Princess of Passyunk (32 page)

“Well,
that's
something.”

“Mr. Joe thought it was a sign. He thought God was telling him he should spend the money to get the lettering changed. It still said ‘ Gusthof and Sons' when I broke it.”

“Yeah? Well, that's Joe for you—such a
karger
. Tighter than one of his damn sausage casings, you should pardon my language. This is all his fault, you know. This thing with Svetlana. If he'd had an ounce of sense in that thick head of his... Ah, but that's water over the bridge. You want to find the girl.”

“I do.”

She settled on him another narrow, intent gaze, puffing away on her cigarette. Just for a moment her eyes, veiled by the curls of blue smoke, reminded him of Baba Irina's. A chill pranced down his spine.

Finally, she spoke to him again, taking the cigarette from her lips as if to underline the import of her words. “Okay, kid. This is what you do. At midnight on the Christian Sabbath—that's 12 AM Monday morning—you go to the butcher shop on Sigel Street between Seventh and Eighth. You got that?”

“Sigel between Seventh and Eighth,” Ganny repeated.

“You can only get into the shop through the window over the sink—it looks out onto the alley, like that one.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the window over her own sink. “You got that?”

Ganny nodded. “I don't have to break it, do I?”

“It'll be open. But if it's not, don't give up. This is about Svetlana, remember.”

How could he forget?

“Inside you're gonna find a setup like this one, but bigger and cleaner. Much nicer, with newer equipment. There'll be sausages hanging in the smoke room. Lots and lots of sausages. Svetlana the Mule-headed is in one of the sausage casings. You open ‘em up, you'll find her.”

“She's in a sausage casing?”

The old woman's eyes grew so wide, Ganady could almost see the whites of them all the way around. “You come traipsing in here following a magic baseball and then have the
chutzpah
to doubt me?”

Ganady felt panic well up from the soles of his shoes. “No! Gosh, no! Of course I don't doubt you.” And he didn't, which surprised him less than he cared to admit. “Which casing is she in?”

“I don't know which one. How should I know which one? She's in one of them—you just keep opening them up until you find her. That's pretty simple, right? You can do that, right?”

Ganny could only nod. “Um...when I find her, will she be
her
or will she be...you know. A—a Cockroach.”

“You find her, kid, and she'll be whatever you want her to be.”

“The curse is done? It's over?”

“The curse is done. Over. Cross my heart.” She did cross her heart, then tossed her cigarette into the sink, where it landed with a soggy hiss.

Ganady thanked her very kindly and turned to go. On his way out the door, he had a thought. “About your screen door. I didn't tear that just now, did I? With The Baseball?”

She regarded him steadily for a moment, then shook her head. “Naw. You didn't do that, you poor
shlub
. Now get out of here. Go sober up.”

“I am sober,” Ganny protested wanly, but went away as ordered, and dragged himself the many blocks home, where he fell into bed and did not dream at all.

oOo

By Sabbath dinner, Ganady wore the abstracted air of a contemplative monk. In his mind, he rehearsed the path to Sigel Street. Rehearsed it so well that he barely noticed the sudden stillness at the table.

But he did notice it, at last—a complete cessation of conversation and movement. He glanced up from his soup, certain that all eyes would be on him, as it seemed they usually were under these circumstances.

But they were not on him. They were on Marija, and then Da said, “What did you say?”

Marija, who Ganady suddenly realized had grown into a most self-possessed fourteen-year-old, drew herself upright in her chair and repeated (apparently) what she had said a moment before: “I wish to become a member of Megidey Tihilim.”

“Marija,” said Da very quietly, “you cannot simply become a member of Megidey Tihilim. It is not like...simply joining another church.”

“I know, Da. I wish to be Jewish.”

Ganny lost track of the words that were said after that. There was shouting and crying and debating and accusation, but the words themselves were lost.

