Authors: Steve Stern
“You’re scared of girls, aren’t you!” she declared, obviously delighted. She shoved me backward onto the mattress, paying no attention to my injuries. “Ouch!” I cried as, laughing, she wrested the soggy sock from my hand and twirled it coquettishly before tossing it over a shoulder. Asterisks of light from the unshaded bulb played in her glossy hair. When she lifted the hem of her dress to straddle me, I saw how the mauve stockings stopped at the top of her tender, goosefleshed thighs. There was a rustling, a fumbling, my heart pumping warm molasses in place of blood. All of creation seemed to have gathered in my pants, which had been shoved to my ankles. Then a mournful cry escaped my lips as my excitement ranneth over.
“Oh dear,” said Rachel, and daintily patted her mouth in a yawn.
I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of the rain tattooing the filmy window. Outside there was neither joy nor peace nor help from pain, while here beneath this sagging roof I held a live woman in my arms. “I will love you till I die,” I whispered experimentally in her ear. Whether she heard me or not I can’t say, but she stirred and asked herself sleepily, “What am I doing here?” Then she bolted from the bed dragging the blanket along with her, which left me naked and shivering. Cursing under her breath, she stumbled about the room in the dark retrieving her stray clothing. I hugged my knees to my chest and, recalling the subject of her research project, informed her with some urgency, “This was the old Jewish ghetto.” “It’s called the Pinch,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. “This neighborhood, the Pinch.”
Hesitating, her spectral silhouette framed in the open doorway, she wondered aloud, “What’s your name?” Then on second thought: “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
When she’d fled the apartment I got up and switched on the overhead light, its harshness turning the room aggressively real. I wrapped myself in the blanket that still carried her fragrance, sat down on the slanting floor, and opened Muni Pinsker’s book to its beginning. Then I started to read for the purpose of gathering information that might interest Rachel in case I should see her again.
On a sweltering August afternoon in 1911, Muni Pinsker, listing from the weight of his battered grip, entered Pin’s General Merchandise on North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee. He was bedraggled and bone weary, having journeyed to America all the way from the mica mines of Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia, where he’d been exiled. The store smelled of pickles and kerosene, its floorboards creaking as did the ceiling fans. Shelves spilled quilting and cotton petticoats; sock garters and suspenders hung like limp rainbows on wooden racks. There was a display case containing a regiment of back scratchers, cutthroat razors, and hand-carved briar pipes. Behind a counter stood a shortish man in a waistcoat and apron, with a distinctively hooked nose and coarse, sandy hair. He was closing the drawer of a gilded cash register beside which stood a jar of hard candy, when he squinted over his nickel spectacles at the wayworn newcomer. Then he peered beyond the newcomer at a gangle-shanked character in bib overalls, who had shambled into the store behind Muni. The man grinned a gap-toothed grin, his eyes dull as pearl onions, while the contents of the burlap sack that was slung over his shoulder appeared to be squirming. He shouted something in the native tongue that Muni had only begun to learn and started to empty his sack, out of which tumbled a braided black clump. The clump plopped onto the sawdusted floor, where half a dozen serpents uncoiled and began to slither in all directions like runneling oil.
“Rabbi Eliakum,” called the shopkeeper in a marvelously unexcited voice.
A stout old man with heavy-lidded, bloodhound eyes and a beard like a grizzled gray broom left off inspecting a lightweight union suit to turn around. He studied the snakes a moment as if attempting to discern a message in their undulations, some signal from the glint of their fangs. Then he pronounced in a throaty Hebrew, “Woe unto the man who meets up with a venomous lizard,” and in an earthier Yiddish, “and woe unto the venomous lizard that meets Eliakum ben Yahya.”
Whereupon the rabbi lifted his eyes toward the beaten tin ceiling and passed a palsied hand above the serpents, which abruptly ceased their slithering, becoming ramrod stiff. They were converted in fact into a clutch of perfectly serviceable walking sticks, which the shopkeeper, coming from around his counter, gathered up and dumped into an umbrella stand alongside several other mahogany canes.
The gangling man let loose a hysterical whoop and slapped his knee before exiting the store. The old rabbi, perspiring freely beneath the fur shtreimel he wore despite the August heat, patted his forehead with a folded hankie, said “Good Shabbos,” and departed as well. The shopkeeper turned back to the newcomer, who had fainted dead away.
Muni came to in a kitchen chair in the apartment over the store to which the shopkeeper and his wife had dragged him. The shopkeeper, his brow deeply furrowed, was fanning Muni’s face with a rag, as his wife came forward to offer the young man a cup of tea. Muni stared at the steaming liquid on the table and wondered: Where were you when the wind had teeth? Because that insufferably stuffy kitchen was not conducive to the partaking of hot beverages. Thanking her nonetheless, he drank and the bitterness began to revive him.
