him; in truth, his pie-eyed visage with its wine-red snoot attested that he was as advanced in drink as Cashel himself. The sweat rolled off his wrinkled countenance in rills.
“God and Mary to you, Father Farquhar,” greeted Cashel somewhat perfunctorily.
“Where lies the candidate for shanctification?” replied the priest.
The sad article whose thrashing and wailing arrested all other eyes and ears was indicated to him. Squinting at Pinchas, Father Farquhar began automatically to recite his office from where he stood, the Latin purling from his lips along with a thread of drool: “Miseratumtuiomnipotensdeush …” Having thus acquitted himself of the sacrament, he made the sign of the cross and turned to leave, only to find his way blocked by Murtaugh and Tighe. Still functioning as their sister’s agents, they were responding to her appeal from the death pallet that Father Farquhar not depart without first administering extreme unction. Dutifully they turned the priest back around and shoved him forward toward the infirm.
Forced to his brittle knees by the brothers, the priest fetched a small flask from his cassock. He uncorked it and extended a limpet-like tongue to receive its contents, which were not forthcoming. “It appears I’m fresh out of the holy chrism,” he complained.
Katie offered some cooking oil, but Father Farquhar allowed as how “your mortal soul favors bonded shpirits to attend its journey home.” Katie frowned, but in lieu of the poteen—the better part of which was dripping from Squire Mulrooney’s chin—she presented the sponge with which she’d been bathing her patient’s brow. The priest squeezed it, catching the drops like a nectar on his tongue; then shuddering, declared, “Thish’ll do.” Reinforced by the stimulating drizzle, he began again to recite his office at the parting of the spirit: “Peristamshanctumunctionem …,” sprinkling whiskey over the fever victim’s forehead and hands. The aggrieved girl pressed her fingers to Pinchas’s chest to try and still his agonies. The front of his nightshirt was coated in the lees of the ersatz vomito negro, and when Katie withdrew her hand bits of the awful matter remained stuck to her fingers, which she sniffed. Then her frightened face passed through several seasons of expression, from flummoxed to suspicious to the wry suggestion of a smile. Father Farquhar was merrily rattling off a litany of the sins the poor man must be excused of—sins of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and carnal delectation. He was interrupted, however, when the afflicted sat suddenly bolt upright and cried in a voice that caused pismires to fall from the rafters, “Katie, mayn gelibteh, marry me!”
Then he fell back and recommenced his spasmodic moaning, giving every indication that he was half-dead already. But the reverent mood of that crooked house was broken, the onlookers stunningly disconcerted. As they awaited the peddler’s last gasp, which was surely impending, Pinchas sat erect again. “Marry me,” he pleaded, “so from your kiss I can die!”
Having entwined her fingers with the peddler’s, the girl made an effort to arrange her sheepish features in a show of solemnity. “It’s in the way of being his final wish,” she proclaimed to the priest, as if no other argument could be entertained.
His knees worn out from genuflecting, the befuddled Father Farquhar rolled backward onto his haunches in a most unvenerable fashion, revealing the calves under his cassock like spiny ninepins. With a foot Murtaugh scooted a low wooden stool beneath the priest’s nates to prop him up, but the more dignified perch did nothing to resolve the issue at hand. For the combustible Cashel, however, there was no quandary at all. “I’ll be scragged and gibbeted first!” he bellowed, and confident of allies added, “My friend Phelim here will have something to say about this.” He pounded the barkeep on the back, who fought to keep his balance, muttering, “I wouldn’t have a widder woman.” Then taking heart, he asserted, “The girl is anyhow a sack of cats. The dead man is welcome to her.”
“But he’s a gobshite Jew!” bawled Cashel, looking now to his sons for encouragement. The two of them wagged their heads in dumb accord but appeared more interested in than appalled by the situation. Cashel then uttered what he must have assumed would put the controversy to rest: “Nor ain’t the man even baptized!”
Katie replied almost dismissively that Father Farquhar could certainly remedy that, though the priest showed no sign of compliance. On the contrary, summoning something of the gravity of his office, he submitted, “One should look, in extremish, to the welfare of the soul rather than the rites of the flesh.”
At that the apparently moribund peddler reared up one more time. “Give to me for a blessing Katie’s hand,” Pinchas rasped, “and it wouldn’t leave from this life in despair mayn neshomah, my soul.” Then seemingly spent from the effort the words had cost him, he fell back again onto the soggy quilt, his eyes rolling into his head. He flopped a moment, twitched, then lay still.
Katie spoke for the priest’s ear only, “If it’s a crime to wed us, sure it’s the greater not to honor his dying wish.”
With his face still screwed up in thought, Father Farquhar could be heard quoting various opposing church canons to himself. At length he confessed, “Thishishmost irreggaler,” as Katie advised him to take another sup off the sponge. He did so and shuddered like a palsy, after which the scales seemed to have fallen from his glassy eyes. “Leave ush make haste then,” he announced, “for the lad’s essence is already in his teeth.”
“Bollocks!” sputtered Cashel, dropping his bulk into a chair beside the deal table. “You’ll put the heart crossways in me.” Behind him Phelim Mulrooney, muttering “Feck the lot of yer,” took the occasion to slip out the door. But Father Farquhar, having turned toward the patriarch, was now become the voice of reason: “It’s the one vow they’ll be making this evening,” he stated, his speech surprisingly lucid, “for the nuptial bed of this marriage will be the grave.” A momentary grin rent his wadded face. “Then the relict may go to her second husband as pure as from her father’s side.”
Cashel threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat. “Marry him, then bury him,” he grumbled. “Then somebody make me my supper.”
The priest rubbed his palms together. He was evidently energized by the prospect of presiding over a wedding rather than administering the viaticum once again, though the distinction here was admittedly a fine one. Swiftly he dispensed with the baptism, splashing the peddler’s face with brackish water from the chipped basin the girl had provided. “I baptize you in the name of the Father …,” et cetera. Katie had hauled Pinchas to a sitting position, his back against the splintered boards, but before she’d finished patting dry his snuffling features with her apron, the curate had moved on to the nuptials. He was asking the bride and groom if they had come of their own free will to give themselves to each other in marriage. Would they raise their children according to the law of Christ and his church? Here Pinchas was aware of having entered a degree of apostasy beyond anything he’d known to date. All religions were opiates of course, but some residual sense of the magnitude of this particular trespass seemed to rankle in his vitals; it might take one of Katie’s sodium clysters to purge it. But what was he thinking? Love was the physic that dispelled every ill sensation the body was prey to.
Father Farquhar was saying, “Do you, Kathleen”—he looked to her sire, who grudgingly supplied “Fiona Aoife”—“Kathleen Fiona Aoife Keough, take as your lawful husband”—the bride provided the peddler’s name—“to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in s-sickness”—his tongue tripped over the word—“or in health, to love and to cherish till death do you part?”
She did, and Pinchas’s heart became a living flame. When the priest repeated the formula for the lovelorn peddler, he replied with a resounding “I do!” Much too resounding in fact, because his sudden robustness awakened a shuffling skepticism among the witnesses.
Next came the exchanging of the rings, and Cashel objected to Katie’s transferring the ring that once belonged to her mother from her own finger to the sheeny’s extended digit. She ignored her father even as she pressed upon the peddler a curtain loop brought by her hapless ma from Ireland in anticipation of curtains that never materialized. Pinchas encircled her finger with it like a quoit. Then Father Farquhar proclaimed, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” and the pale groom, lifting his bride along with him, rose up from the bedding with a self-congratulatory “Mazel tov!” He pulled her to him and kissed her full on the lips, the contact banishing—just as he’d expected—all fear.
It was a banishment on the heels of which the newlyweds themselves were soon to follow. For Cashel was also standing and, even as the gawking Tighe exclaimed “A bleedin’ miracle,” shouted, “We’re played for patsies, lads!” Thus rallied, they would have set upon the peddler in a body had not his defiant bride stood between the groom and his assailants.
“It’s too late, Da,” said Katie, radiant in the assurance of her new estate. “Deny him and it’s myself you’re denying as well.”
“So be it!” her father roared.
It would not do in any event to murder the Jew in front of a holy man, however dissolute he might be. That could wait. And if in the meantime the Keoughs lost their appetite for homicide—since their father’s death soon after from fever or drink would dampen the brothers’ bloodlust—they might satisfy themselves with malicious pranks; though the pranks themselves would diminish in cruelty and decline into habit with the years, when it became clear that nothing was going to drive the peddler from the neighborhood.
Not that Pinchas hadn’t wanted to take his bride far away from that festering slough. During the time he’d spent as the guest of her family, the Pinch had become nearly deserted: a handful of hollow-eyed survivors still reeled and debauched in the streets, though in their halting danse macabre they were already three-quarters ghosts. Some slept, for convenience sake, in coffins rather than beds. But the peddler had no money for travel, and the roads around Memphis were anyway barricaded, the bridges burned; refugees from the city had been shot on sight. Thrust into the night with no more than the clothes on their back—and Pinchas’s borrowed at that—the newlyweds clung to each other, their eyes smarting from the carbolic acid dumped into the seething Bayou, its surface mantled in dead fish. Of course there were other parts of the city where the houses were built of stone, where crape myrtles bloomed and people died in their beds, but there was no place among those for a pauper and his disinherited bride. And in any case, Katie surprised her new husband with her stubborn refusal to stray from what she called home.
“But Katie, ziskeit,” Pinchas had demurred, as admiring of her iron will as he was daunted by it, “the Pinch is geshtank, a shitcan.”
“Then we’ll fill it up with Easter lilies,” she assured him.
They found shelter on their wedding night in the Court Street Infirmary, where the mortally ill squirmed under mosquito netting like weevils trapped in spiderwebs. Their bridal banquet was brined cabbage ladled from a tin dinner pail by a nun. In the morning, turned out on account of their good health, they took up what they assumed would be temporary quarters in an abandoned tenement above a boarded-up saddlery on Smoky Row. (They would remain there, but for a brief excursion into the Underworld, for the remainder of their days.) It was in that apartment, in an iron bed vacant of corpses, with the tar barrels still smoldering beneath their window, that they finally consummated their marriage. That’s when Pinchas discovered, to the delight of his ardent bride, that he was the victim of a persistent satyriasis. It was a condition that left the couple unable thereafter to rid themselves of a bashful self-consciousness in each other’s company. (At least until, after the decades of their failure to conceive, Pinchas began to lose courage and heart.) Their heady pleasure in one another, plus whatever they managed to scrounge in their forsaken district, was nourishment enough during the period of their honeymoon.
Nor had Pinchas used up his fund of ingenuity in winning Katie, but was inspired to a further audacity in his desire to provide for her. When the first frost signaled the beginning of the end of the epidemic, he prevailed upon the Lowenstein brothers, whose wholesale dry goods business occupied an entire city block, to extend him a line of credit. Despite their distaste for the unwashed Ostjuden in general, the staid merchants were impressed by this one’s initiative and drive; and the immigrant came away with an inventory of railroad boots and brass-studded denim pants, silk ribbons, thimbles, combs, and almanacs. Equipped with two sixty-pound packs, strapped fore and aft to steady his balance, Pinchas staggered out to travel the Delta roads; though not before his wife, easily her husband’s equal in resourcefulness, had culled from his stock a selection of mourning goods: black-trimmed calling cards, black crepe. She placed these items in the unboarded window of their squatted building at prices low enough to lure a few hearty souls into the ravaged neighborhood. By progressively lightening her husband’s load before each of his forays, Katie built up the business over time to the point where it was no longer necessary for the toilworn Pinchas to go peddling anymore.
By then the city had once again begun to show vital signs. The din of steam compressors, train whistles, and trolley bells could be heard even from the blighted North Main Street. Cotton bales replaced the caskets stacked along the carious wooden sidewalks, which were themselves replaced with stone, and the stagnant channels of Catfish Bayou were transformed into covered culverts. The Negroes, who had been the city’s unsung guardians during the fever, were sent back to their prior squalor, and while people of quality never really returned to Memphis, the streets were made safe enough for decent folk to promenade. Meanwhile Katie’s clever husband had gotten wind of a legal provision called adverse possession: it seemed that, by paying taxes on a property whose owner had vanished, the squatter might assume the right to ownership himself. Moreover, the bankrupt city was happy to encourage the resettlement of an area it had essentially written off, just as the state had written off the city by repealing its municipal charter. Weaned from his dependence on the Lowensteins, Pinchas now purchased discounted goods straight from the factory warehouses. As proprietor of Pin’s General Merchandise—he’d dropped a syllable from his name to give it an American zing—the former peddler set about making improvements, knocking down clapboard walls to resurrect them in mortar and brick.
He was not alone in his effort to revive the neighborhood; others also arrived to take advantage of the rock-bottom real estate deals. One of the first was another itinerant peddler, who upon encountering Pinchas declared in Yiddish, “Tie me by all four limbs but put me among my own!” Sighing over the quaintness of these wandering Jews, Pinchas felt obliged to inform him that he himself was meshumed, an apostate, living in an unholy union with a gentile woman.
“So long as you got your health,” replied the peddler, Mose Dlugach by name, hardy and quite well fed for a traveling man. A little wary of welcoming competition, Pinchas warned him that the town was prone to frequent bouts of pestilence. Doffing his homburg to scratch his pate, the peddler had offered a humble solution: “If I will sell shrouds, then no one will die.”
He opened a secondhand shop at the corner of Winchester and North Main and sent for his family in Szeged as soon as he was able. More followed, dispersed after widespread pogroms in the wake of the czar’s assassination: a wife joined her husband, a brother his sister and brother-in-law, and so on, until the Pinch was reconstituted as an East European ghetto–style enclave in the heart of the South. Ultimately the neighborhood earned the seal of approval from the city fathers, who viewed their Hebrews as a solid mercantile class. This attitude endured despite the street’s eventual invasion by a gang of fanatical Hasids, whose riotous spiritual exercises resulted in a rending of the fabric of time.
Not long after North Main Street was paved and the bridge over the river completed, after an Otis hydraulic lift was installed in the Cotton Exchange and a Negro shot for accepting a job as a postal clerk, the merchant Pinchas Pin received a letter from a niece in the Old Country. It seemed that, during a peasant rampage in the village of Blod, his brother had been murdered, his body left to marinate in a barrel of kvass. His sister-in-law, having witnessed the atrocity, lost her wits and had since been confined to an asylum in Dubrovna, where she died soon after of disregard. What’s more, in an unrelated incident his brother’s son Muni, arrested for Bundist activities, had been deported after a yearlong imprisonment to a labor camp in the Siberian wastes. Pinchas didn’t know whether it was the news itself or the way the news underscored his utter estrangement from his family that disturbed him the most. In his agitation he was especially moved to learn that his nephew, whom he’d understood to be a pious yeshiva boy, had become a militant revolutionary. The nephew’s fate piqued his uncle’s conscience, aggravated as it already was by the compromise of his youthful ideals for the sake of a livelihood. While no special request was included in the communication—it simply stated that, as a surviving relation, he ought to be informed—still Pinchas believed he might be in a position to help the lad. He appealed to the North Main Street Improvement Committee, which in turn made the case to the congregation of the Market Square Synagogue, a place Pinchas seldom set foot in. Nevertheless, prayers were said and a collection taken up (if a bit sanctimoniously), and the funds, converted to rubles, were stitched by the tailor Bluestein into the lining of a cheviot topcoat.
In a cold katorga compound, below the entrance to a mica mine somewhere east of the town of Nerchinsk, Prisoner 71640 (conspiracy, fifteen years) received a parcel in the mail. This was unprecedented. A trustee had dropped the parcel in his lap in the mess hall, its postmark indecipherable, its contents fairly spilling out of the tattered brown paper. It contained some tins of currant jam, sliced pineapple, and sardines, all of which were promptly snatched up by covetous convicts. Under the cans, however, was a folded topcoat of some lightweight gunmetal material wholly unsuited to the glacial climate. Nevertheless, as no one bothered to confiscate it, and as it signified his persistence in the thoughts of someone beyond the Siberian immensity, the prisoner pulled it on over his worn quilted jacket. Another layer of insulation wouldn’t hurt. But in a week the coat had become a haven for lice; a sleeve, caught in the gears of the ore separator, was ripped to shreds and the tails burnt when he backed against a cast-iron stove. It made him look like a clown, the coat, though clownish was a countenance the prisoner found it convenient to exploit once the lining fell out.
In order to take a dump in the sulfurous latrine, you had first to tamp down the shit that protruded from the holes in the planks laid over an otherwise open trench. The shit was packed so hard and tight beneath you that it tickled your ass as you sat, and there was seldom any available wastepaper to wipe with. Still, such moments were among the few that afforded the convict any respite from the harsh routine. This was the prisoner’s situation as he sat with his pants around his patchy boots, idly meditating upon a loose thread at the hem of his topcoat. Intending to snap it off, he wound it around a finger and gave a tug; then the stuttering thread opened a seam from which fell, along with some cotton batting, a number of thin glassine envelopes. The envelopes, when he leaned over to inspect them, seemed to contain Russian currency in various denominations. The prisoner finished his business with an efficient grunt; then swiftly, before anyone else entered the jakes, he stooped to gather up the packets, stuffing them into his pockets along with a letter that was similarly wrapped.
It took his being sentenced to isolation for some trivial infraction of the rules before he found the privacy to read the letter and take stock of his fortune. The isolation cell was a miniature stone dungeon in which one could neither fully stand nor lie down, but its narrow grille admitted the light of a summer during which the night seemed never to fall. The sunlight illuminated a wall emblazoned with religious graffiti painted by inmates with powdered feldspar and beryl from the mine, so that the cell, despite its constriction, had the air of a shrine. By this brightness the prisoner was able to read the letter’s greeting, in its homey Yiddish script, from one Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America: “Honored Nephew, please find enclosed the means by you I’m sending to come …” But the body of the letter made no more sense to him than did its opening salutation. He read it again, until the language began to stir in his entrails the beginnings of what felt like a symphonic episode. The jarring music, however, communicated not one jot of meaning to his sluggish brain. Moreover, he ached in every joint and fiber from hunkering in such cramped quarters, and his fingers, stiff as claws from the years of wielding the shovel and pick, could barely count the rubles in their envelopes. Once more he read the letter: “… the means by you I’m sending …,” until it struck him that “you” was he, Prisoner 71640, né Muni Pinsker. Then the music, converted at length into words, woke up his fears from what he’d hoped was their perpetual slumber.
