The Puzzle King (2 page)

At night, he slept on one of the wooden bunks lined up two in a row with no mattresses, with whatever blanket he could find. Simon would be so wedged in between the other unwashed bodies that at least once a night a meaty arm fell on his chest or someone rolled over on top of him and all but smothered him. The cries and moans of the others were so palpable sometimes he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t his own. When he thought no one was looking, he would reach into his valise and pull out his mother’s apron. It was the kind that ties around the waist, and it had blue and gray roses and a white ruffle around the bottom and hip pocket. His mother had worn that apron every day, and he could imagine her wiping her hands on it after cutting up a chicken or quartering an apple. He would bury his head in the apron and retrieve its history of cinnamon and onions. Breathing deeply, he could also smell yeast and paprika. For those few seconds, he was back in his mother’s kitchen in Vilna.

His mother was right about the notebook. During the dreary days on the boat, he filled both sides of every page with colorful drawings of his fellow passengers. He’d focus on a few characters at a time and make up stories about them. The Fatso family slept near him, and although all they ate was the rancid food and watery soup that everyone else ate, they seemed to get bigger and bigger as the days went on. He sketched them all as roly-poly
characters who gobbled up chairs and whole lambs and anything else in sight. “They made farts that smelled of gefilte fish,” he wrote under one picture. Under another: “My stomach’s going to explode.”

He thought he would make some drawings of the Screamers, a man and woman and their dimple-cheeked daughter, who was about six or seven. He recognized the Screamers from Vilna, where they had brought his mother clothes for mending. Little Rita hadn’t stopped sobbing since the moment they had boarded the ship; at night, her cries were commanding enough to cause the thin planks of wood to vibrate beneath him. In the daytime when she howled, he could see her eyes, wide and fear filled. Her mother would yell at her father to make the girl stop, and the father would shout terrible things back: “I am pulling out my hair. If this child doesn’t shut up, someone will go overboard: her or me or all of us.”

One morning, Simon came upon the wailing Rita. She was sitting at the edge of a crowded bench and looked as if she might fall off at any moment. He drew a picture of her with a happy face instead of a teary pouting one. In his version, she wasn’t sitting on a bench but was nestled in the limb of a tree on a sun-filled day in front of a pretty house with flowers all around it. And her dress wasn’t the soiled white frock she wore every day—it was pink and clean. She had a big purple bow in her hair, just like the one his sister wore the morning he went away. He tore the sketch from his notebook and handed it to her. Rita stared at the picture with disbelief then looked up at Simon. “It’s you,” he said.

That night, before she went to sleep, he gave her something else. He’d made a drawing of her with her mother and father, and once again he saw it through his prism of sunny days and
pretty houses. Only this time, he carefully tore the picture into odd random shapes and wrapped them up in another sheet of paper. “It’s a puzzle,” he told her. “Try to put it together.” Rita and her mother and father pieced together Simon’s gift, and that night she slept quietly.

After that, Rita rarely left Simon’s side. She came with him when he snuck upstairs to where the first-class passengers were taking their morning coffee on deck. They eavesdropped on their conversations, and, for both, it was the first time they heard English spoken. Their movements, it seemed to Simon, were rigid, and when they spoke, they’d move their heads mechanically from side to side in a way that struck him as funny. That’s where he came up with the character Mr. Machine, whom he drew at stiff right angles. It was Rita’s idea to have his head shaped like an upside-down pot. They’d have Mr. Machine grinning a toothy cartoon smile and saying things like “Please tanks you” and “Mine name es Walthur.”

Sometimes they’d creep into the bowels of the ship and watch one of the ship’s stokers, a small man with shiny balloonlike muscles. He became the inspiration for Strongman, a character with no neck and throbbing biceps, which Rita insisted that Simon emphasize by drawing wavy lines around them. Strongman would pick up first-class passengers and dump them into the ocean. One of his victims was a skinny woman with pointy features carrying under her arm a tiny dog with the same angular features. As Strongman hoists them into the choppy waves, the two of them are screaming, “Yap yap yap!” and wagging their tongues. Another Strongman victim was a young boy flying through the air, his shirttails flapping around his ears and a wurst shoved down the front of his pants.

