City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (19 page)

They pulled out of the tunnel, the other passengers laughing and pointing at them, but to her surprise she found she didn’t care at all. She turned her head away, smiling, staring dreamily down at the matrix of toy trains below her, whizzing in and out of their snowy little tunnels and caves.

In the Streets of Cairo, men in turbans and caftans led their camels and elephants along the midway. A raven-haired woman undulated before a plaster mosque—its dome chipping sky-blue paint.

“The warmest spectacle on earth! See her dance the Hootchy-Kootchy! The
danse du ventre—
if ya know whatta mean!”

She danced out on the boards in stars and bangles: one forelock slicked down in the shape of a crescent moon, eyes painted into mysterious slits above her veil, a paste sapphire mounted in her navel. Her bare, rounded belly wriggled like nothing Esther had ever seen, suggesting whole new worlds.

“Any
where else but in the ocean breezes of Coney Island she would be consumed by her own fire!”

She jiggled and shook slowly around, back toward the sky-blue mosque. A small knot of men, grinning sheepishly, shambled after her into the plaster mosque.

Later, when it got dark, he took her dancing out at the end of the Old Iron Pier. They shuffled slowly around, listening to the waves below them and singing along softly with the old favorites:

She had him request “After the Ball Is Over,” which you could barely go a quarter of an hour at Coney without hearing, but none of the other dancers seemed to mind:

It was late, and everyone was tired. The dancers slumped around the floor together, smelling each other’s rank, pleasurable scents of salt water, and sun, and fried food—

It was late by the time he walked her to the train station. The fireworks were already going off, the last trains pulling out.

“Stay with me,” he told her—meaning it this time, really trying to convince her this time.

“No. I got work.”

She looked up at him and smiled, to show him how much she wanted to stay.

“My little dove. Stay.”

“No.”

He helped her push through the crowds to her train. On board, everyone was exhausted, the children already asleep in their mothers’ laps. She threaded her way into the car, and stood looking back at him through the open door.

“My sweet. My little crown.”

“No—”

The warning bell sounded—and he stepped across the threshold, into the train. Her eyes widened, not sure of what he could be doing.

No one else noticed. Everyone was dozing, or standing stupidly, clutching onto the handrails. No one else cared—but he held her in his arms by the door, as if they were married. Both of them staring at themselves in the darkened windows as they sped back through the ash pits and the coal yards.

They moved up through the sleeping neighborhoods of Park Slope, and Boerum Hill, and over the bridge into Manhattan, the train stopping more frequently now. Everyone exhausted, everyone too tired even to make any noise, the dozing families somehow intuiting when it was their stop, trudging off the train. Half the car cleared off when they reached Delancey and it was her stop, too, but she didn’t budge.

She stayed by the door with him, holding him. They could have had a seat now, but they stayed by the door, holding each other and looking gravely back at their own reflections. Soon the car was all but empty, just two or three single men who had missed their stops snoozing in the corners. They rushed up along the elevated tracks, tenements and new, block-long apartment houses sweeping by. So close they could peer right into their windows and homes and lives—men and women reading or eating, comforting babies or making love, or just sitting under a dim light, having a smoke.

They sped uptown, all the flickering, inscrutable little dramas running together, and he held his arms around her waist and began to kiss her. He kissed her neck, as he had on the Steeplechase, and she leaned her head back, and kissed him full on the mouth, and held her arms around his head. She broke it off, then kissed him again for a long time, and leaned back against him—both of them staring out the window at all the houses going by, the men and women leaning on their windowsills in the hot, still night, staring dully back at the train rushing past them.

When the train would go no farther they rode back to her stop, and then he walked her back home. At the end of her block she pulled away from him, but he held on to her hand—toward what end he did not know. They stood mutely at arm’s length for a moment—then he released her, into the dark of Orchard Street, watching her go through the smears of street-light.

He walked back toward the elevated in the sweaty post-midnight, along streets that were far from deserted. It had always amazed him the most about New York—how many people there were still up, and out, well after midnight. Whores and peddlers, a few working women of a different trade, trailing back from factory shifts, the exhaustion overcoming the fear on their faces.

But mostly it was men—men of all sorts and shapes, but the same furtive demeanor. They hurried past him on the street—trying to seem bold and confident, trying to straighten their weaving drunk walks. Heads buried in their jackets and collars, straws and bowlers pulled down tight over their heads, looking straight ahead.

What was he doing here among them? It was madness for him to come back to the City, Kid knew. Any one of the wraithlike figures scuttling up the elevated stairs could be a snitch or an assassin, happy to get in good with Gyp by putting the finger on him—or worse.

What was he doing?
Why hadn’t he got out already—and all the way out, not just to the whore’s hotel where that crazy little dwarf had stashed him? He had a little money—why wasn’t he already on a New Orleans steamer, or a Pullman car to St. Louis? Somewhere, anywhere, he had a good chance of staying out of the eye of Gyp the Blood forever?

Was it the girl? But there had been girls before, albeit mostly mabs and goohs, and lonely green factory girls, just off the boat. This one was different—but was she worth his life?

He was not unaware of the bigger question, too:
why had he done it in the first place?
Why in the world should it have mattered to him what Gyp the Blood did? What was it his place, to run around saving people?

That was not what he had come here for, he told himself, as he boarded the train for the long trip back to Brooklyn and Coney Island and the Elephant’s Arse. That was not what he was doing here, in New York—not why he had come all that way. Though what he
was
doing, he did not know anymore.

