The Book of Intimate Grammar (18 page)

BOOK: The Book of Intimate Grammar

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When will it end?
He was utterly exhausted from the squirming and the phony smiles and the whispering onion; and also from this new effort he had to make, because for the first time he understood with his brain how intricately conversations are woven and how many invisible threads there are in the corners of a smile.
Yochi came in from the kitchen with another tray of chicken, how many poor hens had given their lives for his bar mitzvah, and Mama tried to grab it from her, but Yochi held fast, and the two of them took a few steps that way, with the tray held high in the air, smiling at the guests, and because they couldn’t quite decide which way to turn, they headed straight to him, the bar mitzvah groom.
Have some pupiklach, said Mama, they’re simply delicious.
No no, said Yochi sweetly, have a wing.
But my gizzards came out like butter today, Mama cajoled him with a cheery face.
Hmm, but the wings are really yummy too.
Yochi curtsied to him, almost shoving the chicken into his mouth, till he pulled away in alarm.
The pupiklach melt in your mouth, urged Mama, fending Yochi off with her shoulder.
Try the wings, whispered Yochi conspiratorially, and the aromas swirled around like fog, condensing into heavy drops of gravy.
I’ve had enough, I don’t want any more!
he protested, why were they jumping on him like that, in front of everyone.
With his back to the wall, confused and flushed, he forced himself into his thoughts again: It’s fun to think, it’s relaxing, it fills you with love, where were we, ah yes, he’d always thought it was a family sham, but today a thin membrane
seemed to peel from his eyes and he could see something new here, a delicate beauty, even compassion, because everyone knew everyone else’s secrets, everyone was a hostage in someone else’s hands, at their mercy or their cruelty.
Why are you thinking these thoughts?
Think like a boy your age.
It all goes back to your problem.
This is just another symptom.
You think you’re winning, but you keep losing.
And you have to be so careful and conscientious in order to make a single statement without hurting or shaming someone: for instance, Mama was just telling the women they were lucky to have daughters, but she only said it when Rivche, poor Lealeh’s mother, went out to the kitchen.
That was a minor mercy, but the air was full of tiny darts, phrases waiting to burst with poison, compliments with false bottoms, the caress of secrets shared, and carefully circumvented topics.
These he discerned, as he opened his eyes to them in benevolent wonder.
And he too, it seemed, would be spared today.

Three of his cousins came in from the balcony, glanced at him, and stopped their conversation.
Go on, join them; no, they’re too young, they don’t know the rules yet the way he does.
Go ahead, join the conversation, or was it an argument: which is better, hand brakes or pedal brakes, and how far can a tutu ball fly?
But Shimmik wants to take his picture with them, to immortalize them standing together.
He turned to the window, pretending to be engrossed in the view.
Straighten your shoulders.
Try to have a good time.
Always be watchful, always be cunning, with grownups, with children, with grownups and children together, like all he needed now was for one of the boys to hear him talking to a grownup, he knew exactly how he sounded.
On the other hand, when he was obliged to talk to one of them, to one of the guys, he was careful to use the old language, though it made him feel phony, like a tourist trying to be friendly with the natives, or like a spy in enemy territory, fighting for his life.
He smiled a crooked smile as he stood by the window.
Who knows, said his smile, what sort of life you’ll have.
And he turned away, nervously touching his chest, his waist.
Who could say how much life there was in a body like this.

Little Uncle Loniu, Ruja’s husband, found one of Leo Pold’s recordings on top of the phonograph and put it on, balancing a full bottle of wine on his forehead as he danced to the rhythm.
The women gathered around him and clapped their hands.
Rivche’s Dov stood at the center of the men’s group waving a fat drumstick and telling dirty jokes.
Rivche
warned him to lower his voice, little pitchers have big ears, and she glanced at Aron with embarrassment.
Aron watched the men out of the corner of his eye.
They were heavy, tired-looking, all of them, like patient beasts of burden.
Their features seemed to have been engraved as monuments to grief, yet they exuded a lukewarm air of failure and monotony.
And once they had been his age.
Perhaps they even looked like him.
He would never look like them, though.
Mama called Papa with her pinchy smile to help her put Mamchu on Yochi’s bed and cover her with the Scottish plaid—She’s so tired, she doesn’t realize how tired she is—but Papa was raptly listening to Dov’s joke about the rabbit who came back to the jungle and told the other animals that he’d shown the lion how to do it right.
A smile of lewd anticipation spread over Papa’s face.
His lower lip, cracked in the middle, moved in unison with Dov’s.
Aron put down the glass of juice he had been holding since the beginning of the party and went to help Mama drag Grandma to his and Yochi’s room.
When the door closed behind them and they had tucked in the blanket, Mama said tomorrow, so help her, she was going to throw Grandma out of the house, like a curse she needed her here, he should see what she just did in the bathroom, she ruined everything.