Escape? Who escaped? There was Shishkov the sharper, found frozen in a fetal attitude not half a kilometer from the camp; and the patricide Alyosha, who was torn apart by sled dogs in sight of the watchtower, his agony backlit by the setting sun. There was Osip Katzenelenbogen, a political, who made it as far as the bank of the swollen Lena, where he was caught and returned to the camp to run a gauntlet of his fellow convicts. Their anger was stoked by the starvation rations they’d received as a collective punishment during the time following the zhid’s attempted flight. In the end his already decalcified bones were shattered and Osip was left to drag his broken body between the barracks and the mineral sluice for the brief balance of his days. But the fact remained that Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America, had sent a parcel to his nephew Muni, a human being. Tahkeh, how could you tell?—when he was harnessed by day to a horse collar that rubbed blood blisters on his scrawny chest as he hauled a cartload of ore up a slanted shaft. He breathed air that was either so cold that it crackled like paper or scorched your sinuses with its reek of excrement and carbonic acid. He never cared whether he was eating bugs or pearl barley in the soup they called “shrapnel,” and his teeth were as loose in his gums as headstones in mud. His body was so inured to filth that scrubbing himself in the bathhouse drew blood. Once he’d helped a fellow hide a convict who’d dropped dead of heart failure, so they could share in the extra rations for the three days it took the putrefying corpse to betray them. But on the other hand, he was light-headedly surprised, this Muni Pinsker, to find himself still alive in another summer, when the snow had retreated far enough to reveal the arsenic green moss underneath.
Almost involuntarily he began to collect the tiny pots of salt from the log canteen, squirreling them away among the fir branches his mattress was stuffed with. Other items he secreted in that lumpy mattress were bought, no questions asked, with hard currency: the mess kit, the tinderbox, a wire noose for snaring game. With gradually increasing histrionics he started to demonstrate the symptoms of derangement that overtook the mine workers as a prelude to total collapse. He spoke aloud to himself in a nonsensical hybrid of Russian and Yiddish, and pretended to read fortunes in the globules of fat he scooped from his gruel on a good day. More than once, though he could barely stand at the end of the working day, he coaxed his toothpick legs into a kind of spontaneous scarecrow gavotte. No one paid him much attention, so accustomed were the other prisoners to the extravagant behavior of convicts on their way out; though Ilya Popov, former editor of the leftist Proletarii, himself stricken with silicosis, saw the method in Muni’s antics and slipped his fellow traveler a clamshell compass with a sundial before he died.
Then it was nearing autumn and the soft ground was hard again; the rivulets from the melted snows that had mired the transport sledges and made the taiga impassable were dried up. That’s when Muni swallowed all the salt he’d been hoarding. The insult to his system brought on a hectic fever that got him transferred to the infirmary, an aboveground facility outside the camp “zone.” Its wards—each guarded by a single sentry seated with a shotgun beside an iron stove—featured every species of real and imaginary affliction. No disease was quarantined: convicts suffering from typhoid lay next to those turned yolk-yellow from jaundice; pneumonia victims rattled their last beside imposters who worried superficial wounds into life-threatening infections. There was little actual treatment, few instruments, and no anesthesia for surgery, and small medication beyond the bottles of alcohol drunk up by the orderlies mustered from among the patients. Nor was there any barbed wire surrounding the infirmary grounds, since who, having gained a berth without shackles in the sick bay, would (even given the strength) want to leave?
Muni lay gibbering on his cot, despite his broken fever, in a self-scripted delirium, raising himself on occasion to perform his St. Vitus rigor. The strategy was intended to get him judged dokhodyag by the skeleton staff: a lost cause convict in the throes of his final agony; and it appeared to work. The stranger his behavior, the more it seemed he was ignored by the population of that raving pesthouse. Moreover, so drowsy was the round-faced sentry that Muni could almost believe that what was left of his topcoat, notwithstanding its clanking from the provisions he’d sewn inside it, served as a cloak of invisibility. Thus emboldened, he contrived, after a week of conspicuous malingering, to sidle by breathless degrees out of the ward, slip along a corridor, and pad down the stairs into the chill October night. He plunged into a stand of larches and paused with a stampeding heart beside a patch of black ice that had survived the previous winter. Though he’d tied the earflaps of his flannel cap tightly under his chin, the cold had already penetrated the several layers of his clothing; his eyes watered, his nostril hairs become bristle-stiff, and frost invaded his lungs. He took the compass from the folds of his coat and tapped its glass face, but the needle would not come unstuck. Neither was he assisted by the stars that glinted metallically through the branches above him, resembling nothing so much as the vaulted ceiling of the mica mine. But there was a pale lavender light in a corner of the sky: that would be the east, and it was away from the light that the fugitive’s steps must tend.
He slept by day, shivering in burrows dug into clay embankments with a sliver of spruce. He ate from his little store of rubbery fish preserved in the stinking oil he’d pilfered along with a bolus of congealed fat; he smeared the fat on the hardtack he rationed himself over the numberless days. He chewed wrinkled berries hard as goat turds sprinkled over a salad of thistles and mushrooms tough as rawhide. Through nights that grew ever longer, he stumbled across the bone-brown steppe and up through sparse timberland, blundering into treacherous ravines. His garments, ragged to begin with, hung from him in shreds, his footcloths working their way out of his galoshes, his hair and beard matted with twigs. He wasted hours building fires, chipping away at the flint from his tinderbox until the sparks ignited the kindling and moss. Often the vicinity of nightfall would threaten to turn the fire into a beacon, and Muni would have to abort his progress; but without the periodic warmth and drying out the fire afforded there would be no progress at all. Shivering in holes lined with ash branches and willow shrubs, he poked his head out to see now a foraging bear, now a party of forced-marching convicts or a patrol perhaps looking for him. Some patrols passed practically under his nose and Muni wondered that they hadn’t sniffed him out in his blind; but the sled dogs were not retrievers and his marginal subsistence left only the slightest of trails.
At some point Muni realized that the search parties no longer seemed to be in pursuit, and guessed that the time allotted for hunting the runaway had elapsed. Or had he actually wandered beyond their range? Muni waited to feel the relief that never came. He grieved that he had no way to measure his transit, no program for reaching Irkutsk, which was the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad some five hundred kilometers west of the mines. He was a speck in a vast mapless terrain, and after so many detours around crags and unfordable torrents he was unsure that he was even traveling in the right direction. Still, the nearly continuous gloom of winter had not yet set in, and the sun, however shrouded, still gave some faint indication of which side of the earth it rose upon.
He nibbled roots, ate a scallopy fungus that he sometimes vomited up, sometimes evacuated in a helpless diarrhea. It hadn’t occurred to him that hunger and exhaustion could so far exceed what he’d already been accustomed to. Then the snows had commenced, submerging the landscape in a polar desert, burying as well the dying flora that provided Muni with occasional nourishment. Wildlife was scarce and entirely unavailable to one who lacked the skill to lay traps. Once or twice, spotting a hedgehog or guinea fowl, he chased it, expending energy he could no longer spare; he found the carcass of a musk deer and cooked what remained of its fetid meat, which he choked down and instantly threw up. In the chill mouth of a cave, where the elements had preserved it, he came upon the corpse of a man. It wore the vestiges of a sheepskin burnoose and bore on a creased blue cheek the Cyrillic tattoo that marked it as an escapee from an earlier era. Muni wondered if his own corpse would age as well. He chewed bark, sucked icicles, and began effectively to starve. Sometimes he remembered the currency tucked in his galosh and had to snicker over the cruel joke his unknown uncle had played on him. Intermittently snow-blind, he wondered if the nothing that wasn’t there was equivalent to the nothing that was. In this way the fugitive’s own logic confounded him.
Though the number that had replaced his name in the camp had faded from his mind, his own given name had little more sonority. Words had become so remote that Muni would occasionally pronounce some phrase aloud (“Administer to the prisoner one hundred flagellum pletes!”) just to ensure that he still had a voice, though he frightened himself by the shattered silence. He exhaled a powdery moisture that stiffened his beard and fell to the ground in a shower of crystals, with a sound the convicts called “the whistling of stars.” Now that the ground had grown too hard to dig, he burrowed in snowdrifts and told himself the snow was fleece. He woke to find the exposed parts of his body distended and without sensation, then stamped his feet and beat his arms with his fists until the stinging began and feeling started to return.
After a storm, while treading a shallow defile where the snow concealed a thin skin of ice over a spring-fed stream, he fell through. By the time Muni had managed to scramble back onto the bank, the water had sheathed his trousers in ice. Unable to feel his extremities, he had the disoriented impression of being unconnected to the earth; he was desperate for a fire but the ice inhibited his movements like a suit of armor. Still he managed to squat and strike sparks with the flint wedged between his gelid mittens. He succeeded in igniting a scrap of birch bark, which he dropped in some nearby underbrush, but no sooner had he fanned the brush into flame than an overhead bough released its burden of snow on top of him, snuffing out the fire. Half-buried himself, he was a stranger to his hands and feet, which he endeavored to locate with filmy eyes. The numbness that swiftly invaded his limbs would soon engulf his heart and still its stammering, and anticipating that moment Muni let go a voluptuous sigh, relinquishing the small affection he had left for the world.
He wandered in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of being attended by creatures whose fur-trimmed hoods framed shadows where their faces should have been. That was in the forest where he was jounced on an inclined litter pulled by beasts with branched menorahs protruding from their heads. Later on he perceived in more lucid moments that, now that their hoods were thrown back, the creatures did have faces of a sort, though the faces seemed to be missing essential features. There were open wounds in place of noses, eyes drooling onto collapsed cheeks like traveling snails. Their chamois-mittened hands, which pummeled him in an effort to restore sensation to his deadened limbs, were not mittens at all but nubs bearing only the stumps of absent fingers. Satisfied that he was either dead or dreaming, Muni drifted until the nerves in his fingers and toes began to send howling dispatches throughout his spent anatomy. Then he woke up to the realization that he was not in hell but on a pallet in an octagonal wooden structure, smoke curling from stoked embers through a hole in the roof. Rather than abducted by a tribe of gargoyles, he had been rescued by the inhabitants of a far-flung colony of the mutilated and misbegotten. They were survivors, the burned-out offscourings of a disease that had run its ruinous course. But while the malady was no longer communicable, it occurred to Muni as he began to recover that leprous deformation might be just the disguise for an absconded brodyag, a fugitive such as he.
His emotions still deep-frozen, Muni felt neither gratitude nor revulsion toward his hosts, as they applied their poultices to his frostbite and pried a revolting broth between his crusted lips. For their part the colony’s population neither ostracized nor made to absorb their guest, but once they’d restored him to reasonable health simply tolerated Muni’s presence. He observed no discernible order to their society, no special roles assigned: those capable of doing did while the rest endured. They raised enough beets and marrows during the short growing season to see them through most of the winter. Occasionally they slaughtered a reindeer from their cadaverous herd, using its hide for the clothing they seldom changed. They caught trout in a nearby stream, which they salted and froze and pounded into a meal mixed with moss to make flapjacks. Once in a while they might procure from an itinerant prospector a horsehead, which they would boil and feast on for days. They slept together in clumps for warmth in their slapdash yurts and the crouched lodge—stinking of sour milk and gangrene—where Muni was housed. The noises they made in the night alternately terrified and fascinated their guest, who was unable to distinguish between their unchaste baying and cries of anguish from the pain of their strangled nerves.
Once he was on his feet again, though still shaky, Muni did try to make himself useful: when he was strong enough, he began to accompany the village’s hunting and fishing parties, attempting the basics of setting snares and drilling holes through the ice with an outsized corkscrew—operations for which he showed little aptitude. Though wary of the fugitive—for they were under no illusion that he was anything else—the natives were not unfriendly. Some, like Fyfka the Reptile, so-called for his crocodilian skin, and Grigory Popp, with his warty lesions and saddle nose, made companionable overtures. Grigory had himself been a hard-labor convict, turned out of a camp lest he contaminate others, and so was well disposed to sympathize with Muni’s plight. Then there was Esma, a Buryat girl with a blacksnake braid, who kept her burnt-almond face kerchiefed like a bandit to hide the rictus of her mouth and ulcerous jaw. She, it seemed, had conceived a particular fondness for the fugitive, which she demonstrated in moderately aggressive gestures. The most conspicuous of these was her habit of rubbing against him at every opportunity, a development that Muni found especially disquieting at night, when he lay for warmth among the others in a squeamish intimacy. Then he might feel her spare hips pressing against his backside, her lobster claw teasing his spine.
It was enough to make him think better of lingering longer in their community, but the season of snowstorms was upon them and it would have been suicide to continue his journey before spring. Besides, the villagers would have been obligated by their code of hospitality to hinder his premature departure. So Muni stayed on, gathering strength, while the brutal weather forced the colony into a period of hibernation.
Dogs and reindeer shared the crowded shelters, compounding their noxious atmosphere. No one ventured outside except to fetch wood or relieve themselves, and a stranger approaching the village would have observed few signs of human habitation. All that was visible above the snow were enameled mounds, black plumes coiling from the smokeholes like tassels on a Tartar’s helmet. In the absence of the sun in its midwinter retreat the inhabitants led a troll-like existence, which is not to say they were idle: their long naps were often an excuse for indiscriminate sporting in the dark. Collectively afflicted with tapeworm, they gorged themselves on their bilge-like bouillon and the gamy venison rissoles with kneaded roe; they drank measureless cups of tea laced with monkshood schnapps. They told tales of werewolves and flesh-eating Baba Yagas by the light of the fish oil lamps. And there was music, when the leonine Attila broke out his concertina and accompanied a windup victrola playing polkas and scratchy quadrilles. Then those with feet would dance despite the cramped space, music and drink having whipped them into a bacchic frenzy.
Throughout the weeks the eager, drop-footed Esma continued to moon over Muni. But the trinkets with which she embellished her frowzy garments and the immodest glimpses she allowed of her scaly flesh did little to promote her suit. Still she persisted in her indiscreet advances, which the fugitive was compelled to eschew in a manner that could only be interpreted as rejection. So disconsolate had Esma become that Fyfka the Reptile, in his capacity as unofficial starosta or elder, felt obliged to intervene. “Why you don’t give to the girl a tumble,” he urged in some polyglot tongue near enough to Russian for the guest to compehend. When Muni replied that he would rather not, Fyfka assumed he was being coy, which was at least part of the truth. For even had the girl resembled his own species, the fugitive would have had scruples; he had after all never known a woman, and (Hebraic taboos aside) had yet to recover enough of himself to feel equal to such an occasion.
Muni tried to plead diplomatically that the girl was just not his type, but the elder put it to him that the situation was urgent: she was wasting away for want of the young man who could boast all his digits and toes.
“How can you tell?” blurted Muni, who immediately wished to retract his thoughtlessness. But the damage was done and from that moment on his welcome—as borne out by the entire community—was officially outworn.
In the meantime a thin band of sea-green light had appeared on the horizon promising the return of the sun: it danced, the light, inside the ice cake that served as a windowpane like a filament in a glass bulb. A speckled snow bunting was seen to perch on a frozen midden, at which sign Grigory Popp and Grinka Spivak, jowls hung with nodules like bunches of grapes, began helping to provision Muni by way of expediting his departure. Having no need of it, the untouchables returned to him the money they’d held in safekeeping, which astonished the fugitive, who’d never missed it. When he offered them compensation, the gesture was viewed as an insult.
They saw him off in a purga, a blizzard, with the assurance that spring was just around the corner. There was no special ceremony to mark his parting, though he was escorted by Fyfka the Reptile and some of the others (leaning on crutches, paddling in wooden crates on runners) past the boundaries of their village. In fact, he was led far enough beyond the belt of mixed forest and steppe surrounding the settlement that Muni couldn’t have found his way back even if he’d wanted to. Somewhat resentful of his abrupt send-off, once he was alone again amid the limitless Siberian barrens, he began terribly to miss his unclean hosts.
They had equipped him well, outfitting him in a fur-trimmed parka, trousers with a white fox lining, and moccasins with reindeer-hoof soles. They’d furnished him with a cedar sledge, lashed to which were a tent and animal snares plus several weeks’ worth of foodstuffs. There was a flask of vodka tasting of turpentine, a brick of black tea, and a sleeping sack made from muskrat pelts. They gave him as well a partial map of the territory, insisting it was all he needed, since by the time he’d traveled beyond its edge he would either have crossed the frontier or expired. They cautioned him to follow the sun (what sun?) due west, but owing to the irregularities of the region it was difficult to maintain an undeviating direction, and often he had the sense that he was traveling in circles. The snowflakes battered him like hailstones, though after his first frightful nights in the wild the squalls began to abate. Muni knew that haste was essential: with spring the swollen streams and mudslides would make the distance to Lake Baikal impassable. Moreover, the lake itself, practically an inland sea, must be frozen solid during his passage or else he would have to traverse the hundreds of miles around it. But he was hard pressed to summon the necessary urgency; his destination—Memphis, America, home of the deliverer to whom he owed (he supposed) some recompense—evoked in him no feeling of any kind. The mindless impulse to cover ground, to put one foot doggedly in front of the other, was all that now characterized his trek.