“Oy,” he sighed, “iz doos a mekhayeh.” Which, roughly translated, meant: I forgot I was alive.
That was the cue for the shopkeeper to drop into the chair beside him, falling upon Muni’s neck and jerking the young man’s tousled head to his breast. “Your uncle Pinchas welcomes you to the Pinch,” he cried. “Katie, give a keek on my dead brother’s son, Muni Pinsker, that he looks, thanks God, like his mother.”
Muni peered out from his uncle’s headlock at Pinchas’s wife, who smiled a tight-lipped smile, winked a jaunty eye, and tucked a strand of auburn hair fading to gray behind an ear. She admonished her husband to give the boy space to breathe, then spooned some mashed concoction from a pot on the coal-burning range into a bowl which she placed before the wanderer. Almost too tired to eat, Muni took (once his uncle had released him) a few gummy bites out of courtesy, while Pinchas apologized for the scene his nephew had witnessed below. “The goyim, they like to play on us tricks,” he said, though Muni was already vague regarding the reference; his head was much too full of actual memories to admit the inadmissible. “They like to see the rebbe do his kishef, his magic.”
“Magic,” repeated Muni, testing the word on his tongue as if it were also a morsel of food. He made a face as if the word were not to his taste.
Ignoring his wife’s token appeals to give the boy time to gather his wits, Pinchas peppered him with questions concerning his odyssey. But whether from aversion or fatigue, his nephew was frustratingly taciturn in his account: “I walked, I rode, I sailed, I rode, I walked,” he shrugged. “I arrived.” Though he had as yet no real sense of having reached a destination.
Then it was evening and they showed him to the closet-sized room they’d prepared for him, the first room of his own that Muni had ever known. He expressed his appreciation for everything, because he did indeed owe them everything, and collapsed onto the narrow camp bed, but he could not sleep. His heart was still keeping time to his interminable forward progress, and the suffocating heat pressed the air from his lungs with a whine like a squeezebox. Stripped to his drawers, he told himself that his sweat was the arctic rime melting from his bones, but he was ashamed to be thus saturating the clean sheets. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that at last he was beyond the long arm of the czar’s police, but unable to relax, he rose and went to the open window to try and catch a breeze.
The full orange moon above the alley illumined a girl dancing in midair. Muni, however, was not deceived; he was accustomed to hallucination, having seen many things that were not there during the long hibernal ordeal of his travels. But look again and he observed that, rather than treading air, the girl—her dusky hair done up in a loose topknot, the strong limbs visible beneath her flimsy chemise—was bobbing barefoot on a rope. It was a slender, sagging rope, perhaps a clothesline, and the girl was balanced precariously upon it, wobbling a bit under the open parasol she was holding. She was staring at him, eyes wide and mouth open in an astonishment that Muni took exception to, since he was the one that ought to be astonished. Then he remembered that he was nearly naked and dove back into the bed.
“This Pinch is a primitive place and all its citizens pig-ignorant,” Pinchas Pin informed his long-lost nephew over the kitchen table, but Muni was paying scant attention. He’d heard the appraisal often enough over the course of the past few days, and besides, he was busily involved in eating a fresh bialy from Ridblatt’s Bakery. The roll was so warm and fragrant, its texture airy as cobweb, that he might have thought it had a holy component—that is, if he’d still set any store by holiness. “There ain’t no superstition that they don’t accept it’s true,” continued his uncle, speaking mostly in Yiddish for his nephew’s sake, though the English locutions kept creeping in. “They don’t none of them share the progressive views of scholars like me and you.”
Muni ceased chewing a moment to register the compliment with a wistful smile. There was a time when he might have been flattered to be included in Pinchas’s exclusive circle; his uncle was after all not without a degree of learning. But now this estimation only amused him. Having returned to society after so many years in perdition, Muni no longer knew what views he held. He only knew that it was a relief to stop awhile and catch his breath, even in such a malarial swamp as Memphis, America. For Muni one swamp would do as well as another, and the bite of mosquitoes was a fair enough exchange for the vicious bite of the frost in the taiga east of Irkutsk. Still, Pinchas’s running catalog of complaints was a mixed invitation.
“It ain’t bad enough you got in their sheets the yokels that are scaring the pants off the schwartzes,” he went on, his English edging out the Yiddish until Muni could scarcely comprehend, “but these Yossel-come-latelies, I’m talking now the Shpinker Hasidim, they got yet to go and monkey with the fabric of time. In most places the days of the week that they follow one after the other, but here you get sometimes a Tuesday contains also elements from Monday and Wednesday. You get the minute that stretches like taffy candy to an hour. This is not chronological; it ain’t any kind of logical.”
