The Sea Beach Line (19 page)

“It's in my blood,” Asher shouted. “You go over to Warsaw, you'll see there's a big statue of the underground who killed collaborationist police during the war. That was my relatives! There should be a statue
of me like that. In fact, there will be, after I sue the city and the university. They'll have to put one up. Solid marble. It'll say: Asher will burn your ass.”

Spending the day next to Asher disturbed me, not just because he was loud and annoying, but because he seemed like a parody of Al. I didn't think Al would deal well with being forced out of his spot. He had his own stories of arguing with the police. Of talking his way out of open-container and parking tickets. Of decking a cop in a pizza place in Canarsie and not getting arrested. He never carried a kitchen knife, but I remembered him sitting on a bench uptown, flicking a straight razor open and closed. It was a cherished memory. I wanted to be confident and fearless, sitting in the city with a weapon in my hand. But until I heard Asher ranting, it had never occurred to me to wonder why Al was holding a razor in his hand.

Al had his own tales of the Polish resistance too. He didn't talk much about his own childhood in Poland, but he spoke proudly of Mordechai Anielewicz and the
ydowska Organizacja Bojowa
. He spoke of how easy it was to make petrol bombs, and how people should not be afraid to defend themselves. I hoped that when I saw Al again, he would seem dignified, and not absurd like Asher.

By two thirty, the lunchtime rush had ended and Asher had tired himself out. The block was peaceful. I took out my macaroni salad and a plastic fork and began to eat. The few students walking down the street were all far away. They didn't want anything from us. There was a bit of breeze, strong enough to soothe, but not so strong it chilled you.

While I was eating, a girl appeared at the table. Her long black skirt billowed, and I had the feeling the wind had blown her up against the table, like it did with plastic bags and other refuse sometimes. She looked down at the table, but her eyes didn't focus on any book. She looked familiar to me. Maybe I'd seen her around the street. No, I would've remembered more distinctly if I had, I thought, because there was something very striking about her. She was beautiful, actually, though not in a contemporary way. Sort of like a picture of Sarah
Bernhardt in a book I hadn't managed to sell. Not because she looked like Sarah Bernhardt but because she looked like a black-and-white photograph.

From her gaunt face, long black sleeves, and nervous demeanor I figured she was a junkie working up the nerve to sell me something. But this girl wasn't holding anything to sell. She looked more like a ghost than a junkie, truth be told.

It came to me. The girl didn't just look like a black-and-white photograph; she looked like a black ink drawing on white paper. The girl was somewhere in Al's sketchbooks. Had Al just seen her on the street before? Or was she connected to him in some way? I tried to remember where in the sketchbooks she had appeared.

As I studied her, her stomach growled audibly. I grinned. She blushed with genuine embarrassment, and tried to hide her face in a delicate hand.

“Are you hungry?” I asked her. It was an unusually direct thing for me to ask a stranger, but I had to engage her if I was going to find out what she had to do with Al.

“Yes. It seems so.” She spoke each word deliberately. She didn't sound like a junkie.

“Would you like some of my food?” I held out my plastic container of macaroni salad.

“Oh, no, I couldn't.”

“It's okay, I have more than enough.”

“That's kind of you. But no, my stomach . . .”

“It's only macaroni salad. I don't eat rich foods. It's good. Just macaroni, prepared as a salad with shredded vegetables.”

“I could eat something like that, I think. Is it kosher?” The question took me aback. “Not that it matters, really,” she said. “I just wondered because you have a beard and a yarmulke.” I'd taken my baseball cap off earlier in the morning since it wasn't very sunny, and after a few weeks of street life, my beard was pretty full. “Surely you don't eat treif food?”

“It's not certified kosher, there's no
hechsher
. But it's vegetarian. So it's not treif either. Have some.”

She ate the whole container, thanked me, and then, before I realized it, she was gone. I cursed myself for letting her disappear without asking her anything.

When I returned to the storage unit that night, I searched through the sketchbooks looking for the girl's picture. She wasn't in any of the West Fourth Street scenes. I found her in Al's study of Galuth's masterpiece. The girl on the street was the same girl who'd been thrown from the tracks of the Sea Beach Railway in the 1920s.

