The Tin Horse: A Novel (2 page)

I open one of the programs, and I’m sitting in the dark, watching my sister dance. Not just admiring her but
feeling
her movements in my body—though I could never have danced with her abandon and fire. I craved private moments, whereas Barbara came alive in the spotlight.

“Elaine,” Josh says, and I realize I’ve been miles—years—away. “Did you dance?”

“No. My sister Barbara.” My throat goes rough with the threat of unexpected tears.

“Ballet?”

“Modern,” I choke out.

“Did she ever do anything with it? Have a career?”

“She did what most of the women of my generation did. Got married, raised a family.” Lying, the words come more easily. Still, I have a sudden image of standing on the bank of the Los Angeles River during a storm, the water churning and my nerves alert for signs of a flash flood. Nonsense! I tell myself again.

He asks if he can take the programs for some kind of dance archive at USC, and I say fine—what would I do with them?

Then the box yields a fresh challenge to my equilibrium: Philip’s business card.

Josh whistles. “Wow! What did your mother have to do with a private detective?”

I mumble something about my having worked for Philip when I was in college. That spins Josh into fresh questions, and he mentions a name,
someone I’ve never heard of, written on the back of the card. I blurt that I’ve come down with a splitting headache and rush him out the door. Then I stop fighting and let the flood come.

I’m expecting some kind of violence, that I’ll break into wild weeping or hurl a vase across the room. Instead, there’s a sense of surrender as I let myself be carried by the river of sorrow and rage and regret and love, the river of Barbara.

A
T 11:52 P.M. ON MARCH 28, 1921, BARBARA WRIGGLED OUT OF
Mama into the brightness of White Memorial Hospital on Boyle Avenue in Los Angeles. Seventeen minutes—but the next day—later, I swam after her. Did she shove me aside? Did I, suddenly shy of the world, hold back? But Barbara always arrived ahead of me. She balanced on a bicycle half an hour before I did, and everyone was so busy congratulating her, they didn’t notice when I climbed onto the bike we shared and wobbled to the corner. People always called us Barbara and Elaine, never Elaine and Barbara. And though I met Danny first, Barbara was his first love.

We were fraternal twins, not identical. Still, no one would have doubted that we were sisters. We both had thick, curly dark hair (hers slightly curlier and mine with redder highlights, of which I was vain), gold-flecked hazel eyes, and largish but thankfully straight noses. When we got into our teens, I shot up to five foot three, which was tall for our family; Barbara was an inch shorter. Our most obvious physical difference lay in
the architecture of our faces. She had soft apple cheeks like Mama’s, while my face was narrow, with Papa’s deep-set eyes; long before I had to start wearing glasses at eleven, people rightly pegged me as the serious one. Did we grow into our faces, or did they express our natures from the beginning? Both of us spoke at a medium pitch and “so clear, like bells! You girls should go on the radio!” Papa, shamed by his parents’ and Mama’s accents, polished our articulation by having us declaim poems. While I kneaded my thoughts into sentences deliberately, Barbara never hesitated. And she could sing, with what matured into a throaty, torch-song voice, while I could barely croak out a tune.

We have the same smile in photographs, the same gap between our front teeth, inherited from Papa. A film, though, would have shown that she was quicker to smile. If one quality most described my sister, it was quickness, in every sense of the word. Barbara was spontaneous, eager, vital, warm, someone who constantly came up with games and mischief, making her a natural leader of the band of kids in our neighborhood. She was also impatient, impulsive, reckless, and hasty to judge. Mercurial, even cruel, a quick-change artist of affection who adored you one day and, worse than anger or hatred, forgot you existed the next.

And she could leave havoc in her wake, a talent I witnessed for the first time when she caused the stock market crash of 1929. Of course, I was old enough at that time—eight and a half—to understand that cataclysms in my family didn’t affect the entire world. Yet I always associated Black Tuesday with the storm that hit our house the same day because of what Barbara did to Zayde.

