Mrs. Goldfanger gushed on about Joe; Tamar’s grandmother kept her knowledge of human nature to herself. “My husband is lucky,” Mrs. Goldfanger said.
Mr. Goldfanger’s decline had been gradual, though Tamar and her grandmother remembered that he had moved in already trembling. The children in the ground-floor apartment opposite the Goldfangers’ had never known him as other than a speechless gremlin. Those funny pointed ears, hair sprouted right out of them, and he always looked as if he were going to speak, but he never did, not one word. They had been warned not to mock him.
This family, referred to as Moroccan by everybody in the building, had all been born in Israel — father, mother, three children. The epithet derived from the previous generation and would no doubt abide for several hundred years. The Moroccan mother got vigorously tarted up for the holidays and for nights out, but at other times she hung around in an unclean satin robe. She had apricot hair and freckles and a mischievous smile. Her children were always underfoot — under her feet, under everybody else’s. Her husband ran a successful tile business; some of the most praised kitchens in Rehavia owed their gloss to him.
He was artistic — or at least he had an artistic eye — but he was not handy. The entire family, in fact, was all thumbs. All ears and all eyes, too; they couldn’t help but be aware of the cleverness of the Goldfangers’ new aide. Such fingers! And so, every ten days or so, when one of their appliances would break down: “Joe! Joe!” they’d call. “That damned toaster!” And Joe, leaving the Goldfangers’ door open in case his patient needed him, would walk across the hall and diagnose and maybe repair the thing, and softly return.
“We must be careful not to take advantage of Joe,” the mother said one morning. The father eyed her with pleasure. Her comments tickled him, as did her languid behavior, so different from the energy of the women who bought his tiles. She was indolent and forgetful, but she didn’t crave much; she’d been wearing that red schmatte since their honeymoon. She loved the children in an offhand way — sometimes she called the older boy by the name of the younger, sometimes the daughter by the name of her own sister. “Take advantage of Joe?” he said. “What do you mean?”
But as usual she couldn’t or wouldn’t say what she meant, just sat smiling at him across the disarray of their dining table. So he got up, kissed her good-bye, and left the apartment. Across the hall he could hear Joe’s calm voice. What do we need with these people? he wondered in a brief spasm of irritation. Didn’t the country have enough trouble? Next time he’d take the toaster to the Bulgarian fixer. Then the mood passed, and he thought maybe Joe could use that flecked jacket he hadn’t worn for years — a bit too vivid for his own complexion; perfect for a yellow man.
The soprano had friends and acquaintances in the Spanish-speaking community and in the musical one, and she went to a lot of recitals. However, she spent most of her time writing and revising letters to the home she’d left.
Besides you, Cara, I miss most the peasants. Do you remember how they used to welcome me whenever I went on tour? — crowding around the train, strewing my path with flowers? I miss their flat brown eyes.
In fact her tours had been flops. In Latin America, trains to the provinces were just strings of dusty cars. Their windows were either stuck open or stuck closed. The soprano traveled with her accompanist — a plain young woman glowering behind spectacles — and the pair were untroubled by admiration or even recognition. But the singer had imagined throngs of fans so often that the vision in her mind’s eye had the clarity of remembrance. She saw a donkey draped with garlands. Her hand was kissed by the oily mayor of a town whose cinema doubled as a concert hall. The mayor’s wife was home preparing a banquet. Many people came to the concert and still more to the banquet, and the floor of the mayor’s rickety mansion rocked with stomping and the room rocked with cheers.
In this ambitious country there is no peasant, no one to love the earth. The collectives pay mercenaries to farm; the countryside is a fiefdom now. The giants of the desert are gone. I am quoting my neighbor across the hall, a woman of strong opinions.
The soprano scratched her letters by hand, sitting on her balcony. She spent a week composing each one. For whose sake were those literary efforts? Tamar’s grandmother inquired. Ah, to entertain her best friend back home, the soprano said, adjusting a soft shawl. She owned its replica in several shades — the gray of dawn, the violet of dusk, the lavender of a bruise.
Nobody cares for singing. We have become a country of string players, all Russian, all geniuses. Then there’s the fellow with a fiddle and a cup who stands outside a big department store. He makes a living, too.
“Of course I no longer perform,” she’d told Joe.
“Your speaking voice is music,” he’d said, or something like that.
Joe grew up in a village by a river. The houses were on stilts. He trained as a pharmacist.
She imagined him mixing powders crushed from roots. He told her that in some of the villages of his country the pharmacist had to behave as a doctor. “Aided by American Police Corps,” he said.
“Peace Corps, surely.”
On the afternoons that she dropped in at the Goldfangers’, she and Joe exchanged tales about high-minded Americans. Then, when she indicated by a tiny droop that the visit was over, he escorted her upstairs to her door.
Come to me, Carissima. Bring your damned parrot. Come.
THE WIDOWER OCCUPIED the whole of the top floor. He was sad but alert. Not for him to be left out when other people were getting favors.
“There isn’t a cab driver in the whole damned city I can trust,” he confided to Joe as they climbed the stairs with the widower’s groceries. “The Arabs? Don’t make me laugh. The Russians are all crooks. That stuff ’s not too heavy for you, is it? Some muscles! Still, you could leave one bag on the landing and then go back for it. And I’ll take the cabbage.” He grabbed a pale head from the top of one bag, as well as the brochure that had constituted his mail of the day.
The widower was currently a vegetarian. Vegetables are lighter than chickens. Joe usually carried the weekly purchases in one trip, a sack in each arm, like twins. He managed the new television, too.
“I don’t suppose you play chess,” the widower said one day.
“I play chess.”
Soon they were playing two or three evenings a week. If Mrs. Goldfanger was staying home they played after Joe had put Mr. Goldfanger to bed. The widower’s apartment was a hodgepodge of office furniture and supplies for his stationery store, which was also a mess. The two men settled themselves on straight-backed chairs at one corner of a metal table stacked with cartons.
If Mrs. Goldfanger was going to a concert or a bridge game they played at the Goldfangers’. The widower brought down his board and his chessmen and a bottle of wine and a vegetable pie. Joe provided oranges and tea. The widower set up the game on the living room coffee table. After pie and wine, the widower dragged a has-sock to the table. He spent the evening on the hassock, hunched over the set. Joe sat on the flowered couch. Mr. Goldfanger, sitting wordlessly beside Joe, often fell asleep with his head on his caretaker’s shoulder. At those times, Joe, reluctant to shift his body, asked the widower to move the chessmen for him.
ON SATURDAY MORNINGS, while Mrs. Goldfanger was attending services and Tamar’s grandmother was reading German philosophy and the soprano was swimming in the Dead Sea with other émigrés and the widower was playing with his grandchildren at his daughter’s house and the Moroccan family, in its best clothes, had pranced off to some celebration, the youngest on Rollerblades — on Saturday mornings, Tamar knocked on Joe’s door.