The water in the pictures varied. It was blue or greenish or calm or stormy. Sometimes the characters in the background were vomiting. On this boat, time melted into a perpetual gray twilight wrapped around the rhythm of the water and the intervals between seasickness. Only Simon, the Fatso family, Strongman, Mr. Machine, and Rita lived in a world of pastels. On their last day at sea, Simon gave Rita a farewell present he had made for her. It was a series of consecutive drawings stacked one on top of the other and tied together with a piece of string from his own luggage. He showed her how, if she flipped the pictures quickly with her thumb, she could see his happy version of Rita in her pink-and-white dress with the purple bow in her hair jumping up and down with the word “America” coming from her lips. On the last page, in the bottom right-hand corner, he printed his name.

A
S THE SHIP
pulled into New York Harbor, Simon’s colors became muted and his images more specific and less buoyant. He drew the ship’s bow cutting a
V
through the gunmetal waters of the harbor. The brick and limestone New York skyline was sharp and angled, a far cry from Vilna, with its sensual silhouette of rolling hills, gothic church spires, and turreted castles.

Just before he stepped off the ship and onto the river barge that would ferry him to Ellis Island, Simon took his vest from his satchel and put it on. He would enter America well dressed. He would stand up straight even as he was ordered into a line with the rest of the children who were traveling alone. He watched the faces around him grow taut, eyes receding with fear. He had not come all this way to be intimidated by these tall and well-fed Americans who were barking directions in English. Compared
with the sharp corners of his language, this one sounded lifeless and lazy. There was no urgency to it.

He looked straight ahead as a man held down his tongue with a wooden tongue depressor and studied his tonsils. He tried not to flinch when another one took a metal buttonhook, turned up the upper lid of his eye, and shone a light into his eyeball. This was the moment everyone dreaded. For one thing, it hurt. But more significantly, if one of the inspectors found even a trace of trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that could cause blindness, they’d send you right back home on the next lice-infested boat. And before you knew it, America would become a fever dream that belonged to somebody else.

Maybe it was the severity of his rimless spectacles, or the gray aura around his eyes, but Simon looked older than his nine years. When he went to the money exchange, the man behind the counter didn’t call him “sonny” as he did the other boys. Instead, he said, “Good luck, young man,” and handed him back twelve American dollars. With his satchel in one hand and notebook in the other, Simon stepped off the ferry that took him from Ellis Island into New York City, a place that was more vivid than anything he could have dreamed up in his own sketches. People were waving handkerchiefs, calling out foreign names. Some were crying. He listened for his name and waited to see a familiar person. But there was nothing; no one.

The families walked in huddles, embracing and laughing and occasionally throwing little children up in the air. He trailed behind them as they headed east, away from the river and the piers. The leather soles of his boots were thin enough so that he felt every step of the cobblestone terrain. It was early spring, and
although there were no flowers anywhere, the buds on the trees were heavy and green, and when the sun shone down on him, he could feel its warmth beat back the chill of his fear. He stepped over the orange peels and wiped away the dust that the horses on the horse cars had kicked up into his eyes. The air was tart with the smell of garbage and manure. He made his way past young boys and old men hawking everything they could fit onto their decrepit pushcarts. “Knives sharpened here,” they shouted. “Ripe melons for sale.” “Potatoes, fresh from the earth.” The words, so new and circuitous with their open vowels and jaw-snapping consonants, sounded more to him like animal cries.

The old wooden shacks and brick row houses here were as shabby and tumbledown as the ones he’d left behind. He kept walking because that was all he knew to do. Every now and again, he reached his hand into his trouser pocket to make sure the twelve dollars was still there. He was so tired that he thought he might sit in a doorway and close his eyes, just for a few minutes. But he knew that a sleeping boy with a satchel by his side and twelve dollars in his pocket was prey, so he kept on going. There were houses that would take him in and give him a pallet to sleep on in a room crowded with others. They talked about that on the ship. Someone wrote the English words on a piece of paper for him, “Boarders, ten dollars a month.” He just had to find a sign whose words matched up.

