Authors: Keir Alexander
‘Hi Poppa,’ her voice, matter-of-fact, pretending all is well but signalling the opposite.
‘May I speak to your mother, please?’
‘She’s tired. She went early to bed.’ He can feel himself cracking, giving way to his anxieties: ‘OK . . . So tell me, where are they? What did she do with them?’
‘This is not a good moment.’
‘I said, where are they!’
‘They are safe, don’t worry.’
‘Oh my God, how could you do this to me?’
‘Don’t shout, please, Poppa,’ she says, and then tells him that the shoes are safe in a bank deposit box of all places. Nothing will happen to them, she tells him, without his blessing.
‘This is terrible, shocking!’ His voice rises to a scream. ‘I am coming over this minute!’
And that, after slamming down the phone, is what he does: shuts up shop there and then, not giving a thought to the fact that it’s two hours before closing time. He hurls the stands across the floor, skidding and colliding, with peaches splattering ripe to the floor, throws down his apron, turns the sign to closed, goes out of the door and hurls the rickety shutter down.
■ ♦ ■
When we got to Amsterdam, which was not far, Felikss had one more surprise, for he takes me to the city hall, to the office of the registrar and asks, in German, to be given forms that will enable us to be married. I was a little astonished at this, since he has overlooked to tell me this small detail and the word love has never passed between us. It is for good reason, he assures me. For here was a way we can go to America. His brother, who is locksmith in New York, was to sponsor him to go and take the same trade. But I say to him that I don’t understand, that does not explain why it is good to marry, and he tells me that this can be my own passport to America and he wishes to repay all the kindness I have given to him. The marriage would exist on paper, but who knows, maybe it could come to love. Whatever happened, once we would be in America I would be free to do as I wished
.
And so I went along with this. Within three days of coming to Amsterdam we were man and wife and within three months we were on our way, sailing steerage to America. It’s cliché, of course, to talk about that moment of arrival in the city of New York. To gaze upon the Statue of Liberty, to look across at Manhattan gleaming in the setting sun, but this really was to be delivered into a fantasy that you have seen only in the movies
.
So in the real world now we were met by Felikss’s brother, Leonids, who was more American than the Americans, in the way he dressed and used the slang and is full of belonging to New York City. He refused even to talk to us in our own tongue and began at once to make us learn English. So then he brought us in a yellow taxi to the West Side, which is not the place of glamour and never was, but is only a walk away from the heart of the city, which is where we went to walk the first night. There it was heaven to look into the windows of department stores and drink coffee in Italian cafés and stare up at skyscrapers till our necks were sore. Even so, this was never going to put a roof over our head or food in our belly. And this is where things started to happen that did not go as I had imagined. Leonids had taken us to his own apartment, which was spacious and full of good furniture and fine ornaments, and there also was his wife, Martha, who immediately I liked and who was a real American of American parents. But then he took us to the place he had found for us. It was right at the top of a tenement block in a noisy, dirty neighbourhood and was tiny, a room only with a place for a stove and everything else was shared, to include the toilet downstairs. It was not what I had dreamed, but it was a place where one could begin to have hope
.
It was my wish that Felikss would wake every day and go bright and early to work with Leonids, but after only a week this was not so, and when I asked him he said that Leonids had agreed on paper only to train him but not to pay him – a detail which had not been conveyed to me. But then I see after that Felikss is not even being bothered to go one block to his brother, even to be trained. And then he tells me he does not much like to work with locks, that he is no good with metal and has not any feeling for it. So now it is I who is getting angry and saying it was not so long ago the Brownshirts would have him kicked to death in the street. And then it is his turn to hit back and he shouts at me, ‘What about you? Why don’t you train? Why don’t you work? You can sew; you can be dressmaker.’
Much argument follows this, and eventually he agrees to go and talk to his brother again, but this time, when he returns there is a bruise on his face and he tells me in English – he was learning quickly – that I should see the other guy. It turns out that he and his brother were in great argument, that the brother was saying that Felikss has let him down, that he was relying on him for help, that he has been used by him to gain a visa and he will go to the authorities if Felikss does not compensate him with dollars! This was unbelievable to me – that brothers should seek to profit from each other and even to fight fist to fist
.
