“This Pinch is a primitive place and all its citizens pig-ignorant,” Pinchas Pin informed his long-lost nephew over the kitchen table, but Muni was paying scant attention. He’d heard the appraisal often enough over the course of the past few days, and besides, he was busily involved in eating a fresh bialy from Ridblatt’s Bakery. The roll was so warm and fragrant, its texture airy as cobweb, that he might have thought it had a holy component — that is, if he’d still set any store by holiness. “There ain’t no superstition that they don’t accept it’s true,” continued his uncle, speaking mostly in Yiddish for his nephew’s sake, though the English locutions kept creeping in. “They don’t none of them share the progressive views of scholars like me and you.”
Muni ceased chewing a moment to register the compliment with a wistful smile. There was a time when he might have been flattered to be included in Pinchas’s exclusive circle; his uncle was after all not without a degree of learning. But now this estimation only amused him. Having returned to society after so many years in perdition, Muni no longer knew what views he held. He only knew that it was a relief to stop awhile and catch his breath, even in such a malarial swamp as Memphis, America. For Muni one swamp would do as well as another, and the bite of mosquitoes was a fair enough exchange for the vicious bite of the frost in the taiga east of Irkutsk. Still, Pinchas’s running catalog of complaints was a mixed invitation.
“It ain’t bad enough you got in their sheets the yokels that are scaring the pants off the schwartzes,” he went on, his English edging out the Yiddish until Muni could scarcely comprehend, “but these Yossel-come-latelies, I’m talking now the Shpinker Hasidim, they got yet to go and monkey with the fabric of time. In most places the days of the week that they follow one after the other, but here you get sometimes a Tuesday contains also elements from Monday and Wednesday. You get the minute that stretches like taffy candy to an hour. This is not chronological; it ain’t any kind of logical.”
Muni scratched his scalp in a show of thoughtfulness and felt how his once thick pelt of hair stood up now in stiff licks and patches since his aunt Katie had trimmed it. Though she was technically his aunt, it was hard to think of the tall, comely woman (a head taller than her husband) as a relation. This was due in part to the fact that she was a gentile, in part because she still seemed so girlish despite her years. There was a mischief, if somewhat laced with melancholy, that played about her zinc-green eyes. With such reckless impetuosity had she flicked her scissors through his hair that he feared she might remove the top of his skull like an egg in a cup. Like the yarmulke he’d exchanged for the worker’s peaked cap in his student days. When he glanced in a mirror afterward — his first glimpse into a mirror in recent memory — he saw a stranger whose weather-seared features appeared as if mocked by a crown of cropped liver-brown feathers.
“A cockleburr,” his aunt had judged, standing arms akimbo behind him.
As for Pinchas, he was entitled to think what he pleased; he was after all the pioneer Ashkenaz of North Main Street. What’s more, he had in large part footed the bill for Muni’s flight from the Siberian waste; he’d provided him with a destination, however unrpromising, and even a job. At first the nephew had protested his uncle’s extravagant generosity; he owed him too much already: “You got here your hands full just to make ends meet.”
But Pinchas pooh-poohed him. “Es mach nit oys, don’t think that by you I’m doing no favors.” In the first place he couldn’t afford to pay the greenhorn a regular salary; all he could offer him was an outsize closet to sleep in and Katie’s stodgy meals. “The truth of the matter is that you will be my slave.”
As servitude was a condition that Muni understood, he took the joke seriously, vowing to stay and work off a debt that his uncle dismissed as null and void. He made himself more than useful, humping sacks of flour and grinding coffee, unpacking denim overalls until his fingers turned blue from the dye. Sometimes, when his uncle was otherwise engaged, he even waited on customers, some of whom had entered the store out of curiosity. They were eager to catch a glimpse of the immigrant who’d come to North Main from the shores of oblivion. (Once when Muni had alluded to feeling like a bit of a spectacle, Pinchas chided him: “You ain’t so special. Is alive, the Pinch, with people used to be dead.”) He ate his aunt’s clotted variations on boiled potatoes and slept the troubled sleep that had yet to relieve his weariness, interrupted as it was by trips to the window to watch the girl who walked on air.
He saw her in the street as well, but there she was different. Sinewy and slight, she still managed to be somehow ungainly, clopping heedlessly along the sidewalk in her apron dress and button shoes. Sometimes she grazed the lampposts and failed to dodge passersby. He spied her through the plate glass of Rosen’s Delicatessen, where she waited tables, spilling seltzer and colliding with customers so often that she apologized in advance. Her name was Jenny Bashrig, an awkward girl who had nothing in common with the one that danced on the wire. With her tapered nose, sardonic lips, and the unraveling skein of her sable hair, she seemed altogether earthbound. In fact, Muni wouldn’t even have recognized her had he not caught her staring back at him from the other side of Rosen’s window with the wire walker’s sloe-black eyes. Then he wondered if she was clumsy or just careless when at large on a planet whose surface she saved all of her grace for rising above.
She was an orphan, Jenny, whose parents had drowned in a steamboat accident near Helena, Arkansas, en route to Memphis from the city of New Orleans. (This much Muni had learned from his aunt, of whom he’d inquired about the girl while at the same time feigning disinterest.) Fished from the river more dead than alive, the child had regurgitated, along with the turbid water from her lungs, a single syllable, the one she’d heard on her parents’ lips since they’d left Zlotopoclass="underline" “Pinch,” she squeaked, and after much consternation on the part of her rescuers, who passed her from hand to hand, it was suggested that her utterance implied not an action but a place. Ever since, she had been a virtual ward of North Main Street. But while the entire neighborhood claimed her, Jenny had struck the attitude from early on that she belonged to no one but herself. The Rosen family, distant relations who’d anticipated the Bashrigs’ arrival, had provided the girl with a roof and, when she was old enough, a nominal livelihood. But though she demonstrated her gratitude through dutiful drudgery, she never suppressed her independent streak; she remained a creature apart, barely educated and prone to undomestic habits. Muni supposed their status as outsiders was not so dissimilar, which was perhaps why she held a certain fascination for him. But while the interest seemed to some extent mutual, he had so far resisted any real exchange with the girl. With the exception of his aunt and uncle, the greenhorn still kept himself aloof from one and all.
On a sultry September morning, after they’d finished their breakfast, Muni and his uncle went downstairs as usual to open the store. Fastening his apron strings behind his back, Pinchas took up his familiar refrain.
“The Shpinker rebbe, old ben Yahya — a crackpot,” he groused. “The man claims to go each evening in heaven where with the Baal Shem Tov he studies Torah.” Persisting in his censure, he no longer troubled to translate the words his nephew was gradually becoming acquainted with. Muni was learning as well to take his uncle’s grievances with a grain of salt. Hadn’t he observed how the storekeeper found such frequent excuses to draw the rebbe into religious disputes? True, they tended to be one-sided arguments, since Rabbi Eliakum largely held his peace. The old man seemed bemused by the freethinker’s capacity to remain unbelieving in the face of such practical demonstrations of the indwellingness of the divine. Today, however, after unlocking the front door, Muni was seized by a rogue impulse to call the proprietor’s bluff.