He scrambled over slippery transverse ridges, inched along shelf-like cornices, threaded clefts between palisades and perpendicular crags; he crossed a jagged penumbral mountain and skirted a gorge scarred by viridian tarns. When the landscape permitted, Muni shod his feet in the klunking racquets the lepers had bequeathed him. Once in a boggy declivity he stumbled upon the timber-sized ribs and tusks of some mired prehistoric behemoth. As he paused to ponder it, he spied through its ark of bones a pair of dogsleds zigzagging down the snow-blown slope he’d just descended. They were likely a party of trappers who, in this country of outcasts, would perhaps welcome a wayworn brodyag. On the other hand, there were bands of bloody-minded peasants who mounted posses in the hope of capturing runaway convicts with bounties on their heads. Rather than wait to find out which they might be, Muni bounded forward, tearing off the hobbling snowshoes in his flight. It was then that the bent pines beneath him, casting off their blanket of snow, stood to attention, and Muni fell victim to the impromptu airborne event that he would later relate to a girl in a tree. A sprung projectile, the fugitive was sent sprawling beneath a cloudbank, sliding over the hatch-marked ice; while behind him the dogsleds crashed into the frozen littoral of Lake Baikal and sank like the chariots of Pharaoh’s army.
In his pious youth Muni would have viewed the event as an instance of divine intervention, but it never even occurred to him that God’s reach could extend this far. Bruised and aching in every joint, he assessed his situation: his food and equipage were strewn behind him over the steppe and the broad lake he slowly picked himself up from would take days to cross. He’d never make it. But neither was turning back, and perhaps encountering his undrowned pursuers, an option. His salvation, it seemed, was only a temporary reprieve, but still goaded by a kind of residual locomotion, Muni staggered on through veils of pea soup. The wind swirled the snow in filigree patterns over the grizzled plane of the lake, while the ice soughed and yawned like an ancient ship’s rigging. He had no idea how long he’d been walking or in what direction his leaden steps had taken him, though he was aware of having nearly outdistanced his body’s capacity for movement. For all he knew he’d strayed beyond the margins of the known world into some uncharted dimension. It was a notion reinforced by the spectral light, like an orange in a nest of spun sugar, which had appeared just ahead of him. He was drawn toward it, the light becoming beacon-bright, the beacon declaring itself as a metal brazier beside which sat a shaggy character holding a trident.
He was wearing a fur cap and sheepskin coat fringed with plaited thongs, sitting on what looked to be an oblong drum. He had a flat, squint-eyed face with a complexion like cracked mud, a beard as fine as milkweed floss. As Muni approached, the old man acknowledged him with scarcely a grunt and redirected his attention to the hole he’d carved in the ice. Having ceased his forward motion, the fugitive now felt incapable of budging another inch; weary beyond measure, he plunked himself down beside the brazier, its kettle on the boil. The embers that warmed his cheek also drained him of his last ounce of energy, and seated cross-legged on the obsidian tabletop of the lake, Muni dropped his chin to his chest and fell fast asleep. He awoke after an indeterminate while to find himself bundled in fleece, a steaming cup of tea set before him. He sipped, wincing at the syrupy consistency and taste of tar, but vile as it was, his stomach welcomed the thermal liquid, which left him feeling somewhat revived. He felt buoyant in fact, and weirdly indifferent to his predicament.
“Do you know maybe the way to Irkutsk?” he asked the old man almost disregardfully, since he suspected there might be no way back to the world from there. At that moment there was the splash of a fish breaking the surface of the water in the hole. The fish—like a transparent bladder, its bones and viscera visible through isinglass skin—was instantly skewered by the fisherman upon his three-pronged spear. Then the old man held it over the brazier, where its sweating essence caused the embers to spit flames.
“Irkutsk,” the man at last flatly responded, pronouncing the word like a preliminary attempt at a foreign language. Then he showed the chipped sprockets of his liver-brown teeth and let go a hyena laugh. He stripped the flesh of the fish from the bone and tossed the feathery spine toward his guest, who snatched it out of the air and began greedily to suck at the few scraps of meat that remained. Meanwhile the fisherman, still chewing, had dumped the contents of his brazier into the hole, from which rose a roiling cloud of vapor. Unnaturally nimble for his years, he whipped Muni’s fleece out from under him—which sent him tumbling—and tossed it along with the brazier onto a hand-carved toboggan. Having battened down his gear, he started off hauling the toboggan across the ice, using his trident like a pilgrim’s staff. With an instinct perhaps more canine than human, Muni scrambled to his feet and followed.
As they tramped through ranks of fog dense as waving draperies, the old man never once turned around to look at him, and Muni wondered if his guide was even aware that he had a shadow. He wondered why he should think of the old man as his guide. Every so often the fisherman would pause to consider, as if he’d arrived at some invisible junction; then he would turn so sharply to left or right (according to what internal sextant?) that Muni thought he was trying to shake himself free of his follower. But while it took all his stamina just to keep up with the old man, the fugitive was determined for no apparent reason to hang on.
In that interminable yellow mist there was neither night nor day nor any way of predicting when the old fisherman would—every once in a very great while—come to a halt. Then showing no signs of fatigue, he would unload the spider-like brazier and sprinkle fish oil over a few foul-smelling pellets to build a fire. He would extract a fat sturgeon from his creel, sear it on his trident, and attack it with slavering bites. A sound he made while relishing the fish suggested articulate syllables: “Ogli” was what Muni heard, and he seized upon it for the fisherman’s name. Then it was Ogli who tossed scraps to his hanger-on, after which he brewed the acrid tea in a tin cup that served double duty as samovar. He would take a sip and nod as he passed the cup to Muni. That the fugitive did not gag was a minor triumph for which he was awarded a degree of refreshment, but the tea also seemed to augment the unreality of his circumstance. Somewhere, he sought to remind himself, there was a body politic; there was a czar and his coterie, complete with mad priest and hemophiliac son; there were Draconian laws and massacres, Jews and revolutionists—all of which seemed illusory to the wanderer at this hyperborean end of the earth. Not that the frozen lake, which knocked and creaked and thundered like distant cannonade, had much in common with the solid earth.
After his meal the fisherman, his slit eyes lit like phosphor, would commence to beat his drum with puckered fists. The pulse of the instrument felt like a corollary to Muni’s own heartbeat: until he feared that if the beat ceased so would his heart. Ogli’s weather-cured features were made the more grisly by the ruby light of the brazier and the stringy hair that whipped his face. His spindly limbs moved in some spastic approximation of a dance, like a marionette trying to disentangle itself from its strings. When he’d completely encircled his follower, intoning sounds that ranged from guttural to rooster, Ogli would sit down on his drum with a hollow thud. Unprotected from the buffeting winds, eyes closed and body motionless, he would appear to have fallen asleep. Concerned that the old man might be in danger of freezing, Muni would poke him experimentally in the ribs. Then Ogli’s eyes would flash open, and, whinnying with laughter, he would spring from his drum, pack up his goods, and proceed apace, with the drooping fugitive straggling at his heels.
Maybe it was the stimulus of the bitter tea or the hypnotic effect of the tinkling silver discs sewn to the fringes at the back of the old man’s coat—which, he couldn’t have said—that kept Muni slogging forward. All he knew was that nothing stood between him and being forsaken to an inhuman solitude but this indigenous loon, whose behavior was anything but reassuring. Once, without turning or breaking stride, Ogli opened a flap at the rear of his breeches to release a steamy turd, which Muni had to dodge to keep from stepping in. Another time the old man retreated so far into his postprandial trance that no amount of the fugitive’s prodding could bring him around. It was as if his spirit had departed his flesh, leaving behind a body as brittle as a dried-up puffball; if you poked too hard the frame would fold in on itself and crumble to dust. Then awareness returned, and, with his characteristic cackling, Ogli sprang from his drum and continued on his way. Muni followed, lagging farther behind, craving more of the bilious tea for its restorative properties, though the tea had begun to have diminishing returns. When his legs did finally give out, Muni sat down on the lake’s frigid moonstone and waited to die. He’d already lost sight of the old man in the encompassing murk. Now the wind slashed his face like a swarm of razors, penetrating his garments till he shuddered uncontrollably. Closing his eyes, he was almost wistful at having traveled so far to perish so purposelessly. When eventually he opened his eyes again, he saw erected in front of him, as in a grainy photograph, a portable yurt of red felt. Crawling inside he found the fisherman curled under a fur blanket fast asleep. He was snoring, farting, filling the tiny shelter with fulsome odors, but as he also exuded warmth like a furnace, Muni nuzzled against him and was soon asleep himself.
He was awakened by the naked Ogli leaning over him, chanting a string of gibberish. Having unbuttoned Muni’s coat and shoved his sweater and singlet to his chest, the old man seemed to be performing some kind of surgery: he was digging with crooked fingers in the pit of Muni’s stomach, tickling him as he scooped out what were either intestines or sausage links slathered in sauce. In a tortured pantomime, his loose flesh and genitals flapping, Ogli wrestled with the slimy mess as with a serpent. Assuming he must be dreaming, Muni wanted with all his heart to wake up to some life he could call his own. It was a desire that would not survive the rest of the journey to his destination, where it would take a cataclysm to rouse it again. It would already have ebbed, that deep yearning, by the time he’d scrambled out of the yurt and stumbled into the sandy cove below the forested cliffs above the lake; it would be further dissipated as he gathered the whortleberries and goose eggs he wolfed down in deserted povarnias. What little remained of his fervid desire would dissolve in the churning waters of the Angara, where he boarded the ferry that took him upstream to Irkutsk. Once arrived, Muni would make for the maidan, the thieves’ quarter, to purchase a forged identity card on the black market. The card would cost him more than the phony passport he’d also have to secure. He would get himself shaved and reappareled, his appearance having earned him stares more agitated than those he bestowed in return, so staggering was the experience of being back in the precincts of men. When he rode the train over the Urals, the very concept of desire would become as alien to Muni as Siberia itself, and he would wonder why he persevered: why not make Moscow his terminus and pick up where he’d left off? Even the kulaks were openly advocating rebellion these days. But by then it would be too late to do anything other than continue traveling, paying bribes and crossing borders, booking passage in the steerage section of the SS Saxonia at Bremen, which set sail for the port of New York. There he would pass as if blinkered through its confusion of tongues, then board another train that would carry him across yet another continent, or at least a sizable slice of it, to Memphis, Tennessee.
But at the moment when he bolted from the yurt, the desire was strong in him to put land and sea between himself and the crazy fisherman. Slipping on the damp ice, he blundered away from Ogli, who was in the process of pulling on his parka over his hoary head. When Muni had emerged from the lifting fog, he turned to see his guide dragging his sledge back into obscurity, trailed by cracks in the ice that was beginning to break up around him. Then the fugitive stepped in the nick of time onto the far shore of Lake Baikal, where it was already spring.
I was reading to Rachel when I noticed that her eyes were getting heavy, so I flipped ahead in the book until I found the passage. “‘Later on in a bookstore on Main Street,’” I read, “‘a scrawny, hook-nosed lad’”—lad was my own edit as the text said, unflatteringly, nebbish—“‘a lad named Lenny Sklarew chanced to open a fat volume called The Pinch …’”
Her eyelids fluttered open and she sat up abruptly, unheeding the sheet that had fallen from her breasts (their nipples like tiny berets). “Give me that,” she said, snatching the book away from me to peruse the page. She returned it in a moment with a harrumph. “Lenny, you’re such a card,” she assured me, having apparently seen no reference to her bedfellow in the text.
“Yeah,” I replied, recalling a caustic rejoinder from some old noir film, “the Ace of Spades.” Then I quickly checked the book again to make sure that I was still there.
In Memphis Muni worked for his uncle Pinchas in his general merchandise and did odd jobs in and around North Main Street. Across the way, at the new Idle Hour Theater, a Keystone Cops two-reeler called Cohen Collects a Debt premiered, and blind Helen Keller spoke on behalf of the Wobblies at the Lyceum off Court Square. A famous evangelist challenged the devil to a wrestling match at a tabernacle erected in Riverside Park, and a black boy, accused of raping a white woman in a Gayoso Avenue brothel, was lynched and dismembered. Muni Pinsker fell in love with the wirewalker Jenny Bashrig, and against every law of decency on or off the books, got her with child. Then he abandoned her to chronicle the history of the Pinch. The history included incidents that took place after the timeless time that was brought about by local fanatics through a regimen of spiritual exercises and prayers. It also included events that preceded and followed that great enchantment, including the fate of the book after Muni had stopped writing it. He wrote with his brain ablaze, as if fueled by the mephitic tea he’d sipped long ago on a frozen lake; wrote in the hope that, in the writing, the task would ultimately reveal to him his reason for pursuing it.
He described an incident involving the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol and his prodigal son Hershel, who was swallowed by a fish. This happened a few years after the father and son had come to the Pinch via the port of New Orleans. They’d come to Memphis because Oyzer had heard it said that the city still maintained a large number of livery stables full of draft horses. These were the horses that pulled the fleets of municipal ice and refuse wagons, and they would require an endless supply of iron shoes. But by the time father and son arrived on North Main Street, they discovered that much of the transport labor had already been mechanized. Moreover, the bulk of the metal work that had been Oyzer’s mainstay in the Old Country was now performed by machinists in factory shops. It was a situation that further aggravated the blacksmith’s already virulent temper.
His temper had not always been so foul. Back in the village of Hrubeshoyb on the River Wieprz, where his family had dwelled for generations, Oyzer had been a principled householder and good provider; he was a gentle if strict father to his son and daughter and an attentive husband to his wife, the baker Pesha Sarah. But late one afternoon in the month of Nissan, as he and his son returned from a fishing expedition (little Hershel trailing behind him toting a string of spiny-finned perch), Oyzer heard shouting and saw smoke. From below the brow of the hill above the river he could spy the street of the Jews with its shake roofs burning. He watched a gang of peasants overseen by uniformed Cossacks looting shops and torching houses, including his own. He saw them beating his neighbors and worse, and lest his son see it all as well, held the boy down and covered his eyes with a hand. But Hershel did see—through the visor of his father’s thick fingers—what the hoodlums had done to the women (among whom were his mother and sister) who had been dragged into the street. He also observed his father’s terrible fixed expression as they lay on their bellies in the eel grass, and when the cries of the martyrs became unbearable, the blacksmith turned his heavy head toward Hershel and saw that he saw. Afterward he could not forgive his son for being a witness to his cowardice.
In America, to which they fled after the pogrom, the blacksmith cursed his son along with his failing livelihood. He cursed his neighbors even as they tried to ease his destitution by bringing him small jobs. “Tinker’s tasks!” he groused, when they asked him to repair a damaged sausage stuffer or lard press. In fact, he might have made a tidy living had not his self-defeating temper driven potential clients away.
To offset their poverty and further stoke his father’s ire (which he preferred to the blacksmith’s neglect) young Hershel took to thievery, stealing tinned victuals and various other essentials from the shelves along North Main. Aware of the hardships the boy endured at the hands of an irascible father, the shop proprietors were likely to turn a blind eye to his petty thefts. There was some tacit consensus that his modest burgling was a kind of insurance against greater encroachments, and there were those who even admired the dexterity of his sticky fingers. Hershel’s father, however, was not grateful for the provisions his son laid in at the forge, serving as they did to emphasize the blacksmith’s inadequacy. But his curses and throttlings did little to discourage the boy. The more he was punished, the more Hershel seemed to step up his delinquent activities, compounding plunder with random pranks. In the end he was more of a nuisance than even the yokels who sometimes invaded the Pinch to bedevil the Jews.
A day came, however, when something seemed to break in Oyzer Tarnopol. One minute he was at his anvil tapping at the twisted barrel of a toy gun (a dainty job beneath his dignity), the next he let go of his hammer, which caused a minor tremor as it struck the earth. He stood a moment with limp arms, his bullet head sagging as if the thick shaft of his neck could no longer support it, then dropped his considerable bulk onto a workbench. Maybe his sudden lassitude was due to the infernal heat of the forge on that mid-September afternoon, or maybe it was the appearance of Zlotkin, the junkman, so wasted with age that he must have thought he had nothing to lose by invoking the blacksmith’s wrath.
“Your boy, the ganef, that he took by me the shmattes from my wagon,” he was complaining, when the blacksmith abruptly wilted and sank onto his bench. The junkman was peering curiously at Oyzer when the culprit himself wandered in with an armload of secondhand clothes. Seeing his father in this uncustomary posture, he demanded of the fossil Zlotkin, “What you did to my papa?”
“I didn’t do nothink,” stated Zlotkin, who seemed disgusted by the blacksmith’s woebegone attitude. In truth the whole of North Main Street had grown so accustomed to Oyzer’s explosive temper as almost to rely on it as a natural feature of the neighborhood. Shrugging his bony shoulders, the junkman shuffled out the open doors of the smithy, snatching back his clothes from the boy as he left.
“Papa?” asked Hershel tentatively, still braced for the inevitable volley of curses, the boxing of his ears that would follow Zlotkin’s charge. He was waiting for the branched veins to stand out on his father’s broad forehead as he rose to deal with his son. Once, he had lifted Hershel by his unruly hair and the boy felt his scalp come unstuck from his skull, admitting whole galaxies of pain.
But the hulking blacksmith remained slouched on his bench. “It smells from your mama’s challah, the hearth,” he said at last, an unprecedented exhaustion in his voice. Hershel looked toward the glowing firepot, which exuded as usual the trenchant stench of burning coal.
Though it fascinated him at first, in the days that followed, the son found his papa’s chastened behavior even more unnerving than his late evil humor. Hadn’t the boy become the neighborhood scapegrace less from cupidity than the wish to provoke a father whose attention he could command in no other way? He would take the blacksmith’s abuse over his quiescence any day. Rascal he might be but no fool, Hershel knew his father’s emotive torment was a last defense against paralyzing despair, and it was the son’s job to keep that torment alive.
With a mind ordinarily geared to capers and practical jokes, the boy set about hatching a serviceable plan. It was nearly Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when the entire population of the Pinch paraded beyond the trolley lines out to Catfish Bayou and tossed into it the crumbs representing their sins of the past twelve months. Although the blacksmith had long since dropped all pretense of religious observance, the tashlikh ceremony was a custom he’d always insisted on performing back in Hrubeshoyb. They’d made a family excursion of it every year along the myrtle-thronged banks of the River Wieprz. Thus did Hershel decide to take advantage of his papa’s docility by persuading him to take part in this year’s ritual.