■ ♦ ■
His finger has hardly left the bell push when the door springs open and Jenny is there, her look forgiving and forbidding at the same time. Even in his fury it occurs to him that she must have stood in this position for a while, perfecting her saintly pose. The voice too is soft with rehearsed compassion. ‘Come on in, Poppa.’
‘Try and stop me!’
‘Don’t be angry, please.’
‘Me? Angry? What the f—!’
‘Poppa, please. No cursing. Sylvie . . .’
‘Send her to bed!’ he yells and, striding into the living room, he finds Karl sprawled on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table, his head thrown back to a bottle as
The Family Man
crackles out of the TV. He sees Sylvie is behind the couch, solemnly playing with her dollies. She doesn’t even break to look up at him. Under strict orders, he deduces – told to keep her distance.
Karl returns the bottle to the table, stretches elaborately and flicks out a lazy hand, saying, ‘Siddown, siddown.’ A chair is there for him, but he will not sit down, he will not allow them to tame his anger.
‘Siddown, Poppa,’ urges Jenny, and then goes over to take Sylvie away to her bed, her half-hearted protest deflected in sly glances away from her and at him.
Some crass joke on the TV sends Karl into fits of laughter: ‘Listen to this . . .’ he snorts, laughing along with the canned audience.
‘Listen to me! Someone kindly listen to me!’ Michael snarls.
‘Oh. Sorry,’ exclaims Karl, tactically surprised, and seizing on etiquette, he removes his feet from the table and sits up. ‘Can I get you a beer?’
‘No you cannot. Where is she?’ he says to Jenny. ‘Tell her to get out here now!’ This provides Big Karl with a cue to make his own display of righteous indignation: ‘Hey. What goes on here?’
‘Just tell her to come now, please.’
‘Now wait a minute, whose house is this?’ Karl does not like to be ignored by Michael. It rankles him to see the man standing right up to him, but with his face turned aside and paying him not the slightest attention. ‘In case you didn’t notice, this is my house and my room and you are shouting at my wife!’ snarls Karl.
‘Shouting? I hear only one person shouting,’ roars back Michael. Seeing the warning signs, Jenny inserts herself between the two men. ‘Please! Both o’ you . . . Poppa, you better just go!’
‘I ain’t going nowhere!’
‘Like I said, mister, my house, my room. You come in here on my night off and interrupt my favourite TV show—’
‘Your favourite TV show!
That’s
all that matters here? You interrupted my whole
life
! You stole from me, from my . . . my family. You took what was never yours to—’
‘That’s it, you’re outta here!’ shouts Karl and jabs Michael in the breastbone, nightstick hard, with his great stubby finger, so that Michael falls back, rubbing his chest. ‘You any idea who you talking to here, buster?’ he hollers, and over and over again he prods the unfeeling finger at the stubborn old man, all the time forcing him back to the door he came in at. ‘Now get outta here, and don’t come back until you feel like talking reasonable!’
Seeing the old man is practically out of the house, Karl turns his back on Michael and lumbers back towards his couch, message sent, job done. But before he can lower himself back down, a ball of wind rises in his gullet and spills out in an almighty belch. ‘Pardon me,’ he says, starting to laugh despite himself.
Michael, who has been on the verge of turning tail and slinking away, takes this as the ultimate insult: ‘You bastard!’ he shouts and sails across the room, leaping with wondrous agility onto Karl’s broad back. Around the ox-neck he clamps his arms, squeezing for all his life and with not a care where it might end. It is an absurd sight, more in keeping with a cartoon comedy show: the big man, barking like a seal with a sore throat and thrashing his body this way and that, trying to buck off the round little pig-a-back man who just won’t let go. And little by little, his own scrabbling hands fused to Michael’s, Karl begins to sink.
