The Pinch (27 page)

They found shelter on their wedding night in the Court Street Infirmary, where the mortally ill squirmed under mosquito netting like weevils trapped in spiderwebs. Their bridal banquet was brined cabbage ladled from a tin dinner pail by a nun. In the morning, turned out on account of their good health, they took up what they assumed would be temporary quarters in an abandoned tenement above a boarded-up saddlery on Smoky Row. (They would remain there, but for a brief excursion into the Underworld, for the remainder of their days.) It was in that apartment, in an iron bed vacant of corpses, with the tar barrels still smoldering beneath their window, that they finally consummated their marriage. That’s when Pinchas discovered, to the delight of his ardent bride, that he was the victim of a persistent satyriasis. It was a condition that left the couple unable thereafter to rid themselves of a bashful self-consciousness in each other’s company. (At least until, after the decades of their failure to conceive, Pinchas began to lose courage and heart.) Their heady pleasure in one another, plus whatever they managed to scrounge in their forsaken district, was nourishment enough during the period of their honeymoon.

Nor had Pinchas used up his fund of ingenuity in winning Katie, but was inspired to a further audacity in his desire to provide for her. When the first frost signaled the beginning of the end of the epidemic, he prevailed upon the Lowenstein brothers, whose wholesale dry goods business occupied an entire city block, to extend him a line of credit. Despite their distaste for the unwashed Ostjuden in general, the staid merchants were impressed by this one’s initiative and drive; and the immigrant came away with an inventory of railroad boots and brass-studded denim pants, silk ribbons, thimbles, combs, and almanacs. Equipped with two sixty-pound packs, strapped fore and aft to steady his balance, Pinchas staggered out to travel the Delta roads; though not before his wife, easily her husband’s equal in resourcefulness, had culled from his stock a selection of mourning goods: black-trimmed calling cards, black crepe. She placed these items in the unboarded window of their squatted building at prices low enough to lure a few hearty souls into the ravaged neighborhood. By progressively lightening her husband’s load before each of his forays, Katie built up the business over time to the point where it was no longer necessary for the toilworn Pinchas to go peddling anymore.

By then the city had once again begun to show vital signs. The din of steam compressors, train whistles, and trolley bells could be heard even from the blighted North Main Street. Cotton bales replaced the caskets stacked along the carious wooden sidewalks, which were themselves replaced with stone, and the stagnant channels of Catfish Bayou were transformed into covered culverts. The Negroes, who had been the city’s unsung guardians during the fever, were sent back to their prior squalor, and while people of quality never really returned to Memphis, the streets were made safe enough for decent folk to promenade. Meanwhile Katie’s clever husband had gotten wind of a legal provision called adverse possession: it seemed that, by paying taxes on a property whose owner had vanished, the squatter might assume the right to ownership himself. Moreover, the bankrupt city was happy to encourage the resettlement of an area it had essentially written off, just as the state had written off the city by repealing its municipal charter. Weaned from his dependence on the Lowensteins, Pinchas now purchased discounted goods straight from the factory warehouses. As proprietor of Pin’s General Merchandise—he’d dropped a syllable from his name to give it an American zing—the former peddler set about making improvements, knocking down clapboard walls to resurrect them in mortar and brick.

He was not alone in his effort to revive the neighborhood; others also arrived to take advantage of the rock-bottom real estate deals. One of the first was another itinerant peddler, who upon encountering Pinchas declared in Yiddish, “Tie me by all four limbs but put me among my own!” Sighing over the quaintness of these wandering Jews, Pinchas felt obliged to inform him that he himself was meshumed, an apostate, living in an unholy union with a gentile woman.

“So long as you got your health,” replied the peddler, Mose Dlugach by name, hardy and quite well fed for a traveling man. A little wary of welcoming competition, Pinchas warned him that the town was prone to frequent bouts of pestilence. Doffing his homburg to scratch his pate, the peddler had offered a humble solution: “If I will sell shrouds, then no one will die.”

