Authors: Steve Stern
After all, they had yet to even hold hands. Meanwhile everyone smiled benevolently upon the young couple. The fiddler Asbestos, whose blessing they also seemed to have secured, encouraged their intimacy with a purling adagio whenever they passed. They passed him often, as there were days when he seemed to occupy every street corner at once. As aggravated by the blind man’s familiarity with the girl as he was arrested by his music, Muni paused once to address him: “Don’t you got someplace else you need to be?”
“I am someplace else,” replied the Negro with his yellow-toothed grin. Then he added mysteriously, “I ain’t what you think I am.”
“Frankly I don’t know what I think you are,” said Muni, thus terminating their exchange.
Was Jenny pretty? Her nose was slightly crooked, her stripling figure wiry to a nearly unfeminine degree, but her eyes—those lamp-black puddles—had their own gravitational pull. Looking into them, Muni felt a tidal response in his kishkes, as if his very insides were being drawn toward the girl. At some point Jenny had discarded her cane, and while she still limped, might limp forever, her jerky movements had become so adapted to her gait that Muni hardly noticed. He was selfishly thankful that her handicap kept her anchored to terra firma, that she didn’t attempt to mount her rope or tinker with the reels that held it taut. Also, she’d stopped talking so much about leaving town, though when she mentioned it Muni fought an urge to hold her back physically. He wanted to hold her. Once he went so far as to remark that her coat was too thin for the climate, imagining she might then nestle against him for warmth. Would he have the courage to enfold her with a cautious arm? He remembered the shameless flirtations of the Labor Bund girls back in Minsk: how he would stammer in embarrassment, his belly a furnace, until deportation put an end to desire. But the weather had turned and a new season was afoot: japonica, forsythia, and sweet jasmine grew out of the cracks in the sidewalk; creepers climbed the alley walls. The perfume of growing things vied with the fulsome odors from Sacharin’s fish market and the nearby river, and energies Muni was unaware he possessed were quickened by his proximity to the girl.
But even while the whole street seemed solicitous of the match, Muni refrained from any conduct that might be perceived as courtship. At the same time he knew that mere friendship would never entirely content him, though he sometimes felt he and Jenny were still separated by mountains and frozen wastes. Then one mild April evening, during the agitated days just after the sinking of the
Titanic
, they took a walk through Market Square Park. A number of other strollers were also abroad in that ill-lighted public space, its gas lamps not yet replaced by electric lights. Leaving the path Jenny had bolted ahead of him out across the patchy lawn, lurching in her uneven stride toward the towering oak that was the park’s centerpiece. This was the tree under whose broad boughs in summer, when the tenements became ovens, the population of the Pinch would bring hampers, picnic on blankets spread over the grass, then bed down for the night.
Despite the faint glow of her eggshell frock Muni lost sight of the girl in the shadows; she was a ghost and then she was gone. Having followed her beneath the branches, he stood there stymied among the sinuous roots peering this way and that, when a pair of strong hands grasped him under the arms and hoisted him into the air. Kicking and twisting, he struggled to regain his equilibrium, even as he was set astride a nodding bough—from which, looking up, he saw Jenny hanging by her knees. Moonlight filtering through the new leaves revealed her braid dangling like a bell-pull from under the skirt draped over her head, leaving her umbrella-style drawers fully exposed. Then, skinning the cat, she dropped neatly onto the limb that supported Muni, and leaned forward to plant a wet kiss on his lips.
The contact, brief as it was, left Muni so light-headed he thought he might swoon; he might have slid from the branch and broken his head had not Jenny held on to keep him from tumbling. The canopy of leaves cast harlequin shadows over her expectant face, and he felt compelled out of gratitude (if not challenged) to return her favor in kind. But while he still lacked the nerve to give back the kiss, there was something he thought she might even prefer. A piece of his past was the least of what he owed her for her attentions, though reaching into that grab bag could be like thrusting a hand into embers.
“When I was brodyag,” he submitted, “that it means a fugitive fleeing the katorga, the labor camp, I came one time in the wilderness to what I think—I’m that weary—is from a wrecked sailing ship its hull. But close up I can see that it’s instead the rib bones and tusks from a old-timey monster.”
Meager as was his offering, the girl received it like a gift and was moved to give him another more protracted kiss. Again Muni’s giddiness threatened to dislodge him from his perch, and grabbing him to steady his wobbling, Jenny was tickled, her laughter approaching a noisy hilarity. Then it was Muni’s turn to take the initiative, clapping a hand over her mouth to mute her cackling lest the strollers discover them in their leafy roost.
