No Country: A Novel (38 page)

I followed her across a meadow. The piglets pranced and circled about us as we walked down the sunlit slope. She gathered her mane of hair and, twisting it into a bun, headed toward a stone cottage. “Have you ever milked?” she asked over her shoulder.

“In our village,” I confessed, “but it was our goat. Nonna made cheese.”

“Nonna?”

“Grandmother,” I explained.

“My Grandpa Brendan lives with us. He’s old,” said Bibi, adding, “Our Belinda—she is our tetchiest cow—will kick you if you try to milk her as if she were a goat. And it would serve you right too,” she chortled. But before I could make a rejoinder, she had flung open the back door of the cottage and entered a large stone-flagged kitchen, cold and spartan. The only touch of color came from a few bottles of pickled beets and peppers in glass jars which
caught the light at the window ledge. Above these, from the wall, depended heavy copper-lined pans. The dark bulge of a substantial stove dominated a corner. I was startled to see a woman, almost invisible in black, her hair tinged with grey, sitting still at the table near it, next to the unlit and scoured fireplace.

She was unmistakably Bibi’s mother. She had been beautiful once, I thought, as I watched her sit, rigid and watchful. There was a cicatrice of severity that marked her forehead as she looked intently at her daughter, who had begun to speak excitedly. Disconcerted by the old woman’s expression, I had not paid attention to Bibi’s words.

“From Buenos Aires!” she concluded breathlessly.

“We need no hands,” the woman said sharply, not moving her eyes from my face.

“I do not stay then,
basta
!” I retorted, stung by her manner. But Bibi was determined to ignore her mother. “Oh Frankie, you’re just afraid of Belinda!” she teased, and I could not help but laugh.

“No,” broke in her mother, “we need no hands, as I told you.” She was standing now, her palm pressed hard against the table. I could see her work-reddened knuckles and feel the hostility in her scrubbed kitchen. I turned quickly to leave, but bumped into an old man who had just opened the door. His book fell to the floor, as did my rucksack, which lay open.

“Grandpapa Brendan,” Bibi remonstrated, “we’re short of milking hands, you said, but Ma won’t hear of Frankie’s working here.” I bent to retrieve the old man’s book with a murmur of apology, but as I did so, he picked up my treasured photograph from the floor: Pasquale and I under that painted studio sun. He peered intently into it, and then he looked up at me, his eyes direct and guileless as a child’s.

“He’s just come from South America. His name is Frankie. His folks are from Italy,” said Bibi, full of news, “like Amerigo Vespucci. And they have a goat.”

“Is your friend here too?” asked the old man, nodding at the photograph.

I shook my head, the loss suddenly touching me to the quick. “I lost Pasquale. On the high seas.”

The old man studied my face, then reached out and touched my sleeve. “I too lost a friend,” he whispered as we walked into the sunshine. Bibi followed us. The grey-haired woman stayed back in her kitchen as if she were guarding it.

“This picture,” murmured the old man.

“It was taken in Montevideo,” I explained, “in a studio.”

“I have no picture,” said Brendan, as if to himself.

“We do need more milking hands,” broke in Bibi. “He can learn.” I looked at Bibi in the dazzling green countryside.

“Tell us about Montevideo,” said Brendan. And I did, standing under the trees. I told them over many subsequent days about all my travels, of far places. Cádiz, Recife, Calcutta, Lisbon, Cartagena.

I could make sense of all my aimless travels now, for they had brought me here to this place, to Bibi, so that I could tell her about them.

I used to open my father’s books, turning their pages. One was a fat book bound in black; another was thinner, but neither had pictures. When I was nine, years ago, I was sitting during vacation under the slow summer sun with the fat volume, my eyes on the strange script like vertical figures, imagining what it would be like to be able to read them. I had momentarily closed my eyes, when I had the strange sensation that my father held the same page, and I was sitting next to him, my hand on the very surface he had just touched.

I heard someone coming out, and turned quickly. It was Grandpa Brendan, who saw me with the book, and sat next to me. “I had asked Jakob to teach me Hebrew,” he said, “but we got only as far as the alphabet. See, Bibi,” he said, turning the pages to the first page, “there is a name written on it.”

