The Pinch (40 page)

At length, addressing him above the hermeneutical drone of the academy, Muni had asked his mate, “Yoysef, with all due respect, what are you doing here?”

Making as if to shuckel over a portion of scripture, Yoysef replied in a prayerful singsong, “I’m marking time till the revolution.” Then he indicated with his downy chin their neighbor Naftali Blinken, who he said was doing the same. “In the meantime he operates for the Jewish Workers’ Union an underground press. And Pesach Kvitko, him with his falling-down britches, he distributes pamphlets in the back alleys of the Bog when he’s not studying Russian at night. Wolf Kipnis over there is organizing already in the factories, and little Anshel Twersky, that’s tripping over his ritual fringes, belongs to the HaShomer Defense League and is preparing to make aliyah to Palestine …”

The litany continued until Muni was convinced that all his fellows were leading double lives; they merely used the yeshiva as a safe harbor while fomenting the overthrow of the established order. Muni Pinsker was perhaps the only authentic student in the school. Yoysef promised he would have his guts for tefillin if Muni breathed a word of what he’d been told.

The awareness of his solitary lot, however, only contributed to Muni’s sense of self-worth. It scarcely bothered him that, other than the exasperating dialogues with his study mate, he had such scant commerce with his own kind. Loneliness and even the chastity that stoked his pimples and an irritation below the belt—these were conditions that further dramatized the martyrdom to his studies, and could also be exploited to good advantage in fables and poems. (The current involved a wonder child who, following a recipe from Sefer Yetsirah, pours oil on water to consult with the sages of old.) Such was his hubris, in fact, that Muni believed his compositions had attained a level of accomplishment that demanded an audience. There were a number of Jewish presses in Minsk that published a variety of texts ranging from the fanatically religious to the outright blasphemous. But was his “work” really ready for a popular reception? After all, no eye but his own had ever viewed his productions. What he needed, Muni decided, was a reader he could trust, one who wouldn’t simply flatter his efforts. Presenting his poems to the implacable Chazon Ish would be like placing an offering before a waxwork; nor did any of the rabbi’s rigid assistants inspire confidence. Then Muni lit on the idea of showing his work to Yoysef Tsentsifer, who was as close to an intimate as he had in that dreary city. Yoysef would certainly have no qualms about giving him an honest appraisal.

Since Yoysef’s attendance at the yeshiva was intermittent at best, several days elapsed before Muni encountered him outside the synagogue’s recessed entrance. The Water Carriers’ shul, as if embarrassed by its hulking stone eminence, appeared to be sinking below the level of the streets. It squatted on the edge of the central market, whose square on that unusually sunny morning was rowdy with hucksters, brokers, and market wives. Pigeons warbled, geese honked in their cages; a Cossack in a crimson tunic, saber flashing at his hip, plied the crowds astride a velvet-flanked stallion.

“Pardon me,” Muni urbanely accosted his mate, “but would you mind taking a look at these?” He held out a nosegay of irregular pages.

Raising an inquisitive brow, Yoysef plucked a single leaf from the bunch, some of which fluttered free. Muni scrambled to retrieve them while assuring the other that he could read the work at his leisure, but Yoysef insisted on reading a few lines there and then. Having done so, he smiled a sidelong smile and returned the page to Muni. Then he took a stiff page of his own from inside his jerkin, unfolded it, and handed it to the poet. To himself Muni read:

The tag at the bottom of the printed broadside identified the lines as an excerpt from Bialik’s “City of Slaughter.” Muni’s heart was still thumping when he looked up questioningly from the verse.

“What’s the matter, Pinsker?” asked Yoysef. “You never heard from Kishinev?”

Of course he’d heard of Kishinev, and Gomel and Durashna; massacres of Jews were nothing new under the sun. They were acts of God, were they not, and little could be done to deter them. “There have always been pogroms,” Muni submitted, irked that his own verses had been so summarily dismissed. “They’re eternal as”—he felt suddenly compelled to say—“the Covenant.”