His idea was that, since the unpardonable sin that fueled his father’s fury now seemed only to weigh him down, perhaps a symbolic unloading of that sin would allow the rage to return. It was worth a try. So on the day in question he dissolved the yeast and mixed the flour and milk himself; he kneaded the dough in the trough but didn’t wait for it to rise. Molding it into a substantial glob, he delivered it to the blacksmith, who received the lump of dough like a convict receives a ball and chain. Then, a little intoxicated by the new power he wielded over his father, Hershel goaded Oyzer into the train of citizens marching to the banks of the bayou. There he pressed the blacksmith to heave his burden into the murky inlet, where a large, stipple-scaled fish leapt up to swallow the dough before it even entered the water.
Despite the miscarried gesture, Hershel waited for his father to be transformed back into the man he’d been before the junkman’s visit, or even—halevai!—back before the destruction of his home and family. But if anything he appeared even more deflated, as if he’d jettisoned what little was left of his spirit along with his burden of sin. The brawny blacksmith now seemed as vacant as a passive clay golem. He still pottered bare-chested about the forge in his dangling suspenders, listlessly busying himself with whatever work came his way. (Ironically, there were more jobs since his customers seized any excuse to view the spectacle of a tame Oyzer Tarnopol.) But he could scarcely muster the strength to pump the bellows or manipulate his hammer and tongs. His inefficacy made his son’s freebooting among the businesses of the Pinch all the more needful, but Hershel’s forays went far beyond mere expedience. On a spree, he stole items that had no practical application—bust food, secret society buttons, a Heidelberg electric belt; he engineered dangerous pranks involving gunpowder. His out-of-hand antics culminated in the theft of a cumbersome shot-metal clothes wringer from Pin’s General Merchandise. Its employee, Muni Pinsker, recent refugee from a Siberian labor camp, fed up with the kid’s terrorizing of the neighborhood, gave chase. He pursued the boy as far as the bayou, where Hershel leapt from the bank and was swallowed by a bloated fish grown immense on the misdeeds of North Main Street.
Or so Muni reported. Nobody disputed him though neither was he especially believed. Since the arrival of the Shpinker Hasids, who conducted their mystical experiments above a Commerce Avenue feed store, the citizens of the Pinch were aware of goings-on that did not comport with the prosaic routine of their days. But even Muni wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d seen what he’d seen. “It’s a fact even if it isn’t true,” he’d declared to Jenny, further confounding himself with the qualification “or vice versa.” He wasn’t in any case too surprised when Oyzer Tarnopol came into his uncle’s store in his stained leather apron to purchase a jointed bamboo rod and reel. Every morning after that the blacksmith was seen to set out for Catfish Bayou, where he baited his hook with a rubber frog, cast his line into the still water, and sat on the muddy embankment all day. And every evening he returned empty-handed to his ill-lit rooms above the smithy. Still, he persisted even during the period immediately following the earthquake, when a breach in its banks caused the bayou to be nearly drained. With something akin to his old energy the blacksmith flung himself into shoring up the rupture, rallying others to pitch in until a dike was constructed and the shallow basin replenished again. Then, while most residents of the Pinch seemed to go bughouse in the wake of the quake, Oyzer Tarnopol continued sitting his stationary vigil beside the bayou with his rod and reel.
Owing to the peculiar time zone that the district occupied after the earth’s upheaval, the prehistory of the Pinch was as available to Muni, from his current perspective, as was the present. In fact, past and present were often indistinguishable, jumbled as they were with visible auguries from the future. As a result, Muni could include in his chronicle, alongside an account of Mrs. Elster’s dancing fever, an appearance by the demagogue Davy Crockett haranguing the tipplers in Bell Tavern; and Yankel Zlotkin hondling malbushim (soul garments) to the lawless flatboat fraternity—half men and half alligator—that tyrannized Smoky Row. Then there was the shiftless kid who found Muni’s “history” in a used book store on Main Street, its contents bleeding into his own late twentieth-century neighborhood; and the golden child of Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, who was stolen from his bassinet by marauding shretelekh and replaced with one of their own.
The shretelekh are a largely innocuous class of Jewish elemental, though known in their caprices to hinder as often as help a human being. Mostly, however, they prefer to remain, unless disturbed, in subterranean habitats—cellars, caves, grottoes, and the like. This particular tribe had dwelled for some time under Market Square Park, in and out of the crannies and tunnels beneath the roots of the great patriarch oak. Only once before the quake had they ventured as a body aboveground. That was when they’d surfaced in order to rid themselves of a superannuated member of their society, a decrepit old specimen who’d long outworn his usefulness. With the hog-tied party in tow, they skulked (knee-high and semitransparent) about the tenements of North Main Street after midnight, surveying the fresh crop of newborns in their cradles. They settled on a crocus-curled, angel-faced little kaddishel, the offspring of Rose and Morris Padauer, a weary-winged couple with an apartment over Dlugach’s Secondhand. Poor in spirit as well as pocket—she a footsore hausfrau, he a luckless traveler in ladies’ corsets and stays—the Padauers had always felt that their beautiful child was an anomaly; he was more good fortune than humble folk such as they seemed entitled to. They were therefore disheartened but not entirely surprised to find that the boy had turned overnight into a shriveled homunculus; though how he’d gotten himself trussed like a Passover pullet remained a mystery. In any event, after the shock had worn off, they continued to care for the “child” as their own, which they after all believed him to be.
For his part the obsolescent little imp, who came to be known like his predecessor as Benjy, had had enough of geriatric abuse at the hands of his own kind. And Mama Rose and Morris were indulgent parents, sensitive to his delicate condition, indignant at the kaynehorehs, the “no evil eyes,” that some spat in his direction when they wheeled him by in his stroller. Despite their slender means the Padauers appareled their creature in sailor suits and flannel drawers; they made sacrifices to ensure him a protein-rich diet full of boiled brisket and herring with smetana—a welcome change from the blue mold and lichen that were the regular fare of the shretelekh. They powdered and diapered him after the spells of incontinence his diet sometimes induced, bought him a windup Kabongo African dancer and a wooden pelican on wheels. Although he remained misshapen, Benjy thrived in the Padauers’ charge and even regained the ability to walk, albeit at an unsteady bowlegged waddle. If he occasionally balked at playing the part of his adoptive parents’ little manikin (he was after all several centuries old), he understood that infantilization was a small price to pay for the pampered existence he enjoyed.
So he persisted in the imposture and considered himself fortunate. As for the Padauers, why disabuse them of their fond delusion? The guardianship of their special child gave them a unique status in the community as universal objects of pity, and besides, they seemed genuinely devoted to the counterfeit boy. For all this Benjy was grateful after his fashion, and even sought to reward his foster family’s generosity. Though what conjuring powers he’d once laid claim to were mostly depleted, he could still provide them with certain luxuries that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. Morris Padauer, returning with his paltry profit from the road, liked to refresh his spirits with a drop of brandy, and Benjy was able to ensure that his de facto papa’s flask remained bottomless. He assisted Mama Rose’s unending efforts at rendering goose fat by making certain that the schmaltz never ceased to overflow its jar. While he couldn’t produce the pot of shekels that his species had been rumored to possess in more storied times, he could see to it that the pennies in Rose’s piggy bank were inexhaustible. The Padauers never knew the source of these small blessings but came to accept them as gifts complementary to the abiding gift of Benjy himself.
Meanwhile the Shpinker Hasidim, a ragtag quorum of celibate bachelors, performed their penitential rites with a wanton zeal in their shtibl above the hardware and feed store. Under the auspices of their venerable rebbe Eliakum ben Yahya they initiated liturgical practices regarded as heretical if not downright obscene by lay observers, practices that ultimately resulted in a neighborhood apocalypse. The earth shook, the waters rose, and the ground opened beneath the great oak in Market Square Park. The tree toppled crown-foremost into a yawning chasm, so that its muddy roots were upended, and the creatures inhabiting those roots were thrust suddenly into the galvanic air. Thus exposed, they scurried from their perches and scattered abroad into the shadows. A few hung on around the flooded North Main Street to further nettle the already arsy-varsy lives of its citizens, but most, with an aversion to water, abandoned the Pinch. They went in search of places where no one would recognize them for what they were.
The outcast Benjy Padauer caught sight of them from his elevation atop the geyser that had erupted beneath him in the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand, where his mama had been hanging out clothes. Riding the crest of that fountain, he suffered a pang of anxiety that the shretelekh might be coming back for him. Then the pang was superseded by the pain generated from the hot waterspout that was scalding his keister through his knickerbocker pants.
When the spout subsided and the temblors ceased, a dazed Rose and Morris Padauer carried Benjy to Doc Seligman to be treated for his burns. The good doctor had set up an impromptu clinic behind a standing hospital screen in Market Square Park, to which the majority of the neighborhood had retreated after the quake. Despite the trauma of having lost their homes and livelihoods, the survivors seemed for the most part in an unaccountably convivial mood. Families with salvaged tea urns and featherbeds occupied their outdoor dormitory like castaways on a charm-bound island.
Physical injuries among the local population had been thankfully slight, but even the superficially wounded insisted on battlefield dressings, which they wore like badges of honor. Thus was the doctor, though capably assisted by a humorless Miss Reudelhuber, exhausted from his labors. His cotton-wool hair was matted, his varicose cheeks puffing like gills, when the Padauers presented their aged child, the seat of whose pants was still smoldering. Rallying somewhat, Doc Seligman welcomed them as he folded the privacy curtain around them and asked Miss Reudelhuber to please fetch a basin of cool water. He yanked down Benjy’s trousers against the “peanut’s” (his mama’s term of endearment) croaking protests, and sat him in the basin, which sizzled from the immersion of his scarlet tush. The peanut emitted a sigh like a rattle; then the doc raised him up and rubbed an aromatic ointment on his blistered nates, while the Padauers looked away, respectful of their child’s modesty. The doctor, applying a gauze plaster with a frown, was not so tactful.
“Good as new,” he pronounced, resisting an urge to give the little oddity’s bandaged bottom a patsch before helping him lift his pants. Then, perhaps realizing the irony of his pronouncement, he added sympathetically, “You folks ain’t yet too old. Why you don’t try for a human child?” Upon which the doc, clearly regretting what he’d said, began to busy himself with his instruments.
He hadn’t meant to let the cat out of the bag, though it wasn’t as if the bag hadn’t already been poked full of holes. This wasn’t his first examination of the Padauers’ stunted entity; the parents had brought him to the doctor early on with the question of why he didn’t seem to grow. An old-school physician cautious in his diagnoses, Seligman had allowed for the rare possibility of a premature aging syndrome for which there was no known cure. He’d suggested they seek confirmation from specialists, whose fees the beleaguered couple could never have paid. Besides, Seligman’s judgment, speculative though it was, was good enough for them. But that night in the park, his weariness infected by the uncommon lucidity of the post-seismic environment, the doctor let slip a truth the whole community took for granted: that the Padauers’ prodigy did not belong to the race of men.
Husband and wife exchanged evasive glances, each trying to hide from the other what they had failed to hide entirely from themselves. Attempting to conceal his stubbly beard behind an upturned piqué collar, Benjy mumbled apologetically in his froggy voice, “Nobody’s perfect.”
The senseless jubilation that had overtaken the Pinch in the aftermath of its earthshaking event served only to salt the Padauers’ wounds. Morris, in his chinless despondency, and Mama Rose, heavy-laden with the freight of her saddlebag hips, seemed in that moment to have lost their knack for comforting each other. At one point Morris even put the question in plain words to their peanut, “Benjy, what kind of thing are you?”
His response was a half-hearted bleat: “I’m a red-blooded American boy?”
It was perhaps the electric atmosphere itself that renewed the Padauers’ motivation to find a solution to the mystery of their charge. Having given up on gleaning enlightenment from the medical community, however, they thought they might consult with clergy. They ruled out the stuffy Rabbi Lapidus of the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue as too insensible to preternatural affairs and chose instead to seek the crackpot wisdom of Rabbi ben Yahya. Like the rest of the neighborhood they’d shared a skepticism bordering on animosity toward the Shpinker fanatics. But as all parties now agreed that the Hasids’ ritual antics were responsible for shifting the planet’s tectonic structure, the Padauers had revised their attitude; they wondered if the Shpinker rebbe might have some special knowledge concerning the origin of their ill-made little shaver.
They gave the Dlugach boys a few coins to row them as far as Commerce Avenue, where they disembarked at Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed. At the top of an exterior staircase they were admitted into the loft above the store by an idiotically grinning young Hasid. Behind him a chorus line of his fellows had linked arms in a frantic kazatsky, chanting psalms and balancing bottles and books atop their heads as they danced. In a corner a solitary disciple waltzed with a Torah scroll wrapped in a corset cover trimmed in Valenciennes lace. (Mr. Padauer recognized the style of the garment as the Esnah Ingenue from the catalog of a company he represented.) The room itself, with its floor like a deck listing to starboard, was strewn with penitential paraphernalia—trays of tacks for rolling in, a cat-o’-nine-tails—that had apparently fallen into disuse. There was a long table piled with books at the head of which sat Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya, instigator of the providential new order. His eyelids were swollen and heavy, his complexion chlorotic, his beard spilling like cinders from a scuttle over his vest. The cushions that held him wedged in his throne-like chair looked to be all that kept him from pitching into the revelry.
Nervously the Padauers approached the rabbi, each holding on to one of Benjy’s nipper-like hands.
“Rebbe,” said Morris, not wishing to disturb him, though how could he not be disturbed by his disciples’ buffoonish behavior? “Rebbe, this is our son.”
The rabbi’s thick eyelids wavered as his fingers groped for the snuffbox on the table before him. Taking a pinch, he stuffed it up a hairy nostril, sneezed, and wiped his nose with his beard. Then, slightly revived, he reached for Benjy, whom he lifted with a wheeze onto his lap. The Padauers’ little curiosity went stiff, wincing at the old man’s sour breath and piss-pot odor as the tzaddik proceeded to bounce him on his knee. Unforbearingly, Benjy submitted to the inspection of his turtle-shaped head and pointy ears, but when the old man stuck a fat finger in his mouth, he clamped down reflexively with one of his few remaining teeth. Seemingly unfazed, the rabbi pried himself loose and returned their bogus child to the custody of his parents.
“These type shretelekh,” he uttered, “they ain’t known to have a poisonous bite.” He nonetheless offered the offended finger for a disciple to kiss.
Morris and Mama Rose looked at one another dispiritedly, but Rabbi ben Yahya wasn’t finished. In a phlegm-filled voice from deep in his throat, he began to list all the things Benjy was not: he was not from sitra achra, the provenance of demons; he was neither lantekh nor kapelyushnikl, who hailed from horeh khoyshdekh, the mountains of darkness, and were no damn good. Theirs was a member of a relatively harmless race of underground folk—“and this one, the pitsvinik, he got left in him no mischief at all.”
It was Rose who first attempted to state the obvious: “Then the peanut is not”—which Morris undertook to complete—“our son?”
“Cholileh,” said the rebbe. “God forbid.”
The noise in the room had reached a pitch that precluded conversation, the dervish dancing of the enraptured disciples causing the building to tremble as from another aftershock. In the midst of it the Padauers raised their voices to ask the rebbe if he knew what might have happened to their original offspring, him of the flaxen curls.
Eliakum ben Yahya cupped a hand to his tufted ear so that they had to repeat the question, but again he was unable to hear. After failing a third time, Morris, in his frustration, shouted, “What should we do now with him?” indicating the creature.
“Him?” said Rabbi ben Yahya, sinking back into his former torpor. In fact, he appeared to be quite unwell. “Why not show to him a good time?” he breathed. “Is playing now they tell me on the Hotel Peabody rooftop the New Pygmy Minstrels, that it’s fun for the whole family I’m led to believe.”
Then he closed his eyes and the downcast Padauers, taking hold of little Benjy again, had to agree they could use a night out, which they hadn’t enjoyed since their courtship days.
Even as his uncle chased after his wife’s ghost as far as Market Square Park, Muni Pinsker sat on his cot in his odorous underwear chronicling the event. He didn’t need to be in the park to observe the episode. If he left his narrow room at all, it was only to fetch another inkwell or nib or more stationery; he visited the watercloset when necessary, shared with Pinchas the food that Mrs. Rosen sent across on a tray suspended from the pulleyed clothesline, then hurried back to his room. In the scribe’s ranging mind, experience and narrative occurred with a simultaneity that made it impossible to know whether the act prompted the story or the story the act.
Tonight Muni munched a stale rugelach from the dish he’d taken to the kitchen to offer Pinchas, who was absent, but Muni never missed him since he followed his uncle’s every movement in the history he was busy composing. Or was it the reverse? His uncle did whatever Muni wrote that he did. Along with ongoing events the nephew recorded others that came before and after, which also somehow happened concurrently: such as General Bedford Forrest’s cavalry charge through the doors of the Gayoso House Hotel, and a monthlong camp meeting on the bluff, where the bull pen was filled with straw so that attendees who got the holy shakes would not be injured—all of which took place even as the butcher Makowsky and Bluestein the mohel merrily prepared to circumcise young Nathan Halprin’s heart.
These things Muni cited while remaining holed up in his cell for an indefinite time, time itself having become as still as standing water. The length of his tangled hair and beard attested to the fact that time still flowed, however, and the music from the fiddle outside his window was both doleful and demoniac.
At the news of Katie’s untimely passing imparted to him by Jenny Bashrig, who abandoned the Pinch soon after, Pinchas Pin never budged. He stayed fixed to the kitchen chair he’d sat vigil in for weeks. Banished from the bedroom by a wife who didn’t want him to witness her suffering, he had wondered if his obedience were due to consideration or cowardice. Still he’d trusted her to the care of Doc Seligman and the watchful Jenny; told himself that when the crisis passed, as it must, she would welcome him back into her presence, where he would find her hale and lovely again, and less cruel. But that outcome had not ensued, and so Pinchas was determined to remain obstinately unmoving until such time as Katie’s fate was reversed. After all, there had never been a satisfactory diagnosis, and an affliction without a name was no affliction at all, and therefore had no power to vanquish its victim. So, mulish, he sat and waited beyond the time when garments should have been rent, mirrors turned to the wall, the burial society called in to wash the corpse. Never mind: tradition no longer figured in Pinchas’s frame of reference, just as illness and death had no place in the present-day Pinch. His neighbors, with their chronic complaints of shingles, piles, furuncles, goiters, and fatty hearts, were not complaining anymore. They had surrendered to an epidemic of unbridled felicity that supplanted illness and death; dying they would now have regarded as bad form.