Zayde Dov, Papa’s father, lived with us. In fact, our house was the same one Zayde had moved into when Papa was seventeen. But Zayde wasn’t from Los Angeles. He had crossed the ocean to come to America. And before that, he’d had to cross a river. A trifling distance, to be sure, compared to the Atlantic that churned beneath him for two weeks, an ordeal that made him refuse to set foot in a boat ever again, not even the little rowboats in Hollenbeck Park. But crossing the river was harder. The first wrenching away from everything he knew and that knew him, a seventeen-year-old boy with his mama’s kugel still warm in his belly and the fresh damp of her tears wetting the scarf she’d knotted around his neck.

And Zayde’s river was no country trickle, but the mighty Dniester, which swept from the Carpathian Mountains past his village in the Ukraine to the Black Sea. Then there was the fact that he had to swim across the river on a March night—the water icy, the current at a gallop from melting Carpathian snow—so the dogs wouldn’t pick up his scent. The dogs and the men with them, men who carried cudgels and guns.

Zayde always paused at this point. And Barbara and I always demanded, breathless as if the dogs were after
us
, “Why were they chasing you?”

“Ah,” he’d say, taking a sip from his cup of tea, laced with whiskey. “A great crime I committed, girls.”

No matter how many times I heard the story, I could never erase the picture that jumped into my mind, of Zayde Dov in his house slippers vaulting onto a horse with the loot from a bank robbery, like the Wild West bandits I saw in the movies.

Until he continued, “I fell in love.”

The girl’s name was Agneta. She was the daughter of one of the farmers who came into town on market day, an event that over time, between Zayde’s storytelling and my imagination, became so real I almost felt as if I’d been there, as if I’d witnessed the scene that sealed Zayde’s fate. Market day in Zayde’s village was busy and noisy, what with the jostle of peasants selling what their farms produced and the Jewish villagers offering goods such as tea, salt, and lamp oil. The villagers also provided the services of craftsmen such as Berel the tinsmith, who was Zayde Dov’s father.

Berel, an enterprising man, had recently bought a grinding machine and branched into sharpening. And scissors, appropriately, proved the instrument of Dov’s
estrangement
—such a rich word, signifying both that you become a stranger to others and that everything around you, everything you see and hear, even what you smell, is alien. No more do your nostrils suck in the precise odors that emanate from
this
soil and vegetation,
this
method of cooking and of handling trash, the perfume, however foul, of home. If only Dov could have foreseen what he was about to lose, would he have acted differently the day Agneta came into the tinsmith’s
shop wanting her scissors sharpened fine enough to cut the challis she’d just bought for a best dress?

It was nearly dusk, and Dov was tending the shop alone. He pumped the foot pedal to start the grinding wheel and held the blades of Agneta’s scissors against the stone. He was more aware at first of the work than of the pretty peasant customer.

“I liked using the grinder,” he told us. “It’s the one thing I was good at. My father said he’d never seen such a schlemiel at working tin.”

He tested the scissor blades with his finger, then ground them a bit more and buffed them with a clean rag until they gleamed in the thin light of a late January afternoon. “Perfect, see?” he said, and demonstrated by snipping a piece of paper and displaying the crisp edges. Agneta, who was shortsighted, leaned close to look, close enough that he smelled her: a scent of rough soap, the dried rosemary she’d carried in bunches to the market, and sixteen-year-old girl.

“Show me on this.” Plucking a parcel from the basket she carried over her arm, she unwrapped the brown paper and freed a corner of the fabric, a bright blue that matched her eyes; it was soft to his touch when he held it and aimed the scissors at it. “No, silly, not that much!” she cried, and snatched the wool from him, her fingers grazing his, her blue eyes teasing.

Emboldened, he handed her the scissors, their touch lasting perhaps two seconds this time. “You do it.”

Agneta folded the fabric back into the brown paper and reached behind her for the braid that fell halfway to her waist. Flourishing her rosemary-scented blond hair between them, she sliced a dozen strands from the end of her braid and held them out to Dov.

