Dog Tags (4 page)

Beside Pinsky he saw 57359, skin and bones, for a second only, but how real! Benny blinked, perturbed, as he and Pinsky embraced. Pinsky, merely a lifelong friend, sobbed once. “You're not hurt.”

“I'm all right.”

“Thank God. You've filled out on that trash they feed you. Beans. Pork.” Pinsky shuddered like an aspic.

“I'm big and hard.”

“Strong as ever?”

“Stronger.”

“That's pretty strong. How goes it, Jake?”

“Benny's back. How could it go?”

Pinsky's wide eyes gleamed; he giggled and jiggled. “Benny. Have a pickle.”

Benny walked forward, tall and broad among the smaller ancients; Benny immense, alien. He swiped a plate from Pinsky's counter and followed his memory, and then his nose, to the pickle barrel, the pickle barrel of myth, eternal and self-replenishing; on impulse he poured a handful of brine to the sawdusted floor: Thanks again, thou who art not. If God preferred gherkins? On such flaws and lapses empires fell. He fished with wooden tongs and landed a whopper. He knew then that he would never die, and bore it off in triumph. Jacob was seated, Pinsky hovered. “Anything you want, Benny. Name it. What you can't get at Fort Mammoth.”

They ordered. Benny wanted one of everything. “There's Kantrowitz,” Jacob said. Waves, gestures, smiles. On each checkered cloth stood a jar of mustard, a family of small condiments, a cruet of vinegar. No sugar. Sugar upon request. Small pools of sound shimmered and spouted, babbling and cascading from table to table, wool, Roosevelt, Auschwitz, peg pants? from my shop? California weight. Pinsky, this is honey? Real honey, fum bees? A genius, Pinsky, a genius. “Aha,” Jacob crowed. “Karp, Karp, Karp. Sit.” Benny reached up to shake hands with Louis Karp, a small man, bald and skinny, who could be inconspicuous in a purple rayon suit. He glowed. “Benny, Benny. You're all right?” All right. “Home for good?”

“For good. Hello, Mister Karp. You look good.”

“Don't ask,” Karp groaned. “I know things got to get worse before they get better. But
always
?”

“That's Trotsky,” Jacob gloated.

Karp shrugged: “If the shoe pinch, fix it.” He cocked his head. “Benny. You'll need clothes.” Karp was ffolliott Suitings. He sat down and sniffed at the mustard. “Fresh.”

Jacob exhaled a classic raspberry. “Clothes he gets from me. From you overalls.”

Karp chuckled. “With your Italian buttonholes. You'll make him a balloon suit?”

Jacob smiled at Benny and tapped himself on the temple.

“What's a balloon suit?” Benny asked.

“You wouldn't believe it,” Jacob said. “Wide legs and sleeves, and the cuffs tight. You never saw such nonsense.”

“No thanks.”

Pinsky arrived, laden, followed by Leon, also laden, and they heaped the table with herring, sturgeon, whitefish, gefilte fish, rye bread and horseradish. With cole slaw and beer. With anchovies and sardines. With carrots and parsley. “Enough,” Jacob said. “Where's the wedding?”

Pinsky sucked thoughtfully at his green thumb. “Okay, Benny? To start?”

Okay, Benny nodded, dewy-eyed; his voice failed him. Pinsky saw his distress and was charmed. He and Leon retired discreetly, professionally.

The three began in silence, a sense of ceremony strong; they raised forkfuls of fish in silent salute; the horseradish was passed, sniffed, assayed with solemnity. With the salt fish Benny swigged beer; Leon brought more and said, for the thousandth time, “Sweets to the sweet.” For the thousandth time Jacob acknowledged the witticism with a dry, weary, patrician smile. Leon was a refugee, a Hungarian, and could be ponderous in seven languages.

“So what will you do now?” On Karp's chin, flotsam.

“Leave him alone,” Jacob said. “He's just off the boat.”

Karp spelunked thoughtfully in the left nostril. “He should decide now. They'll come home thick and fast and furious, and he should do something on the ground floor.”

Jacob grunted. “Pay no attention.”

“I've thought about it,” Benny said. “I had all that time in the hospital.”

“And?” Jacob looked sly. “You'll be a ball player, maybe. With that build. A catcher.”

Karp moaned. “Or the strong man with dumbbells in the circus.”

“So what should he be with those muscles?” Jacob said. “A lawyer?”