He opened a secondhand shop at the corner of Winchester and North Main and sent for his family in Szeged as soon as he was able. More followed, dispersed after widespread pogroms in the wake of the czar’s assassination: a wife joined her husband, a brother his sister and brother-in-law, and so on, until the Pinch was reconstituted as an East European ghetto–style enclave in the heart of the South. Ultimately the neighborhood earned the seal of approval from the city fathers, who viewed their Hebrews as a solid mercantile class. This attitude endured despite the street’s eventual invasion by a gang of fanatical Hasids, whose riotous spiritual exercises resulted in a rending of the fabric of time.

Not long after North Main Street was paved and the bridge over the river completed, after an Otis hydraulic lift was installed in the Cotton Exchange and a Negro shot for accepting a job as a postal clerk, the merchant Pinchas Pin received a letter from a niece in the Old Country. It seemed that, during a peasant rampage in the village of Blod, his brother had been murdered, his body left to marinate in a barrel of kvass. His sister-in-law, having witnessed the atrocity, lost her wits and had since been confined to an asylum in Dubrovna, where she died soon after of disregard. What’s more, in an unrelated incident his brother’s son Muni, arrested for Bundist activities, had been deported after a yearlong imprisonment to a labor camp in the Siberian wastes. Pinchas didn’t know whether it was the news itself or the way the news underscored his utter estrangement from his family that disturbed him the most. In his agitation he was especially moved to learn that his nephew, whom he’d understood to be a pious yeshiva boy, had become a militant revolutionary. The nephew’s fate piqued his uncle’s conscience, aggravated as it already was by the compromise of his youthful ideals for the sake of a livelihood. While no special request was included in the communication—it simply stated that, as a surviving relation, he ought to be informed—still Pinchas believed he might be in a position to help the lad. He appealed to the North Main Street Improvement Committee, which in turn made the case to the congregation of the Market Square Synagogue, a place Pinchas seldom set foot in. Nevertheless, prayers were said and a collection taken up (if a bit sanctimoniously), and the funds, converted to rubles, were stitched by the tailor Bluestein into the lining of a cheviot topcoat.

In a cold katorga compound, below the entrance to a mica mine somewhere east of the town of Nerchinsk, Prisoner 71640 (conspiracy, fifteen years) received a parcel in the mail. This was unprecedented. A trustee had dropped the parcel in his lap in the mess hall, its postmark indecipherable, its contents fairly spilling out of the tattered brown paper. It contained some tins of currant jam, sliced pineapple, and sardines, all of which were promptly snatched up by covetous convicts. Under the cans, however, was a folded topcoat of some lightweight gunmetal material wholly unsuited to the glacial climate. Nevertheless, as no one bothered to confiscate it, and as it signified his persistence in the thoughts of someone beyond the Siberian immensity, the prisoner pulled it on over his worn quilted jacket. Another layer of insulation wouldn’t hurt. But in a week the coat had become a haven for lice; a sleeve, caught in the gears of the ore separator, was ripped to shreds and the tails burnt when he backed against a cast-iron stove. It made him look like a clown, the coat, though clownish was a countenance the prisoner found it convenient to exploit once the lining fell out.

In order to take a dump in the sulfurous latrine, you had first to tamp down the shit that protruded from the holes in the planks laid over an otherwise open trench. The shit was packed so hard and tight beneath you that it tickled your ass as you sat, and there was seldom any available wastepaper to wipe with. Still, such moments were among the few that afforded the convict any respite from the harsh routine. This was the prisoner’s situation as he sat with his pants around his patchy boots, idly meditating upon a loose thread at the hem of his topcoat. Intending to snap it off, he wound it around a finger and gave a tug; then the stuttering thread opened a seam from which fell, along with some cotton batting, a number of thin glassine envelopes. The envelopes, when he leaned over to inspect them, seemed to contain Russian currency in various denominations. The prisoner finished his business with an efficient grunt; then swiftly, before anyone else entered the jakes, he stooped to gather up the packets, stuffing them into his pockets along with a letter that was similarly wrapped.

