He was awakened by the naked Ogli leaning over him, chanting a string of gibberish. Having unbuttoned Muni’s coat and shoved his sweater and singlet to his chest, the old man seemed to be performing some kind of surgery: he was digging with crooked fingers in the pit of Muni’s stomach, tickling him as he scooped out what were either intestines or sausage links slathered in sauce. In a tortured pantomime, his loose flesh and genitals flapping, Ogli wrestled with the slimy mess as with a serpent. Assuming he must be dreaming, Muni wanted with all his heart to wake up to some life he could call his own. It was a desire that would not survive the rest of the journey to his destination, where it would take a cataclysm to rouse it again. It would already have ebbed, that deep yearning, by the time he’d scrambled out of the yurt and stumbled into the sandy cove below the forested cliffs above the lake; it would be further dissipated as he gathered the whortleberries and goose eggs he wolfed down in deserted povarnias. What little remained of his fervid desire would dissolve in the churning waters of the Angara, where he boarded the ferry that took him upstream to Irkutsk. Once arrived, Muni would make for the maidan, the thieves’ quarter, to purchase a forged identity card on the black market. The card would cost him more than the phony passport he’d also have to secure. He would get himself shaved and reappareled, his appearance having earned him stares more agitated than those he bestowed in return, so staggering was the experience of being back in the precincts of men. When he rode the train over the Urals, the very concept of desire would become as alien to Muni as Siberia itself, and he would wonder why he persevered: why not make Moscow his terminus and pick up where he’d left off? Even the kulaks were openly advocating rebellion these days. But by then it would be too late to do anything other than continue traveling, paying bribes and crossing borders, booking passage in the steerage section of the SS Saxonia at Bremen, which set sail for the port of New York. There he would pass as if blinkered through its confusion of tongues, then board another train that would carry him across yet another continent, or at least a sizable slice of it, to Memphis, Tennessee.
But at the moment when he bolted from the yurt, the desire was strong in him to put land and sea between himself and the crazy fisherman. Slipping on the damp ice, he blundered away from Ogli, who was in the process of pulling on his parka over his hoary head. When Muni had emerged from the lifting fog, he turned to see his guide dragging his sledge back into obscurity, trailed by cracks in the ice that was beginning to break up around him. Then the fugitive stepped in the nick of time onto the far shore of Lake Baikal, where it was already spring.
I was reading to Rachel when I noticed that her eyes were getting heavy, so I flipped ahead in the book until I found the passage. “‘Later on in a bookstore on Main Street,’” I read, “‘a scrawny, hook-nosed lad’”—lad was my own edit as the text said, unflatteringly, nebbish—“‘a lad named Lenny Sklarew chanced to open a fat volume called The Pinch …’”
Her eyelids fluttered open and she sat up abruptly, unheeding the sheet that had fallen from her breasts (their nipples like tiny berets). “Give me that,” she said, snatching the book away from me to peruse the page. She returned it in a moment with a harrumph. “Lenny, you’re such a card,” she assured me, having apparently seen no reference to her bedfellow in the text.
“Yeah,” I replied, recalling a caustic rejoinder from some old noir film, “the Ace of Spades.” Then I quickly checked the book again to make sure that I was still there.
ca.1912–1921?
In Memphis Muni worked for his uncle Pinchas in his general merchandise and did odd jobs in and around North Main Street. Across the way, at the new Idle Hour Theater, a Keystone Cops two-reeler called Cohen Collects a Debt premiered, and blind Helen Keller spoke on behalf of the Wobblies at the Lyceum off Court Square. A famous evangelist challenged the devil to a wrestling match at a tabernacle erected in Riverside Park, and a black boy, accused of raping a white woman in a Gayoso Avenue brothel, was lynched and dismembered. Muni Pinsker fell in love with the wirewalker Jenny Bashrig, and against every law of decency on or off the books, got her with child. Then he abandoned her to chronicle the history of the Pinch. The history included incidents that took place after the timeless time that was brought about by local fanatics through a regimen of spiritual exercises and prayers. It also included events that preceded and followed that great enchantment, including the fate of the book after Muni had stopped writing it. He wrote with his brain ablaze, as if fueled by the mephitic tea he’d sipped long ago on a frozen lake; wrote in the hope that, in the writing, the task would ultimately reveal to him his reason for pursuing it.
He described an incident involving the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol and his prodigal son Hershel, who was swallowed by a fish. This happened a few years after the father and son had come to the Pinch via the port of New Orleans. They’d come to Memphis because Oyzer had heard it said that the city still maintained a large number of livery stables full of draft horses. These were the horses that pulled the fleets of municipal ice and refuse wagons, and they would require an endless supply of iron shoes. But by the time father and son arrived on North Main Street, they discovered that much of the transport labor had already been mechanized. Moreover, the bulk of the metal work that had been Oyzer’s mainstay in the Old Country was now performed by machinists in factory shops. It was a situation that further aggravated the blacksmith’s already virulent temper.
His temper had not always been so foul. Back in the village of Hrubeshoyb on the River Wieprz, where his family had dwelled for generations, Oyzer had been a principled householder and good provider; he was a gentle if strict father to his son and daughter and an attentive husband to his wife, the baker Pesha Sarah. But late one afternoon in the month of Nissan, as he and his son returned from a fishing expedition (little Hershel trailing behind him toting a string of spiny-finned perch), Oyzer heard shouting and saw smoke. From below the brow of the hill above the river he could spy the street of the Jews with its shake roofs burning. He watched a gang of peasants overseen by uniformed Cossacks looting shops and torching houses, including his own. He saw them beating his neighbors and worse, and lest his son see it all as well, held the boy down and covered his eyes with a hand. But Hershel did see — through the visor of his father’s thick fingers — what the hoodlums had done to the women (among whom were his mother and sister) who had been dragged into the street. He also observed his father’s terrible fixed expression as they lay on their bellies in the eel grass, and when the cries of the martyrs became unbearable, the blacksmith turned his heavy head toward Hershel and saw that he saw. Afterward he could not forgive his son for being a witness to his cowardice.
In America, to which they fled after the pogrom, the blacksmith cursed his son along with his failing livelihood. He cursed his neighbors even as they tried to ease his destitution by bringing him small jobs. “Tinker’s tasks!” he groused, when they asked him to repair a damaged sausage stuffer or lard press. In fact, he might have made a tidy living had not his self-defeating temper driven potential clients away.