Beach Music (32 page)

“I was in love with Anna Singer. It was a secret,” Max said. The rabbi’s laughter thundered through the hall of the Eastern Shul.

“A butcher’s assistant in love with the daughter of Abraham Singer?” the rabbi said, disbelievingly.

“I didn’t aspire to marry her, Reb,” Max explained. “I simply loved her. Mottele told me that was not possible.”

“Abraham would have thrown you out of the house if you had even dared to ask,” the rabbi said.

“Not on the night of the pogrom,” Max said. “That night, Abraham Singer would have welcomed me like a rabbi.”

“You witnessed the violation of his daughter,” the rabbi said. “Abraham would not have liked that.”

“I killed the violator of his daughter,” Max said. “Abraham would have liked that very much.”

“You were a savage that night,” the rabbi spat at Max.

“I was a Jew that night,” Max said.

“A Jew more cruel than the
goyim,”
the rabbi said.

“A Jew who does not allow Jewish girls to be violated,” Max said.

“You do not belong in Kironittska, butcher. You have unsettled the Jews of the city.”

“I will do what the rabbi says,” Max said.

“I would like you to leave Kironittska forever. Go to Poland. Go anywhere. Go to America.”

“I do not have enough money for the passage,” said Max.

“The mother of Anna Singer has come to me,” the rabbi said. “She will give you the money for your passage. The Singer family is uncomfortable that you are still in the city. Abraham had many powerful brothers. They are all afraid you will talk about what you saw that night.”

“I have talked with no one,” Max said.

The rabbi answered, “The Singer brothers do not trust a butcher’s assistant to keep his mouth shut for long. Peasants are known for their loose tongues.”

“I did not see the Singer brothers on the night of the pogrom,” Max said.

“They were home praying for the deliverance of our people like all pious Jews were,” the rabbi said.

“I too was praying,” Max said. “My prayers took a different form.”

“Blasphemer. Murder is never prayer,” the rabbi said.

“I am sorry, Reb. I am not an educated man.”

And so Max Rusoff left Kironittska for the long and dangerous journey to the Polish border, and from there he booked passage on a freighter sailing for America. During the voyage in the overcrowded steerage section, Max met a language teacher from Cracow by the name of Moishe Zuckerman. It was Zuckerman who gave Max his
first English lessons, and to the surprise of both of them Max showed a natural aptitude for languages.

At night, Max would stand on the deck of the ship studying the stars and practicing the strange new language that he would soon have to speak. Max had no one to meet him at Ellis Island and that made him different from most other Jews he met on the freighter. But Moishe Zuckerman understood that Max could not just land in America with nowhere to go. And so Moishe Zuckerman made all the bewildering arrangements, found a temporary room for Max in the home of a cousin, and finally put him on a train at Pennsylvania Station to South Carolina, where he told Max there was beautiful land and no ghettos. Riding all night through the states of the Eastern seaboard, Max tried to control his fears for he knew there was no possibility of return. The farther south the train went the less of the new English he had learned did he understand. By the time he reached Charleston at ten in the morning, all the words had been softened and moistened and stretched out by the purring elisions of Southern speech.

He was met by Henry Rittenberg, who approached him immaculately dressed and surprised Max by addressing him in Yiddish. Because of his dress and the elegance of his manner, Max had mistaken him for an American. The Jews of Charleston were extraordinarily generous to the strange Jews who wandered into their midst and Henry Rittenberg called his friend Jacob Popowski, who had just lost a salesman in a territory that ran south to the Georgia border.

A week later, Max was walking out of Charleston laden down like a beast of burden with two packs.

For the first year, Max walked the lonesome highways and forests of the sparsely populated roads. He was an exotic, outlandish presence to these Southerners he visited unbidden as they plowed fields behind mules or tended their scrabbly poultry in grassless farmyards. At first his English was primal and comic and Max would spread his wares out for a housewife and let her finger the baubles and brushes he offered before her. “You like. You buy,” he said in his heavily accented voice that frightened some of the women, especially the black ones. But there was something about Max’s face that
many of the women along Highway 17 found reassuring. As his grasp of English improved and he became a familiar sight entering the range of vision of these hardworking and lonely people, the visits of Max Rusoff gradually came to be anticipated and even cherished. The children of the farms adored him from the very beginning. He always brought something in the pack that he gave to the children for free. A ribbon here, a piece of candy there.