The lights that streamed through the kitchen window from the jubilee beyond made auroras of the waving chintz curtains, while Pinchas continued to sit in dull denial. Grief at this stage was its own anesthesia: he felt nothing. Oh, maybe some bitterness, as when he suspected that his wife’s malady was his punishment for failing to lie with her as her husband these past several years. But if so, hadn’t he been punished enough? “Katie, come back already!” he shouted, then had a laugh at the sheer idiocy of his outburst; then forced himself finally to his feet and went to see if she might have obeyed his summons.
He was met at her door by a sickly-sweet odor that filtered into his nostrils and penetrated his guts where feeling began to return. The resulting pain was exquisite, as when (wrote Muni) frozen limbs begin to thaw. Stumbling into the bedroom, he found a blue marble woman—her ice-gray hair threaded with rust—laid out in her nainsook chemise as on a tomb. But before Pinchas could fall upon her as his pain dictated, a thing happened that would have violated the limits of his freethinking consciousness, had that consciousness not been already so savaged: for Katie’s spirit—he assumed it was her spirit though it wasn’t in the least diaphanous and looked instead uncommonly alive—had begun to detach itself from her dormant body and, once free, rushed directly out of the room. Pinchas watched her departure, wondering if he were the catalyst, that even in the tranquility that had succeeded her suffering, his wife preferred to elude his regard. But so urgent and quick did her risen shade appear that it rendered all but superfluous her supine form; it was in every way the animated likeness of the original, which confused Pinchas as to whether you could even say that the ghost was deceased. And as dead was still not a concept he was able to attach to his wife, Pinchas managed to overcome a disabling anguish and lumber after her out the door and down the hall.
“Katie, my dove,” he called to her, “this is foolishness, no?”
He had some vague intention of overtaking the apparition, because the more distance her spirit put between itself and his wife’s remains, the more permanent did that separation become. He realized as well that this logic, unique to the moment, was at the same time entirely groundless, though it must have some basis in reason—mustn’t it?—since Pinchas was a reasonable man.
“Och, Katie,” he cried, “I’m loving you beyond logic!” and would follow her, dead or alive, wherever she led. Or so he believed.
Once outside, Pinchas sloshed into the canal that the neighbors declared had its source in Eden, whose surface the shade walked briskly across. For their part his neighbors, if not playing at being shopkeepers and artisans, could be seen prospecting with strainers for the nacreous dream residue that bobbed like manna atop the shimmering stream. The jeweler Gottlob led his goose of a daughter through seasons that changed from one block to the next, bundling and unbundling her in her peacoat accordingly; the pharmacist Blen waved a butterfly net from his wherry to try and snatch a monkey-faced ziz bird out of the air. The North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened in the back of Makovsky’s to propose names for emotions that no one had previously experienced. So preoccupied were the citizens of the Pinch with their manifold phenomena that they scarcely noticed the bespectacled merchant in pursuit of his wife’s fugitive ghost.
On the crest of the little hill that was formed by the great oak’s uprooting, Katie paused a moment as a breeze stirred her auburn hair and pasted her chemise against her well-knit bones. Above her in the violet sky a cloud hung from a crescent moon like a rag from a scimitar; an owl hooted and the merchant’s phantom wife ducked without a backward glance below the surface of the earth. She sank among the inverted limbs that extended into the fissure as if she were descending a staircase. Having mounted the hillock behind her and peered over the brink into darkness, Pinchas balked in his pursuit; he’d come (it seemed) as near to the abyss as his tether would stretch. Weak from days without eating and further debilitated by a fathomless sorrow, he was snapped back to a plausible sanity: Katie’s ghost was not Katie; the wraith swallowed up by the earth’s open maw had nothing to do with his beloved wife. Hysteria had given way to a soberer rationale: he was a retail merchant again, and rather than follow a shade into the sunless unknown, Pinchas elected to turn around and retrace his steps back home.
He left the park and again confronted the spectacle of a neighborhood he perceived as a perverse impersonation of itself. But no sooner had he arrived at the bank of the canal than he realized that he’d succumbed to a stunning failure of nerve. Katie’s specter had more vitality than the corpse growing stiff back in the apartment to which he knew he couldn’t bring himself to return; the ghost had the greater claim to his allegiance, and Pinchas hated himself for having turned around. Isolated from his preposterous community by grief, he belonged to neither this world nor any other. Deeply ashamed, he stepped into an empty coracle moored to a hitching post in front of Poupko’s Hosiery and began paddling toward the place where all the lunacy had begun.
Mr. and Mrs. Padauer were leaving as Pinchas arrived. As they passed him on the landing above Hekkie’s Hardware, they were debating whether it was actually possible to travel beyond the borders of the Pinch.
“Mama,” Mr. Padauer was saying, “it’s like there’s around the neighborhood a Shabbos boundary, and can’t nobody come in or go out.”
“But we got special an exempt from the rebbe,” she countered, to which her husband concurred, though he had no recollection of having received such a thing.
Pinchas stepped undeterred into the dusty shtibl, where the Hasids were behaving as if it were Yom Kippur eve. They were performing the kaporeh ritual, twirling roosters by the spurred ankles above their heads. So rapidly were they twirling the chickens that the birds had begun to function as propellers, lifting the chanting fanatics into the air while feathers fell all around them like snow. Pinchas had to duck beneath the elevated disciples’ kicking feet as he approached the slumbering rebbe, with whom he had never before stood on ceremony. Still, he was a little daunted by the old man’s waxy countenance and stertorous breathing. But in his desperate need for answers, he gave the holy man’s shoulder a vigorous shake, until his lids began to open like jimmied clamshells.
“My Katie died and her ghost went in the hole in the park,” he stated defiantly.
“So you say,” replied the rebbe with a yawn, automatically reaching for his snuffbox.
Taking his response for indifference, Pinchas felt himself becoming incensed; he was on the verge of blaming the old kocker for his broken heart and demanding to know what he was going to do about it, when he remembered that Eliakum ben Yahya was not responsible. He and his band of zealots might be blamed for turning the Pinch into a sort of supernatural funfair, but he’d played no apparent part in Katie’s demise. No one was culpable, he reminded himself in an effort to calm his outrage, though he still couldn’t manage to rule out his own guilt. Then Pinchas became aware that the rebbe was posing a question.
“So why you didn’t follow her?”
“What?” said Pinchas, who’d heard him perfectly well.
The rebbe emitted a restive grunt. “Why you didn’t go after her?” he repeated.
“To what end?”
“Tahke, to bring her back.”
Again Pinchas was near to erupting with rage, until he realized, again, that the real target of his anger was himself. Hadn’t he gone to the park with that very purpose in mind before the madness of his resolve stopped him cold? Nevertheless he felt obliged to restate the irrefutable. “She’s dead!”
“So go where go the dead and bring her back.”
This was too much; he was being mocked. He’d compromised his integrity by seeking an audience with the old charlatan only to be humiliated for his trouble. “It’s what I deserve,” he supposed. But on the other hand, why had he come here if not for confirmation that the laws governing the conventions of the ordinary were in abeyance. And where wouldn’t he go to fetch back his Katie?
“You ’fraid?” Pinchas was dimly conscious of the rebbe inquiring.
“You damn for sure right I’m afraid!” he barked.
“But you been there before,” reasoned Rabbi Eliakum. “You should know from the way back already.”
Pinchas peered at him in perplexity before grasping the old man’s reference; everyone knew the story: how the young pack peddler had been rescued from his entombment during the Fever. He’d told it so often, leaving open the issue of whether he’d been actually dead and resurrected, that he’d practically leached the tale of any truth, but now the memory recurred in all its stark veracity: Katie had saved him then and had given him now an opportunity to return the favor. Wasn’t that what the rebbe implied? But it had been so long—not since leaving his country of origin—that Pinchas Pin had been called upon to take himself into the unknown.
Seeing how he was torn, Rabbi Eliakum, with a heavy “Oy,” endeavored to raise himself to his feet. Some of his Hasids, spent from the aerial exertion of twirling their chickens, had dropped from the ceiling to lie in a blissful heap among the cross-eyed birds. The rebbe made an exasperated gesture with his bearded chin as if to say they were beyond his influence now. “I’ll go with you,” he asserted. Then taking up his walking stick and a small siddur, which he slipped into the pocket of his caftan, he began to scoot haltingly toward the door. Even through his own forebodings Pinchas could see that the old man was in no shape to play his guide.
“Rabbi, you’re not well,” he cautioned.
“A nekhtiker tog,” pooh-poohed the old tzaddik. “Nonsense, a nice stroll will do for me good.”
Once on a visit to the Pink Palace Museum with Rachel, while standing in front of the case containing a pair of shrunken heads from Borneo, I tried pitching my voice.
“Oy,” I made one of the heads to say, and the other, also in an old man’s voice via Rachel, replied, “You’re telling me.”
An item now, you might have seen us together around town: at a poetry reading at the Bitter Lemon Coffeehouse or an Italian film about a plague of boredom at the Guild Art Theater. We made a road trip at Rachel’s suggestion into the Delta, a pilgrimage to the crossroads where bluesmen bartered their souls to the Devil, and to the grave of William Faulkner, where we shared a fried pie. We watched the sun set over the river, which left an indelible rose madder impression on my brain, even without the agency of LSD. Then we repaired to my apartment—never to hers; I’d yet to be invited to spend the night at her place—where we fooled around and I read to her aloud.
I guess you could say I was happy. Hadn’t I waited all my days for such a girl? Still, there were times I wished I could get even closer to her, to penetrate her heart’s core as they say. Though wasn’t it enough that, to put it crudely, I was getting laid? So what if Rachel never quite responded in kind to the zeal of my attentions; never mind that her caresses often seemed almost maternal, as if she was moved less by desire than compassion. Not proud, I would take what I could get. Besides, I had sufficient enthusiasm for the drum-tight hollow of her abdomen and the scent of her tar-black hair, the spicy compartments of her mind, to compensate for whatever was lacking in her participation. The fact of our lovemaking was enough for me to build a small universe upon.
The sap from my arrested adolescence surged like an aneurysm whenever she touched me. Meanwhile The Pinch had receded from primary experience to the dimensions of a regular book; its pages ceased to swallow me whole as they had before my association with Rachel, whose history I would sometimes investigate as eagerly as I had North Main Street itself.
“When,” I’d asked her somewhat hesitantly, “did you lose your virginity?”
“Well, there was the unicycle when I was thirteen, and again …”
“Again?”
“… at fifteen, a boy from the planet Mongo …”
“Never mind”—becoming mumpish—“I don’t want to know.”
“What’s the matter, Lenny? Can’t you take your own medicine?”
She was right of course, since even with her I tended to trade mostly in double-talk. Still I refused to let her off the hook: “Were you ever—and you should know I stand ready to avenge you if you were—abused?”
“No,” she said demurely, “but there was the guitar-playing cantor at Temple Sinai—I was his pet—who asked me once if I wouldn’t mind spanking him. I remember I was so flustered I told him I had a cold.”
What was her greatest disappointment? When, after having her tonsils out at age eight, she’d written to Neil Sedaka to come visit her in the hospital and he didn’t show. Once she caught her big sister in a primal embrace with the country club golf pro and wrecked their moment by laughing until she spat up. She was a daddy’s girl until he suggested a fix-up with an old friend’s son, the feckless heir to a radiator steam trap industry. She had a thing for animals: her favorite TV show was Zoo Parade, her favorite book National Velvet, which had surpassed even Anne Frank’s diary as a teenage passion. She traveled in Israel and Egypt the summer after high school graduation with a boyfriend who claimed not to have had a bowel movement during their entire month abroad. Despite her practical bent (she’d been treasurer of a Brandeis College political action committee and worn a gas mask to an uneventful demonstration), she thought she might like to die like Joan of Arc.
Then it would be my turn, though her interrogations tended to be less specific, as when she asked, “So Lenny, why are you such a—to put it mildly—such a case?”
“Blame it on my childhood.”
“Your childhood.”
“As you know I was snatched from my cradle by a buzzard that dropped me on the doorstep of a London blacking factory …”
At which point during that particular exchange she had stiffened and turned away from me. I sat up in bed to find her staring at the opaque glass of the window that gave back the reflection of her seal-sleek body. My eyes slid down her breast and clung to the nipple like Harold Lloyd hanging on to the face of a clock.
“You’re not really an authentic human being,”she mused, and in case I hadn’t got it that she had my number, “are you, Lenny?”
“Me?” I said, dodging the subject lest she think she’d struck a nerve. “I’m an open book,” I insisted, reaching for the book and opening it to the place where we’d left off reading—the part where old Yoyzef Zlotkin, who sorted tin at Blockman’s junkyard, developed the faculty for what is called kfitzat ha-derekh, or the seven-league leaping of the way.
“I interviewed his granddaughter Mindy Gerber last week,”put in Rachel, albeit a bit mechanically. “She graduated from White Station High School and went to Yale on a full scholarship, one of the first women to take a PhD in physics. All she recalled of her zayde was a disagreeable odor.”
In 1855, according to Muni Pinsker, Mayor Israfel Baugh and Dr. Roscoe Dickinson settled their feud with pistols for two, coffee for one, behind the slave pen on Exchange Street. In 1924, Clarence Saunders of Piggly Wiggly fame built a palace of pink marble out on Central Avenue, and in the thirteenth month of 1913, a month that included all others, the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol, in his frustration, threw his anvil into the soup of Catfish Bayou. It was a ponderous anvil that took what remained of the blacksmith’s once fabled strength for him to toss it, and the colossal splash caused a shower of displaced fish to fall all about him. Walleye, garfish, and even a Cretaceous alligator flopped in the mud at his feet, though none appeared to have swallowed his lost boy.
Poking about the bank inspecting the fish, the blacksmith did unearth a beaver-felt shoe he recognized as having once belonged to his son Hershel. Contemplating it awhile, he reasoned (aware that his reasoning was skewed) that perhaps the fish that took the boy might return for what it had left behind. So he hung the shoe on his hook and cast it into the muck. Still no luck. Then Oyzer did a thing that would have been unthinkable during his ferocious days. Though he set no store by religion anymore, and assumed that God had as little use for him, he went to visit the Shpinker rebbe. Why? Because that’s what North Main Streeters had done—furtively, to be sure—whenever the absence of all other options left them wondering if there was more in heaven and earth than they cared to believe.
Oyzer’s neighbors, starry-eyed from an excess of belief, ogled him from atop the sandbag seawall as he trudged through hip-high water on the way to ben Yahya’s shtibl. But the rebbe wasn’t there. His disciples, however, were still in residence, behaving more like a mob in a tavern than daveners in a holy place. Their monkeyshines ceased abruptly upon the entrance of the terrible blacksmith.
“You can tell me please where is Rabbi Eliakum?” inquired Oyzer, his hangdog humility annulling his bull neck and barrel chest.
The schnapps-soaked Hasids looked at one another. Surely the blacksmith’s subdued condition was further proof (if they needed it) that the messianic age had arrived. One of the Shpinkers, reclining on the floor with a dead chicken for a pillow, informed him to the amusement of his fellows, “He went in the Cave of Machpelah.”
Another, plucking a still-wriggling fish by the tail from Oyzer’s pants pocket, chimed in, “He went like Akiva in Abraham’s bosom alive.” Others got into the act, enjoying the fact that the blacksmith could be teased with impunity; they gathered round him, continuing their taunts: “The rebbe went in Gehinnom to lasso with his tefillin the devil Asmodeus.” They danced around him, a manifest version of the internal demons that had harassed him throughout the years. At some point the blacksmith’s neck tendons began to swell and he trembled in all his limbs, seeing which the disciples left off their sport. They grew quiet again, bracing for the violent outburst that was surely at hand, but all Oyzer released was a spate of hot tears.
So daunting was this display that it convinced at least one of the Hasids, a rodent-faced lad with a pronounced overbite, to abandon the high-handed antics in favor of pity. He attempted a serious explanation of the rebbe’s disappearance—“When is exposed the hidden saint, his work here is done”—then looked dismayed that the explanation sounded so much in line with the taunts.
With no reason to tarry, the still-sniffling Oyzer turned to go, when the earnest disciple seemed possessed of a realization: “No more is he the blacksmith,” he proclaimed, indicating their visitor with a gesture. “The fisherman is he become!”
“The fisherman!” echoed others of their minyan, as if a veil were lifted and the blacksmith’s true identity revealed.
The earnest Hasid had moved to the long table upon which lay a double-crowned Torah scroll. Reverently peeling a negligee from the scroll, he began to unroll the vellum parchment until he found the passage he was looking for. “Toyreh is the best of merchandise,” he declared, producing from a pocket a pair of pinking shears. Then like a haberdasher cutting fabric, he guided the scissors in their munching progress across the passage and held the clipped fragment of scripture aloft. The others seemed disappointed that the fellow wasn’t instantly atomized by a fist of lightning but accepted his demonstration as more evidence that a new order obtained. All was permitted.
“The Toyreh one studies in this world,” stated the rodent face, “l’havdil, it’s nothing compared to the Toyreh one studies in the next.” The implication being to all within hearing that they hadn’t seen anything yet. Then coming forward he pressed the passage into Oyzer’s thick mitt. “Fisherman, put in your pipe this and smoke it.”
Of course Oyzer did not smoke or drink or engage in any kind of profligate activity; his remorse had always been sufficient to fuel his immoderate wrath. But despite the dubious authority of the Shpinker disciples, cantankerous in the absence of adult supervision, he began to think of himself as “the fisherman.” As if that designation relieved him of the onus of being Oyzer Tarnopol. Plucked from his cheder at an early age to become his father’s apprentice, he’d forgotten the little Hebrew he knew, and so was unable to read the scripture he’d been given. But it nevertheless assumed for him a talismanic cachet.