He shaved his face the day they buried his father. As soon as he came back from the funeral, with its straggling line of mourners, he pulled out the slab of mottled glass, and the straight razor he had bought from the goy in Kovno. First he cut the coarse, tangled hair of his beard, already graying, with a knife. Then he splashed his face with a little water, and went to work on the remaining nub.

What a massacre it was. His poor skin had never been shaved. Neither had anyone else’s in all of Old Zagare, or even New Zagare, where they were all sinners. Except when the Cossacks had come, and held them down and shaved them off with a cavalry saber, and most of those had not survived very much longer.

He wiped his cheeks and chin with a rag, and looked into the glass again. A pale, serious face stared back, suddenly youthful. His large, jagged nose and dark hollowed eyes loomed large, and innocent, and ungainly.

He placed the glass and the razor in the meager pack he had prepared, along with a picture he had of his father and another of his mother, from their wedding day and, for reasons he did not quite understand, one that an itinerant photographer had taken of Old Zagare itself: a ridiculous picture, really, featuring the wagon-rutted roads at the height of its spring mud season, the bare trees and huts, a pathetic fence trailing off to nothing.

He stuffed it in his pack anyway, and slung the bundle over his shoulder. No more than these possessions: the photographs, his father’s Bible with the family tree written in the first pages, a couple of rolls, the few vegetables that had come up this year. He slapped a worker’s cap on his head, bought at Kovno the same day he got the razor, and set out—not bothering to so much as close the door or even look back at the two-room log cabin, covered with mud and straw.

He walked out through the rest of Old Zagare, past the synagogue and the school, the slaughterhouse and the
mikvah,
and the long line of
luftmenschen
waiting patiently outside the almshouse for their daily soup and bread. He walked right down the center of the main dirt road, its mud already whipped to clouds of dust by the first winds of the summer, smelling the herring and potatoes from the midday meal.

He walked through the cemetery, where he had just been that morning, past the freshly turned earth of his father’s grave. There the schoolboys from New Zagare liked to come and hide themselves behind the gravestones, hoping to glimpse the corpses from Old Zagare their parents told them about. He laughed to see them stare and run off when they saw him, knowing he was a greater shock than any hundred-year-dead rabbi risen from the dead.

He crossed over the bridge into New Zagare itself—its own collection of log and mud and straw huts, with its own
shoichetin
and
mikvah;
its own schools and synagogues and town hail and
luftmenschen,
all bitterly opposed to anything having to do with Old Zagare. He was through it in minutes, a meaningless speck in the middle of nowhere, and he paused only for a moment to look back at the twin villages where he had lived his whole life, before walking into the enveloping dust of the open road:

Oh, that I should only bury you all in one day!

He kept walking. He walked until he was too tired to walk anymore, and then he lay down and slept by the side of the road and when he woke up, he started walking again. He walked for weeks and months, he walked until he had no idea how long he had been walking—until he had walked out of the flat, treeless land, stretching out to the horizon.

He walked west, always west, albeit getting lost time and time again, drifting north and south. When the few vegetables and rolls he had brought were exhausted, he lived by his wits. He begged work where he could get it, cadged food from the carts in town markets, ate with strangers on the road. Sometimes he got a lift in a wagon for a few miles, a ride on the back of some peddler’s donkey—but almost always, he walked.

He walked through all the double eagles emblazoned on the border gates. The splendidly uniformed border guards, Habsburg or Hohenzollern, caressing their moustaches with immaculate yellow gloves while they pored over his papers:
JOSEF KOLYIKA
—his old face, now barely remembered by himself, creased and stained and covered with more eagle stamps. Invariably, they refused to let him cross over, whatever the border. They weren’t sure what new subterfuge this was—a man who shaved his beard to reveal his face!—but they didn’t trust it.

He began to stay away from the border posts, feeling his way at night down the ambiguous edge of empire—looking for a place to cross over. He was spat upon in some estaminet of Warsaw, beaten by the police in Budapest, set upon by gypsies in Prague.

Still, he kept walking. He came at last to a great and leisurely city, emerging slowly from a pleasant woods, opening up to him in ever wider streets and boulevards. The avenues were full of students in uniforms; fat, contented people in good coats; thick clouds of dust rising from the soft, red paving blocks.

He staggered among them in his heavy, ill-shapen clothing, gawking at the palaces and mansions. He was somewhere German, he knew, by the harsh, guttural language. The windows groaning with meats and breads and fantastic pastries; the endless file of statues standing stonily along the main boulevard. The streams of pedestrians opened and closed around him like he was some derelict tree trunk in their course, their faces filled with distaste.

Of course, he could not be allowed to remain out in public, looking like he was. The police removed him from the streets as quickly and efficiently as the municipal sanitation service snatched up any droppings from the carriage horses. They marched him to a station house, ran him through a booking—but his papers were so pawed by then they had finally become illegible. In the little German he had, he told them he was from Ruthenia—a province so geographically and intellectually removed from the capital that its very existence had never been confirmed.

They were suspicious, but it was clear he wasn’t an anarchist, or some assassin snuck in from the Balkans. They dropped him off at a flophouse around the corner, gave him a coin for a meal and a night’s lodging. That evening he sat at the big communal table in the kitchen, gratefully wolfing down the bowl of hot potato soup and bread.

It was a clean, well-lighted place, run with Germanic tidiness—more a dormitory for transients than a true flop-house. Beside him at table were men speaking in all the dialects of the immense, ramshackle empire. On his right was a man with wild, dark eyes and a short sweep of hair, dressed like a street artist and obviously a lunatic. He tried to speak to him kindly at first, but when the man discovered he was from the East he turned away abruptly, declaiming something about the Jews at the top of his voice.