On the road Max would exchange merchandise for a place to sleep in the barn and eggs for a meal. In fact, the housewives along his route began to call him “the egg man” because of his refusal to eat any food they prepared for him except for hard-boiled eggs. The hard-boiled egg was the only way he could nourish himself, yet still remain a pious and kosher Jew. He had cut his earlocks and shaved his beard when he saw how much he stood out among the other citizens and even the Jews of Charleston. But the business of becoming an American in the South would require more laxness than even Max had figured.

By the end of the first year, Max bought himself a horse and wagon and his operation got much larger, as did the scope of his ambition.

It was with this horse and wagon that he extended the range of his travels and in the second year he arrived at the small river town of Waterford and ventured farther into the sea islands that made their way into the Atlantic. In Waterford he drove his horse slowly through the streets of the town and took note of the kinds of stores the town had and the kinds it lacked. He questioned the townspeople who treated him in the courteous but offhanded way that Southerners have always regarded strangers. His accent caused some of them to laugh, but Max did not mind.

In his second year in South Carolina, Max was driving his wagon down the farthest road of St. Michael’s when he heard a man shouting at him across a narrow saltwater creek.

“Hey,” the man said, a young, strong-shouldered man with a pleasant, sunburned face. “Are you the Jew?”

“I am,” Max shouted back.

“Been hearing about you. I need some things,” he said, “but wait a few minutes so I can row over.”

“Be my guest,” Max said, proud of the American lingo he was daily adding to his vocabulary. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Max watched as the stranger rowed himself across the small creek in a wooden bateau.

The man got out and shook Max’s hand.

“My name is Max Rusoff.”

“And mine is Silas McCall. My wife is Ginny Penn and we’d like you to stay the night with us. We’ve never met a Jew, one of the people of the Book.”

“I won’t be much trouble,” Max smiled.

“Ginny Penn’s already boiled up a dozen eggs,” Silas said, helping with the horse. “You ought to start up a store and stay put,” Silas said. “Aren’t you tired of peddling door to door?”

“Yes,” said Max.

This was the way that Max Rusoff met his best friend in the New World and how the destiny of one Jewish family became intricately bound with a Christian one. The lines of fate operate with a dark knowledge all their own and their accidental encounter would change the lives of all around them. Both men knew much about solitude and had been waiting for the other’s appearance for their whole lives. In less than a year, Max had opened his first small store in Waterford and had brought Esther, daughter of Mottele, the Butcher, over to America to be his bride. Their wedding party was given by Silas and Ginny Penn McCall. Many of the best people in Waterford attended.

In 1968, Max and his wife Esther took a trip to Israel and in Yad Vashem, the memorial to the slain Jews of the Shoah, Max found the married name of Anna Singer among the slaughtered. She had been with the Jews of Kironittska who had been taken to a huge pit and machine-gunned by SS gunners. For an hour, Max stayed at Yad Vashem and wept over the impossibility and innocence of his love for Anna Singer. There was something about the purity of his love for that beautiful girl that represented the best part of himself. Though he was sixty-five years old then, he still felt like that sixteen-year-old boy struck dumb by the comeliness and charm of that pretty, flashing-eyed Jewish girl. He could not bear the thought of her kneeling in her nakedness and shame, of Anna dying
unpraised and unhonored and buried in an unmarked pit. He never told Esther that he had found Anna’s name. Max had a dream on the same night he read her name on the list of the dead.

In this dream, he saw Anna Singer and her husband and children rousted out of their homes by the Nazi beasts. He watched the fear on Anna’s face, the same fear he had briefly glimpsed on the night she had been ravished in her own home as her father lay dead in the courtyard. On her face, Max saw that Anna knew that she was about to die for the crime of being the chosen of God. Her hair looked like dark fire that ran down her shoulders. As she approached the pit, holding hands with her children, she walked between a jeering line of Nazi soldiers.