“Could do worse,” Karp said. “Look at Brandeis.”

“I'm looking,” Jacob said. “The only thing this country has too much of is lawyers. In ten years they'll be shlepping into the ocean like lemons.”

The pickle was perfection; Benny bit into it with wonder, with the glorious resignation of one who knows that he will never be poor, or sick, that he has been singled out for a long and untroubled life. The Solomon of pickles. What'll you do first when you get home? they had asked, and the immediate, obligatory obscenity hooted down, they had, true Americans, shifted to mom's apple pie, popcorn, sundaes. Benny's destiny was a sour pickle.

“He'll make up his mind when he's ready. First he'll sleep, and read the funnies.”

“They're not so funny.” Karp stood up, wincing.

“Where you going now?”

“The men's room,” Karp groaned, a man afflicted, secret stones and spasms. “The Wandering Jew was looking for a men's room.” He trudged off.

“A nice man,” Jacob said. “The union goons beat him once.”

“I know.” Benny and Jacob disagreed politely on unions. “How's his wife?”

“Fine, fine. All day she plays mah-jongg. Well. You made it. For once we swindled the angel of death.”

“I ran into him once.” Benny saw 57359 hunched in Pinsky's, munching on halvah. Jacob grew grave and respectful; Benny laughed. “Don't be silly, now. The worst time was in the hospital.”

“You had pain?” Again that tone, eternal: there is no life without pain. Pain is the one sure sign.

“No. The bedpan. I was in plaster.”

“Undignified.” They were both thinking of Hannah, bald and raving. “Well, you're home.”

“I'm home.” Benny hesitated. “I think I want to be a doctor.”

“Benny!” Jacob leaned toward him, fork upraised. “Benny! A doctor! Of course!”

Benny dug him in the ribs and said, “It's those nurses, sport.”

Some nights they talked, and some nights Benny roamed the streets. Days were lazy; princeling, he rose late, ate well, perused reports from city and province, and proceeded by easy stages to the Polo Grounds for the vaudeville of war-torn baseball. Or walked to Wall Street, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to Central Park. His leg grew firm, his limp vanished. Scars faded. Old friends were long gone but he found a girl, black-haired, pouting, and stoked her every few days with steak, movies and rye whiskey, in return for which she consented to further stokings. She wanted to be a singer. Benny approved. Her voice was indifferent but her figure was good. “I'd like to learn Latin,” she said, and Benny jumped a foot. “What for?” “So I can sing Latin-American songs.” Benny told Jacob, who was reproachful: “No need to tell your father tall stories, in an age of monstrosities.” Benny said, “When did I ever lie to you?” Jacob said, “You're serious. You mean this.” Benny nodded and Jacob grinned in unholy triumph: “Shiksas.” But Benny loved her; what else could he call it? The warmth that suffused him as he invaded her was the heat of prehistoric swamps, of ancient suns, of the primeval soup. “Don't move,” she whispered. “Let's don't move for as long as we can,” and for many minutes they simmered at the edge of madness, of the vast hot nothing, and slipped in and out of deep dreams and steaming landscapes; they quit time. Then she moved, or he, and they strained and burst and traveled the universe; and she liked him, and he liked her.

A hot night in early August; father and son paused for orange crush. Jacob wore a blue sports shirt, Benny a Vassar T-shirt acquired by swap. They stood at the stand. “We'll stand at the stand and drink our drink,” Jacob said, and while they drank a rumor limped toward them. They sensed event. Cars stopped. Windows opened. Shouts flew. The vendor asked, “What's up?” Benny said, “I don't know. A fire?” The vendor said, “Let me see on the radio.”

And so Benny heard of Hiroshima. Amid rejoicing he stood with Jacob. “A whole city,” Jacob said. “What's this atomic bomb? Do you know?”

“I have an idea. A thousand tons of ordinary bombs, the man said. Einstein had something to do with it.”

“That's all right then,” Jacob said.

“It changes things.”

“For the worse?”

“All change is for the worse,” Benny said, and they laughed.

“Then the war is over.”

“It must be.”

“Life begins again.”

“Life begins again.”

