[5] A dream sleep has fallen on the city

First thing, she tried to pass one by you about playing catch with Johnny. The truth – she’s terrified he’s going to be left-handed. Don’t ask me why. I’m left-handed, and she loves it. My right hand never did much for her unless she was already in a mood to be done to, but when she feels my left one coming up the back of her left knee … like a bath in fireworks for her. Used to be. Here’s an even darker secret – she’s left-handed, and she’s ashamed. If you want to see her blush mauve, catch her writing something and watch her try to hide that she was. When anyone but me is there, and she has to sign her name, pour from a bottle, pick up a broom, anything like that, she pins her left arm to her side like it’s paralysed. The guilt, I tell you. Don’t ask me where from. And now it’s about Johnny. She takes a little cloth ball in her right hand and tosses it towards his right hand, and waits to see which way he’s going to lean. Every day, over and over. The truth is, her demons stopped trying me on a long time ago. I learned to ignore them for the both our sakes. For example, it’s okay that I loathe her mother as much as she does, but I’ve stopped calling her brother Emil an evil dwarf when she can hear me. He is, obviously to anyone you want to know, but the first time the woman you love tells you he isn’t, or that two and two make three or that lamppost there is made of marzipan – it’s over. You hear the way she told you, then cast her a nod of credibility and go over and choke down a bite while she’s watching. Do you love a woman? Think long, stare at the horizon, remember the walk you’re making together. Then don’t argue about what won’t matter when you get there. I tell myself that some of what she believes was true once, or that she’s being allegorical.

If it’s a story you want … I’m no good at them but I’ll try. You take a plum, a late fall one, purple with a crimson flesh, and cut a sliver out of it this wide from stem to bottom and give it the gentlest squeeze. That’s what she looked like down there before Johnny, but now I don’t know, she won’t let me see, and she stares at Johnny as if he was the last who did and he’d better not tell. Mirrors … Long ago it was, she could never pass one. As soon as she saw, her graven self-image yanked her to a lingering stop. I understand, actually – so would you. Anyone who thinks that beauty is subjective has just never seen her walk with intent. Her eyes would pour into her reflexion to absorb herself entire, and she’d straighten and arch, hands sliding caresses up her belly, her tilting hips and shoulders, until she lifted her hair with elbows high, having loosened her frock just so it slipped down her waist from her hint of command. It saddened her, you could tell, that the world could never be as perfect as herself, that only in a mirror would she ever experience the sublime vision we all met in her. Then she’d cup her breasts up (a tender moment to share with herself) and gaze longingly at her features one by one, and sighing wistfully turn to remember me waiting in bed behind her. All right … My turn then, let the worship begin. She was like that the first night I saw, before she knew anything except herself. Vain? I didn’t mind, and she knew how to carry it lightly and when to put it away when there was no one near to intimidate. It was less work for me that she could love herself outwardly without my help or approval. But she lives in her head now, and that’s an adjustment for her. She was told for years (not by me) that her head was where all her problems were, and now it’s the part that always works. Since Johnny’s Big Day, she’s had no choice but to think first.

In the silence at the studio door, charging my sunset pipe, I can intuit the forces. It’s a time and place I always can. I’ve no desire for eternal forms, and just then, here, I can sense the mutable forces while they come out. Below in the city, people yearn only for stasis. Come out here now, forces, cast your stars for us to know this heaven, truly.

I watch her grandfather stop his cart at the foot of the rope walk. He leads Ostara into the snow-filled ditch a little nervously, cosies her under a blanket, ducks her kick. When a horse doesn’t snort before it kicks, you know evil exists. There are a hundred types of Jews in the Dream City. If they ever rule the world, their king will look something like him – burly, round-edged, round-faced, wrinkled eye creases and a wide straight mouth. Tall felt boots, tucked black pant legs, two heavy grey sweaters below a fisherman’s cap but never a jacket. His neat beard is a rich-looking grey. Life hasn’t crushed him, and it’s good to know that someone old has survived this world as well as he has. It’s good for Emma to see it. But no one knows how he’s done it. Sometimes you want to be around someone like that, who can slow the world down with just the look he gives it. He came down from Stryj half a century ago and did well. He could have left the Isle of Jews years ago, he did well enough to buy into the Ninth Quarter like his son (Emma’s daddy, in the register). But he doesn’t want to. All his customers are there where he started, and he feels obligated to them.

