“Oh dear,” said Rachel, and daintily patted her mouth in a yawn.
I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of the rain tattooing the filmy window. Outside there was neither joy nor peace nor help from pain, while here beneath this sagging roof I held a live woman in my arms. “I will love you till I die,” I whispered experimentally in her ear. Whether she heard me or not I can’t say, but she stirred and asked herself sleepily, “What am I doing here?” Then she bolted from the bed dragging the blanket along with her, which left me naked and shivering. Cursing under her breath, she stumbled about the room in the dark retrieving her stray clothing. I hugged my knees to my chest and, recalling the subject of her research project, informed her with some urgency, “This was the old Jewish ghetto.” “It’s called the Pinch,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. “This neighborhood, the Pinch.”
Hesitating, her spectral silhouette framed in the open doorway, she wondered aloud, “What’s your name?” Then on second thought: “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
When she’d fled the apartment I got up and switched on the overhead light, its harshness turning the room aggressively real. I wrapped myself in the blanket that still carried her fragrance, sat down on the slanting floor, and opened Muni Pinsker’s book to its beginning. Then I started to read for the purpose of gathering information that might interest Rachel in case I should see her again.
2 Welcome to the Pinch
On a sweltering August afternoon in 1911, Muni Pinsker, listing from the weight of his battered grip, entered Pin’s General Merchandise on North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee. He was bedraggled and bone weary, having journeyed to America all the way from the mica mines of Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia, where he’d been exiled. The store smelled of pickles and kerosene, its floorboards creaking as did the ceiling fans. Shelves spilled quilting and cotton petticoats; sock garters and suspenders hung like limp rainbows on wooden racks. There was a display case containing a regiment of back scratchers, cutthroat razors, and hand-carved briar pipes. Behind a counter stood a shortish man in a waistcoat and apron, with a distinctively hooked nose and coarse, sandy hair. He was closing the drawer of a gilded cash register beside which stood a jar of hard candy, when he squinted over his nickel spectacles at the wayworn newcomer. Then he peered beyond the newcomer at a gangle-shanked character in bib overalls, who had shambled into the store behind Muni. The man grinned a gap-toothed grin, his eyes dull as pearl onions, while the contents of the burlap sack that was slung over his shoulder appeared to be squirming. He shouted something in the native tongue that Muni had only begun to learn and started to empty his sack, out of which tumbled a braided black clump. The clump plopped onto the sawdusted floor, where half a dozen serpents uncoiled and began to slither in all directions like runneling oil.
“Rabbi Eliakum,” called the shopkeeper in a marvelously unexcited voice.
A stout old man with heavy-lidded, bloodhound eyes and a beard like a grizzled gray broom left off inspecting a lightweight union suit to turn around. He studied the snakes a moment as if attempting to discern a message in their undulations, some signal from the glint of their fangs. Then he pronounced in a throaty Hebrew, “Woe unto the man who meets up with a venomous lizard,” and in an earthier Yiddish, “and woe unto the venomous lizard that meets Eliakum ben Yahya.”
Whereupon the rabbi lifted his eyes toward the beaten tin ceiling and passed a palsied hand above the serpents, which abruptly ceased their slithering, becoming ramrod stiff. They were converted in fact into a clutch of perfectly serviceable walking sticks, which the shopkeeper, coming from around his counter, gathered up and dumped into an umbrella stand alongside several other mahogany canes.
The gangling man let loose a hysterical whoop and slapped his knee before exiting the store. The old rabbi, perspiring freely beneath the fur shtreimel he wore despite the August heat, patted his forehead with a folded hankie, said “Good Shabbos,” and departed as well. The shopkeeper turned back to the newcomer, who had fainted dead away.
Muni came to in a kitchen chair in the apartment over the store to which the shopkeeper and his wife had dragged him. The shopkeeper, his brow deeply furrowed, was fanning Muni’s face with a rag, as his wife came forward to offer the young man a cup of tea. Muni stared at the steaming liquid on the table and wondered: Where were you when the wind had teeth? Because that insufferably stuffy kitchen was not conducive to the partaking of hot beverages. Thanking her nonetheless, he drank and the bitterness began to revive him.
“Oy,” he sighed, “iz doos a mekhayeh.” Which, roughly translated, meant: I forgot I was alive.
That was the cue for the shopkeeper to drop into the chair beside him, falling upon Muni’s neck and jerking the young man’s tousled head to his breast. “Your uncle Pinchas welcomes you to the Pinch,” he cried. “Katie, give a keek on my dead brother’s son, Muni Pinsker, that he looks, thanks God, like his mother.”
Muni peered out from his uncle’s headlock at Pinchas’s wife, who smiled a tight-lipped smile, winked a jaunty eye, and tucked a strand of auburn hair fading to gray behind an ear. She admonished her husband to give the boy space to breathe, then spooned some mashed concoction from a pot on the coal-burning range into a bowl which she placed before the wanderer. Almost too tired to eat, Muni took (once his uncle had released him) a few gummy bites out of courtesy, while Pinchas apologized for the scene his nephew had witnessed below. “The goyim, they like to play on us tricks,” he said, though Muni was already vague regarding the reference; his head was much too full of actual memories to admit the inadmissible. “They like to see the rebbe do his kishef, his magic.”
“Magic,” repeated Muni, testing the word on his tongue as if it were also a morsel of food. He made a face as if the word were not to his taste.
Ignoring his wife’s token appeals to give the boy time to gather his wits, Pinchas peppered him with questions concerning his odyssey. But whether from aversion or fatigue, his nephew was frustratingly taciturn in his account: “I walked, I rode, I sailed, I rode, I walked,” he shrugged. “I arrived.” Though he had as yet no real sense of having reached a destination.
Then it was evening and they showed him to the closet-sized room they’d prepared for him, the first room of his own that Muni had ever known. He expressed his appreciation for everything, because he did indeed owe them everything, and collapsed onto the narrow camp bed, but he could not sleep. His heart was still keeping time to his interminable forward progress, and the suffocating heat pressed the air from his lungs with a whine like a squeezebox. Stripped to his drawers, he told himself that his sweat was the arctic rime melting from his bones, but he was ashamed to be thus saturating the clean sheets. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that at last he was beyond the long arm of the czar’s police, but unable to relax, he rose and went to the open window to try and catch a breeze.
The full orange moon above the alley illumined a girl dancing in midair. Muni, however, was not deceived; he was accustomed to hallucination, having seen many things that were not there during the long hibernal ordeal of his travels. But look again and he observed that, rather than treading air, the girl — her dusky hair done up in a loose topknot, the strong limbs visible beneath her flimsy chemise — was bobbing barefoot on a rope. It was a slender, sagging rope, perhaps a clothesline, and the girl was balanced precariously upon it, wobbling a bit under the open parasol she was holding. She was staring at him, eyes wide and mouth open in an astonishment that Muni took exception to, since he was the one that ought to be astonished. Then he remembered that he was nearly naked and dove back into the bed.