The Place Will Comfort You (23 page)

“Oh,” he said, taking another step. “Interesting news. I wonder how you plan to enforce this.”

As usual these days his gaze was shifty but he knew when he was being looked at. He hesitated very briefly before breaking into a rush. Three paces and he was in the kitchen. Garbage bags rustled. Chair legs scraped. Chair legs knocked against the table. The bags rustled some more.

“Fuck it,” he said behind the wall. “Shit-pile blockade.” He emerged chairless, walking with the same haste as before, but towards the bathroom.

“I could use your help,” she said.

He seized the doorknob, by which he heaved the whole door
upward in its frame, this was the method, and then in. He walked inside and closed the door, unnecessarily hard. Eytan returned to the sofa and put the mammoth down. He reached for a scrap of newspaper and wrapped the standing bass player.

“Do double layers on all the porcelain,” she said.

“Them that's like this kind?”

“Yes.”

They heard the toilet being flushed, once incompletely, then success. The medicine cabinet latch released. A bathroom object clacked, tumbling into the sink. The sky thundered again.

“What's the blessing for thunder after lightning?” she said.

“‘Whose power and might,'” Eytan said.

“Very good,” she said. “So let's go.”

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, King of the universe, with whose power and might the universe is full.
He recited the Hebrew fluently.

“Amen,” she said.

The bathroom door opened. Yitz, in just his briefs, strolled out, one hand slowly massaging salve onto his belly, the other gripping an unfamiliar pink tube, any print or logo worn off. He settled on a damask ottoman, legs splayed. Eytan looked up a moment, and turned back to wrapping. He lifted another newspaper strip, but let it drop again, instead selecting a full sheet with which he wrapped a bookend.

They each attended to their task. Between clashes of thunder newspaper crackled, cleanser fizzed, and scar tissue softened with moist, private sounds.

If Yitz insisted on treating them to a freak show this evening, on the other hand spirits were remaining calm now, and he was making no more moves to step outside. She believed he had never meant to, had come in to get out of the storm but sought to import one indoors. The current attempt was as unpalatable, but quiet. To comment on it would only fix the little one's attention on this weird public tenderness and its object. The scar was dark red, raw as a
scrap of organ meat, and self-inflicted. The boy's body would have come out undamaged by combat, had he not burned it by his own hand on sentry duty, with the embers from bowls of hashish.

To explain the practice he would say only that it had helped him focus, all at once on every tree in the surrounding grove of cherries. And in the green sickroom where this practice landed him, could he have been diagnosed as focused? Trapped in the full length of hours throughout which a young man could sob without resting, isolated high upon the terrifying pinnacle of his young experience, the vision of boys just like him exploding all around.

But what right had she to decide that hers, of all the boys of Israel, should be exempted from this vision? No, what right had she twelve years ago, to decide that Yitz would be a boy of Israel. This was what the sacrificial ram was asking now, having jumped out of the fire into her living room, eyelids burnt off, very angry.

Crisped around the glaring ovine eyeballs, very nice, a very pleasant thought. Perhaps Harvey was right and she did like to amplify misery. Yitz had gone nowhere near his eyes with the embers. And he could be meaning nothing by this conduct, now. He could be doing simply what you would do in the army, taking care of your private business in the group's full view.

She set the canister of Pledge down with an inadvertent knock. “Yitz?”

He looked up.

“Yitz,” she said.

“Yeah,” Yitz said. He kept going with the salve. “What?”

Eytan turned around, holding a papered clump, his hands inky.

“We're doing housekeeping in here,” she said.

“Yup,” Yitz agreed. “I can see that.”

“Yitzy.” For once he looked directly at her. “Right now this room is for housekeeping.”

“Do I offend you?”

“Housekeeping,” she said.

“It's not so bad,” he said. “Take a good look. Hey, little bro, want to look?”

“You take your personal hygiene to the proper room, now!” she screamed. “Eytan is busy with a job!”

Yitz shot to full near-naked height, upsetting the ottoman. He marched to the bathroom and again disappeared inside, again slamming the door, but even harder, a nerve-racking number of times. Boom. She set her face in a slim smile. Boom.

