The girl had screwed up her face and crossed her eyes in a burlesque of seriousness, defusing Muni’s mood. “We are not by you amused,” he pronounced, his peevishness already dissolved into parody.
“Okey-doke,” said Jenny, still playing along, commencing as if to climb down. “Drop me a line when you get a chance.”
“Jenny—” Muni grabbed her wrist to detain her. Maybe this was it, the ideal opportunity to propose to her, but the very thought flooded his head with an excess of emotion that robbed him of speech. The girl slid fluidly from her perch into his arms, as though in pronouncing her name he held an empty garment for her body to slip into. She leaned against him, pinning him to the crotch of a dirt-caked root with the pressure of her small breasts and hips. They had yet to repeat the deed that preceded the quake, when their fused bodies tolled like a clapper in a bell. But now the heat of their contact, for all its urgency, served only to enhance for Muni the delight he took in observing the very rich hours of North Main Street. It was an appallingly pure sensation, the kind that begged to be recorded the way sins and mitzvot are inscribed on the Jewish New Year in the Book of Life; because nothing in experience was real — this was his thunderous conviction — until it was wedded to the word. That was the marriage over which Muni, with Jenny’s blessing, felt a sudden blind compulsion to preside.
“Don’t go away,” he blurted, leaping clear of the abyss to hit the ground running. “I’ll be right back,” he shouted over his shoulder, though he was already out of earshot.
The grand canal of North Main was lit by lanterns, moths, and toy gondolas with guttering candles for masts, with silk tallises and celluloid shirtfronts for sails. The buildings that bordered the water, despite their hobbled condition, assumed such a look of stability that you’d have thought they’d always been so skewed, and the shops were open for business though there was little left to sell. As a result, commerce was more a performance than an actual exchange of goods and services, the citizens like children who played at being entrepreneurs. Only Pin’s General Merchandise, once the flagship enterprise of North Main Street, stood in darkness; for these days Pinchas Pin remained mostly sunk in despondency at the kitchen table. He roused himself only to inquire of his wife’s health from the visiting doctor or to receive the consolations of Jenny Bashrig, who came and went. But even the gloomy store, an aberration in that glimmering neighborhood, had for Muni an air of deepest mystery.
He foraged among the mildewed shelves, poked with matches into shadowed recesses until he found what he was looking for: a chirographic fountain pen with an automatic inkstand and a quire of white octavo stationery. The pen’s tapered handle was split and the paper moldy, its virgin leaves cockled and water-stained but nonetheless sufficient for his purpose. Muni tiptoed up the stairs past the kitchen in order not to disturb his brooding uncle. He could hear Pinchas lamenting aloud and even caught snatches of his blaming himself for Katie’s ailment, for the barrenness of his marriage. And while his uncle’s plaint made no immediate impression, it nevertheless penetrated Muni’s awareness, lodging in some remote corner of his brain from which it might work its way out like a splinter over time.
Muni took the pen and paper into his matchbox room, its only furniture the folding cot and squat deal dresser upon which stood a porcelain ewer and basin. He peeled off a single page from the stack and shoved the rest beneath the slopjar under his cot. From his uncle’s bookshelf in the hallway he selected a substantial volume, the Yiddish translation of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread as it turned out. He sat on his cot, placed the book on his knees, and spread the paper across its smooth cloth binding. Then with a galloping heart Muni took up the inkpen and prepared to begin: he had some vague idea of making notes for future reference, of quickly acquitting himself of his renegade impulse then hurrying back to Jenny; it was after all with her that the real inspiration resided. But he found himself paralyzed.
He hadn’t actually indited anything to paper since the doggerel verse of his yeshiva days, though lack of practice wasn’t the only reason for his hesitation. For one thing, he couldn’t decide what language to write in: his Hebrew was rusty from disuse and he regarded Yiddish as the holy tongue’s poor relation; nor had he yet taken full possession of his host country’s idiom. But even if he were able to choose a vernacular appropriate to his undertaking, what precisely was his subject? Everything he observed was replete with meaning, and he stood ready to make of himself a kind of conduit: the postapocalyptic Pinch would speak through Muni Pinsker as its primary means of expression. But how does one distill everything into a cogent narrative? His uncle, quoting a favorite Russian author, once told him that all happy families are alike, and there was certainly a democracy of elation among the families of North Main. Some were as possessed as Muni, literally so, claiming that the voices of dead folk lately spoke to and through them. But those voices were not wanting for interpreters.
There was also the matter of the time that composition demanded, time that could be better spent in the company of your beloved. But wasn’t there, given its apparent immutability, plenty of time to go around? Still Muni felt that what he contemplated amounted to a betrayal. What had come over him that he’d left his girl dangling alone among that mare’s nest of undulating roots? He should hasten back to her at once and offer his most fervent apologies. “Jenny, sweet kichel, forgive me! Be my bride!” Conjugal fever was anyway in the air, several couples having already succumbed to matrimony since the flood. Hadn’t the hidebound Rabbi Lapidus from the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue just been enlisted to perform a triple wedding? A barge had been outfitted with singing oarsmen and a pavilion-sized canopy for the ceremony. Muni decided on the spot that he and Jenny should be a part of the ongoing celebrations, which looked as if they might never end. A scribe! What had he been thinking?
He was at the point of running back to the girl when he heard his uncle’s groan from the kitchen. It was a full-throated animal groan that was answered by the corrosive strains of the fiddle from somewhere outside. Since the quake and the numinous period that followed, Asbestos’s playing had evoked more than ever a pathos at odds with the general gaiety. To be sure, other sour notes had been struck in the Pinch, other characters out of step with the prevailing high spirits. The blacksmith, for instance, still sat dejected with his bamboo rod on the bank of the bayou, which the dike had restored again to a shallow cove. And Mr and Mrs Padauer remained deeply unsettled by the resemblance of their child to the host of fey creatures that flitted in the margins of everyone’s vision. Muni’s uncle sat slumped in the kitchen like a husband banished from a room where a wife is giving birth; only, Pinchas understood it wasn’t shtik naches, it wasn’t a new life that Katie was being delivered of. Then there were the memories that persisted in bubbling up from Muni’s own sorrow-laden past. Such contrary elements stood out like loose threads that wanted weaving back into the otherwise harmonious tapestry of the street; they called attention to themselves, in fact, with a needling insistence that superseded every other affection on earth.
7 Flashbacks
The next time I saw Rachel was at a concert at the Overton Park Shell. The Shell was an outdoor amphitheater located in the forested midtown park that also contained the city’s zoo, and between sets you could hear the yowls and screeches of beasts and rare birds. It was really a summer venue, the Shell, with its broad stage arched over by a concrete crescent like the mouth of a horn of plenty, but despite the nippy March evening the concert had drawn a large crowd. Velveeta and the Psychopimps, at Elder Lincoln’s urging, had organized a roster of regional musicians, including old blues originals like Bukka White, Furry Lewis, and Sleepy John; they’d engaged other popular local rock bands such as the transgressive Mud Boy and the Neutrons, and guaranteed that the event’s proceeds would go toward funding the sanitation workers’ strike.