“You understand, girls? Agneta was a goy, a Christian. She thought she could say anything she wanted, because I was nobody, a Jew.”

Dov Grinshtayn didn’t believe in such distinctions, however. He intended to abolish them; everyone did at the socialist meetings he snuck off to. And he was a strong, good-looking boy, fonder of walking in the forest and (luckily, as it turned out) swimming in the river than spending all day shut up in the rabbi’s study hall. In a photograph taken in New York a few years later, his jaw is firm, his shoulders solid, and his eyes, under thick, wavy black hair … Even though the photo is slightly out of focus, you
can see the challenge in his eyes. The kind of look I pictured him giving Agneta.

“Here,” she said when he just stood there instead of reaching for the lock of hair. “Take it.”

“Why would I want it?”

“To think of me.” She tossed her head, even as the disdained hair grew damp with sweat from her fingers.

“Why would I want to think of you?”

Her jest turned against her, Agneta’s smile lost its courage and became the sucked-in lips of a child fighting tears. And Dov experienced in one telescoped moment everything that was fine and everything that was mean in himself. “Ai, I felt sorry for upsetting her. But living in America, girls, you have no idea. Christian boys used to beat us up; they did it in plain sight of adults and got away with it. Sometimes mobs of Christians attacked all the Jews. It was called a pogrom. Every minute of your life, you were afraid.”

Given the perpetual anxiety of being at the mercy of the Christian peasants, Dov couldn’t help but savor his taste of power over one Christian girl … until tears brimmed in her eyes. Then his heart melted. Gravely he held out his hand. Agneta pressed the lock of hair into his palm. He twisted the hair into a triangle of paper and slipped it in his pocket.

They spoke now only of their transaction.

“Are they sharp enough?”

“Yes, they’re fine.”

“Shall I wrap them?”

But every word carried poetry in its arms.

“Agneta, what’s taking you so long, girl?” A man’s voice at the door, thick as if he’d just come from the tavern, and that was when Dov learned her name.

“Coming, Father,” she called.

“Wait. Take …,” Dov said, before he had any idea what to give her. “Here!” A pencil from his pocket, almost new and hardly chewed at all.

“Oh.” She looked at the pencil as if she didn’t know how to use one. Was she even literate, this girl who was going to hurl him into exile? She thrust the pencil into her basket and scurried out the door.

She came back two weeks later with a pot to mend, but the shop was busy, and he had to focus on the work under finicky Berel’s eye. Nervous, he burned his fingers with solder, but that hardly aroused his father’s suspicion, as it happened all the time.

He was luckier on the next market day. When he passed the stalls in the town square, on his way to deliver tin pails to the dairy, he spotted her and caught her eye. She slipped off and followed him. In a stand of beech trees, he and Agneta were alone at last.

“Did you kiss?” we asked. We went to the movies. We knew what happened when people were in love; not that we saw this kind of behavior between Mama and Papa!

“The ideas you girls have. Once, I kissed her.” But they didn’t dare linger and risk being seen. And she had important things to tell him: how to recognize her farm, at what time she came out to feed the chickens, and that she had a secret place in the woods at the edge of the farm, where no one else ever went.

Since their first meeting, Dov had saved bits of tin and wire, scraps left from trimming pots or punching holes in colanders. He’d snuck the leavings into his pocket, where he also kept the lock of Agneta’s hair. Once he had enough scraps, he devoted himself to tinsmithing as never before. His father was right, he had little talent. But despite his lack of skill, not long after he’d first kissed Agneta, he was ready. The next Shabbos, when he had the afternoon free, he walked by her farm three times. Each time, he continued a hundred yards past the house, then turned and—heart pounding, terrified that every one of her four brothers had seen him—passed again. At long last, Agneta came out carrying her bucket of chicken feed. She raced into the chicken house and a moment later, never glancing his way, hurried toward the woods. She stayed within the fence; Dov paralleled her on the road. Once they were out of sight of the house, he climbed over the fence to her … and gave her his gift, a tin menagerie.