Michael has not the slightest thought for the man who he is trying, without really knowing it, to kill. He takes no heed of Jenny’s yelling, or her frantic scrabbling to prise them apart. He does not hear the wild laughter of Sylvie, who has sneaked down from her bed and thinks some kind of game is going on, and he does not even notice his own wife, who now comes padding into the room in her sky-blue velour dressing gown and pink fluffy slippers, her hair in curlers. Even as Karl slumps to his knees, down to the last gasp, Grace stares, baffled, at the scene confronting her, wondering how she had never before seen such passion in her man. Then, hearing Jenny still screeching like a stuck pig and Sylvie wailing and in distress, she slips into the kitchen and returns with a convenient object, a large well-used frying pan. High above her head she raises it and brings it down in a wide swooping arc to slam it home-run hard against the side of her husband’s cranium, with a clang right out of Universal Studios sound-effects department. It does the trick: Michael sails away sideways and beaches face down on the carpet, while Karl topples over onto his back, spluttering and gasping, his hands at his throat.
‘Oh my God!’ squeals Jenny. ‘My God, this is so bad! Poppa coulda killed Karl; Karl coulda killed Poppa!’
Grace looks down on it all. To the one side she can see Michael rolling over and groaning, his hand at his head; to the other there is Karl, his arms locked against the floor as he tries to lever himself up.
‘Nah, I don’t think so . . .’ she pronounces, as calm as you like. ‘I always dreamed about hitting him over the head with a frypan one day, but mine is too heavy. Now
it
coulda killed him, but this one is nice and light. To tell the truth, throwing that whack gave me more pleasure than I ever imagined!’
■ ♦ ■
Karl comes out of the kitchen, pressing a bag of peas to his throat and glaring at Michael, who is sitting bent over on the coffee-table edge, running his fingers over an egg-shaped bump on the topside of his skull. He is not pleased: ‘You crazy bastard,’ he says. ‘This better not bruise. You forget I’m a cop? The only thing standing between you and a night cell is that you are Jenny’s old man!’
Making much of being unimpressed, Michael looks Karl in the eye, brings his wrists together and puts them out ready to take the cuffs. A silent face-off follows, in which Karl snorts and puffs in his own performance of indignation, and Michael glares and glowers in his improvised show of self-righteousness. Grace and Jenny meanwhile just look on, shaking their heads at the insanity of it all. It is Michael who finally breaks the deadlock.
‘OK, this is where I get up and go. But no way do I let this lie. Listen to me, Grace, we walk outta here now, and the key to the box comes too. You understand me?’
His words are aimed hard and unforgiving at Grace, but his eyes are fixed on Karl. As Michael walks towards the door, Grace at last finds her voice and speaks up obligingly.
‘Sure I understand you, Michael.’
‘OK, so come on . . .’
She looks at him all pitiful, then turns to face her daughter: ‘Jenny, would you mind if I was to stay here one or two nights – let the dust settle?’
‘Sure, Momma, if that’s what you want.’
Karl is not slow to drive home the advantage: ‘Sure. You stay here long as you like, Momma, and don’t let nobody push you around.’
There is nothing left to say. The four of them just hang there in silence; Michael, isolated, defeated and waiting still for the Seventh Cavalry who are not going to arrive. ‘OK,’ he says at last and about-turns, like a sentry man at the end of his travel, and marches stiff-backed to the door.
■ ♦ ■
Every day there is a new consignment of books: as many as thirty copies from the publishers or from central stock. James enjoys dealing with them for a couple of hours before things get really busy. First, there is the quick scan of titles – the variety of them, the sheer multiplicity of ideas and experiences that they represent. Then there are the more practical things to be done: removing dust sheets; covering them in film and embossing the hard covers with the NYPL crest, not to forget laminating in barcodes. All this is part of a process to dress the virgin book and make it decent. Mostly, James leaves this ritual to his staff, but once or twice in the week he likes to sit himself down and enjoy the simple, sensual pleasure of handling new books, their colours, textures and scents, some spicy or gluey and natural, some chemical and astringent. There is a childlike pleasure to be had in stamping and sticking things and cutting them out, and beneath all this, deeper, darker undercurrents of appropriation and retention.
At break time, he sits with Marcia drinking coffee. Through the glass in the door, he can see Jack going to and fro, returning books to shelves. ‘Our friend Jack,’ he asks, ‘how long has he been with us?’
‘Years – at least four,’ she tells him, curious at James’s curiosity.