The Book of Intimate Grammar, Page 3

  “She hurt my feelings.”

  Papa stroked his head. Aron melted at the touch. Again the piano tinkled upstairs, tentative, wary, like the first green sprouts after a forest fire. Papa sat still. Only his hand moved, stroking Aron. There was still enough light to see the veins on the leaves. The music fluttered through them, plucking delicate strings. Aron peeked up at the sky, the deep blue sky of twilight. And then Papa stared into his eyes until he made him smile.

  “Anyway,” said Papa, “what’s-his-name, Napoleon, he was a shorty, and so was Zioma Schwatznicker, now that’s a fact!”

  4

  Aron found Mama in the kitchen, wobbling on the Franzousky with her head in the storage loft. Hearing him enter, she popped out again wearing a pink rubber bathing cap to protect her from the dust. Don’t think I didn’t see you in the tree, that we’ll settle later, now go get a pair of woolen socks from the sock drawer in the big closet. Woolen socks? grumbled Aron. Now? In the middle of summer? How do you expect to try on boots, then? Barefoot? But in this heat, Mama, wool? I know what I’m doing, now go get the socks.

  Angrily he opened the closet in his parents’ bedroom. Behind the sock drawer he found a little brown envelope, like the kind that came in the mail with Papa’s reserve orders, only this one had no name or address on it. Printed across the envelope were the words Alfonso’s Pussy Circus. He peeked inside and saw something strange, a black-and-white photograph on the back of a playing card. He knew at a glance this was something he shouldn’t be looking at. But when he peeked again, his hands began to tremble. Close the door and get out, he commanded himself. Close the door and get out, he whispered to save his soul, then slipped the card into the envelope and put it back, trembling so much he almost dropped the socks. He stood frozen in the middle of the bedroom. What was I looking for? And again he commanded, with a quivering voice, Get out of here now! I said now! Then he stumbled to his room and flopped down on the bed, to calm himself before Mama found the boots in the storage loft. He curled up in a ball and suddenlyrealized that things had not been going at all well lately. There were certain signs, like the broken guitar strings or the fights with Zacky, though what did they prove, what did they mean, he only knew that up until now, it might have been possible to turn back the wheel of signs and proofs. He didn’t think, he only tried to listen to the sober voice inside him whisper: “Not good,” and “Tsk tsk tsk,” like a doctor’s prognosis, and Aron was startled, not by the voice, but by the gravity of the “Tsk tsk tsk” and the shake of the head that accompanied it, like Mama’s that time they passed a fatal road accident on the bus to Tel Aviv, and suddenly he recoiled at the thought. Nothing’s changed, he told himself, it’s just a mood, get up, but he didn’t.

  The day was over; a lazy summer evening stretched ahead. From every doorway came smells of salad finely chopped, dewy cucumbers in yogurt, herring wreathed with onion, eggs dancing sunny side up, fresh rye bread thickly sliced and ready on the table. The sultry sky began to darken at the seams. Blithe new strains floated through the fourth-floor window—hesitant at first, measured and slow, then breaking loose in a rampage of pounding. Papa sighed and collected his tools from the fig tree. He looked down at his fingers, stained yellow with the ointment, as he listened to the music, wrinkling his brow in an effort to remember where he’d heard it before. He shrugged his shoulders. Hinda’s voice boomed out, she’d found the boots and was calling Aron to try them on. Just as he jumped down from the fig tree, Zacky rode over. “You mean to say you’ve been up there alone the whole time?” He scowled in innocent dismay. “Go on home now, it’s getting dark,” said Papa, and Zacky stared down at his bicycle fender and said he didn’t feel like going home yet. But it’s dangerous to ride around without a light, Zachary; Don’t have one—dynamo’s out. Remind me tomorrow and I’ll fix it for you: never fear—Moishe’s here. And Papa scratched his prickly hair, but his mind was elsewhere, his hand perfunctory, and Zacky drew back with indignation and quickly rode away, pouting as he leaned over the handlebars. Oh, please let a car speed by with blinding headlights, like a fist out of the blue. Around the corner he slowed to a stop, looked both ways, and kicked the taillight of the Fiat with all his might.