Muni scratched his scalp in a show of thoughtfulness and felt how his once thick pelt of hair stood up now in stiff licks and patches since his aunt Katie had trimmed it. Though she was technically his aunt, it was hard to think of the tall, comely woman (a head taller than her husband) as a relation. This was due in part to the fact that she was a gentile, in part because she still seemed so girlish despite her years. There was a mischief, if somewhat laced with melancholy, that played about her zinc-green eyes. With such reckless impetuosity had she flicked her scissors through his hair that he feared she might remove the top of his skull like an egg in a cup. Like the yarmulke he’d exchanged for the worker’s peaked cap in his student days. When he glanced in a mirror afterward—his first glimpse into a mirror in recent memory—he saw a stranger whose weather-seared features appeared as if mocked by a crown of cropped liver-brown feathers.
“A cockleburr,” his aunt had judged, standing arms akimbo behind him.
As for Pinchas, he was entitled to think what he pleased; he was after all the pioneer Ashkenaz of North Main Street. What’s more, he had in large part footed the bill for Muni’s flight from the Siberian waste; he’d provided him with a destination, however unrpromising, and even a job. At first the nephew had protested his uncle’s extravagant generosity; he owed him too much already: “You got here your hands full just to make ends meet.”
But Pinchas pooh-poohed him. “Es mach nit oys, don’t think that by you I’m doing no favors.” In the first place he couldn’t afford to pay the greenhorn a regular salary; all he could offer him was an outsize closet to sleep in and Katie’s stodgy meals. “The truth of the matter is that you will be my slave.”
As servitude was a condition that Muni understood, he took the joke seriously, vowing to stay and work off a debt that his uncle dismissed as null and void. He made himself more than useful, humping sacks of flour and grinding coffee, unpacking denim overalls until his fingers turned blue from the dye. Sometimes, when his uncle was otherwise engaged, he even waited on customers, some of whom had entered the store out of curiosity. They were eager to catch a glimpse of the immigrant who’d come to North Main from the shores of oblivion. (Once when Muni had alluded to feeling like a bit of a spectacle, Pinchas chided him: “You ain’t so special. Is alive, the Pinch, with people used to be dead.”) He ate his aunt’s clotted variations on boiled potatoes and slept the troubled sleep that had yet to relieve his weariness, interrupted as it was by trips to the window to watch the girl who walked on air.
He saw her in the street as well, but there she was different. Sinewy and slight, she still managed to be somehow ungainly, clopping heedlessly along the sidewalk in her apron dress and button shoes. Sometimes she grazed the lampposts and failed to dodge passersby. He spied her through the plate glass of Rosen’s Delicatessen, where she waited tables, spilling seltzer and colliding with customers so often that she apologized in advance. Her name was Jenny Bashrig, an awkward girl who had nothing in common with the one that danced on the wire. With her tapered nose, sardonic lips, and the unraveling skein of her sable hair, she seemed altogether earthbound. In fact, Muni wouldn’t even have recognized her had he not caught her staring back at him from the other side of Rosen’s window with the wire walker’s sloe-black eyes. Then he wondered if she was clumsy or just careless when at large on a planet whose surface she saved all of her grace for rising above.
She was an orphan, Jenny, whose parents had drowned in a steamboat accident near Helena, Arkansas, en route to Memphis from the city of New Orleans. (This much Muni had learned from his aunt, of whom he’d inquired about the girl while at the same time feigning disinterest.) Fished from the river more dead than alive, the child had regurgitated, along with the turbid water from her lungs, a single syllable, the one she’d heard on her parents’ lips since they’d left Zlotopol: “Pinch,” she squeaked, and after much consternation on the part of her rescuers, who passed her from hand to hand, it was suggested that her utterance implied not an action but a place. Ever since, she had been a virtual ward of North Main Street. But while the entire neighborhood claimed her, Jenny had struck the attitude from early on that she belonged to no one but herself. The Rosen family, distant relations who’d anticipated the Bashrigs’ arrival, had provided the girl with a roof and, when she was old enough, a nominal livelihood. But though she demonstrated her gratitude through dutiful drudgery, she never suppressed her independent streak; she remained a creature apart, barely educated and prone to undomestic habits. Muni supposed their status as outsiders was not so dissimilar, which was perhaps why she held a certain fascination for him. But while the interest seemed to some extent mutual, he had so far resisted any real exchange with the girl. With the exception of his aunt and uncle, the greenhorn still kept himself aloof from one and all.