It was getting late and the sun was low in the sky. He looked back toward the harbor and watched the sky change from a pale yellow into a blood red. Light shimmied off of the glass windows like fire and everything was touched with gold. He felt embraced by the light. It was not his mother’s embrace, but it had a feeling
of warmth, of something he might learn to love. His heart beat fast and his stomach growled so loud with hunger that he was certain that everyone could hear him coming.

At last, he saw the letters whose shapes he had memorized: “B-
O-A-R-D-E-R-S
eight dollars” a month. Close enough. He would stay here.

The number 262 was painted on the lintel above the entrance. In Vilna, he would have taken the steps two at a time, but this was not home. Slowly, he pulled himself up the stairs and pushed against the wooden front door. Save for a bowl of light coming from a gas lantern in the lobby, it was completely dark. He dropped his satchel to the floor and shouted, “Hallo.” He heard voices from above and footsteps on bare wooden floors. “Hallo,” he shouted again, trying to sound more authoritative. “Hallo.”

After the third try, he heard a woman’s voice call down to him. Her words were a garble but her tone was unmistakably annoyed. “
Ja, ja
,” she said, as she made her way down from upstairs with slow, heavy footsteps. He noticed her hands, red and gnarled, tightly gripping the mahogany banister. Her eyes were cloudy and she squinted, trying to make out his form in the darkness. When she did, the edges of her voice softened.
“Ein Kind,”
she said, then said it again, as if she were speaking to someone else.
“Ein Kind.”

He pulled out his twelve dollars and waved it in the air.
“Hast du essen?”
she asked, pretending to lift food to her mouth with a fork. He rubbed his stomach to indicate that he was hungry.
“Komm,”
she said, beckoning him upstairs.
“Müss essen.”

The old woman knew what she was seeing. He was not the first young boy to arrive hungry and alone on a stranger’s door-step.
There was an unspoken fellowship in this neighborhood:
They come, just as we came, and whatever food we have, we share. We can always make room for one more body. But we don’t have to like it
.

There were two rooms and twelve people in this apartment. They all spoke at once, each in a different cadence and accent. It sounded to Simon as if dishes were breaking. An old man yelled at a young boy, then turned and pointed at Simon. A lady about his mother’s age, though shorter and rounder, placed a pot of borscht and some freshly baked bread on a table. The others rushed for the food, making no pretense at politeness. He waited to see if anyone would offer him some soup or bread, but no one bothered. He took his place next to a girl who seemed to be his age. She pushed him aside and broke off a hunk of the bread for herself. He tore off another piece of bread and ladled the beet-colored soup into his bowl. All the while, a thick, fleshy teenage boy kept asking him a question. “Outside?” he’d say. “Wanna go outside and take a piss? Piss. Piss. Even foreigners have to piss.”

Simon gulped down the soup as the boy’s eyes stayed fixed on him. When he finished, the boy, frustrated at Simon’s lack of comprehension, motioned him to follow. They went down the back stairs to a little unlit yard. Simon recognized the acrid odor of urine before he saw the hole in the ground. The boy unbuttoned his trousers, took out his penis, and aimed straight for the hole, about a foot away. “That’s better,” he said, shaking off the last drops. “C’mon, you gotta have to piss by now. Stand here.” He pointed to a spot right next to where he was standing. “See if you can get it right into the hole.”

Simon did as the boy had done; only he held his penis so that the trajectory of his urine formed a fine golden spray before it
met its destination. The boy slapped him on the back. “That’s the way to go,” he said.

As they headed back up the stairs, Simon worked his lips silently and then tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Piss,” he said, shyly.

“That’s right, piss,” said the boy.

“Piss,” said Simon again, and then again, proud that he had just learned a new word of English.

It was a cold evening, but the room that Simon shared with seven other people was hot. There were no windows and the only air there had already been breathed by other people. But that was okay. He had a full belly, a roof over his head, and for the first time in many weeks, he was not rocking and pitching and fighting back nausea. Tonight he would sleep, and tomorrow he would look for a job.