  Mama reached into Aron’s boots and pulled out the wads of newspaper. Aron trudged wearily through the hall, careful to conceal himself from her penetrating eyes, fervently praying for a last-minute reprieve.If only someone would explain it to him, slowly and patiently. Walking like this, in slow motion, he was reminded of David Lipschitz, the albino kid in his class. That’s how David walked, dragging his feet and wagging his head from side to side. Papa was at the front door; he pressed the handle with his elbow and came in, carrying his tools and medicines. “Hey there, Aronchik, why so glum?” Papa smiled at Aron’s startled face, the brush sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Aron panicked, what if he headed for the bedroom now and looked behind the winter-sock drawer. But instead he went to put the palette with the jars and the rags down on a newspaper in the bathroom. I’m going to shave now, Mamaleh, and then we can sit down to eat. At least he didn’t suspect anything. Aron hurried to the bedroom, but changed his mind. Not now. His lips were dry, crusty, how would he get the pictures out of there without his parents noticing? Someone might suddenly walk in and go straight to the closet, and then what?

  Mama emerged from the kitchen and found him leaning against the wall. She rushed to his side: “What’s wrong, Aronchik, why are you acting like this?” Everything’s all right; he waved limply. Maybe I got out of bed too fast and it made me dizzy in the head. I’ll be okay in a minute probably. She gave him one of her special hugs and held him so tightly he could feel a worrisome throbbing under her skin, an intense vibration almost like an engine inside her. “Mama, you’re strangling me!” Gently she let him go, and again he pressed himself into her body, into her soft, saggy waistline, her heaving bosom, and the perspiring nest under her arms, and suddenly he tore himself away, afraid to touch her even with his fingertips, and she opened her eyes wide with a strange little laugh: “Too big to hug your mama? All right, go try on the boots, they’re on top of the cans in the pantry.” And she went off giggling to tell Papa.

  Aron reached into the old boots and pulled out a few more wads of last year’s newspaper. He spread one over his face to hide from the world, but an item with a squiggly line around it caught his attention, something about a young blacksmith from a village in Armenia who died and was buried in a wooden coffin, but at night the gravekeeper heard the sound of kicking and ran away, and the next morning the police came and pried off the coffin lid and they found the blacksmith, only his face was contorted and his nails were broken, and the lid was covered with scratches. “God in heaven,” said Mama in his ear, “howlong does His Majesty intend to keep us waiting? Would you please try on your boots already?”

  Aron slumped down on the benkaleh and leaned over to unbuckle his sandal. Where were we? David Lipschitz’s father works for the Ministry of the Interior, he’s a big shot, that’s why the school authorities let David pass each year. Aron felt benevolent as he contemplated David Lipschitz, as though suddenly he had all the time in the world to pay an old debt. Did David wag his head like that even in his sleep, Aron wondered. Tick-tock! The big albino face with the eyes blinking out like frightened creatures in a cave … and the only thing he cares about is Anat Fish. The cruel and beautiful Anat Fish, who has a “freshie” boyfriend. David stares at her and smiles, he’ll pay a whole sandwich for one of her pencils or a sheet of paper from her loose-leaf notebook, and if you bring him her sweater, he nuzzles it and his eyes get misty. Sometimes in winter he runs out of the classroom, and when the bell rings, you find him in the hallway, rubbing against her coat. But she’s so mean, she never looks back. She has eyes like an Egyptian queen. Aron pulled the sandal strap.

  The front door opened and slammed shut: Yochi was home from Madame Nikova’s. She threw herself down on the bed and burst out crying. She often cried these days,
especially after ballet class; he could hear Papa humming in the bathroom as he lathered his face. A year and a half from now, it all goes to me, he mused: the shaving soap and the razor and the shiny tray, but the thought of it was not particularly exciting; in fact, the certainty of it only oppressed him, and alienated him from Papa even more, and suddenly he imagined Mama there, all dressed up, with a fat banana hairdo, smiling radiantly at the company as her fingers searched under his chin for the chicken-pox scar. “Didn’t I tell you whiskers would cover it one day?” Aron pulled away indignantly: he remembered the first time she said that, when he was seven years old. He had resented her deeply, she sounded as though she wanted to lock him inside the future and jangle the keys in his face.

  “No bread for me, thank you,” said Yochi as she sat down red-eyed.

  “What, no bread? You can’t live without bread.”