It took his being sentenced to isolation for some trivial infraction of the rules before he found the privacy to read the letter and take stock of his fortune. The isolation cell was a miniature stone dungeon in which one could neither fully stand nor lie down, but its narrow grille admitted the light of a summer during which the night seemed never to fall. The sunlight illuminated a wall emblazoned with religious graffiti painted by inmates with powdered feldspar and beryl from the mine, so that the cell, despite its constriction, had the air of a shrine. By this brightness the prisoner was able to read the letter’s greeting, in its homey Yiddish script, from one Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America: “Honored Nephew, please find enclosed the means by you I’m sending to come …” But the body of the letter made no more sense to him than did its opening salutation. He read it again, until the language began to stir in his entrails the beginnings of what felt like a symphonic episode. The jarring music, however, communicated not one jot of meaning to his sluggish brain. Moreover, he ached in every joint and fiber from hunkering in such cramped quarters, and his fingers, stiff as claws from the years of wielding the shovel and pick, could barely count the rubles in their envelopes. Once more he read the letter: “… the means by you I’m sending …,” until it struck him that “you” was he, Prisoner 71640, né Muni Pinsker. Then the music, converted at length into words, woke up his fears from what he’d hoped was their perpetual slumber.

Escape? Who escaped? There was Shishkov the sharper, found frozen in a fetal attitude not half a kilometer from the camp; and the patricide Alyosha, who was torn apart by sled dogs in sight of the watchtower, his agony backlit by the setting sun. There was Osip Katzenelenbogen, a political, who made it as far as the bank of the swollen Lena, where he was caught and returned to the camp to run a gauntlet of his fellow convicts. Their anger was stoked by the starvation rations they’d received as a collective punishment during the time following the zhid’s attempted flight. In the end his already decalcified bones were shattered and Osip was left to drag his broken body between the barracks and the mineral sluice for the brief balance of his days. But the fact remained that Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America, had sent a parcel to his nephew Muni, a human being. Tahkeh, how could you tell?—when he was harnessed by day to a horse collar that rubbed blood blisters on his scrawny chest as he hauled a cartload of ore up a slanted shaft. He breathed air that was either so cold that it crackled like paper or scorched your sinuses with its reek of excrement and carbonic acid. He never cared whether he was eating bugs or pearl barley in the soup they called “shrapnel,” and his teeth were as loose in his gums as headstones in mud. His body was so inured to filth that scrubbing himself in the bathhouse drew blood. Once he’d helped a fellow hide a convict who’d dropped dead of heart failure, so they could share in the extra rations for the three days it took the putrefying corpse to betray them. But on the other hand, he was light-headedly surprised, this Muni Pinsker, to find himself still alive in another summer, when the snow had retreated far enough to reveal the arsenic green moss underneath.

Almost involuntarily he began to collect the tiny pots of salt from the log canteen, squirreling them away among the fir branches his mattress was stuffed with. Other items he secreted in that lumpy mattress were bought, no questions asked, with hard currency: the mess kit, the tinderbox, a wire noose for snaring game. With gradually increasing histrionics he started to demonstrate the symptoms of derangement that overtook the mine workers as a prelude to total collapse. He spoke aloud to himself in a nonsensical hybrid of Russian and Yiddish, and pretended to read fortunes in the globules of fat he scooped from his gruel on a good day. More than once, though he could barely stand at the end of the working day, he coaxed his toothpick legs into a kind of spontaneous scarecrow gavotte. No one paid him much attention, so accustomed were the other prisoners to the extravagant behavior of convicts on their way out; though Ilya Popov, former editor of the leftist
Proletarii
, himself stricken with silicosis, saw the method in Muni’s antics and slipped his fellow traveler a clamshell compass with a sundial before he died.

Then it was nearing autumn and the soft ground was hard again; the rivulets from the melted snows that had mired the transport sledges and made the taiga impassable were dried up. That’s when Muni swallowed all the salt he’d been hoarding. The insult to his system brought on a hectic fever that got him transferred to the infirmary, an aboveground facility outside the camp “zone.” Its wards—each guarded by a single sentry seated with a shotgun beside an iron stove—featured every species of real and imaginary affliction. No disease was quarantined: convicts suffering from typhoid lay next to those turned yolk-yellow from jaundice; pneumonia victims rattled their last beside imposters who worried superficial wounds into life-threatening infections. There was little actual treatment, few instruments, and no anesthesia for surgery, and small medication beyond the bottles of alcohol drunk up by the orderlies mustered from among the patients. Nor was there any barbed wire surrounding the infirmary grounds, since who, having gained a berth without shackles in the sick bay, would (even given the strength) want to leave?