Aron stayed in the room a little longer to look at Grandma.
Compassionately he stroked her porcelain face, which was hardly wrinkled because fools never grow old, and for a moment she opened her foggy eyes, trying to recognize him or tell him something, maybe she didn’t remember where words came from anymore.
Maybe she was scurrying around inside, crying and searching for the way out.
That was exactly how she looked when she came to give him that heirloom.
The golden thread.
Too bad he hadn’t kept it.
He could have shown it to her now and brought her a little happiness.
On a sudden impulse, stupidly, he touched her mouth, offering a hint that this was where words come out, and her soft, surprisingly supple lips wound around his finger.
For a moment she sucked with the fierceness of a baby, and he drew his hand back in alarm.

Her lips groped blindly for his finger, which was wet with the embarrassing moisture of life, but he managed to hide it just in time.
In walked Mama and stood by the door, sensing something, not comprehending.
“You leave Grandma alone, you hear?
You hear?”
she whispered
furiously.
“You let us take care of her.
Go do what a kid your age should do, you hear?!”
Again he was dispatched to the salon, where he stood alone, confused and agitated.
Someone tapped him roughly on the shoulder, frightening him before he had a chance to tense the muscle and disguise his scrawniness.
“What’s with you, nebbich?”
called Uncle Loniu, who was small and round as a button.
“What’s with him, Hindaleh,” he cackled, and everyone heard.
“Don’t you feed your bar mitzvah boy?”
And a few months later, these words of Uncle Loniu’s spelled the beginning of the end of Aron’s leaps on the rock, as rough-hewn sobs erupted from deep inside, more like the crude ore of the soul than an outburst of tears.
He leaped and fell, lacerated by the thorn-bushes and bruised by the stones, his eyes clogged with tears, but he couldn’t do it, so he tried to envision everything that had happened to him over the past two years, all the facets and figments of his problem, and still he crooked his arm at the last moment, till finally, when his strength failed, and all he remembered was that he had to get up and fall, get up and fall on his arm, though sometimes he only imagined he was up, then he suddenly remembered the time at his bar mitzvah when smart little Aunt Rivche caught Loniu by the arm and whispered, What do you want from the boy, give him a rest today, and Loniu shook off her hand and said, “Is this why we came to Israel with the sun and the vitamins and the oranges?”
And Rivche caught his arm again and said quietly, tensely, Leave him alone, Loniu.
Luz im nuch, what do you think, somebody’s doing something on purpose here?
And Loniu crooked his arm and said, “At his age he should be starting to packa packa!”
And he looked around, with a grin, and Rivche pressed her face up close and crackled as only the women in the family could: People in glass houses, Loniu.
It seems to me the coat rack at our house hangs pretty low too, but again he evaded her and came back to Aron, who was by now completely paralyzed, living, say, in New York, where he read about this sad case in
Woman’s
magazine; Aron, who survived a night among the corpses in the cellar at Komi by remembering his magnificent bar mitzvah.
And Loniu stood screaming at the top of his lungs, “Take a tip from Omri!
Look at him!
Body-building!
Body-building!”
And poor tormented Aron peered into his eyes and beheld the vengeance his butterball uncle had wreaked upon nature by means of his son, and for a moment he almost felt compassion for the stupid
man, who had burst the bounds of family etiquette and screamed through the lump of anguish that was stuck in everyone’s throat, and then came the blessed moment, two months later, when grief and loneliness overwhelmed his ofzeluchi brain and Aron leaped up and plummeted from the rock and heard, with a mixture of shock and relief, the bone in his arm go crack.

Another year went by.
And nothing.
Like egg white folded evenly into batter, so his days were stirred into time.
It was a weird winter: icy cold, with storms and piercing winds, but not a drop of rain.
They were already talking about a drought.
An arctic winter, they said on the radio, and Aron shivered.