I come down to greet him, and tell him again: ‘A little hay in the morning, a little more at noon, just a handful of oats in the evening with a tossing of hay. When a mare has this much jump to her, it’s good for her to start work a little tired.’

‘Logical,’ he says. When he uses that word, he smiles with his silver eyes wide open, a little boy’s eyes after seventy years. ‘But it’s her nature to be skittish. Let’s let her be what she is and not try to make her what she isn’t. And how is Emma? Has Johnny caught his ball yet?’

The backstairs maid is still there. I’ve told her to wait for grandfather and boil us some dinner and get a ride with him back to the city. Emma has gone to bed again, still in her robe, and now she’s wearing a round boxcap with her hair billowing from under it, embroidered silk, red with unreadable yellow script, another Johnny’s Day gift from Gus. Johnny is at the foot of the bed, talking cackle talk to himself. Emma lights a cigarette and blows a smoke ring at his right shoulder.

While the maid is bringing us mugs of tea, he places our apartment mail in front of me and pats it with his hand.

‘No bills, no draughts. And how is little Johnny?’

‘Hold him and see,’ Emma says. Their little ritual. He dandles Johnny in his hands, the lad’s arms winged out, eyes round and bright with unfocused wonder. Johnny never smiles at us, but look at him now. Grandpa inhales his milk smell and kisses his forehead.

‘Four kilos seven,’ grandfather says. He’s handled cabbage out of his shop forty years, so I believe him. He smells of sauerkraut, but softly.

‘Little lion, what colour is your hair going to be, eh? Like your father’s? Like your grandfather’s? I think not. That colour goes to the women in our family. The next century’s yours, lad. How will you change it when we aren’t there to see, eh?’

Emma has energy only to stare. She has one of those for me and everyone else – pale and flinty – and then this melting one that you see when her grandfather’s near. God knows we can use his smile. There’s been plenty of laughter around here since Johnny, but not much smiling. You laugh at fate, you don’t smile at it.

‘I got up twice today,’ she says. ‘I can sit in the armchair.’

‘That’s good news,’ he says.

‘If you don’t believe me, ask her,’ she says, pointing to the maid. ‘She saw.’

Another of Emma’s specialties – she has null tolerance for being disbelieved or misunderstood. The maid brings us each a plate of potato soup with a little sauté of cabbage piled in the centre. Deal with the maid quickly, let’s. I don’t know her name, and she has no personal qualities – Emma’s mother scraped them off her within a week twenty years ago. She’s a robot, which is how Mrs Aaronson likes everyone. Mrs Aaronson’s world is a function of her own needs, so tell yourself how much fun Emma’s had as her daughter. The maid cooks and cleans for us and then goes back to the city at dusk, to tell Emma’s mommy everything she saw up here, because really, and everyone knows it, mommy loaned her to us for spying duties. Now we’re supposed to worry about what her mother knows, but even Emma doesn’t do that any more.

Then after dinner grandfather takes three slim tubes of lathed wood from his pocket, unstained mahogany, their ends sealed tight with pegs, and a tack hammer and three tin brackets from the other pocket, and a sachet of flat-head nails. He places all of it on the corner of the table so that Emma can see. No, she says without reaching, show me. And I hand one tube to her.

‘One doesn’t have to place them during the day,’ he says. ‘It would have been better, perhaps.’

‘In case God’s eyes are failing,’ I say.

‘In case mine are. God has no opinion on that part. Some of us mortals do, I’m sure, but we’re safe from them up here. Let me explain: Sh’ma yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai ekhad. That’s “Hear, oh Israel, our God Adonai is one.” Which is also the first prayer I learned as a lad. Then three more lines, mostly from Devarim. That’s what’s written on the slips of paper inside. Three mezuzot is all you need here. The kitchen doesn’t have a door, so not there. But the bedroom does, and the front door, of course, and the back door. Not your studio, because you work there, you don’t dwell there.’