At that Yoysef laughed so heartily that he had to hang on to the bill of his cap. He made to turn away but, on second thought, hauled off and socked the young poet in the jaw.

Muni lay on the granite flags ogled by a fishwife or two, while a gust of wind disseminated the pages of his literary oeuvre. They wafted over cabbage bins and settled in baby carriages, one page plastering the face of a legless ikon artist until he scrunched it up in his fist. Not long after that Muni got word of a disturbance in his hometown of Blod. During Passover, fueled by the usual rumors of ritual murder and goaded by the police, the peasants had gone on a rampage. In a letter full of rhetorical flourishes composed by Reb Death’s Head himself, the student was informed that his parents and sisters had suffered tragically at the hands of the barbarians. Estranged as he was from his family, Muni borrowed a few rubles from the academy fund and traveled to his native province. The wretched huddle of wooden houses that comprised the shtetl looked as if they’d been picked up in a whirlwind then dropped in a heap on the barren ground. Citizens were bandaged like mummies, leaning on pokers and hobbling in splints. Once arrived, Muni discovered that his younger sister, Puah Lippe, had been defiled before the eyes of his mother, who’d lost her wits. His hapless father had been missing since the outbreak of the violence, but on the very eve of Muni’s return his body was found fermenting in a barrel of kvass.

It wasn’t until sometime after he’d returned to Minsk that Muni began to succumb to pangs of conscience. Hadn’t he been a fundamentally dutiful son? He had after all sat shivah for his father and helped facilitate his burial; he’d assisted his big sister, Zilpah, in installing his unstrung mother and her younger daughter in a Dubrovna asylum run by the Society for the Poor and Sick. But while he assured himself he’d done all in his power, that his responsibilities were faithfully discharged, Muni was unable to resume his studies with his former equanimity. He tried meditating on the words from
The Pomegranate of Ibn Zimri
: “The Torah is fulfilled only by one who offers his life for it”; instead he brooded over reports that a handful of Jews in Olevsk—teamsters, patch tailors, a glazier, a clerk—had taken up clubs to defend themselves, only to be shot by soldiers from the local garrison for attacking the attackers. He attempted a midrash on the occupations of the Messiah while He tarried in the Palace of the Bird’s Nest, but the exercise seemed frivolous to him now. He could hardly concentrate, and, improbable though it seemed, he missed his study mate, who’d been truant since his return. There were topics he would have liked to discuss with Yoysef.

Muni looked for him in the narrow streets where conversations among the laborers grew hushed whenever he passed by. He crossed an iron footbridge over the open sewer of the Svisloch River into the teeming Bitza District at dusk. Soot from the tanneries and sugar refineries blanketed the crooked passages in black snow; rank perfumes mingled with the odors of boiling noodles and pitch. Ladies with unspooled hair, wearing wrappers like draggled fog, beckoned from eroded doorways. University students, themselves on strike in sympathy with the conditions of the factory workers, loitered in the noisy courtyards and teahouses. It was among them that Muni eventually located Yoysef Tsentsifer, seated at a table in a seamy tavern—the first Muni had ever entered—along with both male and female comrades.

“Look at what the red heifer dragged in,” greeted Yoysef with his trademark mixture of antagonism and mirth. The pretty girl at his side yawned like a cat, then winked at the tense newcomer. “Nu, Reb Pinsker, what can we do for you?”

In the first instance Muni didn’t know; then he did. “You can tell me how to volunteer for the Jewish Labor Bund.”