  “I said no bread!” Her lips were quivering. “You should have heard the names Madame Nikova called me.”

  “Yocheved,” cooed Mama, wiping her hands on the apron with thekangaroo, “Madame Nikova may be an expert on dancing, but I know something about girls and growing up.”

  “Look, just look at this!” screamed Yochi, kicking her leg out and slapping her thigh where it joined the hip. The pink flesh rippled. “It’s because you never sit down properly when you eat,” Mama explained, “I’ve told you a thousand times—” “And today she put me back in the second row!”

  “Yochileh,” said Papa quietly, “at your age you’ve got to build your bones. Later on you can reduce if you want to, but now the bones need nourishment.”

  Yochi shook her head and squeezed her mouth shut to keep from crying.

  “One slice?” asked Mama. “With butter and a little matjes herring?”

  Yochi shook her head furiously, then tucked it between her shoulders as though waiting for a blow. Ever so casually Mama opened the jar of matjes herring, swirled it around in the air, and forked out three fat pieces. Then she spread a slice of bread with a thick layer of creamy butter. Yochi turned her face to the wall. From his seat in the pantry Aron could see the yellow-red eruption on her cheeks and forehead; soon she’d get the curse again and everyone would start worrying, that’s what happened every month since the fateful day she flushed her curse down the toilet and there was a big eisseh-beisseh because in the middle of supper Mama raised her knife and pointed, and her face turned pale and she lost her voice, and when they looked around they saw a tiny lagoon spilling out of the bathroom, flowing through the hallway into the kitchen, and Papa ran to get the pliers from his tool chest in the pantry, and the water kept gushing out and Papa stuck his hand with the pliers all the way in to see what was clogging the toilet, which spewed up more and more muck and filth, and finally he fished out a glob of something that looked like a piece of meat, and he stood there gaping at it until Mama grabbed the pliers from him and waved the glob in front of Yochi’s nose. Well well, the princess has the curse, like a million other women, including her mother, and right on time, too, so just keep it to yourself, you don’t have to shout it from the rooftops, and then she waved the pliers in front of her, like a triumphant surgeon, screaming at the top of her lungs; maybe that’s when Yochi developed the whistling in her ears, and Yochi, nobody’s lemaleh, sat perfectlystill this time, red as blood, and after that she was always careful with the curse, and Aron too learned to be careful in the toilet, and Mama said, “Nu, Aron, are you going to stand there gaping all night, can’t you see the table’s set?”

  From the pantry he watched them sit down to supper, reflecting how cozy the kitchen was at times like this, with everyone eating and talking at once, but the wistful scene dissolved before his eyes, and an arctic fog descended, full of ghoulish apparitions, naked bodies, tangled limbs, a dog on top of a woman; he suddenly felt the blood drain from his hand as he picked a boot up and reached into the lining with its smell of old fur, glancing bleakly at Yochi slouched over the table, angling for breadcrumbs with her little finger; and from Yochi’s jaundiced face to Grandma Lilly, not yet sixty and already senile, muttering to herself as she wandered around the house, and only a year ago she was so lucid, so cheerful, and then a tiny blood vessel got clogged up and that was that; how he pitied his parents, especially Mama, working so hard to keep Grandma’s illness a secret, to hide it from everybody, including their rummy friends on Friday night, and then he remembered it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Mama served bananas in sour cream with sugar on top in those orange dessert dishes, and while he wasn’t so crazy about squashed bananas, he liked to see the expression on Mama’s face when she served it to him, and he felt a pang; where were we, what were we thinking about, oh yes, his film collection, the negatives he picked up outside Photo Lichtman, and the pieces of celluloid he’d found, including one really long strip from an actual movie showing a tall woman with white eyeballs, white lips, and black, flowing hair, which meant that in real life she was blond, and she was standing in the doorway, talking to someone, and the subtitles said: “Don’t kid yourself, Rupert, no one is indispensable”; but what if Grandma died, she was a little girl once too, you know, there may be billions of people in the world, but there’s only one Grandma, and he checked again, carefully, but knew it was hopeless, he had seen what he had seen, and he heaved a sigh, how fragile life is, he never realized that before, yes, they would have to pull together as a team, in perfect loyalty, he melted with compassion for them, for their smugness and ignorance of what lurked behind the sock drawer. Slowly and carefully he unbuckled his sandal, and nearly fell asleep again over his outstretched foot, but who could have brought such a thing into this house and hidden it in thebedroom, and then he had another staggering thought, what if his finding the cards behind the drawer had made him, God forbid, an accessory in the crime, his fingerprints were smeared all over the pictures, so the agent who smuggled them in could use them as evidence to blackmail him, there were stories like that in the newspaper sometimes, and it was anyone’s guess what a person like that was capable of, and how would Aron be able to prove he was pure and innocent?