Two things penetrated Ganady's consciousness. One was how calm and firm Marija remained in her quiet assertion that she wished to be Jewish—to take up again the Faith of her forebears. The other was that Baba seemed neither smug nor celebratory, but rather a little sad.

oOo

At precisely midnight on the Sabbath, Ganady stood in the alley behind a building on Sigel Street, many blocks south of the candlelit cathedral in which he'd been at prayer forty-five minutes earlier—hedging his bets, Nick would call it. He had brought along his old Space Cadet flashlight, and used it now to find the window the crone had mentioned.

He found the window easily enough, but it was set high off the ground—the ledge roughly level with his chin. The window itself was open, but the screen was closed.

After several minutes of trying to pry the screen frame up, first with his flashlight, then with his pocket knife, he gave up in consternation. Was this a sign that he should stop before he did something truly mad? Was it really possible that Svetlana Gusalev could be hidden in a sausage casing?

No more or less possible, he supposed, than that she had been hidden in a Cockroach carapace.

He used his pocket knife to slit the screen. It was easy after that to reach inside and flip the latch, to move a crate so that he could hoist himself up and slide his lanky frame into the darkened building.

He found himself squatting in a large sink. Fortune was with him; it was dry and empty. He clambered down, turned his flashlight back on, and went in search of the smoke room. He found it behind the third door he opened, which he considered a good omen...until he flipped on the light, at which point he decided that good omens were overrated.

He stood in the doorway, mute and numb, as the smoke escaped past him like the ghosts of errant cats. He had expected hundreds of sausages; the little room seemed to contain thousands, hanging in perfect loops from the ceiling. The sight of them assailed his senses no less than did their perfume. His mind became lost in the whorls of fragrant smoke.

Where to start? The sausages were of all sizes, and while it seemed logical to suppose that a life-sized girl should require a larger sausage in which to hide, Ganady feared that might be the trick, and that she was hidden within the tiniest sausage of all. Still, he reasoned, she had been a rather large Cockroach, so he would start with the larger sausages.

But should he start with the sausages nearest the door and work his way back, or should he assume that she would be hidden farther from the entry? Who would hide something nearly in plain sight?

Who had hidden Svetlana? The author of the curse? Her father? Had she hidden herself? Was God party to the curse, testing him because of his lack of patience and his neglect of Svetlana's express wishes?

Ganady knew the answer to none of those questions, and knew no protocol for the magical (or miraculous) hiding of things, and so he decided to start with the sausages nearest the door. He took a deep breath of the seasoned air and pocketed his flashlight, praying that he would find Svetlana soon.

oOo

Dawn came, invading the narrow alley behind the butcher shop on Sigel Street, pouring over the kitchen windowsill and into the sink, then spilling out again to run across the floor, where it eddied just inside the door of the smoke room.

If dawn had possessed the power of speech, it would have admitted that it had never beheld such a sight as met it that morning in the smoke room. In fact, it rarely got into the smoke room this early, for the door was usually shut tight.

The inner door of the kitchen swung open, but the dawn neither flinched nor withdrew, staying on as if curiosity demanded it.

“
Ai
! What's this? What's this?” A woman's voice cut through the cold dregs of smoke that lay near the floor and huddled in the corners. “That idiot boy left the smoke room door open!” Her steps stirred the smoke and sent it scurrying.

“Did you hear me, Joseph Gusalev? That
dumkop
Mikhail left the smoke room door o-
Oh
!” The sentence ended in a shriek that should have sent both the smoke and the dawn scuttling for cover.

It seemed to have very little effect on either, and even less on the strange young man who sat in the far corner of the smoke room amid mounds of finely ground meat. Sausage casings hung from his jacket, clung to his hair, and lay limply across his lap. He blinked up at Stella Gusalev without even a hint of fear or contrition or intelligence.

Only when her husband Joe joined her in the doorway to his smoke room, did the strange young man show any emotion.

He laughed.

oOo

“I don't smell alcohol on him,” said the police sergeant, sniffing suspiciously in Ganady's general direction. “I smell sausages. He's making me hungry.”

“You're always hungry, sausage smell or no,” his lieutenant replied, and nodded toward the cell block. “Lock him up.”