“Housekeeping,” she said. She strolled towards the ottoman and righted it. Boom. Skipped away on her aching feet. Boom. Something metallic fell and skittered on the bathroom floor. “House-skipping,” she sang, dancing on to inspect the box, the half-cleared sofa.

She told Eytan he was a champ. He snickered, wiped a hand across his nose, let the hand cover his mouth a moment, then rubbed an eye. Boom. His hand traveled to the back of his head, and tugged at a tuft of hair.

She had started removing pictures from their nails, Eytan had returned to mind his stock on the sofa, and Yitz apparently had run out of steam when she heard the warped beginning of a familiar tune, four notes and no more.

“Show how,” Eytan said. He was struggling with the stiff key of a music box.

She walked to the sofa. The box, belonging to the shtetl set, was modeled after a poor cottage with, what else, a fiddler on the roof. For whatever reason he had grouped it with Abe Lincoln. Thunder broke again. She wound the key.

She stood the contrivance on an end table and Eytan watched it spin slowly around, tinkling a number from the musical, maudlin and hesitant and ending with the inconclusion typical of these
cheap novelties. In the bathroom Yitz turned on the ventilator and turned it off.

“Again,” Eytan said, and she recognized that he was crying. Why would he not cry? Still she was shocked, not having seen tears from him in so long.

He cried differently now. No longer the crumpling of the face, not shoulders shaking, no more sound, only the eyes welling with water. When he saw her looking, he smiled, chin tipped bashfully towards the chest, his gaze flitting to the carpet.

“Here,” she said. Her arms still recalled his baby weight, the small spasmodic heft.

He pushed her away with surprising force. “Again,” he said.

She wound the key. He wiped his eyes and left gray newsprint streaks. He wept some more. His seventh year's smile, perhaps his one for life, chided the indulgence, but for the moment he demanded it, again and again, and she provided.

Barbary Apes
 

A
PIGEON PACES THE external sill, ruffled, red-eyed, fat and in a stupid panic. Beside the radiator Dassa pretends to lose her traction on the desk connected to her chair, deprives her head of a supporting arm and swings an elbow at the glass. It's a lost cause. The pigeon knows the girl in lecture room 500 to be of zero consequence, all show. The panes are sealed, the panic undisturbed.

Intro to the Sephardic Diaspora, a social science credit class. Rabbi Haziza has been standing and lecturing for forty-seven minutes from the same spot and in the same posture: one fist, cupped in the other palm, pressed to his chest, primed to administer his own CPR when ultimately the strain overcomes him. Why should he strain at all? The dullness in the eyes of mandatory credit students drains a teacher's soul. Well, sustenance is near. In the region where the radiator valve dispatches a perpetual hiss, there sits the Rabbi's most committed freshman, alternately broiled and chilled. The outside cold may puff in through the spongy caulk, bearing from the streets below the smell of motor-oil mingled with Manhattan rain, or it may not. The girl is oblivious, captivated by the Rabbi's teachings. See her shining eyes.

She checks the inner corners for dried sleep. The left is clean. The right smoothes with a rub.

“And that topography seems to have borne a direct influence upon the vocal stylization of—”

A natty, oldish man, clean-shaven and small, the Rabbi is a Jew of Gibraltar. She loves that about him. Yes, with the monkeys, he replied in the first session. Everyone knew about the monkeys, or at least pretended. Only Dassa brought them up, hand flagging even as the teacher introduced himself.

Please. The student in back.

Gibraltar with the monkeys?

Yes! he answered. With the monkeys! he said, struck. The Rock Apes go hand in hand with the mention, he said, to those who know.

Thus nearly four months ago, but the impact remains fresh. He will set eyes on her today. He will remember Dassa with the monkeys.

There is a value to these monkeys, far and above the starting worth of any monkey, already high. A monkey of any kind is at the very least likable, but a Gibraltar monkey has a reputation. The Monkeys of Gibraltar: It rang a bell for everyone, or at least the pressure was on to feign the knowledge. What the reputation is, she doesn't know. This kind of reputation is much stronger than the kind you have the details on. You must create them.