After that the progress of their touching was a hole-and-corner affair, conducted exclusively in the tree that became their regular trysting place. Jenny was always the provocateur, assuming a sauciness on high that she would never have dared on earth in broad daylight. Given the right circumstances—stars, redolent breeze—she might bite Muni’s ear-lobe or peck his brow. Certainly her lambent attentions were prompted by a genuine fondness, but there was another more expedient motive behind them. Because for every kitsl or stroke he received, Muni felt it incumbent upon him to divulge another memory in return. Squeeze his hand and he might recall how even words froze in the Siberian immensity, so that you had to wait till the spring thaw to hear what was said months before. Buss his cheek and he told you that compared with what they were fed—brined cabbage garnished with a single goosefoot (“So tsedrait were we with hunger that we licked from the wheelbarrow the axle grease”)—his aunt Katie’s black pudding was a feast. Their cleavings and caresses, however, remained confined to their nocturnal fastness, untranslatable to solid ground where they maintained a discreet acquaintance.
Nevertheless, the electricity between them when they were together was palpable. Though they feigned nonchalance, no one was fooled. Jenny’s expression remained fixed in a kind of cat-that-ate-the-canary simper, while Muni wondered if people could tell that his veins and arteries were flushed with quicksilver. Amused by his nephew’s distracted manner, Uncle Pinchas pretended impatience with him in the store, while his aunt might suspend her crabbiness long enough to pinch his cheek in passing. And once, with a dreary sigh, she said, “Faith but I’m not half jealous of you and yer flame.” There was a beat before Muni realized that by “flame” she meant Jenny.
Then night would fall and he and the girl would withdraw into the branches of the oak. They went separately to the tree to ensure the clandestine nature of their meetings, and one would always find the other waiting among the lower branches. Then they would climb ever higher, scooting farther out along the nodding boughs, Jenny assisting Muni, who lacked her simian skills. They clung to aeries that afforded broad vistas over the tar-papered rooftops of the Pinch and the river, with its riding barges spangled in hurricane lamps. “I can see from here the Statue of Liberty,” Jenny might insist, “and the Eiffel Tower and the Wall of China.” While Muni: “I can see the depot at Poplar and Front,” which was only a few blocks away, but farther than that he didn’t care to look. Then they would kiss, kiss and embrace, and despite their dizzy swaying Muni learned to retain his balance. He trusted the girl to keep him from falling even as his dazzled brain remained steeped in a broth of wanting. How was it, he wondered, that things done in the tree seemed never to leave the tree, their consequences not extending past the reach of its branches?
Muni understood that Jenny was no ordinary girl, and that by coaxing him into empyrean altitudes, she introduced him to a new order of being. Above the earth they were beyond the range of the rude world’s conventions. The fear he felt the first time she placed his hand over her breast gradually dissolved into an ambrosial delirium. And when, tentatively, she drew his fingers under her dress until they rested on the stocking fabric above her knee, he could believe that the warmth that infected his vitals was somehow holy. The sounds that reached them at that lofty height—train whistles and automobile klaxons—were muffled by the wind, though a measure from the blind man’s fiddle might still be audible. Although his music was not made a whit more cheerful for being tempered by tenderness.
“Are we bad?” Jenny would whisper to Muni, who honestly didn’t know; he’d traveled too far from his largely forgotten youth when he had the statutes of the rabbis by heart. But while it may have been merely self-serving, he maintained that the rabbis had no jurisdiction over their aerial petting.
Their conversation was still more conspicuous for what they didn’t say than for what they did: Muni continued doling out his somewhat unreliable memories, while Jenny invoked a wanderlust she was increasingly less invested in. Once or twice Muni asked her what she and his aunt Katie shmoozed about, since it was only in Jenny’s company that his aunt appeared untroubled these days. “Girl stuff,” Jenny assured him with a wink, as if he would know what that meant, and Muni nodded like he understood before admitting he didn’t. But in the language of their arboreal bundling each was becoming fluent. Muni could now reciprocate Jenny’s clippings and claspings with equal fervor if not virtuosity. The more graduated was his exploration of her person, the nearer he felt to inhabiting the place he’d been living in for a solid year. He needed only Jenny Bashrig’s express invitation to finally arrive.