“That says Jakob Sztolberg, this writing?” I peered at the writing, its black coils seeping into gray on the old page.

“No, dear,” he said, “it spells out Ephraim Sztolberg. Your grandfather. And this is the Hebrew Bible.”

“Wait one moment, right there.” I rushed off, returning with the other book. “See, I can tell the writing on this book is different.”

“Yes it is, Bibi. This is a book of poems by Solomon Ibn Gabirol. And the name inscribed on the first leaf here is Jakob Sztolberg.”

I kissed his name. I felt Grandpapa Brendan’s palm on my hair.

“Jakob came from very far away, Bibi,” he said. I nodded.

“Very far away,” I repeated to myself.

•  •  •

E
VERYBODY FELL UNDER
Frankie’s spell, especially Grandpapa Brendan. His tales of far places shook me loose from the earth under my feet, and I wanted to become part of all his future stories. We had begun to go fishing at the lake, just the two of us, seldom catching anything, our kisses leading us deeper and deeper into our own secret wood. And I, romping Bibi of the northern farm who had heard dread talk of the first blood, marveled at those silly tales. After our lovemaking we would speak of the world we might travel, Travancore or Trinidad, Valparaiso or Bombay. Lying by our placid lakewater, I felt transported beyond the far seas.

“Why don’t we,” he said, “first go to see Jedwabne, Lemberg, and Odessa from where your father sailed?” I held him close. No one else could have thought this.

“Will you take me to Burlington first?”

Frankie laughed. “I shall do better. Let me make arrangements to visit New York.”

My mother watched me balefully when I returned, lips bruised with kisses, my aching body sated. I knew that battle lines were being drawn. Before she could open fire, I took the wind out of her sails by announcing that I was going to New York City for a
visit. She was so furious that, at a loss for words, she sat rigid at the kitchen table, clutching her hands together. I wanted no dinner that night.

•  •  •

T
HE TRAIN WAS
a swift planet, clacking and whooshing through the black night, rocking me. I dozed for a while and sat up in that somber hour when light cracks the day open, and the light turns pale as the underwing of a predatory owl, and through the window I saw the sky, still and hard as a forgotten bowl of milk left outside on a frozen morning. It was already the time when the dairy milk would be collected, and the farm astir within the barns. I laid my head on Frankie’s sleeping shoulder, burrowing my face into the curve of his neck, breathing him in, and fell momentarily asleep, a bird with its head in its feathers, on a branch that moved with the urge of the wind.

•  •  •

W
HEN
I
WOKE
in the tumult and came out clutching Frankie’s hand, dry-mouthed and wide-eyed, the ebbing crowd washed us through the channels of the platform into a vast hall. Above the marble floor on which the people surged, the roof was a sky of lights, and a huge clock ruled. Echoes moved round and round as in a vast milk churn.

I sensed the pulsing city all about me as we emerged on the street. I glanced back at the looming marble statues above the gateway. The gas streetlamps were still lit though it was light.
New York, New York
, I whispered, watching the welter of people and
horse-drawn cabs. Careful of the steamy dung on the streets, we walked east, to the river. Prows of moored ships leant over the riverside road that ran along the length of this island. We could see sailors on deck, hear their occasional shouts, the creak and clatter of numerous ropes and tools. A few gulls flapped overhead, and the sun bounced off the water from the east across the sparkling loop of a great bridge in the distance as wagons inclined over its arched surface to another island.

I struggled to keep my balance as I walked with my head tilted up, staring at the great heights of the buildings, their ornamented corniches and water towers that stood like huts on stilts. Cars coughed by, bumbling one after another, like gaggles of geese past newspaper vendors, chestnut sellers, peddlers with cigarettes and candy. We walked on until the streets got narrower, the houses huddled together. Men sat on the stoops and boys played stickball or ran up and down the block. Frankie led me by the hand to a corner of a leafy park at whose center stood a white arch. Paved paths merged upon it, and people were walking about, and children ran here and there. We sat down on one of the many benches, footsore but happy, gazing all around at the imposing buildings.

