Unpleasant as it was, Muni was grateful that she gave him an audience, since almost all others, Pinchas included, were forbidden to enter the sickroom.
“Seligman says Katie is with me a shlecht vayb, a shrew, so that I won’t miss her when she’s gone,” confided Pinchas from the kitchen chair that had become the seat of his distress. “But I know better.”
“What do you know, Uncle?” asked Muni, who could barely stand to linger indoors while outside the people carried on like skylarkers in Eden. He was hardly paying attention when Pinchas replied, “I know that she punishes me.”
This gave his nephew pause. “Beg pardon,” he respectfully submitted, uneasy to find himself gainsaying his uncle, “but isn’t it Aunt Katie that’s the victim?”
“She punishes me,” continued Pinchas, oblivious of Muni’s challenge, “because I’m not anymore with her a man.” It wasn’t a confession that Muni would have invited, but his uncle wasn’t done. “What’s the point if we can’t make together a baby?”
That the couple were well past their childbearing years seemed the least of what was wrong with Pinchas’s argument. “I don’t think that from spite nobody dies,” Muni offered with a great lump in his throat.
“You tell that to my Katie,” called Pinchas, for his nephew, who’d heard all he could bear to, was already halfway down the stairs.
Dr. Seligman came and went with his syringes and gentian blue vials, and Jenny was also much in attendance. She brought herbal infusions from the Widow Teitelbaum and soups from Mrs. Rosen, which the patient seldom touched. (The deli was operating out of the Rosens’ upstairs kitchen, Mrs. Rosen lowering baskets of borscht and sandwiches into the passing boats from her fire escape.) When Pinchas poked his head into the bedroom, however, Katie spat a string of Irish curses until he withdrew, though he hung on in the doorway suffering her abuse like a warm spring shower.
But despite his aunt’s progressive emaciation Muni still couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for her. This, he knew, was unconscionable: she was after all the wife of the man who’d rescued him from affliction, and didn’t he venerate her gentle person as well? Hadn’t they both been in his eyes — that is, until his uncle disabused him — the very model of domestic harmony? But the giddy climate of North Main Street was unfavorable to your common-variety pity; it was an atmosphere that argued against even the remorse you might feel for not feeling pity. And anyway Muni thought his aunt was beautiful in her languishing: wasting away became her like a cameo on an ageless sepulcher.
That’s how things stood in the old neighborhood: nobody and nothing was so base or inessential that they lacked some aspect of the sublime. Every gesture, from scrounging for foodstuffs to caulking rust buckets and emptying water closets with a sieve, seemed to take its place in the grand narrative. Viewing the scuttled street from an upstairs window, Muni would recall the concept of neshomah yeterah, the bonus soul the faithful are granted on Friday nights. He remembered how, back in his childhood cheder in Blod, even their sadistic old melammed would wax rhapsodic when speaking of Shabbos: how the Sabbath was a palace in time whose architecture contained both the immemorial past and the promised future. Now the Pinch seemed to occupy a perpetual Sabbath that encompassed a past as distant as Muni’s childhood and then some. Every action echoed a chiddush nifla (Muni remembered the phrase), some wondrous event.
Every ladder was a type of Jacob’s Ladder; every mired but still spinning bicycle wheel — a rainbow in its spokes — was a version of the wheel Ezekiel saw. The flood was a reprise of the Flood. During sanguine sunsets the canal of North Main Street became the River Sambatyon, beyond which dwelled the lost tribes of Israel. When Tillie Alperin’s little Esther burned her tongue on a hot knish, Isaiah’s lips were seared again by the angel’s lump of coal. Jakie Belz proudly presented his soiled linen as evidence that he’d been visited in the night by the demoness Lilith. Every gas pipe, base burner, and bedpan contained a trapped soul demanding release. Ike Petrofsky complained (or was he boasting?) of having to wade through several past lives in the morning in order to get back to the here and now—“And tomorrow I can step if I want into today.”
Muni supposed he might also get around to recognizing a future that infiltrated the present at every turn, but there was no rush. For the time being he was captivated by current events that were themselves still encrusted with the past, his own and others’. Memories once too painful to revive — of prison and the katorga and the hopeful time before — seemed as if refined into luminous tintypes in the alchemical air. When he’d read them as a child in cheder, the stories of the Torah were converted before his eyes into tangible experience. Now, though he was blindsided by the prospect, Muni’s experience of the Pinch seemed to clamor for a translation back into text. He remembered how the tales from holy writ, conveyed through the medium of Hebrew characters, could filter the grayest shtetl light into a Joseph’s coat of colors; so how much brighter would words make a light that was already resplendent. The neighborhood was tohu v’bohu, a mishmash of stories that needed only some designated scribe to apprehend and record them for all time.
“Somebody ought to write it all down,” Muni told Jenny one evening, when they were huddled together among the Medusa’s hair roots of the inverted oak.
Her reply was a suggestion she would regret till her dying day: “So why don’t you already?”
They had picked up their affair of the heart more or less where they’d left off before the quake. Of course the entire community was now stricken with a kind of pandemic infatuation, a free-floating euphoria that perhaps lent spice to the lovers’ feelings; though a gleeful Muni preferred to think it was the other way around: his passion for Jenny had enlivened the whole neighborhood. But whereas his spirits were practically lighter than air, Jenny, whose medium had been thin air itself, seemed to keep at least one foot on the ground. She almost resented that their affair was nothing special in a place where everything was special, and she worried about Katie Pin. She even admitted to feeling some guilt over being happy while Katie lay at death’s door. “It isn’t nice to be romantic under her nose,” she cautioned, sensing that their amorousness may have served to aggravate Katie’s lamentable state. Muni couldn’t have disagreed more.
“Does her good, I think, to see young people in love,” he insisted, unable to understand Jenny’s reservations.
Then one night in the tree, in a burst of spontaneous sentiment, he’d confessed to a youthful folly.
He was gazing at her barefoot countenance, her slender form in an embroidered smock backlit by a red-orange dusk that caused the twisted roots to do a fair impression of a burning bush. Other couples occupied those wavering boughs as well, flirting with each other more boldly than they’d have dared on dry land, dry land having become a scarce commodity. Above them Muni also caught sight of an ill-shaped little entity in a brass hat, which, when he squinted to sharpen his focus, was gone. A grin wreathed his face as he wondered if all this immoderate gladness was merely a function of his desire for Jenny.
“You know,” he was suddenly moved to confide in her, “I used to make poems.” There was one he remembered — remembered for the first time in an age — about the prophet Samuel in a foul mood after being recalled from death by the Witch of Endor; there was another about the sheydim, the elementals, who wove elflocks into Samson’s beeswaxed hair …
“And now you make what?” mused the girl, tickling his middle with an uplifted toe. “Whoopee?”
But instead of divulging another memory, as her touch had routinely prompted, Muni swatted away her foot like a housefly. “Be for a moment serious,” he scolded, shocked at his own thin-skinned response. But he was not done mulling over his recollection of the poems, which were admittedly callow and immature though not without a certain … he searched for the word.