  He felt exhausted, as if he’d just been through a terrible ordeal, like one of those poor children he read about in books who had to leave home and fend for themselves. Papa came out of the bathroom with shaving cream on his face. Aron lay low, and felt his soul evaporate into a single quivering strand; carefully he put the boot on his childish foot, and was startled to find everyone staring at him, even Yochi turned in her chair, and Grandma came closer and gawked at him, making him shrink even more, his bare foot drained white, his skin numb and cold.

  Nu nu, said Papa. Nu nu what? said Mama. Nu nu, it fits, said Papa, and wrinkled his brow, as his lower lip covered the upper lip. That I can see for myself, said Mama, that much is obvious. Maybe the sock isn’t thick enough, suggested Papa, his mouth a red hole in a mountain of foam. It’s a heavy winter sock, said Mama, I specifically told him to get a heavy winter sock. But he’s worn those boots for two years in a row; Papa suddenly raised his voice. Tell that to him, not me, said Mama, turning away. Please, Mama, please buy me a new pair! whispered Aron. In your dreams, answered Mama, pulling off the boot. You’ll get new ones the day I have hair growing here, she said, indicating the palm of her hand with an arching of a furious eyebrow. Go on, y’alla. She pushed him away, stuffing last year’s newspapers back in the boots. Wash your hands and come to the table, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll finish every bite on your plate.

  5

  There was Rosaline, and Natalie, and Lizzy and the chimp, and Angela, the blind girl, and Roxana, his favorite, and Alfonso, the whip-cracking dwarf, ringmaster of the Pussy Circus. Each picture had a caption under it scribbled in Hebrew: “Giddyap! To the Racetrack of Desire,” said the one showing the black stallion named Ringo with zaftig Lizzy. “Now she sees …” said the one showing Fritz the chimp paired off with Angela, who knows by touch. The slovenly, unfamiliar writing was full of misspellings that irked him even mor
e than the pictures did: corruption spread like mildew from the pictures to the words. He also noticed that the newspaper Alfonso was reading in the picture where Rosaline crouched between his hairy knees was in a foreign language. Looking through a magnifying glass, he saw it wasn’t English: the letters were crooked and clumsy, and he couldn’t make out the date either, though the magnifying glass did reveal a number of large, greasy fingerprints on some of the photos, especially the ones of Roxana. With the eyes of a detective, he examined the pictures one by one and deduced from the evidence that this circus was in serious financial trouble: the high-heeled shoes worn by smiling Natalie turned up on Angela, the blind girl, in the card with the silver horn, and Fritz’s eating trough reappeared in the picture where Alfonso uses Natalie as a saddle on Ringo. The pictures really disgusted him, yet every time his parents stepped out the door, he went running back to the sock drawer, he couldn’t help it, he had to take one last peek,and a moment later he was at it again, frantically thumbing through the cards, God forbid he should skip one; then he would slip them back in the envelope and continue sitting there, distraught, as though he’d just seen them for the first time, these joyless men and women, naked slaves of an invisible emperor, writhing together like hammy actors in a play, with twisted grins and bulging eyes.

  Who then, he wondered, had smuggled these cards into the house, who were the girls, who was the photographer, and supposing the circus was still in town, on an ordinary street nearby where crowds of lecherous adults gathered even now to pay their homage to the emperor … One night he woke with a start: a distant blast, like an engine backfiring, had frightened him out of a deep sleep, and he lay rigidly in his bed, certain that not too far from the building project, amid whispered confessions and ghostly groans, the emperor’s slaves were pitching the circus tent, erecting the king pole for a hasty performance, and in the dim glow of the spotlight the ring looked like a huge red eyeball or a cavernous mouth, and Alfonso, in a top hat, cracked his whip while four grimacing, grease-smeared girls jumped obediently through a burning hoop …