Coney (6 page)

“Can you picture it?” Schnozz had demanded, leaving no doubt that Harry could not fully imagine the required majesty. “A million electric lights. One million!”

In the smooth cadence of the sideshow spieler he had been, he daubed like a pointilist, dotting white buildings on expanses of grace and pleasure. A derisive hand dismissed the vulgarity of Luna Park's
Trip to the Moon
, where one was greeted by midgets dressed as Moon Men. Dreamland, a place of taste, had offered three hundred midgets in a life-scale replica of Jonathan Swift's
Lilliput
, augmented by a few giants from
Brobdingnag
.

Dreamland had opened in 1905 and burned to the ground in 1911. Schnozz's words brought back to short life birds unable to escape the inferno with flightless singed wings and crazed lions and tigers shot to death by policemen suddenly on safari in Coney.

After the tale, Schnozz had suggested a walk on the beach. The strong wind had reddened Schnozz's pockmarked face, lodging sand in the crevices. He had guided Harry under the boardwalk, where they could rest and talk.

They sat on the cold sand. Schnozz's words slowed and fell to a whisper. His right hand smoothed Harry's cheek, moved across his chest and found the buckle of his belt. His fly was parted, button by button. Schnozz dug for his penis which popped out like a released jack-in-the-box. Harry had watched Schnozz's naked pate move over his penis and dip like the arcade game's miniature crane that descended, metal jaws spread wide, to claim a prize. Soon Harry had filled Schnozz's mouth. The old man swallowed and wiped his white-specked lips with the back of his hand. Harry, nauseated, had run to the ocean's edge to submerge his face in the jarring cold. When he had turned around, Schnozz was gone.

Schnozz sat down beside Harry. Their knees touched under the bar of the bike. Harry slid out of contact. Schnozz mocked him by widening the gap with a shimmylike thrust of his buttocks. His knee hit a wheel.

“Where did you get this bike?” he asked.

“Woody.”

“What! You brought it from that lousy dwarf?”

“Sort of a trade.”

“For that beauty you had!”

“I had an accident and it was all busted. Woody took it for parts and gave me this one.”

Schnozz gripped Harry's shoulder.

“He's a crook and worse. Let's you and me go over to that store and have it out with him right now.”

“No, Schnozz. I sort of like Woody, and with people you like …”

Schnozz squeezed Harry's hand.

“Want to take a walk on the beach?” he said, smiling shyly, like an unsure child attempting to cajole an adult.

Harry returned the pressure to show friendship, but shook his head. They were even now. Harry had paid a fair price for permanent admission to Schnozz's fabulous spiels.

A
BA
S
TOLZ, NÉ
A
VRAM
S
TEIN, WINNER OF PRESTIGIOUS PRIZES FOR
Yiddish poetry, illegal alien, having entered the country three years ago on a two-month visa to cover the 1936
US
presidential election for a defunct Polish publication, sighed and lowered himself onto the outside steps of the house on West 35th Street, where he boarded with the Catzkers.

He had just returned from an odyssey that had begun with a phone call from Samuel Modell, a wealthy Philadelphia textile manufacturer.

“Hello, is that Aba Stolz?”

“Yes.”

“Aba Stolz, the poet?”

“The same.”

“Good.
I
would like you to come to Philadelphia.”

“Why?”

“To read your poetry. Why else?”

“Indeed, why else?”

Train tickets were sent. On a Sunday evening, Stolz had arrived at the Modell home, where a group of affluent Philadelphia Jews were gathered for dessert, coffee and culture.

Modell, a man in his fifties who proudly displayed a paunch of affluence under a tight vest spanned by a gold chain, took him aside.

“All the people in the room have contributed funds for you.”

“Thank you.”

Modell's bland brown eyes darted left and right. He whispered:

“You don't write anything dirty, do you? Some of the people understand Yiddish.”

“I will keep it clean. You may be the judge.”

“I don't understand Yiddish.”

“Then, why …?

“My mother …”

“Ah, she is here tonight?

“No, she died twenty-five years ago. She spoke Yiddish. Especially when she didn't want me to understand what she was telling my father.”