One evening he’s sitting on Farouk in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for the Sabbath cholent.
The balcony window keeps banging in the wind.
It gets dark by five these days, and people stay indoors.
The cozy smell of kerosene pervades the house, and if you keep perfectly still you hear the old Friedman heater breathing.
Mainly, though, you hear Papa moaning on the sofa.
Mama and Yochi are busy on his back, Mama working her way up and Yochi working her way down, so they’ll meet in the middle.
It goes faster without Grandma.
She always insisted on helping, poking everywhere, giggling like a girl, tickling poor Papa under the arm, and sometimes, recalls Aron, peeling faster, concentrating with all his might because of the chirring sound he’d started hearing lately, and when Grandma was in an especially good mood, she would squeeze in between Mama and Yochi and throw herself on Papa with her cheek to his back, singing a Polish song into his rib cage with a sly peek at Mama, and Papa would start writhing with ticklishness or stifled laughter, maybe it was one of those songs Mama forbade him to sing, from Grandma Lilly’s nightclub days; the chirring sound is shrill and it’s a signal, he knows, he figured out when he gets it, for instance—when
he’s using a kitchen utensil, holding something in his hands, touching a tool or some other object, even a person, right away he hears the tsss tsss tsss, like an electric discharge, like a warning or a hiss of mockery, and then his fingers slowly open, and go numb, that’s how he broke the glass at supper yesterday, it fell out of his hand; he heard the chirring and gripped the glass, but the sound continued, and his fingers started trembling, getting weaker and weaker, and Mama saw it happening, she stood there, watching his trembling fingers slowly unclench, who knows, maybe she heard it too, and now, with the knife and Papa’s groans, Meirky Blutreich has it under his arm, today Aron saw the third proof in broad daylight, during gym class, and the third proof is final; the chirring is persistent, like a fluttering outside his ear on the left, and inside it, and Hanan Schweiky is clearly entitled to a gergeleh, it’s amazing how fast he developed it, only yesterday Aron noticed it for the first time, and already it’s official, it just hatched overnight, but still, for the sake of protocol, as they say, he would only confirm it after two more sightings, a day apart.
Enough already!
He lets the peeling knife drop.
Thank God.
A little quiet.
It’s cold in the kitchen.
What is this, we have central heating and a radiator in every room, but all the neighbors have been using their kerosene heaters for the past three years to get even with Mrs.
Pinkus, the divorcee who lives over the Boteneros and refuses to pay her dues to the Residents Association.
Where were we?
He quickly counts on his fingers.
Seventeen boys in his class have at least one item.
The armpit list’s the longest.
Though interestingly enough, some boys, like Asa Kolodny or Haim Saportas, for instance, have a lot under the arm, practically a forest, but hardly any on their legs, proving that in these matters too a variety of strategies exists, so maybe there’s a certain, well, arbitrariness, and things sometimes get bungled the way they do in bustling offices, like the office of the army reserves.
And think what would happen if someone started tidying up, it would be all over.
Oh sure, sure.
He stops.
Listens.
Nothing.
Good riddance.
Carefully he picks up the red knife, so the knife won’t notice and neither will he.
But no cheating.
There it goes again, the chirring.
There’s no end to the ingenuity of this problem.
Sometimes the sound seems to be addressing him.
It’s hard to understand what it’s saying, though.
Scolding him or threatening.
He glances warily into the salon, where Papa lies writhing in ecstasy under one or another pair of feminine hands, signifying by the tone of his groans that the end is near, here it
comes, hmmmm, Aron hums against the chirring, a special hum he has that’s so shrill, it sets the pipes inside him quivering, and then the chirring goes away.
Hmmm—he hones the hum, feeling his teeth vibrate; hurry, fill the silence, and how furious Mama used to get whenever Papa and Grandma Lilly spoke Polish together, which she didn’t understand; before she married him she made him promise to speak nothing but Hebrew.
But there are some things I can only say in Polish, Papa protested once, during the big fight they had after Yochi’s bat mitzvah.
It’s our language!
But you promised!
She wagged a finger at him, because Grandma sang one of her songs at the bat mitzvah and Papa joined in, and suddenly you could tell they were related, their eyes shone with the same light, and when the song was over they sat in the corner chattering in Polish, loudly interrupting each other as Mama stomped by them at least a hundred times.
Aron had never heard Papa talking like that to Grandma Lilly, or anyone else for that matter, so lively and cheerful, and after the guests left there was a big fight, the walls shook;
ntzz ntzz ntzz,
it hisses like a snake now, and Aron slows down.
He nearly cut his finger.

Just then, when Papa got up off the Bordeaux sofa and heaved a sigh, and put on his shorts and the haimish shirt that was accidentally dyed blue in the wash, there was a knock on the door.
It was such a muffled knock that at first they didn’t realize it was a knock at all, they thought maybe the pantry window was banging again, that maybe Sophie Atias slammed the door the way Sephardim do, but then came another knock, and then a quick loud rap that shuddered at itself, and the whole family ran to the door and who should be standing there but their upstairs neighbor Edna Bloom, huddling in her enormous overcoat, trying to smile with trembling lips.
Aron’s heart froze at the sight of her: Uh-oh, she found out, I left signs, she’s here to tell them.
The potato knife was still in his hand.
Edna Bloom hesitated in the doorway.
Papa, in his spotted haimisheh, stood up straight and suddenly shrank and apologized for the way he looked, and hurried off to change his shirt.
A wrinkle of amazement zigzagged over Mama’s right eye.
Do come in, Miss Bloom, why are you standing in the doorway, such a rare visitor, of course you’re no bother, a cup of coffee?