Early next morning—a morning like the others that came and went without advancing the calendar date—the fisherman was back at the bayou. Dawn, he recalled from his days along the Wieprz, was an optimum hour for angling, though that was the extent of his knowledge of the pastime. The fog hung like lace tatting over the water, on the other side of which Oyzer was able to descry some figures emerging from a large conduit. This was the conduit that the old Gayoso Bayou, converted after the yellow jack plague to a sewer main, spilled out of into the Catfish cove, and from its mouth appeared a procession of spectral figures. A fever blister of a sun shone through the fog, illuminating the blind fiddler Asbestos as he picked his way at the head of a plodding file of colored men. Pausing in the sludge outside the tunnel, the musician clamped his cane between his teeth, removed his instrument from the gunny sack, and began to improvise a humoresque. It was a mercurial air in marked contrast to the dirge-like pieces he was generally heard to play around North Main Street, and the men seemed to scatter in time to its sportive rhythm. Some made for the shanties north of the cove while others stepped into pirogues and paddled for the narrow channel that led into the Wolf River tributary. A little stimulated by the music himself, Oyzer stuffed the passage of scripture into Hershel’s shoe; he snagged the shoe once again on his hook—a hayhook he’d optimistically fastened to the end of his line—and cast it over the pond.
At once a gigantic fish broke the surface with a three-story splash and struck the bait before the shoe had a chance to hit the water. The horsehair line grew taut and the spool spun rapidly as the fish ran free with the beaver-felt lure. The resulting tug nearly pulled the cork grip from Oyzer’s hands, yanking him forward at a stumble into the shallow water as he tried to hang on to his rod. With only a rudimentary experience of the sport, he understood that he was seriously outmatched, giving up already the farcical misnomer of “fisherman”: a wretched smithy was all he was.
“Palm the rim,” came a harsh smoker’s voice from behind him.
Oyzer strained to look over his shoulder, where a pink-eyed rustic in a dusty sack coat was standing.
The man spat a stream of tobacco juice. “Palm the rim of your spool to give it some drag,” he said, gesticulating with his hand. “Use your thumb.”
The blacksmith applied pressure with his cudgel-sized thumb to the reel’s rotating spindle and felt a slight retardation of the big fish’s headlong run.
“Now play that sucker,” said another more nasal voice. “Click and pawl.”
Oyzer turned again to see that Pink-Eyes had been joined by a lantern-jawed gent in a battered straw skimmer.
“He ain’t got no clicker, Ethel; that’s a cheap-ass Alright reel.”
“Should of bought hisself a Orvis multiplier; them’s got a slide drag for easy retrieval of your got-dang game fish.”
“Myself,” said the original kibitzer, “I’m partial to the Pflueger direct-drive, which it’ll let you feather your line with a forefinger.”
“Had me a Pflueger oncet,” countered Ethel, “but the got-dang bird’s-nest device couldn’t keep the line from snaring.”
“You should try shometime the Koshmic quadruple,” came a third voice that Oyzer, facing forward again, recognized as his neighbor Alabaster’s, speaking as usual through a chomped cigar. “With the fifty-pound tesht I uzhe it, and alwaysh with the woolly booger lure.”
There commenced a heated debate concerning the virtues of woolly boogers versus mayflies, caddises, midges, and hare’s-ear nymphs, but by then the blacksmith wasn’t listening anymore. He was struggling to maintain some traction against the prodigious fish pulling with the might of a man-o’-war at the end of his line. Resigned now to contending with the fish not as an angler but as a stiff-necked Jew, Oyzer was able to draw again on some portion of the blacksmith’s strength. He’d managed to slow without halting the free run of the fish toward the channel outlet by applying pressure to the reel, but was unable as yet to summon enough force to reverse the clockwise revolution of the crank handle. As a consequence, leaning backward at an inordinate angle with his heels dug into the mud, the blacksmith was in a stalemate with the powerful fish.
He was aware that a growing number of spectators had gathered behind him, heard snatches of advice he ignored, knowing in his bones that he must bring in the fish on his own or not at all. The fog had lifted and the sun shone forth on a brilliant late spring (or early fall) day. North Main Streeters had ventured beyond the enchanted zone to mingle with a few gentile citizens alerted to the blacksmith’s struggle. As Oyzer gripped the handle of the still turning reel, the cane rod was nearly bent double from the tension, but miraculously it did not break nor did the line snap. Miracles notwithstanding, however, what was called for was simple brute strength. But while the veins stood out like cordage on his ham-sized forearms, Oyzer was unable to wind the spool in the opposite direction. He groaned aloud, his red face contorted in the anguish of his effort, but the handle on the reel would not be moved.
In describing the deadlock from the confines of his narrow room, Muni Pinsker evoked epic contests with legendary denizens of the deep, associations that lent velocity to his pen. But the thoughts of Oyzer Tarnopol, who shared no such associations, were elsewhere: he told himself that, had he interfered on that black day back in Hrubeshoyb, he could only have succeeded in getting himself murdered alongside his wife and daughter, thus leaving his son an orphan—and that, however, was finally no excuse. Meanwhile the blacksmith’s neighbors, Jew and yokel alike, had tied an anchor rope around Oyzer’s thick middle and hauled on it as in a tug-of-war to prevent his being pulled farther into the drink.
Morning gave way to afternoon then evening—the orange sky deepening to plum—then morning again, the first day; and still the blacksmith held fast in his struggle with the fish. Sweat streamed in runnels from his brow, tiny blood vessels bursting in the whites of his eyes, which he squeezed shut; he clenched shut his jaw, though he opened his mouth periodically to receive the chicken soup that Mrs. Rosen insisted on spoon-feeding him. The neighbors, heaving at the hawser that kept him from pitching forward into the bayou, spelled each other, comparing fish tales of their own as they rested before taking another turn. Then another evening and morning, the second day; and Oyzer’s neighbors began to show signs of fatigue and restlessness, some wondering why they’d left the scintillant waters of their canal to assemble by this noisome sump. Most of the goyim, grown bored with the marathon encounter, had begun to wander off, as what had they been waiting for anyway? The lunker, presumably stalled below the surface, had yet to reappear, which made one question whether it even existed. Most likely the big Yid had snagged his hook on a scuttled flatboat. By the third evening the blacksmith’s trunk-like legs were sunk to his thighs in the gumbo, so that he looked to have been planted there, more an immovable fixture of the landscape than a man.
Oyzer himself, his every sinew and nerve on fire, his brain an ember, wondered whether the fish remained on his line, or was it that—his thoughts unraveling—the dead he’d deserted were attempting to pull him under? How he’d resented his son for whose sake he’d refrained from taking his own life, though staying alive was surely the punishment he deserved. But with Hershel vanished, what reason was there not to surrender? Maybe it was time to follow the sins he’d flung into the bayou. Ever fewer of his neighbors now manned the rope that held him against the opposing tow, and the suction of the mud he was lodged in could scarcely offset the leverage he’d lost. Soon what strength he had left would fail him, his heart would burst from the strain, and he would be dragged into the water to perhaps become food for the very creature he battled with. It would be a welcome end. But in the meantime he owed it to the family he’d betrayed to prolong his agony.
There was no telling how much time had passed—another day and night?—when suddenly in the gusty late afternoon the line went slack. With the cessation of tension the blacksmith fell backward into the sludge, along with the handful of neighbors still tugging at him from behind: the fish must have slipped the hook. But standing on the bank in back of them were Oyzer’s initial observers, volunteering a different conclusion. The pink-eyed one said, “Thang’s done turned around,” and the lantern-jawed other, “Git up now and wind your reel like a scalded devil.” Because the lunker had apparently doubled back and was swimming straight toward them, the broad V of its wake ruckling the surface of the coffee-colored water. Muddled and covered in slime but not quite defeated, Oyzer hauled himself to his feet and began to crank the previously unyielding handle. He cranked with a galloping alacrity that caused smoke to emanate through the vents of the aluminum reel and the braided line to smolder from the friction. He cranked until his shoulder was practically thrown out of joint and another circuit of the handle seemed beyond his powers of endurance. At that point the line grew abruptly rigid again, and calling on some reserve fund of strength (donated in part by the chronicler Muni Pinsker in his description), Oyzer locked the reel and heaved the rod upward. Crying “Gottenyu!” he thrust it into the air until the titanic fish hung suspended from a slender bamboo wand as curled as a shepherd’s crook. Seeing how he wobbled so unsteadily, nearly impaled by the hilt of the rod wedged against his gut, others came to the blacksmith’s assistance.
He hadn’t set out to catch a mythical monster, but there it hung: awesome and shuddering, a dreadnought of an aquatic vertebrate, oily water pouring from its massive silver flanks. It was risen only partway out of the bayou, the great saw-toothed fan of its dorsal fin only half exposed, its thrashing tail concealed beneath the churning surface, gills puffing in and out like the bellows in Oyzer’s forge. The diminished crowd of onlookers was swiftly reconstituted, the hardier pitching in to help uphold the rod as if rallying to raise some mammoth primeval standard. But as they held it aloft, the monster, its eyes dull as old chrome, opened its jaw to show a double row of needle-sharp teeth before sliding back into the turbulence. In its place was another fish, smaller but still monumental, its torpedo-shaped flanks louvered with breathing tiger stripes. Then that one also opened its mouth and slid back into the cove, leaving a lesser giant still on the line. Lifted high enough above the water to reveal its cankered underbelly, its forked tail slapping the air, that fish too slipped back into its element, leaving behind it young Hershel Tarnopol hanging by his collar from the rusty hook. He was grinning around the piece of paper clenched between his crooked teeth, his legs cycling slowly in his baggy plus fours; in his hands he held a large round loaf of baked challah bread.
Several of the men rushed forward to help disengage him from the hook. As they lowered him, Hershel shifted the bread to his left hand in order to dip his right into the breast pocket of one of his assistants. When they set him down in front of the blacksmith, whose body was still heaving from its Homeric exertion, the boy’s feet (both of them shod) made squelching sounds in the mud. Removing from his mouth the biblical passage with which Oyzer had baited the shoe, he said sheepishly, “Straight from the hearth, Papa,” as he offered his father the golden loaf. Then, with the wisdom he’d acquired during his confinement in the fish, Hershel began to read the Hebrew script in a stentorian voice.
“‘Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you fill his skin with harpoons, or his head with fishing spears? Lay hands on him; remember the battle—but never do it again!’ Job forty-one, one.” And assuming a dignity he had not previously been known to possess, the son enjoined his father the fisher-smith to “Ess gezunterhait, Papa. Eat in good health.”
With a sigh that rocked his entire frame and admitted a seepage of tears, Oyzer took a bite of the warm challah baked in the heat of a monster’s bowels. It had a cottony texture that tasted of sweet divinity and ashes, and melted in his mouth before he could swallow. In that moment the blacksmith forgave his son for having forgiven him. Then the stationer Seymour Lipow, noticing that his breast pocket was empty of his seven-jewel Swiss, shouted that he’d been robbed, and Hershel took off at a sprint. His bandy-legged father gave chase, roaring after him: “Marinated imbecile! When I catch you I throw you back!”
Somewhere there was a war. There was also a mass jailbreak from the county clink at Auction and Front Street and a surefire cure for pellagra concocted in a basement on Beale; there was an evening when Rose and Morris Padauer took along their proxy son, Benjy, to dinner and a show on the roof of the Peabody Hotel. They might have chosen a venue more suitable for children—a circus or a zoo—but the old rebbe had assured them that the roof garden cabaret specialized in family entertainment. So, despite their desolatation over the plain truth that their child was not their child, they took the old man’s advice. Of course, if they were honest they would have had to admit to experiencing as well a measure of relief: for the unsightly specimen they’d nurtured these several years had not, it seemed, sprung from their own loins. In the interim, however, they’d lavished so much fondness on the wizened little chap that, regardless of Benjy’s tenuous relation to humanity, it was too late now to withdraw their affection.
To save money—since Mama Rose’s pillaged piggy bank had disbursed only a pittance—they spared themselves the trolley fare by walking the dozen blocks to the hotel at Main and Monroe. Crossing the unmarked border between North Main and Main Street proper, they realized yet another instance of relief. Because once they’d begun to stroll beyond the neighborhood, the world reverted blessedly to three dimensions, as opposed to the dizzying multitude observable in the Pinch. The last to find out what everyone else already seemed to know, the Padauers felt like strangers in their own community, and so breathed easier at having left it for a turn.
“Mama,” said Morris, admitting a roguish smile as he swung one of Benjy’s horny hands in his own, “I feel like we keepin’ company.”
“Fresh!” chided Rose, flushing vermilion while squeezing their creature’s other hand.
On the Peabody roof they were seated by a maître d’ with a permanently arched brow at one of the farthest tables from the stage, below a parapet hung with paper lanterns. The air was pervaded by the caustic scent of citronella from the candles on every table; the potted palms stood about like discreet chaperones. Looking around, the Padauers tried to quell the sense that the other patrons were of an altogether better class than they; they were further disturbed to find no children in evidence at all. They consoled themselves that it was in any case a warm summer night, the stars low-hanging fruit above their heads.
They would have liked to order, say, a plate of mamaliga or noodle pudding but were served instead the singularly unkosher entrée—chicken-fried steak and pinto beans stewed with ham—that came with the bill of fare. (The haughty waiter in his waist-length jacket advised them there were no substitutions.) Unaccustomed to worldly pleasures as they were, the Padauers were nevertheless determined to enjoy their evening out. So they sipped their sweet tea, into which a neighboring couple were pouring something from a brown paper bag, and speculated on the ingredients of a menu item called shoofly pie. They rubbed the sparse thatch atop Benjy’s outsize head and solicited his assurance that he was having a good time. (“I’m havink a ball,” he croaked, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.) Then they applauded enthusiastically when the penthouse curtain parted and the New Pygmy Minstrels pranced onto the low stage.
High-stepping in procession around a semicircle of chairs, they played a ragtime number whose base melody the Padauers identified as, remarkably, the fraylekh standard “How Does the Czar Drink Tea?” They played an array of instruments—clarinets, bass fiddles, snare drums—with exaggerated gestures and flourishes, marching about the raised platform long enough to give the audience an opportunity to appreciate their gnomish anatomies and outlandish garb. Their burnt-cork features beamed from globular heads like faces painted on balloons, balloons from which dangled stringy torsos and bantam legs. Shod in spangled buskins, they wore top hats and spike-tailed coats stitched together from swatches of calico, croker sacks, and colored glass. When the general hilarity was subdued enough for the tune to be heard, the bandleader, no taller than the others but perfectly proportioned, signaled the troupe to halt. “Gemmun,” he called in a nod to Negro dialect, “be seated.” Though forceful enough, his voice was that of a child, as were the soft honey curls that peeked from under his tall hat in contrast to the minstrel makeup.
Once seated, the players performed another spirited number, this one a syncopated but ill-disguised version of “Zing, Faygele, Zing.” The Padauers exchanged puzzled glances, wondering that the goyim didn’t lose patience with such a hybrid program—though in fact the audience, unacquainted with Old Country klezmer, seemed to accept the performers as a variety of authentic blackface minstrelsy. Then the bandleader doffed his stovepipe, releasing his profusion of curls, and presented himself as “Your humble interlockator.” Again the juvenile voice was at odds with his authority, as he begged permission to introduce “two chaste and elegant gen’lemen.” “Mr. Tambo,” he called, and a sprightly little musician leapt forward from one end of the orchestra, shaking his tambourine. “And Mr. Bones.” Another pygmy musician sprang forth from the opposite end of the chairs, clacking knucklebones. “In their inimminable Ethiopian pah-de-do.” Upon which the interlocutor surrendered the stage to Tambo and Bones, who bowed to one another, bumping heads.
Tambo (earnestly inquiring): “Mistah Bones, yo’ mammy and pappy, am dey siblinks?” The dialect was Negro but the accent pure Galitzianer.
Bones (just as concerned): “Nu, Mistah Tambo, do y’all still have from nature a ’fection for it, despite what it done to you?” Again Negro with a Litvak inflection.
Tambo: “How mizzable am our lot, Mistah Bones. Plagues we got, pogroms, the Ku Klux Klan … Sometime I tink we been better off not to be born.”
Bones: “But who has dat much luck, Mistah Tambo? Not one in a thousand.”
Their dialogue accelerated to a rapid-fire exchange, each joke graduated in saltiness (“Do y’all with your wife make love doggy style, Mistah Tambo?” “I sit up and beg while, tahkeh, she rolls over and plays dead, Mistah Bones”), punctuated with rim shots on the drums. So shocked was Rose Padauer that she clapped her hands over Benjy’s ears but couldn’t help sharing a furtive smile with her husband.
The antic pair concluded their routine with a brief skit involving a change of gender by Mr. Bones, who adopted for the part a princess petticoat and a sheitl wig. (He’s a lady in a café who lets fly a fart then tries to deceive the other patrons by scolding the waiter: “Stop dat!” The waiter: “Absolutely, madam, which way were it headed?”) Then the minstrels struck up a raucous choral rendition of “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band,” to which Tambo and Bones commenced to dance.
Their capers began as a combination of cakewalk and (as the Padauers perceived) a mother-in-law dance of the type seen at Jewish weddings, but soon progressed to acrobatics bordering on the hyperkinetic. They were joined by other band members juggling their instruments and spinning dreidls that disappeared in multihued whirlwinds. Bedlam reigned onstage until a Lilliputian trumpeter blew some shrill notes on a spiraling ram’s horn, and the interlocutor reappeared with his winsome face scrubbed clean of burnt cork.
“Ladies and mentschen,” announced the squeaky-voiced trumpeter, “we now present for your delectification the kindshaft phenomenum Master Splendido, hypnotist and animal magnet extry-ordinaire.”
The minstrels performed another roistering walkaround, playing a march tempo version of “Nokh a gletzl vayn” while circumambulating their featured entertainer, before exiting through the sequined curtain. That left the audience to admire the comely boy who stood before them, having swapped the interlocutor’s tatterdemalion for a silk-lapeled coat whose tails swept the floor.
