No, all she can hope for is that he’ll take pity on her. The bedbug. That he’ll take her measly twenty-five as a down payment maybe. She can skimp for a while, promise to pay him a few dollars per month. He’ll understand paying over time. Even a businessman can take pity, can’t he? Can’t he take pity? That word that she both dreads and covets.
Outside, the air is indeed fresh, briskly scrubbed by yesterday’s rain, as she heads for the uptown subway.
She can still so easily return to her mother’s studio. The pleasing sharpness of the spirits in her nostrils. And the oily aromas of the paint on the palette. Her eema used only a certain brand of hand-mixed Belgian oil paints famous for their vivid colors. Rachel can remember the smell of sulfur in the cadmiums was so strong it was like the smell of a match head as it ignites. Even in the pawnbroker’s shop, had she somehow expected to detect the sulfur emanating from the canvas after so many decades? In her mind’s eye, she can see it. The canvas seated firmly on Eema’s massive easel. The figure of a girl rendered in fiery colors. The pungent perfume of the cadmium red. Folklore warns that the smell of sulfur is a sign of the presence of demons. In this case, perhaps true. She can summon the image of the girl seated on the dais at rest, lazily smoking a cigarette, wearing a gauzy robe that exposed the color of her flesh. Hair red as a blaze.
Rachel was just a child. Still Rashka. She had come to her eema’s studio with her nanny. Eema, of course, was too busy with the nanny, dispensing directions, to pay much notice to her daughter, but that was bearable. Certainly not unusual. Really she had been hoping to pet the cat who lived there. A big tawny beast who often snoozed in the light that poured through the loft’s windows.
But then there was this girl. The subject of the painting that was still glossy with freshly applied paint. Rashka inhaled the telltale whiff of sulfur. It was this girl who had the cat under her spell. With Rashka, the beast was impatient. Too big for her handle. Easily provoked into scratching. But in this girl’s arms, he was tamed. Purring loudly with contentment. Rashka was jealous. Not just of the girl’s capture of the cat’s affection but of the affection itself. She was mesmerized. It was easy to fall under this girl’s spell just like the cat had. A wink and an intimate smile were all it took. She imagined what it must feel like to absorb such tender attention. She pictured herself as the cat in the girl’s arms.
***
The bell jangles above her upon entry. But when the curtains divide, it isn’t the bedbug at all who greets her from the back room, it’s a gray old man. Tall and slouched like the bedbug, but with one gold tooth in a row of brown and a belly hung over his belt. “Can I help?” he asks her, digging at the old tobacco baked into the bowl of a pipe with a penknife. His voice is throaty and rough. She can smell the sweet stench of smoke on him.
“I’m…” she starts to say. But what? She’s what? The gray man lifts a pair of wiry eyebrows. “I’m looking,” she says. “There was a gentleman here yesterday.”
Maybe the gray man thinks this is funny. A joke. “A gentleman, was he? Well. Won’t his mother be proud to hear?”
“He showed me a painting,” Rachel tells the man. “Is he here?” she asks with a certain polite impatience. “I was hoping to talk with him.”
“Not here. Not today. But tell me again.” The man scrunches his brow together. “He was showing you what?”
“A painting,” she repeats. “It’s monochrome,” she says.
“Oh, yeah, is that what it was?” he replies, still sounding grayly amused.
“It’s a painting of a girl done all in red,” she says.
“Ah.” The man’s expression lifts. “Sure.” He grins. “The nudie!”
Rachel breathes in.
“Sorry,” the man tells her, “but that one? That one’s gone,” he explains.
Her heart thumps a single stroke against her rib cage. “Gone.” She says this as if she suddenly may not understand the meaning of the word.
“Yep. That’s what I said.” The gray man sniffs, banging the pipe bowl against the rim of the black enamel ashtray, loaded with crushed cigarette butts. “I sold it this morning first thing.”
“Sold?” This can’t be. “To whom? Who bought it?” Rachel hears herself demand. She realizes that she has gripped the ledge of the counter. “Was it a man?” she wants to know. “Old? Silver in his hair? Slim? A pointed beard?”
But the gray man only shrugs. “Sweetness,” he tells her. “You know I can’t say. I’m running a business. There are rules,” he explains. “A customer bought it. That’s all.”
Michnik Brothers Tobacconist on Rivington Street feels like a dusty mausoleum when she enters. Dark wooden shelving. The air infused with an ancient odor of tobacco. She was hoping to find her uncle behind the counter at the far end, where the most expensive cigars are displayed in their boxes, but instead it’s the owner, Mr. Michnik, gazing at her through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He looks glumly disappointed to see her, but then doesn’t he always look a little disappointed? She doesn’t take it personally. “I was hoping to find my uncle,” Rachel tells him. “Is he working this week?”
Mr. Michnik appears pained by this question. He’s a hunched old fellow. Also a refugee, but one who left Poland twenty years before the war. Business was good here in America. He opened this shop with his brother. They sent money back to the mishpocha in Warsaw. And then he blinked, and all were gone. An entire family reduced to ashes. Then his brother passed a year after the war’s end. Heart attack, said the doctors, but who knows about the power of grief? Anyhow, he keeps the place going. She knows that he’s seen the number tattooed on her uncle’s arm. She knows he employs him more out of a sense of charity than of business. A part-time clerk to work the cash register. Shelve the stock here and again and maybe pick up a broom. What’s the harm? Especially when he thinks of all those who perished.
But now he’s shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t keep him on any longer. Sometimes he wouldn’t show for his shift. Or I’d come in and find him in the back room smoking instead of working the counter. And then,” Mr. Michnik says before he sighs. He doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to, but he must. “Stock went missing,” he confides. “Not much. A box or three of Phillies Panatellas.” He shrugs. “A nine-cent cigar. Not so expensive. But when it happened more than once, how long could I ignore? Add to that the miscounts on the cash drawer, and I’m sorry,” the old man repeats. “I had to let him go.”
Rachel feels her cheeks burn. Shame. Shame and pity. Pity and guilt. Which is worse?
She searches Feter’s downtown haunts. Not only the café where they’d met the previous day but also the coffeehouses and cafeterias, the delicatessens and dairy restaurants along Delancey, and that place on Essex Street that serves everything pickled. She searches any and all of the corners below Houston where her uncle has been known to perch, but all to no avail. She finds the old snowy owl, Mr. Smushkevich, the chess maven, contemplating his board alone, trying to crack the code of some obscure gambit from les jours de tsar as he nurses his tepid tea. He shows her the ancient smile as he offers his regrets. “Ikh hob nisht leygn an aoyg aoyf im, liebling.” Haven’t laid an eye on him.