Before the reading, he mingled and explained poetry.

“How do you know so many words that rhyme?”

“There is a secret way to use a dictionary. Kabbalistic.”

In the salon, amid couches and chairs upholstered in an explosion of foliage, Modell introduced him:

“We are proud to have with us tonight Aba Stolz, a Yiddish poet whose gifts have brought joy to millions of our coreligionists from coast to coast.”

While reciting the first poem, he scanned the faces for comprehension. Some twenty men and women somehow had managed to assume identical frozen expressions, as if staring at a tiny dot indicated by an optometrist. He wondered if there had been group practice. The only exception was Modell, who, from the first word, wept.

Following the last poem there was a long silence until the audience realized the recitation had concluded. He received discreetly muffled applause. Modell, red-eyed, waved a thick envelope.

“Poet Stolz,” he said, his arm sweeping the room and catching Stolz in the neck, “all these good people have contributed funds to help you continue your wonderful work.”

He handed Stolz the envelope, which Stolz accepted while transforming his benefactor into as an organ grinder and himself an ingratiating monkey.

Stolz had come away with twenty single-dollar bills. He rubbed at the roll in his pocket, accepting as just irony the possibility that he might never enjoy spending it since he was sentenced to freeze to death on the stoop for the recidivist crime of losing his key.

Snow began to fall. To pump heat into his veins, he imagined the
Jewish Daily Forward
running a skimpy obituary on him. Enraged, he punched Schrage, the editor, bloodying his nose, and triumphantly shouting: “Ha, you thought dead was the end of me.”

Harry, head down, his forlorn eyes fixed on his bike's useless chain, did not see Aba.

“Hey,
boychik
,” Aba shouted, “all the gold in the
Goldeneh Medinah
has been found. You can stop looking.”

“Aba!” Harry dropped the bike and leapt into an embrace.

“Hoo-hah, such a welcome. In Philadelphia, they were slightly more restrained. Anyway Heshele, you saved my life. I lost my key—don't say
what again
—and was within an icicle of death, when you, my savior, arrived.”

Harry ran up the steps to open the door.

“Heshele, the bike. It seems to be a different one. Don't come down. I'll get it.”

Inside they sat in the kitchen. Aba poured himself half a water glass of vodka and gulped the colorless liquid.

Harry thought of Aba as a man on fire. His carrot-colored, uncombed hair stood up like licks of flame. The matching beard was a brush fire scorching albino-white skin and menacing a thin hooked nose. His green eyes were saved from incineration by their luminous wetness. Chapped lips, however, had been seared into permanent parting, revealing yellow teeth that rooted at any available angle like trees desperately clinging to a mountainside.

“
Nu
, Heshele,” Aba asked, “what is new in this America of yours?”

“And not yours?”

“Good, Heshele. Answering a question with a question will never get you in trouble. Answers are dangerous. Once, in Warsaw,
a
pogromchik
asked me the time. Foolishly, I told it to him. He slapped me for thinking that he did not know the time of day. I should have said:
What time would your excellency wish it to be?
For this he would have also slapped me but with the force of a question, not an answer.”

“Is that true?”

“Does it matter? If it is not true it will be. Everything will be true and false by turns.”

“Did they like your poetry in Philadelphia?”

“Poetry had nothing to do with it. They liked patting themselves on the back because they were supporting a Yiddish poet. If they could have done so without listening to his poetry, they would have been much happier.”

Aba's eyes did not dance now. They were elsewhere, collecting sadness. It was a harvest common to Harry's father and his friends when they considered the rapidly shrinking number of Yiddish-speaking people on earth.

Once Fred Krause had come by the house to pick him up. Ackerman, the playwright, and Aba were arguing, in Yiddish, as to whether it was in fact true that Tolstoy believed that Anna Karenina could see her own eyes glowing in the dark. As was normal for an important conversation, it provoked derisive finger pointing and fist shaking, while the decibel levels rose apace. Fred had been riveted, absolutely certain he was witnessing a prelude to mayhem. Ackerman, catching Fred's intense interest, had asked him in English:

“Do you understand Yiddish?”