In this dream, Anna began suddenly to dance, but the dance was invisible to the soldiers and to the other doomed Jews around her. It took Max several numbed and bedazzled moments to realize that Anna Singer was dancing for him, acknowledging through memory and time that lonely, dishonored Jewish boy who had loved her from afar, but had loved her with a fury that burned brightly all the years of his life. She danced and the birds began to sing and the air smelled of mint and clover as the line of Jews kept being pushed forward to kneel a last time and die.

Suddenly, Max saw what had inspired the graceful dance of Anna Singer. On one side of the pit, there was a butcher shop on a narrow street of Kironittska and a strong sixteen-year-old butcher had come out to see what the commotion was all about. He came out muscled and shy into the sunlight. The young Max stopped when he saw Anna dancing and he bowed deeply and would have joined the dance but there was great work to do.

Before he began he looked at her and saw that Anna had transfigured herself into the girl who had once come into his shop with her mother. She knew that Max loved her, and being a girl with choices to make, this time she would make the correct choice. She shouted across the pit, yes, yes to Max, yes always to Max, my avenger, my protector, my love.

Max Rusoff went up to the two remorseless and cowardly Germans firing bullets into the helpless throng of women, children, and rabbis, and he cleaved their heads like the ribs of sheep with two
powerful blows. Then he went along the stiff line of Nazis and leaping in the sun and putting his cleaver through their brainpans, sinking as deep as the eyeballs, cut them down one by one as he made his slow, bloody way to his love. His strong arms were covered with the blood of Germans when he finally stood before her and bowed his head to her and offered a battalion of slain Nazis as her dowry.

Then the blood was gone and only sunlight remained and Anna kissed Max tenderly and invited Max to the dance at last. They waltzed toward the butcher shop and whatever life there is on the far side of time. In each other’s arms they danced toward the field of paradise where the stars shone like a love letter from a generous God.

Max awoke to machine gun fire and the sight of Anna Singer’s bullet-riddled body tumbling with her children into the pit.

When he returned to Waterford, Max went to the synagogue he had helped build with his own hands to say kaddish for Anna Singer.

In the American South, he prayed for her soul. By this time, the townspeople referred to him as “the Great Jew,” not for anything he had done in the universe, but for what they had seen him do in their town. When he traveled to Israel that first time, he went as mayor of Waterford.

I
spent the rest of the morning running errands for my mother. Dupree and I went back to Rusoff’s Department Store to buy her a new nightgown and makeup. We also bought her three wigs she could wear in the coming weeks when her hair would fall out due to the chemotherapy. We bought her the best wigs available in Waterford and Dupree wore one of them all the way back to the hospital as he told me about his days among mental patients at the state hospital. He worked well with manic depressives and had an inordinate empathy “for schizophrenics of all flavors” as he described it.

In the early afternoon, the nurse helped my mother get into the nightgown we had bought her and she was wearing one of the wigs when I came in for my daily ten-minute visit.

“The wig must’ve cost a fortune,” my mother said.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “But Dupree helped. He pitched in five bucks.”

“The gown’s lovely,” she said.

“Makes you look like a movie star.”

“Where’s John Hardin, Jack?” my mother said.

“I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

“Would you keep your eye peeled?” she asked me. “He can be a handful, that boy.”

“That’s what I hear,” I said.

“I called Leah today,” my mother said, surprising me.

“What did she say?”

“She invited me to Rome,” Lucy said. “I promised to visit her as soon as I am strong enough. I also invited her to come home for a long visit. I’d like her to be with me when the loggerheads come in to lay their eggs, from May to August.”

“The turtles’ll lay whether she’s home or not,” I said.

Lucy said, “I’m in charge of the program over on the Isle of Orion. We monitor the beach. Count the turtles. Make sure their eggs are unmolested.”

“Leah would love that. Look, a whole crowd wants to come in now. Grandpa’s out there. Everyone wants to see you, Mama. I’ll come back later. I have to leave on Sunday.”