As Mama Rose removed her hands from his ears, Benjy fidgeted in the face of all he beheld. Suffering their hijinks, he couldn’t help but gloat over the situation of his former brethren, who’d cast him out of their underground kingdom only to be cast out themselves by the aftermath of the quake. He could picture with relish the collapsed catacombs that sent them scrambling up into the province of mortals, where they were met with a flood that dispersed them even farther afield. Seeking a more hospitable environment, they had apparently forsaken their habitual meddling in the lives of the Jews to assume this ludicrous imposture on higher ground. But while he might take some satisfaction in their reversal of fortune, Benjy harbored no lasting resentment: they’d merely done to him what they’d done to generations of antiquated ogres; countless like him had been switched for rosier human types and left to soldier on as best they could in the upper atmosphere. But you could bet your second sight that few had found accommodations as favorable for a haimish ever after as were his with the Padauers. Even now, when forced to acknowledge his alien origin, they continued to treat him as their cosseted ward, and he regretted that the skimpy gifts he was able to give them were so unequal to the attentions he received in return.
Now, however, he was in a position to give them the supremest gift imaginable: he could reintroduce them to their stolen child. It would be the greatest sacrifice a fake kid could make for his adoptive family. But the shretelekh were an essentially selfish breed, not known for a generosity of spirit, and the substitute Benjy, who couldn’t even recall his original name, had never supposed himself to be better than the rest.
Meanwhile the callow headliner, Master Splendido, had invited volunteers from the audience to step onto the stage. Charmed by his cherubic face and piping voice, a goodly number accepted his invitation, the gents helping the ladies onto the platform where all took the chairs vacated by the minstrels. The volunteers were a largely youthful contingent in dinner jackets and cotton voile frocks, slightly lit and eager to participate in whatever frolic was requested of them. Master Splendido wasted no time in exploiting their receptiveness. He addressed the house, reeling off his credentials without a trace of the former mock dialect: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Splendido, who was initiated into the mysteries by the stupefying sorcerers of Sfat …” The audience was as transfixed as they were amused, if only by the distinction between the child’s reedy voice and the inflated claims he made. The performer removed from a coat pocket the small tin figure of a grass-skirted African dancer and turned the key in her back. Then he held the shimmying doll at their eye level as he paced back and forth in front of the row of volunteers.
“From this moment everything I say, no matter how stupid, will become your reality. But first, go to sleep …”
At their table Rose and Morris Padauer were as spellbound as the volunteers, for they’d recognized the windup doll as the very twin of the one they’d replaced for the unshapely replacement of their kidnapped baby boy. Surely a coincidence, since it was as absurd to believe they could have begotten a Master Splendido as it was to think they’d spawned the little bogey seated between them. The boy onstage was nothing like the infant they’d lost—except for his fair hair and beryl blue eyes, the snub nose, the poppy petal mouth … Between them their surrogate child saw his guardians in the process of making a stupendous connection, dismissing it, then tentatively beginning to entertain it again. Benjy sucked his vestigial tooth: a reckoning, he understood, was at hand. The Padauers had perhaps only to declare themselves for a joyous reconciliation to unfold before the assembled, leaving the cast-off “peanut” hung out to dry.
But thunderstruck as they were, Mama Rose and Morris remained seated lest they disrupt the proceedings—they were that cowed by their circumstances. It’s true that Mrs. Padauer had started up without thinking from her chair, but Morris, himself drained of color, restrained her with a hand to the wrist, saying, “Mama, we cooled already our heels this long …” Her full bosom aquiver, his wife resumed her seat; their reuniting could wait (could it not?) till after the show, though in the meantime both she and her husband might plotz from anticipation.
Charged by the hypnotist to sleep the sleep of the guiltless, the row of volunteers had instantly slumped against one another like weary travelers in a station waiting room. Sauntering to the front of the stage, Splendido assured his rapt audience that the subjects were now entirely under his control. “I can change them any way I want,” he boasted. His voice, no longer merely beguiling, had acquired a touch of the petulance consistent with his age; it was a little chilling given the powers he laid claim to, and the cabaret patrons laid down their utensils, their dinners growing cold on their plates.
“You, sir,” said the hypnotist, tapping the shoulder of a natty gentleman sleeper, who was jerked awake at the touch. “You were created by the echo of a voice from the black heaven and are now infested with demons.”
Straightaway the young man tumbled from his chair, his lacquered hair losing its wave as he began to roll around the stage. Thrashing and flailing as if attempting to escape his own skin, he was heard to utter words in languages that (the hypnotist submitted) were conceived before the creation of Adam.
Leaving the possessed gentleman to his loquacious seizure, Splendido began tapping the other volunteers. “You and you and you,” until all the rest were awakened, “are swine.”
The lot of them lurched from their chairs and, negligent of their evening finery, began scrambling about the stage on all fours, grunting, snuffling, and rooting about as if for truffles. Readdressing the possessed man, the hypnotist proclaimed, “By the secrets I stole from a nest in the cosmic tree, I command the demons to flee through your left big toe.” The man was propelled into the air as if yanked by the foot in question before falling limply onto the boards. Then via some invisible transit, his demons seemed to have taken up residence in the swine, who emitted bloodcurdling squeals as they spilled from the stage and circulated among the tables. The audience snatched up dishes and bunched their skirts, craning their necks to watch the bewitched volunteers racing toward the surrounding parapets. They clambered onto the low walls, where they reared up on their hind legs, teetering perilously above the streets, until Master Splendido called out to them, “Be as you were!” At his direction they stepped backward from the walls as one and, uttering residual oinks, returned to the stage, where they resumed their chairs and again fell immediately asleep.
Shaken by what they’d witnessed, the spectators dabbed their faces with napkins and murmured among themselves in a susurrus of hushed conversation. Onstage the hypnotist, having reawakened and dismissed his volunteers, doffed his high hat to take a bow. The applause was irresolute. “Mama,” whispered Morris a bit uncertainly, “it’s a rare little pisher we made,” but Mama Rose could barely nod her head to concur.
Released from their trance, the volunteers, apparently amnesiac, looked perfectly composed as they took their places again at the candlelit tables. Their fellow patrons, however, regarded them suspiciously. Then Master Splendido began to move among them, menacing now despite his pink cheeks and dewy curls. In fact, most of the audience avoided making eye contact as he toddled past them, asking, “Who would like next to be transmogrificated?” Nor did he seem especially discouraged that no one was willing. When he’d strolled to the farthest tables, he paused beside the Padauers and smiled at them like, they felt, the breaking dawn. “Would you care to join me on the stage?” he asked warmly, and Rose and Morris squeezed hands under the table. Between them the pretend Benjy was acutely aware of their contact, and he cringed in his knowledge of what he believed they were thinking: they were thinking that the wonderful boy had recognized them as well, and was summoning them to a surprise reunion where all would be revealed; the audience would stand and cheer the happy occasion. Benjy’s heart (or whatever crabbed organ still pumped the green ichor through his calcified arteries) sank as he watched the half-pint sorcerer help his family to their feet—she in her frumpy tub frock and he in his shabby gabardine suit.
Diffident but full of expectation and exchanging secret grins, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer trailed behind Master Splendido back onto the stage. There they stood looking tenderly at the Tom Thumb mesmerist, who had already removed the grass-skirted figurine from his pocket and turned the key. Despite his poor eyesight and distance from the stage, Benjy was nevertheless able to lip-read the word the volunteers were mouthing in unison: “Zuninkeh.” Darling son. But the doll had already begun to wiggle her hips and Splendido, an unkind expression distorting his pretty features, to utter his trance-inducing suggestions. Then, still sharing their inane grin, the Padauers sank into the chairs—all but two of which had been removed by pygmy assistants—and were sound asleep.
The hypnotist wasted no time in rousing them again, rapping their heads with his knuckles till Rose and Morris sat abruptly upright.
“Feeling kind of amorous, are we?” asked Splendido. Mama Rose made a flirtatious moue in response to which her husband raised and lowered his monobrow suggestively. The spectators succumbed to a nervous tittering. “Perhaps you will give to the audience a lesson from romance.”
The couple needed no further encouragement. At once they were entwined in a heedless embrace, clinging to one another with grappling arms and legs as if seeking wrestling holds. Morris planted suction-cup kisses over his wife’s face and fleshy neck, popping a button at the top of her bodice in his passion; while Rose, her coiffure askew, grabbed hanks of her husband’s ebbing hair in her fists. Every blatant moan he extracted from his wife elicited another endearment from Morris: “Hartzeniu! Sweet hamantash!” The audience was in fits, though some shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, moved to concupiscence by the heat of the demonstration. At one point the pygmies wheeled on a gauze-curtained hospital screen, which Master Splendido, making a show of discretion (it had after all been billed as a family revue), placed in front of the lovers. But the sounds emanating from the shadow play behind the curtain provoked even greater gales of laughter than had the couple’s groping in plain sight.
At the back of the house Benjy seethed, the public humiliation of his foster parents having brought him to the brink of tears. The sensation had no place in his emotional repertoire; sympathy was not a common function of his species. His time among mortals, aggravated by the insults of his outdated age, must have softened him, which was itself a cause for indignity. He was further incensed when a pair of minstrels reappeared to accompany the lustful cries of the Padauers with screechings and tootings on their fiddle and flute. This sent the audience into convulsions. Benjy suspected that what he was seeing was not so much entertainment as a type of revenge. The pipsqueak hypnotist was after all a meshumed, a convert, gone over entirely to the tribe that had abducted him. He’d recognized his original begetters and was punishing them for the threat they posed to his disowned identity. Rather than embrace them as a returning prodigal, the little renegade had chosen instead to reject his birth parents outright: their degradation would put the lid on that rejection and by extension his rejection of humankind.
Such was the case, based wholly on instinct and enlightened self-interest, that the aged outcast had constructed against Master Splendido. Then it followed that, instead of making himself the instrument of their reconciliation, the greatest gift Benjy could give to Mama Rose and Mr. P. was to save them from their natural son.
He slid from his chair and began a resolute if splay-footed approach to the stage, bent on a showdown with the wicked child. It would be a duel between conjurors, with Benjy summoning the array of powers he’d inherited as a veteran shretele. There was the ability to shape-shift and render himself unseen, though colitis and lumbago had taken their toll on those faculties. (The most he could command in the way of invisibility now was to make himself a bit blurry about the gills.) There was the talent of invoking mind-bending incantations in occult tongues, none of which he remembered, or calling on animal helpers, though even friendly dogs shied away from him these days. He could still sour milk at a glance and tie the hair of sleepers in granny knots, but such skills would be of little use here. So what was left but a sixth sense that had small value now that the other five were so severely impaired? By the time he’d managed to scramble onto the stage he realized that he was virtually unarmed. Regardless, Benjy—he owned the name now that its previous possessor had forfeited it forever—intended somehow to unmask Master Splendido for the imposter he was.
The cabaret audience was still in stitches over the mounting crescendo of the Padauers’ dalliance behind the curtain, so no one paid much attention to the diminutive newcomer who’d lately taken the stage. In the interim a dwarf vocalist had joined the musicians, integrating Mama Rose’s rapturous oys into a song whose refrain went “I wanna be an oy oy oyviator.” Busy conducting the whole cacophony, the hypnotist had also yet to remark the intruder; then, out of the corner of an azure eye, he did. He ceased the rhythmic waving of his hands and faced the shrunken atomy, removing his hat to make a sweeping bow.
“Paskudnyik,” croaked Benjy, “a thunderbolt in your pants if you don’t release from your spell these good people.”
Master Splendido seemed to welcome the challenge. He’d already withdrawn the tin doll from his deep pocket, but Benjy was much too shrewd to be seduced by her hoochie-kooch. He ignored the hypnotist’s injunction to “Watch Jemima dance” and instead looked the kid straight in the eye. He steeled himself to do … what? Maybe head-butt him in his kishkes, the beautiful boy, with his blue eyes flecked with gold like tiny fishes swimming in circles, the circles themselves spinning like pinwheels. Peering into them, the old hobgoblin, centuries old in fact and very sleepy, lost all consciousness.
“What looks here like a miniature Methuselah,” pronounced the hypnotist in the fullness of his authority, “is really a chicken.”
It would have been diverting enough just to leer at the little eyesore who’d dared to defy the child phenom. But to see him now as a docile subject dropped into a squat, beginning to cluck and flap his elbows like wings, sent the audience into an orgy of belly laughs and guffaws. That the hypnotist’s subject did actually manage to stay aloft for some seconds in his maniacal flapping only increased the general mirth. Then Master Splendido invited the spectators to toss any spare change they might have in their pockets and purses onto the stage. A hail of coins showered the ensorcelled Benjy, who, waddling awkwardly here and there, proceeded to peck at the scattered pennies and dimes; he paused just long enough in his foraging to raise his chin, shaking his head to facilitate the sliding of the coins down his gullet. So loud was his contented squawking, to say nothing of the peals of rooftop hilarity, that the symphonic climax of the couple behind the screen was drowned out. Nor was it observed that the man and wife had warily poked their heads through a gap in the curtains.
“He’s too gristly for roasting,” judged Splendido with respect to the chicken, “but he might make a tasty soup.”
He clapped his hands and a party of pygmy minstrels, stripped now to grass skirts with bones through their noses, carried out a large zinc boiler possibly commandeered from the cabaret kitchen. It sloshed over when they set it down on the boards, steam coiling out like hooded cobras. Then, pursued by the pygmies, the pseudochicken ran gabbling and squawking about the stage as aimlessly as if he’d lost his head. In the end he was tackled and bound hand and foot with lengths of rope, though he struggled in a welter of imaginary feathers. In the throes of his furious resistance, however, Benjy became dully alert to a fact of his trussed condition: how it was analogous to his plight on that memorable night some years ago when he was smuggled into the Padauers’ apartment. The realization was sobering enough to rouse him from his trance. An awareness of his present circumstance returned to Benjy as it had for his foster parents, whose tempestuous trifling had jolted them back into a consciousness of their whereabouts. Of course they had no recollection of what had happened or how they’d arrived at such a pass; nor did they recognize the author of the event as anything more than the puerile principal of the evening’s program—who, with the help of the near-naked minstrels, had hoisted their little Benjy above the cauldron and was about to drop him in.
This the Padauers could not abide. They hesitated only a moment, as if trying unsuccessfully to recall some unrelated issue, then shared a mutual shrug and, with their clothing still immodestly disarranged, charged forth from behind the screen. Mama Rose went teeth-first for the hypnotist’s tender calf while Morris grabbed his throat and a fistful of his golden locks with tenacious fingers. Taken off guard, Master Splendido lowered his hands to defend himself, leaving the unsupported weight of his victim to slump onto the crown of his hat, shoving the stovepipe over his ears and eyes. His assistants—their bare chests like saloon doors on spindle legs—backed away from the frenzied interference. In the succeeding fracas Benjy was left to tumble onto the planks, where he wriggled like a bug from a chrysalis as he shucked off his bonds. Besieged by the Padauers, Splendido had lost all pretense of his magisterial presence; blind now and powerless to fend off his assailants, he’d begun to bawl like the child he was. At length his whimpering incited his tribe to regroup and make an effort to come to his rescue. The aborigines that had already taken the stage were joined by the costumed strutters, all of them swarming over the couple who’d disabled their young headliner. Semi-recovered from his ordeal and seeing his family in danger, the self-liberated Benjy trotted headlong into the fray; promptly tossed out, he turned about and headed back into the scrimmage again undismayed.
The audience, having assumed that everything thus far was part of the act, were confused by the current turn of events. If they’d been previously well disposed toward the entertainers, they were dumbfounded now to the point of outrage. With the defeat of the Confederacy always fresh in their memories, it was not in their nature to sit idly by while Caucasians—albeit of Hebrew extraction—were torn apart by cannibals. However misguided their motives, a score of the diners abandoned their tables to storm the stage, some producing concealed weapons (such as a sword unsheathed from a cane) in the process. Standing beneath a pergola twined in artificial grapevines, the treble-chinned maître d’ signaled frantically to the waiters to intercede, while the waiters waved back in amiable helplessness.
But the shretelekh are finally not a confrontational race. The present kerfuffle notwithstanding, they much preferred flitting stealthily among mortals, creating discord then becoming scarce. So rather than make a stand against such wholesale insurgency, they scattered. Some slipped back behind the sequined curtain; others dove through skylights and bulkheads in varying stages of anatomical evaporation. They took with them their stolen child in his crushed stovepipe, who for all his talents remained perfectly discernible: a royally spoiled and squawling brat.
Indifferent to their own scrapes and abrasions, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer made to soothe their little goblin, Mama Rose straightening his sailor collar as Morris smoothed the part in his few remaining hairs. Benjy fairly purred at their petting. On the walk back from the Peabody Mrs. Padauer began to hum one of the jaunty minstrel airs (was it “Under the Matzoh Tree”?) while her husband asked her teasingly, “Mama, did we have tonight enough fun?” Then he stopped at a newsstand to purchase, for the first time in his life, a Havana cigar. They strolled home slowly in the cool of the evening, since Benjy’s short legs were especially bowed from the weight of the coins he’d swallowed. But after he’d used the WC—the loot having proved a much-needed laxative—he winnowed and washed the coins from his movement and presented his mama with a bulging piggy bank.
While Pinchas Pin was otherwise occupied, the czar was overthrown and the revolution that the merchant had waited for for so long finally happened. The so-called Sodomites of South Memphis, sworn enemies of the Pinch, released a sheet of raw ooze and filth from Carr’s tannery into the bayous around North Memphis; but that was before Pinchas’s time. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat on a flagpole above the Commercial Appeal building on Second Street as a crowd watched from Court Square then grew bored; but that came much later. Meanwhile, on the night he and his improbable companion Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya set out in pursuit of Katie’s absconded spirit, Pinchas was less concerned with this world than the next.