Monkeys. At the zoo aren't theirs the most popular cages? You not only glimpse them in passing but stand and study. From the best enclosures, one will study you back. Gorillas break your heart because of their sad pace. A mother's black fingers go on grooming her baby while her gaze slowly sweeps the crowd beyond the moat. The male might contemplate a tire, then lay it down and settle as on a raft from which to stare up at the sky. Consider living side by side with these wordless family units, but a variety with smaller individuals, minding their business right along with you and yours. You
come and they go, casual as park-goers and birds, except that on occasion pairs of eyes would recognize each other briefly, from across.

“Codified,” the Rabbi says, “in the least lavish thread in the embroidery.”

A series of far sirens cries. A second pigeon joins the other on the sill, on landing frightening its predecessor, whose fright alarms the new arrival. Both birds race to opposite ends and keep these posts, the small heads pulsing around and around, the beaks the second hands.

“The gold of course,” the Rabbi says. “In preexpulsion tapestries you know it would be actual—”

The first bird's plumage is pink-brown. The new one is the same. Occasionally the breeze reveals the underlayer, pale wisps overresponsive to the air.

“As I, as I, as I—”

She turns towards the blackboard and finds the Rabbi looking out, through her window.

“I pointed out to you,” he says, back from the momentary absence, though continuing to gaze afar. “Also in the case of the Toledanos, so here, again, we see force of necessity converting heirlooms into tender—”

Dassa trains her gaze to follow his: Gibraltar, rocky, gray. Blue ocean waves whip wet crags upon which famous monkeys rush, ecstatic. Various aquatic fowl circle the pure sky. Beneath them, a youth, a young Rabbi Haziza, bids good-bye to his favorite monkey, who, alone among his peers, crouches inert, grave and attentive.

I will miss you, says the Rabbi. I will miss you, my good friend.

And in a blink the noble Rabbi is a man, displaced, stranded high in a cold city, in a lecture room, where torpid figures meld into the shapes of desk-chair combinations. Steam spits. Beyond the windowpanes, bumbling pigeons roost in the eye of skyscrapers gray as cliffs. It is to them the Rabbi lectures. Round and small in
his lovely old-fashioned suits, he hawks his line of goods to the Manhattan towers: the golden history of oriental Jewry, Sepharad. Samples include clarifications of the Laws for living penned in Egypt, rabbis counseling to Spanish kings, poets of Yemen penning glorious unrequited hymns to distant Zion. Habits of celebration among Syrian Jews of modern Brooklyn. The Rabbi labors on, regaling the skyline.

But towers are content in rising up, blind to interiors. When she checks back, the Rabbi has returned to the room, still wistful— bitter, never—sweetly tolerant of life's indignities. An easy A. He is forever gentle with the girls and would extol even the most insipid commentary. Anything. Today not even drivel issues forth.

The radiator chokes down a wet sneeze. The Rabbi starts, looks over.

There she sits. In attendance all along, everything a teacher wishes for, an audience to whom his story is alive. He widens his eyes: How have I been coming across? She stares back: good, poignant. The Rabbi smiles with a mild rise of the brows: Now don't go overboard. He isn't here for sympathy but for the purpose of providing texture to the thoughts.

And indeed there he is, again back in boyhood, the same roly-poliness of his adulthood, but scaled down and in a sailor suit, navy and white. He sits in the shade of a stunted Mediterranean tree, in a circle made of many more small boys, all sailor-suited, partaking of the Torah which flows from their schoolmaster's lips. It is a Friday afternoon. A procession of mothers marches by, over a dusty footpath, conveying cauldrons of raw stew to a communal hearth. Their sons may sense them but they don't look up, rapt at their master's feet, enthralled, naive. Little do they know. The beatitude will soon be shattered when the War compels them all to sail for asylum in New York, where they'll be charged with roomfuls of dull-witted college girls. The last of the Gibraltan mothers marches past the children, the flicker of a long, dark hem. Then she is gone, with her
cauldron of stew. The blue ocean thrashes against wet crags upon which monkeys, vehement, alarmed, guffaw and rant as if they might be heard above the waves. A frantic pantomime display. The waves overwhelm every sound.