“No.”

Ackerman had sighed: “
Oy
, I should be so lucky”

“I should be in Palestine,” Aba said. “The Arabs are killing Jews, the Jews are killing Arabs and the British are killing everyone. It must be a land of poets. And furthermore, if Palestine becomes a Jewish homeland, it could save the Yiddish language.”

“That would be great. You would be a great poet there.”

“But that will not be, my optimistic American friend. In fact, a Jewish homeland will deliver the last rites for Yiddish.”

“I don't understand.”

“Of course you don't. You see straight ahead, in your wonderful American way. The facts are these: If there is a Jewish homeland, the official language will be Hebrew, a biblical language about as relevant to the modern world as the Bible. Yet preferable to Yiddish.”

“Why?”

“Because Yiddish is the enemy of all nations. Actually, if Yiddish were proclaimed the language of a Jewish homeland, it would be the fulfillment of a millennial Jewish dream—the creation of a perfect paradox: a nation born and committing suicide simultaneously. Consider a country running on Yiddish. If you wish to call a man an idiot, you call him
a soldier
. If you wish to promote him to super idiot, you label him
a prime minister
. To identify vulgarians or worse, look to designations for men who drive trucks or till the soil … and so it goes. So what you have is a nation whose heroes, leaders and builders receive simultaneously medals and dunce caps. No state could survive that lingua franca.”

“Will there be a Jewish homeland, Aba?”

“I doubt it. The goyim need Jews to beat up and borrow money from. There doesn't seem to be any replacement for these necessities of goyishe life.”

The front door opened and closed. His mother, who despite dedication to lightness and delicacy retained a floor-shaking, flat-footed planting of one definite foot after another, entered the kitchen.

Aba rose and embraced her.

“So, how was Philadelphia?” she asked.

“It was Philadelphia.”

“Don't I know it. The first three years of Harry's life we lived there. Do you remember, Harry?”

“No.”

“Of course you do. I wheeled you everywhere. People looked into the carriage and said how beautiful you and I were. Don't you remember that?”

“No.”

“Anything to be contrary. He begins everything with
no
and his father with
we must
Between them I have no luck.”

“Where is Moishe?” Aba asked.

“Who knows? Playing cards in that dive, or discussing something he knows nothing about, like making money. I didn't feel well, so I came home.”

She turned to Harry.

“Did you eat?”

Harry held up his quarter.

“So what are you waiting for? I'm surely not cooking.”

“I was talking to Aba. I saved his life.”

“Absolutely …”

His mother cut Aba short.

“I have no doubt. Have you gone completely crazy, Aba? Now, you are riding a bike.”

“Excuse me, but I don't know how to ride a bike. Wherever did you get that idea?”

“From the bike in the hall that I almost killed myself on. It looks like it's been in an accident.”

“As far as I know, it belongs to this American boy.”

“Nonsense. He has a beautiful bike that cost a fortune.”

The silence was Harry's to fill. He looked at Aba, wishing magic: Couldn't a poet, a man who knew the secret meanings of words, know to say simple words:
It was a joke, Velia. It is my bike.
Aba was silent.

His mother, excited by the scent of catastrophe, pressed her lips together, draining the blood. Harry mumbled: “It's my bike, sort of.”

“Sort of!”

He told the story, ending with a defense of the bike as a beauty worth much more than the other, but in need of a few repairs.

“A beauty! Worth more! If it's worth a nickel, it's a lot.”

“Oh, Mom …”

“Don't oh Mom me. Do you know how long I had to sit at a typewriter to earn enough money for your bike? Do you know!”

Aba held up his hand.

“Velia, easy, slowly. We must …”

“Another
we must
country heard from. Harry, we are going to see that thief.”

“The store is closed.”

She stomped toward the hall.

“Closed, ha. We'll see.”

Harry's eyes pleaded with Aba, who rose shakily and scratched Harry's scalp.

“Don't worry, American boy, we'll find a way. Velia,” he called, “I will come with you. In matters of commerce, I am a regular J.P. Morgan.”