All sorts of ideas went through my mind. Was the girl actually a ghost? Or maybe she'd never lived before, was conjured from imagination by R. Galuth, and had just now walked out of the painting? Did such things happen? Had I finally had a mystical experience, and encountered someone from the other side?

Of course, there were other explanations. My father could have seen the girl on West Fourth Street, as I'd first suspected, and then grafted her face onto the study. Or it could just be a coincidence. But no, I knew there were no coincidences. All things meant something, even if the meanings were hidden.

10

TIME PASSED QUICKLY ON
the street. I blinked the third day, and when I opened my eyes again I'd been selling for almost a month. I felt badly for not seeing Becca, but before coming to New York, we hadn't talked more than once every month or two anyway. Had it been like this for Al these past years? He'd think of sending a postcard, but then months and years of work would pass without him doing it? I was afraid that if I wasn't careful, five years would pass, and I'd still be on the street, unable to remember how or why I came down here.

Although I enjoyed frequent downtime on the street itself, the long days, manual labor, and responsibility of managing every aspect of the small business were physically and mentally exhausting. I had never worked so hard in my life. My muscles grew from pushing the cart and lifting the boxes. If I had extra time at night, I read a bit of one of the crime novels stacked by the bed. These books were lighter than the texts I'd been reading before, and easier for my tired mind to keep up with. I was also intrigued because they were evidently what Al read. They were his entertainment, but they also related to his code, to his worldview. I read a couple short ones, then tucked into a tome called
Knickerbocker Avenue
, by Sal Di Conte. According to the foreword of a newer reprint I later found, Di Conte was the pen name of a woman named Leah Schkolnik, who also wrote private detective books under the name Ricky O'Banion.

Knickerbocker Avenue
was an epic about the rise of a Brooklyn gangster named Arturo Costa. At the beginning of the book, Arturo is a poor, good-hearted kid—a former altar boy, in fact—growing up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the '60s. His father is killed in an accident at the Fresh Pond Freight Yard when Arturo is young, and as soon as he's old enough Arturo drops out of high school to help support his mother and sisters. He gets a job at a bakery, rising early six days a week to knead bread and cannoli dough.

Despite being surrounded by books, I actually read less than I used to. Most nights I was so tired from working that I only got through a few pages before I lay down and closed my eyes. As I fell asleep, my mind flipped through the lists of sold stock, and my hands imagined they were placing books on the table.

Of course, becoming a bookseller was not supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to connect with Al. On the days I didn't go out on the street because of the weather, I looked through his sketchbooks, trying to make some sense of his life and disappearance by studying the images. It was like scripture to me. I could see the simple level, the
peshat
, for myself. The more I looked, the more I began to see the
remez
, the hinted meanings. Some things made more sense in context. That was called the
deresh
, and the more time I spent in the streets the more I would understand the context and references. What I was really after was the
sod
, the hidden meaning. The secrets. I had no idea how to get at that.

There were some clues, though, like the woman from the Galuth painting who'd appeared on West Fourth Street. When I asked around, no one knew who she was. I was afraid that I wouldn't see her again, and that I had missed an opportunity. I kept my eye out for her on the street.

Goldov appeared in the sketchbooks a surprising number of times. Apparently he and Alojzy were deeply involved. I didn't know how
much of Goldov's importance was tied to his connection to Galuth, or vice versa. My father had spent a long time creating detailed studies of Galuth's paintings, especially the “masterpiece,” where the poor young woman was thrown from the train tracks. Goldov appeared outside of the gallery too, though. There were times when Goldov also appeared with Roman and Timur, and even one time when the dead soldier appeared with all three of them.

The dead soldier was obviously key. He appeared in the sketchbook more than anyone else, with the exception of my mother, and in every setting and situation. Since he appeared in both Israel and New York, I wondered where Al had met him.

On closer inspection, I discovered Hebrew words worked into the background texture around one of the images of the dead soldier. The picture also included Timur and Roman. The soldier stood next to them on the dock, upright but clearly dead. In the wood of the dock itself were the words
. I was used to the book form of Hebrew, not curving script, but I made out the letters. The first word meant “I,” but I had to check the adjective in a Hebrew–English dictionary. “Sorry.” “I am sorry.” Had the dead man committed some transgression or error? Was Al sorry for what had happened to the man? Or for something Al himself had done to the man? I went back to other images of the dead soldier, and found the same words in three or four drawings.