When he and the rabbi arrived by dinghy at the shore of Market Square Park, the inverted tree at its center was illuminated by a jumble of lantern-lit shacks. They were small, jerry-built shacks nestled amid the network of gnarled roots that had reared up in place of the great oak’s undulant branches. The shacks were made of the kinds of odds and ends from which the Jews constructed their sukkah booths, though to Pinchas’s knowledge it wasn’t Sukkot. Or rather, it was Sukkot, Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah rolled into one. For just as on holidays the Jews acknowledged themselves to be living contemporaneously with their biblical forebears, so in this new dispensation did all the holidays occur at once. And through the fabric walls of the booths, some of which dangled like lockets from ropes and chains, Pinchas could see the silhouettes of North Main Streeters at their tables observing simultaneous celebrations. The sight halted him a moment in his tracks, though it only took a tug at his sleeve from Rabbi ben Yahya to bring him back to the mission at hand.
“Did you think I forget!” fumed Pinchas, who needed no prompting.
“Touchy touchy.”
Pinchas sighed, sparing a worry for the frail old man who’d offered himself as his safe passage to the underworld. He’d always judged the tzaddik and his followers to be frankly insane, and now, when the old dotard should have been on his deathbed dispensing holy madness to his disciples, here he was leaning on his cane at the edge of an abyss. He was meshuggeh all right, as must be the dry goods merchant who had agreed to follow his lead.
Always Pinchas had regarded himself as a forward-thinking man, who, had he lived in the age of Spinoza, would also have been declared a heretic. But his wife’s untimely end had reduced him to a fool like the rest of his demented neighbors. The rebbe had explained it all so plainly in the boat on the way to the park: how, thanks to the interference of himself and his fanatics, below was now above, and vice versa; existence was turned on its head. This afforded the individual a rare opportunity, since one could now enter the afterlife (which in this instance came before) without having to die. By the same token, those who expired during this erratic interlude were not officially defunct. Katie had perished at an opportune moment …
At which point Pinchas had shouted, “Shvayg!” and held his ears; for his yearning after his departed wife finally wanted no explanation. It wanted only her foggy green eyes and washed-out terra-cotta hair, the swan’s-neck curve of her spine in her taffeta waist; it wanted her flashes of temper, her terrible jokes (“They say Saint Paddy chased the snakes out of Ireland, but he was the only one who saw the snakes”), her roast potatoes like kidney stones. In the absence of Katie’s animate presence, Pinchas’s desire for her had overwhelmed his grief and stunned him with the force of an apoplexy. Then it had set him in motion.
Throwing away his cane, the rebbe leaped with a single bound from the lip of the crevasse into the roots of the tree. With an agility that seemed to Pinchas indecent in one of his dropsical and dilapidated years, he lowered himself as far as the base of the sunken trunk; then crab-like he began to scramble down its incline until he was swallowed up by darkness. Leaning over the edge of that obscurity, Pinchas froze. How pointless it would be—he reasoned—if in the course of chasing after his lost wife, he should lose himself. But frightened as he was of the descent, he found he was even more frightened at the prospect of losing sight of Rabbi ben Yahya. So the merchant, no young man himself, overcame once again the rational turn of mind he’d set such store by and, exhaling a prayer, made the thrilling leap into the roots.
He caught hold, absorbing the bruising impact with his chest and chin, and astonished at finding himself still in one piece, hugged the tree for all he was worth. Then, with extreme caution, he began the treacherous downward climb. Steep as was its declivity, the thick trunk was studded with hollows and knobs, so there were no end of ridges and footholds to hang on to, and the cool loamy scent of the earth was somehow beckoning. Even now Pinchas was skeptical that the tree, in its inversion, could serve as an artery between two worlds, but once he’d begun his descent he seemed to have left (along with his logic) his fears largely aboveground. He gave himself up entirely to this penumbral element, which presumably had a logic of its own—one he hoped to discover as he inched his way down the long incline. It was an endless descent that provided him plenty of time to contemplate his objective: for Katie’s runaway soul, in its corporeal aspect, was—he believed—inextricable from his own. He had the sense that, sinking farther into the earth, he was sounding the depth of his devotion, which ought not—if he were worthy—to have a bottom.
He was deep enough now that the hole above his head had shrunk to the size of a penny embossed with a silver sliver of moon. Though the coin had no capacity to shed light into the fissure, the spores and slick mosses that Pinchas encountered appeared to give off a phosphorescence of their own. An orchid-like flower sprouting from a knothole shone like a gas burner. There was sufficient light to give the merchant fair warning that he should halt and let pass the fiddler Asbestos, who was tapping his way out of the mouth of a broken sewer tunnel. The fiddler was followed, as he groped his way round the tree trunk and into a similar segment of sewer pipe on the other side, by a raggedy column of Negro men. Each had an arm on the shoulder of the one in front of him so as not to be left behind in the dark, as they disappeared into the far conduit. Farther down, there was more traffic and Pinchas had to make way for a party of elemental creatures (some still in costume) with a pouting human child in tow. Back from their theatrical exile, they skirted the tree’s broad diameter and burrowed into an oval grotto on their way to reclaim their native haunts.
Though he must have been by now many fathoms beneath North Main Street, Pinchas had yet to arrive at the spreading branches that had tipped foremost into the crevasse when the oak was toppled. The nubbly trunk itself seemed interminable, and where, by the way, was the old rabbi who’d volunteered to be his guide? For some reason Pinchas refrained from shouting after him, afraid perhaps that his raised voice might cause a cave-in. Or was it that in the quiet of his descent he rather cherished the solitude?
Then he’d reached a depth where the darkness was absolute. The tree bark had become less coarse, more slippery with bubbling sap; there were whole stretches where, still hugging the trunk, the merchant was unable to find a purchase. In addition, exhaustion had begun to overtake him in every limb, and he wondered again how such precipitous folly could result in the recovery of his bride. He was slipping more often, barely hanging on until his gumsoles could snag on a protuberance or his fingers grab hold of another indentation. Still Pinchas had no thought of turning back; the climbing up would in any case be more arduous than the climbing down, and the oblivion that awaited him if he fell was no more menacing than the oblivion he’d already penetrated. Then his foot struck what seemed to be a solid bough projecting from the trunk and, completely spent, Pinchas folded onto his haunches, sitting down at long last and dangling his legs. But before he could draw a breath in relief, his stomach lurched into his throat and his brain was swamped by a wave of total disorientation; bereft of his internal compass, he found himself hanging by the crook of his knees whose strength was close to giving out. In a moment he would drop into the abyss and God (whose authority the merchant disdained) help him.
At that juncture a hand grasped his arm and hauled him upright, where he was seated on the bottommost limb of the patriarch oak. “Aliyah tzerichah yeridah,” came the singsong voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who, perched on a neighboring branch, appeared to have aged a decade or so in reverse. “To ascend you got first to descend,” he chirped. “What took you so long, Reb Pin?”
His heart kettle-drumming in his ears, Pinchas looked out over the park and the street beyond, and had no idea where he was. Then gradually it dawned on him that this was the Pinch, though this particular incarnation looked to have awakened from the sublime dream of itself to a threadbare reality. The houses and buildings from his elevated vantage were smoke gray against the heliotrope sky, the park itself appearing neglected, the neighborhood deserted though unaltered by natural disaster. With a groan the dry goods merchant began creakily to lower himself from the stout branch. The rebbe dropped neatly to the ground beside him, his billowing caftan covering his head as he landed. When he swept it back, Pinchas saw there was color in the tzaddik’s pursy cheeks, his wispy beard become robust and full. Even his previously deflated skullcap rode his head like a proud cupola.
“Nu?” said the rejuvenated old man.
“It’s a ghost town,” asserted Pinchas, but the rebbe begged to differ.
“We are here the ghosts. Is waiting, this place, for the world to get tired from magic.”
Pinchas squinted at him. “You don’t make no more sense down here than you did up there.”
“What makes you think this ain’t ‘up there’?”
Then Pinchas felt again the hot pain of his loss boiling up from his chest into his throat. “Katie!” he cried, and heard his voice echoing through the empty streets and alleyways surrounding the park.
The rabbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “Go home already,” he said.
The merchant let go of one last sob, pushed his eyeglasses back over the hump of his nose, and was calm. Though he hadn’t run since who could remember, Pinchas began to lope down the gravel path past the dry fountain, out into Second Street and over to North Main, gaining momentum. He ran beneath unflapping awnings past vacant shopfronts whose dirty windows showed his reflection with its lanky legs pumping like pistons. Arrived at the grimy portals of Pin’s General Merchandise, he burst through the front door and bolted up the stairs through the parlor and into the kitchen, where he found his wife seated at the table, singing a cradle song (“Oh hush thee my lapwing …”) as she peeled the skins from a bowl of spuds.
Looking up at him with her emerald eyes clear of clouds, she said, “Sometimes I think my whole life was about potatoes.”
In his head he’d already rushed forward to take her in his arms, so what held him stalled and still hesitating in the doorway? Winded from his sprint, Pinchas swallowed the heart that had heaved into his throat again. “Katie,” he replied, “I don’t believe you are all-the-way dead.”
She was nowhere as pale as the blue marble woman he’d left in their marriage bed, though her complexion was still a bit tallowy, the bones still prominent beneath the flesh. Here and there about her fingertips and split ends were signs of a transparency that might, if uncared for, spread to the rest of her anatomy. Ignoring his remark, Katie reflected aloud that the illness that had taken her was perhaps a reprise of the one that took half the town in the early days of their romance. “Sure all our years together were borrowed from the distemper that returned to take back the years.”
But Katie’s symptoms were not those of the yellow jack; Pinchas rejected her theory out of hand, and in so doing summoned the courage to dismiss it with an emphatic “Feh!” “Speakink of which,” inching a gingerly step closer to the enameled table, “to take you back is why I came here.”
“Back to where?” asked Katie, tilting her head quizzically.
It irked Pinchas that the question should deserve consideration. But the quiet of this abandoned North Main Street did have a seductive quality, peaceful compared to the carnival aberration that the postdiluvian neighborhood had become. In truth, this alternative version was more faithful to the original, homelier and less rigorously demanding of one’s energies. In its recent manifestation everything in the Pinch was so hugely important, whereas here only Katie mattered.
Just then a voice was heard at the open window, and husband and wife looked to see Rabbi ben Yahya standing outside on the fire escape, smiling in all his abnormal good health. “Excuse me my lack from discretion,” he said, “but I wanted to see with my own eyes you are safe.”
Jerked from his brooding by the interruption, Pinchas wondered that the rebbe, who with his minions had turned the whole cosmos inside out, should worry about being discreet. Apparently satisfied that things were in order, the old Hasid said a bit flightily, “So good-bye and good luck,” and turned to leave. But Pinchas, realizing to his chagrin that he had no earthly notion of how to get back to the world, lunged for the window. “Rabbi,” he asked in a panic, “where are you going?”
“Where else?” replied the blooming ben Yahya. “To pray. Should be nice and quiet, my shtibl, without all those tochesleckers hangink around. Oh,” pivoting his head to whisper by way of an afterthought, “you should know by your Katie that her days are still numbered.”
“What are you saying?” gasped Pinchas. This was cruel and unreasonable.
“Once it gets the habit from wandering, the soul,” the rebbe shrugged, “nishtu gedacht, it’s a hard habit to kick.”
Pinchas shuddered as if the earth’s tremors had started up again. “Rabbi,” he blurted in desperation, “I will need still from you a guide.”
Stepping deftly onto the horizontal ladder, the holy man mentioned in parting the condition that qualified his own return. “If is allowed your wife to go back with you, then somebody got to, how you say, stand surety. Somebody got to stay here in her place.”
The horizontal iron stair dipped his plump person toward the sidewalk—though how he’d mounted the thing in the first place was anyone’s guess.
Still languidly engaged in her labor, Katie had shown small interest in their conversation. Was this then her postmortem punishment, wondered Pinchas, to peel potatoes in this unpeopled purgatory until the hill of skins grew to a height she could scale to heaven? But why should Katie be punished at all? She’d been an exemplary wife, endured with equanimity her life as a colleen among yentes only to expire before her time. True, their marriage had been without issue, for which she’d always taken the lion’s share of blame; but if anyone was at fault it was Pinchas himself for allowing her to assume his portion of guilt as well. It was an attitude that had contributed in part to his neglect of her in recent years, but nobody died from a dereliction of affection, did they? No! thought the merchant, there was no rhyme or reason for her being here, and he was perfectly within his rights (by the authority that sheer chutzpah had vested in him) to fetch her back.
But there was nothing of penance about her activity; in fact, she looked, despite her sere and slightly pellucid countenance, quite self-possessed. Like Rabbi ben Yahya, the afterlife became her. It seemed almost a shame to drag her away, and Pinchas, torn now himself, felt the temptation to linger awhile amid the tranquil reassurance of the spice pantry, coffee mill, and brass-bottom tea kettle—household objects pleasantly divested of the totemic aura they’d acquired back in creation.
“Katie,” began Pinchas, his brain near to exploding, “it’s lonely here.”
She placed the peeler atop the curlicued pile of skins on the chopping board and looked up. “Husband,” she sighed, “you’ve a face like a slapped donkey’s arse.”
At that the merchant fell to his knees wringing his hands, scooting forward in that perpetual twilight until his chin was practically resting on the table between them. “I miss you!” he cried in a beseeching tone that seemed finally to get his wife’s complete attention.
A wry smile spread across her features as, abruptly, she shoved the table into his chest, which knocked him sprawling onto his backside. Then she was standing over him, yanking the pin from her hair and shaking it out until it framed her head in a rusty corona. From flat on his back Pinchas admired how the points of her breasts poked like pear stems through the thin material of her chemise, its hem brushing his brow as she stepped across him.
“If you want me,” she said, looking over her shoulder, coquettish for all her years, “you’ll have to catch me.” Then she fled the room.
“Oy,” groaned Pinchas. It wasn’t enough he’d come all this way for her, he had now to play with her hide-and-seek? But he was on his feet again, staggering after her, prepared to pursue her to the ends of eternity if need be. He plunged into the dust-mantled parlor where, hidden behind the door, she darted past him back into the kitchen. Turning about, he followed, chasing her several times around the table, which she managed always to keep tantalizingly between them.
“Didn’t I climb already down a hole for you?” he pleaded.
“And didn’t I one fine morning plumb the plague pit to find you?”
As he stood pondering the difference, she slipped past him again, though he’d reached out to snatch her waist. Or had his hands passed through her, grasping only vapor? Whatever the case, he’d begun to warm to their game, convinced that if he captured her spirit he captured everything. He chased her back through the parlor and along the narrow hallway with its flickering gas sconce, past the closet-sized room they’d once set aside for a nursery but was occupied now in another dimension by a scribe. The scribe was at that moment busy recounting how a harried husband chased the shade of his wife around the underworld …
Pinchas blundered into the bedroom at the rear of the flat, where he could barely perceive the outline of her shadowy form, standing there beside the iron bed in the coppery gloom.
“Katie, I never lost for you the yetzer,” he told her breathlessly, “the wanting.”
“Prove it,” she challenged.
At that Pinchas became aware of a throbbing in his pants, the beginnings of a pride he hadn’t achieved in an age. As he contemplated this signal event, Katie made to sprint past him again, but this time, holding wide his outstretched arms, he was quick to bar her way. She passed straight through him—a puff as from an atomizer—then stopped and turned around, husband and wife now facing each other in a reciprocal sorrow-stricken distress.
“Beg pardon,” came the voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who appeared at the window (the bedroom window beneath which was no fire escape) again. “This I forgot.” Then he began to intone ex cathedra, “‘Thy dead shall live, for thy dew is as the light, and the earth shall bring forth the light of shades.’ Isaiah twenty-six, nineteen. Of course,” he stipulated further, “Maimonides don’t mention resurrection, while Nachmanides maintains that, after Judgment Day, the soul don’t necessarily get back the body it had before …” His voice faded as his head disappeared below the windowsill, by which time Pinchas and Katie, who had already embraced, were no longer listening anyway.
The heat that met Pinchas upon holding his wife was torrid, as if he’d clasped a lighted bundle of kindling to fuel his own immolation: that was his mad thought as he lifted her, laying her gently across the creaking bed and crawling in after. He touched the warmth of her midsection, which yielded under the stuff of her chemise; felt, as he gathered her into his arms, the washboard ribs that illness had carved from her once ample frame, and exulted in her compliant palpability. Ablaze himself, he marveled that he wasn’t consumed, that his limbs, which he shucked of his garments, remained wondrously intact—as did his wife’s, whom he also feverishly stripped bare, while she returned his attentions with an equal appetite. Then what they exchanged along with their voracious kisses was the sense that neither was any longer the sole occupant of his or her own skin; so that Pinchas thought Katie’s Gaelic outcry, “A choisel mo chroí!” issued likewise from his own lips, just as Katie heard herself bellowing in Yiddish, “A leben zolt ir!”
When they were finally able to peel themselves apart, gasping and glad to find that they were still capable of separation, it was morning, or whatever passed for it in that bravura atmosphere. The sun slanted through the bedroom windows like a boat oar dipped in gold; the reflection from the canal was a school of silvery minnows on the ceiling, and blue notes from a nearby fiddle dashed themselves against the furling wallpaper like birds that had lost their way.
“Katie,” said Pinchas, “I think we are home.”
“Lord save us,” she replied, burrowing her head beneath his arm.
Now that the crisis of her infirmity had passed, Katie was visited by a parade of neighbors congratulating her on her miraculous recovery and bearing unbefitting gifts: nursing flasks, nipple shields, colic remedies. Among the visitors were a company of Hasids, hungover and shamefaced in the absence of their rebbe, greeting the merchant’s wife with an obligatory “Mazel tov!” “HaShem that he tells us,” said their rodent-faced spokesman in the tone of one citing a little bird, “you going to have a blessed event.” Dismissing the news as more of the sort of twaddle they were accustomed to hearing from that quarter, Katie began despite herself to snicker then laugh out loud; she gave herself up to an unblushing salvo of horselaughs until she saw on the faces of the gathered fanatics that God has no sense of humor at all.