In a corner a vendor stooped over a shallow metal pan, roasting sweet potatoes, a blue wisp of smoke rising from a charcoal fire under it. I realized how hungry I was. The man’s face was brown and papery, like the skin of the sweet potatoes he sold. As if aroused from sleep, he swiftly withdrew two potatoes with one deft hand, and with a knife in the other, he sliced open the potatoes and insinuated a smear of butter, swaddling the smoking lumps in torn newsprint before handing them to us with the air of a man who had nothing to do with them. They were delicious.

“Where are we going? Do you know?”

Nodding his head, Frankie walked me through more crowded streets and soon arrived in a short block, lined with shops and houses, busy as anthills with people going up and down. While Frankie dashed into a store momentarily, I waited on the sidewalk. Peddlers went by calling out their wares while carts and wagons trundled past, and kids roistered in noisy groups.

Frankie led me up a stairwell, and I wondered where we were headed. Nobody paid us any attention. I could smell the cooking on each floor. Finally Frankie stopped and fished out a key which shone like a talisman.

“Who lives here, Frankie?” I whispered. No one was inside. In a corner stood a fine wooden wardrobe full of clothes and some women’s dresses. Beyond, it opened into another dim room without any windows but with a bed covered with a flowered sheet, everything clean, though worn with much use. On a coverlet, I found a child’s toy, a carved wooden horse. A framed print of some smoking mountain hung on one of the walls, on another a picture of Jesus holding his own golden heart which sent out a beam. One other room lay beyond it: the kitchen. At its center sat an enamel bathtub, glowing like a receptacle made for the finest cream. Above it glinted a tin ceiling, spangled with its private map of rust.

“My friend Giuseppe is away to Boston to visit his wife Nicolina’s folks. They had planned it for weeks. That’s when I got the idea to show you the city. When we leave, we’ll return the key to Mr. Lepore at his photographic studio,” said Frankie. I lay down, exhausted after the heady sights. The only light came from the smudged front window, in front of which I saw a rusty platform, a metal ladder extending above and below.

“What’s that?” I asked sleepily.

“That?” said Frankie, holding me. “That is a fire escape.”

•  •  •

“W
AKE UP, WAKE
up, Bibi!” Frankie was shaking me.

“What is it?” I asked, startled. “Is there a fire?”

“No,
cara
.” Frankie hurried about. “I almost forgot about the ships.”

“But we’ve seen the ships,” I reminded him.

“No, no, we must hurry, Bibi.” He was pulling on his shoes. “This is special. That’s why we chose this week.”

“I thought it was because Giuseppe and his family would be away.”

“Oh come on,” he said, tugging at my hand playfully.

In the sunny afternoon all the world had gathered on the narrow park at the bottom of the island which they called the Battery. Countless peddlers were selling colored balloons, crushed ice with gem-like syrups, steamed corn, and roasted peanuts. We passed a building with wide stairs, and marble statues in front. “The New York Customs House,” Frankie explained. We held hands, making our way through the merry crowd to the edge of the water. Then I saw the lady I knew well from her pictures, smaller, across this shining stretch of water, than I had expected. The afternoon sun etched her bronze against the sky as she stood with her torch on her island. I knew I would talk of this moment to my children in the years to come.

Frankie bought me something I’d never seen before: ice cream in a cone of crunchy wafer—which I ate with gusto, while he drank a bottle of sarsaparilla soda. And now the great ships sailed into view, covered with the most splendid flags, fluttering in the warm breeze. Frankie showed me the one from Italy, its tri-color flag flapping in the wind, and shouted loudly in Italian while everyone cheered, our voices part of a great chorus, with
people everywhere—at all the windows of the buildings, on the trees, even on the statues in the park, and all along the Hudson riverfront. What a city was this New York! Great hurrahs went up as each stately ship passed. Oh, Grandpapa Brendan would have known all the flags, and for the first time I wondered what kind of ship Mama had sailed on.

On the ships, brass bands blared, drums booming. Some ships—those from England, France, and Germany—set off their cannons to salute the crowds. The first ones startled everyone into a hush, but soon we got used to all of it: the music, the booming cannons, the clatter of drums, the waving flags as more ships hove royally into view.

Like a small black cloud my thought troubled me: Why was it that every ship from all the nations mounted their cannons, and none without armory? What if these boats turned their guns on each other rather than play their gay music? I whispered this to Frankie, who at first seemed startled by the thought. Then he broke into a laugh.