The day we returned here after Johnny’s Big Day, he visited the day after, and she asked him for these. I believe in luck, so if she’s looking for some of her own, I’m not going to step in front of her.

Grandfather and I join each other on the front step, the snowbanks surrounding us a cold sea under the moon.

‘Shoulder height so that people can touch as they enter,’ he tells me.

‘You know what I think,’ I say. ‘This is Emma making sure her parents never visit us here.’

‘We have to live before we learn to live well,’ he says. ‘That’s why it’s so sad to look back instead of forward. So … always attached diagonally. Two wise people got in an argument over that centuries ago. One said horizontal, the other said vertical. So, an easy compromise that’s lasted eight hundred years. Can we hope?’

‘Do you people turn everything into a life lesson?’

‘Do you people turn everything into a superstition?’

He places the first bracket where I can tap in the first nail.

‘Oh yes, Paul,’ he grins while I tap in the second nail. ‘Keep walking, do. All the walks you take will get you somewhere, if you end-to-end them long enough. I’m always curious whom you’ll meet. If you ever see someone special beside you, tell me. I’ll come over for dinner, bringing some special biscuits, perhaps, and Emma will roast a nice saddle of lamb. A real end-of-days feast.’

He slides the first box onto its bracket and pats it with his fingertips. ‘Barukh atah Adonai … We’d love to see God, Paul, but we also accept that he doesn’t want us to, so we never expect to. I’d say it’s better if no one ever does – heaven help civilization if people ever think the gods are actually revealing themselves. When I think of all the churches full of symbols in this city, I don’t wonder that so many people are resented for insisting He can’t be seen. And Emma?’ He brushes snow from his sweater, puffs a few stray flakes from his hat. ‘There’s no such thing as a pure motive. Perhaps these are Emma’s way of saying she wants to believe something, or it’s just her way of declaring, “A Jew lives here.”’

‘It’s like I said, she’s hanging garlic to keep her mother away. Her mommy hates being a Jew. I don’t understand that. How can people not like what they are?’

He sighs once gently and looks at me with his head tilted a little. ‘Paul, you married a woman who every day of her life has been despised by half this world immediately, intensely, and for no reason at all. Get used to it, sonny.’ He shrugs once, quickly. Enough. ‘You’ve blessed me, you two. I don’t know anyone with a great-grandchild. Life has been all worry and hope since he came to you.’

The question – How will you raise him? – he’s never asked it. Nine days after, Johnny kept his helmet. If he’s sad about that … he isn’t sad. He’s having too much fun. That’s what a baby means, you know – a chance to find new sense in the world for a while.

‘Now the bedroom. One blessing per house, by the way. No more barukh and so on.’

When we enter again, Emma is sleeping in my armchair, a baby’s bottle in her hand, Johnny sprawled over the bedspread across from her. I lift Johnny from her lap before he can learn how to slide off. Grandfather catches the bottle.

‘Nothing will wake her for a while, will it?’ he asks.

We attach the second mezuzah to the doorframe behind her, and a third, outside again, to the back door. I swoop Johnny into my arms and hand him to the maid for her to feed him and invite grandfather into my studio for a moment. The Aaronsons’ maid is clicking her tongue at both of us. She’s a bundle of repressed hostility. That’s something. She thinks this is Mayerling and she’ll find us dead in our beds one morning before the month is out, struck by lightning and a pistol cradled between us, charged with opium pellets and cocaine powder.

In the studio, the stove is smoking, and I tinker with the flue while I tell him, the desk, the near corner. He unties the portfolio and looks down, sliding the sheets slowly, layer by layer. Thank God she’s wearing something in these. When he turns –

‘Take one, please.’

‘Thank you, Paul.’

‘Next time, on your way from the island you can stop at Rosemeyr’s on Hail Mary. He’ll have a frame ready. Which one did you choose?’

He shows me. ‘They’re working drawings for that one,’ I tell him. ‘The third dropcloth, please.’

All right, yes, [ … ]