A drunk in a shabby mackintosh stumbles from the audience into the sand-and-sawdust ring. The ringmaster, attired in white jodphurs and scarlet tailcoat, is announcing through his bullhorn the high-wire act of Mademoiselle La Funambula. He’s visibly disturbed by the intrusion of an inebriated member of the audience, who’s pantomiming his desire to perform. The crowd of nearly a thousand in the floating amphitheater is confused but entertained by the unscripted trespass. The ringmaster tries to shoo him away, but the drunk lingers on the margin, leaning against then grabbing hold of a guy wire attached to a platform high above the ring. As the ringmaster continues his spiel, the intuder swings onto the cable and manages by clumsy degrees to mount it, wobbling and lurching in a bungling attempt to maintain his balance. Alerted by the laughter of the audience, the ringmaster turns about and blows his whistle. A pair of burly roustabouts come running in to grab the drunk before he does himself an injury. They bob for his ankles, but kicking and squirming, the man evades his would-be captors and continues his lubberly progress beyond their reach. Ringmaster, roustabouts, and audience are helpless to do anything but watch the fool in his reckless ascent up the inclined cable. There’s a universal intake of breath as the man pitches frantically to and fro, losing items of his wardrobe—the mackintosh, the porkpie hat—in the process. Then somehow he’s managed to gain the platform some forty feet above the ring, where he sheds the rest of his garments and shakes out a head of crow-black hair to reveal the lithe form of La Funambula in spangled tights. The crowd goes wild.

She proceeds to cavort on the wire, returning to the platform for various props—a unicycle, a pair of stilts—while far beneath her two men and a gargantuan lady position themselves to spot her in case she falls. The three of them compete for the ideal placement, though no one pays them much attention, all eyes riveted on the girl prancing in the amber followspot.

She skipped rope, turned cartwheels, and somersaulted through a tasseled hoop. Children gawked and women covered their eyes, peeping through parted fingers; godly men expressed shock at the briefness of her costume, then surrendered to fantasies. Journalists penned tired bromides—“she’s more a creature of the air than the earth”—and cited the dramatic contrast between the grace of her aerial daring and the limp she exhibited as she plodded out of the ring. And it was true that, capering above the upturned faces, she was beyond the reach of memory and heartbreak, always just a giant circle away from a total liberation from the terrestrial sphere. But Jenny Bashrig had no wish to liberate herself. Like the poet that the sad clown had read aloud to her, she was less in love with the products of eternity than of time.

Not that the circus had much in common with ordinary time. Plying the river from Dubuque to New Orleans, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun weighed anchor at towns fixed to the regular calendar. But after a run of no more than three days in any designated port of call, the circus was launched again like the Flying Dutchman in a perpetual navigation of the Mississippi. The river flowed and the towns stood still along its banks, where time passed, while the river remained impervious to its passage. For Jenny, the equilibrist, this was a fine arrangement, the balance between rolling river and stationary shore, a state of affairs much more preferable than, say, a North Main Street stuck in its everlasting chronological rut. She’d become adept at observing the bluff reefs, falling chutes, and shoals, and could interpret what lay beneath dangerous dimples on the surface of the water as well as the roustabouts that doubled as deckhands. Her fondness for riding the river was rivaled only by her excitement on disembarking at the cities and towns, when the entire company, mounted on horses, elephants, velocipedes, and a thundering calliope, paraded through streets thronged with rubbernecking locals. She liked sampling the bazaars of places with names like Festus and Andalusia, places not always welcoming to circus folk. Over time her sea legs had become steadier than were her same halting limbs on dry land, and the wire was never so compliant as when she felt the slap and sway of the
Palace
in its watery berth.

Of course the great floating extravaganza had seen better days. The old packet boat that towed the barge and menagerie behind it was in a constant state of disrepair; its kingposts, hogchains, and stern wheel had been replaced so many times that the vessel could no longer qualify as the original
Yellow Wren.
(Defaced by weather or wags, the name painted across its bow now read
Yellow W en.
) While it still maintained a few showy staterooms for its principals, the
Yellow Wen
seemed to anticipate its own wreckage: the plush banquettes had long since given up their stuffing, the gingerbread trim broken off to feed the high-pressure engine when fuel ran low. The ancient boiler pulsed like a dilated heart; pistons sputtered and would have come to a shuddering halt were it not for the occasional nudge from a passing bum boat. The grand saloon was converted to a mess hall, where performers practiced their juggling and the less carnivorous beasts—the ones not confined to the trailing menagerie scow—roamed free. Excluding the bedlam, however, when viewed from a levee at night, the moonlit Carnival of Fun in its musical progress constituted a siren-like tableau, luring small-town boys to swim out after it and sometimes drown.