Benny's singer thought it was marvelous and served them right. “Look what they did to the Jews,” she said. When her husband was discharged Benny stopped seeing her. By then he was a senior at City College. He and Jacob supped off brisket and horseradish; winter winds beat at their walls and they sighed and shivered intellectually, morally, staring out at the cold lights of the capital of the world. “I was twelve,” Jacob said, “and not big, naturally, even shorter than now and ninety pounds. They gave me letters for Uncle this and Uncle that, and I crossed from Russian Poland into Germany—a refuge then, you understand, a place of light and freedom—and took a boat to London. I ate like a pig, like a real pig, paying no attention to kosher. In London I delivered the letters and found that I was a courier for the socialist Bund. A labor hero at twelve. You see why I hated the goons. If the Russians had searched me I would now be sewing buttons on flies in Verkhoyansk.”

And the war, always the war, echoes, memories. On a rainy night Benny said, “We swarmed from the hollow ships and pitched our tents on the shore of the wine-dark sea. Eisenhower king of men led us, and the wily Montgomery bided his time on the flank.”

“Now what's all that? Some other landing.”

“Some other landing. It wasn't bad where I was. It was worse later. Mostly dull. Except at the end. Whose plane was it? Where is that little fellow?”

“He saved your life, maybe.”

“And got me shot up, maybe.”

“You should write to UNRRA,” Jacob said firmly.

“Yes. Or maybe no. Maybe we all go our own way, and don't look back.”

“Maybe you saved his life,” Jacob said. “I happen to know that according to the Chinese that makes you responsible for him.”

Benny brooded. “I'll write. Needle in a haystack.”

“You know his number. I'll find out, is there a newspaper for the camps, like want ads. Messages. Isaac knows these things. A fund-raiser.”

“What a family,” Benny said. “Everything but a black sheep.”

“We're counting on you. What do they call it? A rake. Benny the rake.”

“I'll do what I can,” Benny said. “You're a pretty immoral patriarch, old Jacob.”

“From wrestling with the angel,” Jacob explained. “The angel won on a foul, so why should I be moral?”

“Impossible. Blasphemy.”

Jacob snorted. “‘Touched the hollow of his thigh.'”

“A fine thing,” Benny said.

“They were rough in the old days. Elijah. Killing a hundred men just to show what a big shot. And the wives? the children?”

“I wonder what it adds up to,” Benny said. “I bet you everybody killed in the whole Bible was about ten percent of the last five years.”

“Progress. That's called progress. The worst is yet to come.”

“Always,” Benny said. “Some of these generals want to bomb the Russians. The poor god damn Russians.”

“Generals!” Jacob said. “Old Mendel—you know, overcoats—
he
wants to bomb the Russians. Overcoats!”

Another night Benny fiddled while Jacob beat time with a disproportionate cigar. From a gypsy nothing Benny modulated to the sweet German dance from the B-flat quartet, and Jacob sang a sigh; the cigar rested. To this he did not whistle. Jacob whistled often but in the tuneless tradition of Russian opera, and could not believe that his melodies were unidentifiable. He loved music blindly, and deafly, honoring his own nine-tone scale so that he believed, for example, in the existence of a French composer called Jackie Bear; that anything whatsoever in three-four time was a waltz (what else could a German dance be?); that Benny was a great fiddler; and that he himself had perfect pitch. It was all heredity. “A,” he would say as Benny tuned up. “That's an A.”

Another night Benny said, “It was a mistake to let me see her. You should have said ‘Mommy's gone to heaven,' or even Miami, and won't be back. You wanted too much truth.”

“What's too much truth?”

“Too much truth is asking a ten-year-old boy to share tragedy.” Benny cocked a cold corona. “I should have been allowed to remember her as someone, or something, warm and soft, all food and drink and love. Not bald and delirious, not that dead-white color and arms like a sparrow. Aaah.” He looked away, groped for matches.

“Yes,” Jacob said. “Me too. She was so pretty when I met her, the pawnbroker's daughter. In those days a pawnbroker was a great man—possessions, money, jewels, even a metal safe. She was what I always thought women must have been like centuries ago, in the golden days. A big woman,” Jacob's eyes were moist and Benny fussed with his cigar, “saftig, smelled of bread, uncomfortable even at the movies. She loved home. The opera too, but she fidgeted, looked around waiting for a uniformed guard to march her off. In a fur coat she was an impostor.”

“I remember the time she lost a ring. It was the first time my feelings were hurt.”

“You? Why you?”

“She asked if I'd taken it.”

“She wasn't calling you a thief.”