It came on a midsummer night during the first real heat wave of the season. The jaundiced sky above the Pinch contained the humid swelter like a bell jar, impelling neighbors to flee their airless apartments. They lolled about under the boughs of the great oak in Market Square Park, swapping complaints and fanning mosquitoes away from their sleeping children, while high above them Muni and Jenny disported themselves. Fireflies flickered in an intermittent semaphore answered by flashes of heat lightning over the Arkansas floodplain. Jenny sprawled among the rustling branches as if relaxing in a hammock while Muni straddled the fork of an adjacent limb, admiring her languor.
Then he did something he hadn’t done before: unprovoked, he volunteered a memory—though the accuracy of his hindsight was always in question.
“When I’m in the taiga a runaway,” he began, “the dogsleds are on my heels. They might be a party of trappers or they might be peasants out to capture and collect on the fugitive his bounty—” but he couldn’t afford to wait to find out which. Whips cracked, oaths were shouted, and Muni took off on his clodhopping snowshoes over the glassy expanse of the steppe. Ahead of him was a cloud bank he hoped to reach before the sleds overtook him. Hobbled by the broken racquets attached to his feet, however, he stopped to tear them off, but the snow’s brittle crust only slowed his progress. Then for all of his panic, he was aware of a stunning phenomenon: a burst of sunlight had turned the rolling steppe golden, illuminating the cloud bank before him in a celestial nimbus. At the same time the ground itself had begun to stir under him. “Comes a loud noise like, excuse me, the firmament is breaking wind—” then the ground beneath Muni’s feet erupted and he was catapulted into thin air.
Despite the evening’s dimming half-light Muni could see that Jenny’s mouth hung open, and for once he felt like the seducer and savored his power. He assured her the event was no less remarkable for its logical explanation: that a grove of dwarf pines, bent horizontal by its burden of snow since the previous autumn, had been stirred by the first warm sunshine of spring. The trees were further alerted by Muni’s footfalls, which had cracked the ice that embalmed them so that they snapped in a sudden snowquake to attention. Thus did the reawakened trees fling the fugitive like a shot from a sling into the gilded fog, where he landed toches-over-teakettle on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, the inland sea.
“Jenny,” said Muni, his heart lifting heavy wings to confess, “when together we smotsken, I am flying again in the air.” His next utterance might have been to ask her to marry him, had she not spoken up first.
“So what are you waiting?” she replied, smiling brazenly. “Ravish me already.”
Muni knew better than to take her seriously. It was her talent to sound in deadly earnest even as she teased him, this time with a phrase she might have borrowed from some dime novel. After all, both of them were aware in their bones that the trespass they entertained was more than the Law (which who could remember?) allowed. Nevertheless, as Jenny still lay carelessly cradled by the pitch and sway of their perch, Muni was further inspirited by her boldness, intoxicated by their perilous altitude. Above their heads the Milky Way spiraled like cream stirred in black coffee and the blind man’s fiddle could be heard playing some incidental melody of the spheres. Leaning forward, Muni gingerly lifted the dust-ruffled hem of her skirt, as Jenny, biting her lip in concentration, fumbled with the buttons of his fly. She reached into his pants the way a naughty child steals into a jar to snatch a macaroon, only to find that she’s pulled out a serpent instead; but fascinated more than alarmed, she couldn’t let go—while Muni, submissive to that part of his anatomy that had leached the blood from his spinning brain, cried aloud as he seized the girl in an ultimate embrace.
The initial shock of their coupling nearly jettisoned them from the top of the tree, each hanging on exclusively to the other. Muni’s rapture purged him of every concern that wasn’t Jenny. Released from the familiar world, he dangled in a hanging garden of sensations that were utterly strange in their sweetness, convinced that no one before him had ever known such bliss. But the seismic tremors they shared at the nether extreme of their passion had roots that troubled the depths of their fears as well. Because their shuddering embrace, Muni suddenly realized, had generated a contagion that prompted in its turn a universal trembling. Opening his eyes he saw from Jenny’s expression that she had reached the same frightened conclusion: they had gone too far and the impact of their union had unseated nature itself. Or was it the reverse? Nature was settling scores with the wayward lovers. Whatever the case, the great patriarch oak had become unstable; tilting slowly, it groaned as if mortally wounded, wrenching its roots free of the planet to which it was moored, and with a sound like a nail pried from the vault of heaven, it started to topple. The lovers, holding on to one another now for dear life, declared their mutual devotion even as they rode the tree down its windy decline toward the earth, which gaped open to receive them.