Ganady was ushered into a small cell in the back of the precinct house at 100 South Broad Street. It was furnished with a blanket-covered cot, which filled Ganady's sight to the exclusion of all else. He could almost feel the cozy warmth of the woolen blanket, and the thought of being horizontal almost made him weep. He faced the hungry sergeant, hoping the man would grant him leave to lie down.

Instead he said, “Mr. Gusalev says your name is Ganady—is that right, son?” He seemed kindly enough, though he kept licking his lips and eyeing Ganady as if he hoped he might reach into his pocket and produce a kielbasa.

“Yes, sir. Ganady Puzdrovsky.”

“And you live around here, do you?”

“Yes, sir. On the
zibete
—I mean, Seventh Street. Between Wilder and Dickinson.”

“He seems polite enough,” the sergeant said to the lieutenant, who had followed them as far as the hallway outside the cell.

“Hmp,” the lieutenant replied, and asked Ganady if he knew his address and phone number and if there was someone at home that might be responsible for him.

He recited his particulars to the police, wondering why they should think he did not know them. He told them his parents and grandmother would be at home, though his Da might have already gone to work.

The policemen left him, shaking their heads and murmuring between themselves.

Ganady lowered himself to the cot, which squealed in response, its aging grid of metal straps sagging. In the silence that followed, he heard the dripping of water somewhere above, and what sounded like the whispering of mice in the walls. He smiled a little at that, for he recalled any number of fairytales his Baba had told him in which the hero lay languishing in prison only to find that he had allies among the small vermin that lived in the straw. Of course the jail cell had no straw, but Ganady enjoyed the thought that there were little hidden creatures whispering plots to help him. There was certainly little else to enjoy in the situation.

He sighed, feeling the weariness he had tried to keep in his head spread languorously to all his limbs and members. “I don't suppose you little guys could break me out, huh?” he asked any mice who might be listening.

In his imagination, the whispering grew in volume, as the mice and rats consulted about his escape.

Half-dozing, Ganny tried to sort through the things that had befallen him since he walked into The Tavern on Saturday night. His already peculiar life seemed to have taken a turn for the criminal. Had he really broken into a butcher shop—Joe Gusalev's
original
butcher shop, as it happened—and cut open every sausage in the smoke room expecting that his beloved would pop out and fly into his arms? What had possessed him to do such a thing? And why had the Titan Street Crone sent him to do it?

The whispering distracted him from his thoughts, and he sat up, glancing about the cell, almost expecting to see a delegation of mice advancing to welcome him. In the fairytales, they always wore little velvet weskits and sometimes shoes with tiny buckles. But there were no mice, not even naked, furry ones.

Ganady heard the outer door open and close, and the sound of footsteps in the corridor. A moment later, the sergeant appeared at the door of his cell. Mr. Joe was with him.

“Well, Mr. Puzdrovsky, Mr. Gusalev here would like to speak to you. Why, I'm not sure. Joe?”

The sergeant stepped back and allowed Mr. Joe to come to the bars, from which he stared at Ganady as though he had no idea what to say to him.

There was only one thing Ganady could say. “I'm sorry, Mr. Joe. I really am. I'd be happy to pay for the sausages.”

“You bet you'll pay for the sausages,” the butcher told him. “But what I really want is to know why. Why you gotta go and spoil all those beautiful sausages? I didn't pay you enough to wash my windows? Okay, I admit, I took advantage of that whole broken window thing.”

“Oh, no! It was because of the Crone on Titan Street. She said that's where Svetlana was.”

“In my butcher shop?”

“In the sausages. She didn't tell me it was your butcher shop. She just told me Lana was there...in a sausage casing.”

Mr. Joe's brows gathered above his nose like furry little thunder clouds. In the moment of speechlessness, the sergeant leaned toward the butcher and stage-whispered, “You gonna press charges against this kid, Joe? The poor boy is
meshuggeh
.”

Mr. Joe turned his gaze to the sergeant, who reacted as if an invisible bolt of lightning had shot from beneath those thunderous brows and struck him where he stood.

“I'd like a private word with Mr. Puzdrovsky,
if
you don't mind.”