The Sea Beach Line (24 page)

Around this time, I heard that Milton, the silent veteran, had died. As with Al's purported death, it was a rumor on Mendy's lips. In this case, Mendy had more detail.

“He burned up,” Mendy told me. “I know a guy who lives in the same SRO. The fire department came in the middle of the night. The whole building was filled with smoke, but only one unit was destroyed: Milton's.

“Apparently, he left his hot plate on when he went to sleep. His whole place was filled with newspapers and books and junk—he was kind of a hoarder, I guess, though maybe some people would say that about me too—and it all went up. They found Milton charred in his bed. His neighbor, Richie, saw them wheel the remains out.”

“Damn,” I said. I hadn't really gotten to know Milton, both because of the communication obstacle and because he spent his time at Asher's table, which I avoided after listening to Asher's paranoid tirades, but I hated to hear about a man dying like that. “That's awful.”

“Yeah. At least no one else in the building was hurt. He went down by himself.”

“True. Do you think he's going to the potter's field?” I asked. “On Hart Island?” I remembered what Goldov had said about Al, and himself. Al could have died as easily as Milton had. If Al burned up in some residential hotel out West, where he was checked in under a fake name, and was buried in an unmarked grave, no one would ever know.

“No.” Mendy shook his head. “It'll be the military cemetery on Long Island. He was injured pretty badly at the Battle of Khe Sanh.
I think that's why he couldn't speak . . . shrapnel to his chest and throat. Richie and Asher called the VA—Milton didn't have any family—and the military took possession of what was left of his body.” I had known people who died before, but never so suddenly. Milton was an old soldier—just like Al. He had survived bombs and bullets. He had survived a war. Then he died one night, stupidly and without reason.

We spent the Friday afternoon after Rayna moved in going through the stock for the weekend. I had given up my
shomer Shabbos
ruse, and explained that my skipping work on Saturday was a onetime thing. We moved the cart out into the hallway to give us room to work. Setting up a stepladder where the cart usually stood, I climbed up to look through the boxes that were stacked up high along the back wall. Rayna sat on the ground, in the open doorway, with a box we'd pulled off the cart.

We came to a box of books from the Classics of Western Spirituality line. These were big books, six inches wide and nine inches tall. Depending on the length of the text, they were anywhere from one to one and a half inches tall, and from about one to one and a half pounds in weight. Their heft made them feel full of knowledge. Being convenient collections of fairly obscure primary sources, they were big sellers with the college crowd, especially the grad students.

“Do we have an
Augustine
?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“
Early Anabaptist Spirituality
?”

“Yes.”

“
Nachman of Breslov
.”

“Yes.” She flipped through the pages. “He was the one who told the story about the boy and the girl in the forest?”

“Yes. No one knows how it ends.
Apocalyptic Spirituality
?”

“No. Hand that one to me.”

“How about
Hildegard of Bingen
?”

“Hildegard? I'm looking for H-A-L-L. . .?”

“No, Hil-de-gard. H-
I
-L.” Sometimes Rayna had trouble with the spelling of words. To be fair, “Hildegard” was a strange one. I noticed she didn't have any trouble with the Classics of Western Spirituality books on Jewish subjects, which spelled the names out in Hebrew letters too. She was more comfortable with that alphabet.

“Oh. Yes. Go on.”

“
Ibn ‘Ata'illah
?”

“No.”

“Here.
Abraham Isaac Kook
?”

“Yes.” She studied his portrait on the book's cover. “Who was he?”

“Kook? A rabbi. In Palestine. He was like a Litvak and a Hasid at the same time.”

“That's good.”

“Yes. But also a Zionist.”

“Oh.”

“
Menachem of Chernobyl
?”

“No, we need that one.” I handed it down to her.

“
Pyotr Gershon of Glupsk
?” She didn't answer. “The cover also calls him
The First Glupsker Rebbe
?” Still no response. I looked down. Rayna had her face in her hands, and I stepped down one rung so I could reach to touch her shoulder. “Rayna, are you okay?” She had run away from a religious household. Did her father study the teachings of the Glupsker Rebbe? What memories did the book trigger?

“Just dust,” she said, shaking off my hand. “Nothing more than dust. No, we don't have a copy of
Pyotr Gershon
here. Hand it down.” She took the book from me and shoved it in the box without looking at it. “Listen, Isaac, after these, should we take a look at the Penguin Classics?”

“Definitely. That's a good idea.” She was learning the business quickly.

We worked hard for the rest of the afternoon. Our accomplishment was measured in the three empty water boxes we cut down and recycled when we were done. The street boxes were all fully stocked, the empty spaces stuffed with extra volumes of Vonnegut and Burroughs.

