Muni knew the legend of the breaking of the vessels from his yeshiva days, but it hurt his brain to remember. It was a feeling like when he swallowed too fast the crushed ice in a cherry dope.
Sometimes in the evenings Jenny Bashrig would entertain the street with her wirewalking. Wearing a nainsook nightgown over drawstring pantaloons, her bare toes gripping the cable as the wisps of her midnight hair came undone, she gamboled above the alley between Rosen’s Delicatessen and Pin’s Merchandise. “La Funambula,” she called herself, as she bounced on the braided cord suspended from twin pulleys; she jumped rope and juggled lit candles with fingers that often seemed, at sea level, as if slathered in butter. In the past she’d performed to the Widow’s gramophone standards, but lately she was accompanied by the eldritch music of the Negro Asbestos standing in the alley beneath her. Muni had observed the girl bringing stuffed turkey necks and bowls of bay-leaf stew to the blind fiddler on his corner. From time to time his instrument was heard to echo the notes of the shofar from the nearby Market Square shul. He had even played teasing descants on the solemn “Kol Nidrei” as sung by Cantor Bielski, whose clarion voice rang the synagogue rafters. Some thought it blasphemous that the panhandling black man should ape the sacred music, but none seemed able to stop listening; nobody, with the exception of Pinchas Pin, held his ears.
Having situated his chair alongside the others in the street where the cobbles showed through the worn asphalt, Muni watched Jenny’s feats of equilibrium. In his gut he experienced a queasy sensation whose source he could not at first identify. Was he afraid she might fall? Then it came to him that he was jealous, not wishing to share a performance that should have been reserved exclusively for him.
Then it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the businesses along North Main Street were closed until sunset. Muni, having done penance enough in his day, was feeling unquiet, so he wandered south across Poplar Avenue to Nutty Iskowitz’s Green Owl Café. But even Nutty’s louche establishment, its interior papered with posters of main events at the Phoenix Boxing Arena, was emptied of its regular clientele. Its horse-faced proprietor was slumped in a booth, coughing thickly into a handkerchief, while across from him sat a stubble-cheeked gent smugly sipping his beer. Upon Muni’s entrance Nutty launched into a complaint in Yiddish: the goy — he nodded toward the teamster, who emitted a contented belch — claimed it was more than his job was worth to unload the delivery wagon himself. “There’s four bits in it for you,” he offered, “and a plate of trayf on the house.”
Muni was thankful for any respite from his aunt Katie’s cooking.
In the alley behind the café he set to work unloading the beer wagon, whose pair of crow-bait nags stood in their traces nickering and flicking flies with their tails. Alcohol was technically illegal in the city of Memphis, but the dry law was rarely enforced, only when saloonkeepers failed to pay their monthly sops to Mayor Crump’s myrmidons. Muni rolled the heavy wooden barrels backward down a sagging two-by-four ramp from the bed of the wagon, then wrestled them into the hatch of a second incline that sloped into Nutty’s cellar. It was the kind of laborious task to which his body had become habituated during his exile, and while it revived a thousand dormant aches, the work nevertheless soothed his brain. Although it was late September, the summer was making a blistering last stand, and sweating buckets, Muni removed his dank broadcloth shirt. He noted in so doing the similarity of his own to the panpipe ribs of the draft horses — this despite his aunt’s starchy diet — and wondered when he might regain even the meager weight of his student years; though flesh, he reflected, was the least of what he’d lost in his trials. At the bottom of the ramp, Muni rested his hands a moment on his knees. He began slowly to straighten his sore back, when his blood surged from the touch of strange fingers along his spine. Coming sharply to attention, he turned to find himself face-to-face with the fiddler Asbestos.
“Vos machstu! What you doink?”
“Bend over again,” came a husky contralto (though the fiddler’s lips had yet to move) and from behind him stepped the whip-thin Jenny Bashrig. She was wearing one of her formless dun-white smocks, which contrasted rather fetchingly with the shapeliness of her athletic limbs. Gazing at her, however, Muni was still unable to square the ungraceful waitress with the daredevil who danced on a string. “He wants to feel your stripes,” she said.
“Vos ret ir epes?”
“Say it in English,” she urged, as if to encourage his facility with the American tongue — though why should she care?
“What are you talking?”
“He wants to feel the stripes on your back.”
Suddenly Muni was self-conscious, acutely aware of the wounds he’d suffered over the fearful years. The “stripes” she referred to were welts raised by the knout employed arbitrarily by prison guards — the knout being a treated hide thong embedded with metal filings and a hook fastened to its supple end. It inflicted such pain, tearing flesh from bone in strips like peeled bark, that the victim usually lost consciousness by the third stroke. Muni had of course never seen his own wounds, but he imagined them as a sort of topographical map leading back to the torments he’d fled. Sometimes he asked himself if you could judge an escape successful when its itinerary remained etched in your skin.
He continued to look at the girl in utter bewilderment.
“That’s how he makes his music,” she explained, which was no explanation at all.
“Nu?”
Her voice had a hint of the honeyed inflection of a native speaker. “He reads the stripes on the backs of former slaves and makes from them his musical compositions.” She told him he had exhausted his stock of the old freedmen living down around Beale Street and had come to North Main looking for Israelites who still bore the signs of their captivity. “That would be you,” she submitted.
Muni tried to think of an argument against allowing the blind man to fondle his scars. It was some kind of rude violation, wasn’t it? To say nothing of the bizarre proposition that such ugly excrescences could be translated into musical scores. But the girl looked at him so appealingly with her serious, doe-soft eyes that he thought he might be willing to do a thing or two to oblige her. He might do things for her that made no earthly sense. Such as kneeling in the unpaved alley, leaning over the top of a barrel and hugging the plywood staves, as the fiddler’s cool mocha fingers began to describe the marks on his back. The sob that welled up in his chest had nothing to do with physical pain; there was no pain, only a stirring of unwelcome recollections.
“Why is he called Asbestos?” asked Muni, in a bluff effort to suppress the intensity of his feelings.
This time he was answered by the man himself, chuckling breezily as he spoke: “’Cause I playing as best as I can.”
Later that night Muni was slogging across the frozen surface of Catfish Bayou, following tracks left by the blades of dogsleds, leaning into the biting wind. He could no longer feel his feet, and the numbness that crept up his legs would soon engulf the rest of him; it would stall his progress and leave him to become another changeless feature of the frozen landscape. With each faltering tread his boots fractured the jade-green ice, the cracks sending out branches in all directions, the branches sprouting tendrils until the whole bayou was a lacy fretwork of rupture. Then the entire expanse of the pond collapsed beneath him like a breaking mirror. But instead of plunging into the icy depths, Muni hung suspended, held aloft by a pair of strong arms. He opened his eyes to find himself in the firm embrace of La Funambula. The strains of a nearby violin released splinters of sound that shot across the night sky like comets, their peacocks’ tails showering sparks over the couple below. Muni nuzzled Jenny Bashrig’s spice-scented hair, felt her small breasts crushed against his chest, and was proud to be holding her as staunchly as she held him. Then the music became more tempestuous, and Muni was abruptly aware that he’d been sleepwalking. Fully awake now, he was standing with the flesh-and-blood girl on her tightrope above the alley. A dizzy dread overcame him, and, tottering dangerously, he lost his balance, while Jenny, attempting to steady him, held on to Muni as he fell.