Edna teetered in, with little bobs and curtsies at Yochi, at the oval photograph of Mama’s father on the buffet, at the new lamp fixture, at anything and everything in the room.
Aron walked behind her.
How
would he explain.
Where would he begin.
Maybe he should run away before they were ready.
Maybe he should faint.
What could they do to him if he fainted.
Maybe he would stab her with the knife and then kill himself, but just then the chirring started, mocking him, Aron who didn’t even know which way you screw in a screw, let alone how to hold a glass, if he tried to switch off his body, he’d only wind up with another silly defect.
Edna cast a wonder-filled glance around the salon, with the reupholstered Methuselah and the Pouritz, and the big new lampshade; they redecorated after Grandma, and she’d never seen their apartment inside, because she didn’t attend the Residents Association meetings, and Mama noticed and showed her the salon with a sweeping gesture, more sweeping than necessary, and apologized for the mess, though everything was shiny clean as usual, it was Thursday night, you could eat off her floor, and she prided herself on the fresh paint job and the new buffet, it had a modern bar, and a light went on behind a red plush curtain whenever you opened the door, the bottles were reflected in the mirrors.
Why don’t you take off your coat, Miss Bloom.
No no.
Edna Bloom shivered, diving deeper into her overcoat and glancing wide-eyed at the modern bar, though maybe she was surprised to see such a grand buffet but no books anywhere.

Papa returned in his checkered blue-and-white, his hair slicked down with water.
Mama’s face was unchanged; Edna Bloom seated herself daintily on the edge of the Bordeaux sofa, clasping her rosy fingers and shaking her head with giggly coruscations as though in the midst of some deeply discomfiting inner dialogue, which only her blushing cheeks evinced.
Papa sat down facing her on Methuselah, clenching the armrests with his powerful hands.
You see, Miss Bloom, he began ineptly, trying in vain to hide his bulky legs, even in winter I wear shorts around the house; and he smiled at her foolishly.
I get hot from inside, I’m like an oven, summer and winter both.
Edna gazed up in bewildered silence.
Mama cleared her throat and waited.
Again the silence enveloped them.
Aron coughed.
Such a cough he’s developed, Mama threw him an angry glance, everything has to be a chendelach with that boy, but he did have to cough, really, he coughed with all his heart, maybe he was ill.
Maybe he would die.

Edna Bloom leaned over, accidentally touching the lemon in the bowl on the coffee table, and then sharply withdrew her hand as though guilty of unspeakable rudeness.
The family wriggled in their seats; Aron
gave another nervous cough, the prelude to an imminent storm; who knows, with a little effort he might even spit blood, and you can’t argue with blood.
But he knew it was hopeless.
These were his last moments among them.
No explanation would convince them of what he was doing at her house, and anyway, they’d probably been preparing themselves for someone to come in and break the terrible news about him.
Suddenly the words burst out of her in a high, strained voice, and she recoiled into herself with a shudder.
Aron stopped coughing and gaped at her.

“But I don’t … I’m not a workman that knows how to … no …” Papa laughed in surprise.
“What you need is a real professional.
Me, I’m just a handyman.”
He was embarrassed and fell silent.
“I really believe, Mr.
Kleinfeld, in fact I’m almost certain, that you would do it as it should be done.”
She blinked and giggled and craned her neck like a bird shaking off a drop of water.
“I heard how you fixed the electricity at the Atiases’ and the kitchen pipes at Mrs.
Botenero’s.
I’m sure you will succeed, Mr.
Kleinfeld.”
“But those were small jobs,” murmured Papa, carefully gauging Mama out of the corner of his eye, did she see how hard he was trying to refuse the offer?
But her face remained impassive; though she wavered, studying the anemic complexion of Edna Bloom, her swollen red eyelids and her teeth; forty, she decided, not one day less, with a wasp waist Moshe could easily fit his hands around, and her untried womb and unsuckled breasts … “It’s true, Moshe is a good worker,” she weighed the pros and cons.
“Only he’s not much of an expert in what you want, and he has a little trouble with his back in winter, so I don’t know what to tell you, Miss Bloom, maybe you should look for someone else?
Everyone is replaceable, no?”

Aron watched Edna’s eyes grow wide.
“Not exactly, Mrs.
Kleinfeld.”
She shook her head.
“I wonder if anyone is truly replaceable.”
His heart went out to her for speaking so well, even though the conversation was about something ordinary and boring.
But Mama too was alert to the strange scintillation in Edna Bloom’s voice: she shook her head and no longer smiled.

“I will pay generously,” said the visitor.

“We’re not talking about money yet,” muttered Papa.

BOOK: The Book of Intimate Grammar

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