In the late evening, we walked up into the Village to buy some good bread from the Italian bakery and some olives, cheese, hummus, and candy from the market. These were the things we liked to eat.

We set up our food on a crate in the storage space. Before we ate, Rayna dug out two tea lights and lit them. She closed her eyes, raised her hands over her eyes, and began to make the blessings. She blessed the tea lights, our cheap red wine, and the Italian bread.

“My mother said the blessings in our home,” Rayna said. “It's the only thing I miss since coming here.” I thought Rayna was happy to be free of the yoke of observance, but I supposed you can only go so far. Besides, the controlling laws of Rayna's Orthodox family and her connection to the unseen were likely two distinct, and largely unrelated, things.

I was afraid the candles would set off the fire alarm, but they didn't. Everything was okay, and Rayna's Hebrew filled the space. The letters floated around the room, sanctifying it. Rayna's
Kabbalat Shabbat
did not feel like an empty ritual so much as a true conversation with angels. This room was our home, the Shabbos bride was welcomed, and the angels were sent away. They would return to their world while Rayna remained here with me. I wondered what Al would make of seeing his son, now grown, sharing a traditional Shabbos dinner in his storage space.

After Rayna and I ate dinner and the Shabbos candles burned themselves out, we sat on a bench out on Sixth Avenue, by the statue of General José Gervasio Artigas, the father of Uruguayan independence. The general stood with his hat in his hand. There were electric lights around the Artigas statue, and I read to Rayna from
Caravan of Cats
, a book we'd discovered in the storage space. She had been attracted by the cover of the slim, tall hardback, which portrayed, in the style of a Coptic Orthodox icon, a lion thrashing as it died from the spear sticking out of its chest. The book had been printed in England, but the publication information was strangely formatted and confusing, not to mention partly in Arabic, so I didn't know what to make of the book's origins. According to the note at the beginning of the book,
Caravan of Cats
was the translation of a work by Farid Shenouda,
who was an assistant zookeeper at the zoo in Cairo in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Shenouda was from a devout Coptic family, but practiced his own personal religion, a form of atavistic animism. His few friends were British zoologists. He was killed by a mob loyal to King Fuad in 1922, possibly because of his colonial associations, possibly because of his fanatical antimonotheistic and antimonarchist beliefs, or possibly just for having the misfortune to be in the path of a violent mob.

Caravan of Cats
is a book-length poem, telling the historical saga of the lions of the Near East, as seen from the perspective of the domesticated cats of Egypt. In the time of the kingdoms, the Egyptian lions—who are known as the “guardians of the Eastern and Western horizon”—live where the lush land meets the desert, and are admired from afar by their tamed and diminutive cousins, who keep the royal storehouses free of vermin. As the desert grows, the realm of the lions shrinks, and the prides dwindle. The pharaohs hunt the few remaining lions to extinction. Amenhotep III kills over one hundred lions in one day hunting, shaming the families of the court cats who will be mummified in his tomb. The last lion of Egypt dies out in the desert, not from a king's arrow but of starvation. Her flesh is torn apart by the hated and cowardly jackals.

Lights whipped past us on the avenue, and we huddled close on our bench as I continued reading.

In time, the cats of Cairo hear tell of the lions of Judea. A caravan sets out to the east, crossing the Sinai and entering into Gaza, where they are fed and housed by the monks of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, some of whom even knew the secret language of cats. Taking leave of the kind humans, the Cairo cats head north along the coast to Judea, where they meet the lions of Judea on the banks of the Jordan River. This tribe is made up of lean Asiatic lions, who are much smaller than the Barbary lions of Egypt had been, but strong and proud nonetheless. Alas, these prides perish too, with the onslaught of the European crusaders. In the end, it is left to a humble mouser of Saint Catherine's Monastery of Mount Sinai to put the history of the Levant lions down on parchment, and his account is the foundation of
the book we now held. I had been attracted to the book as a novelty, but as I read on, I became more and more invested in the cats' quest. I knew what that was like, to go in search of a lion. The cats hated their domesticated status, and wanted to run with true hunters.

After I'd read to Rayna about the lions for a while, we came back inside and went to bed. It was early, not quite ten o'clock yet, but we wanted to be ready early the next morning. We nestled together, like we did every night. Her hair fell across my face, and I kissed her on the back of her head. She rolled toward me and kissed my face. We kissed on the lips, eagerly but shyly, like kids in the back of a movie theater, for a couple minutes, then Rayna pulled back. She gave me one last quick kiss and rolled away, her back facing me.

“Good night, Isaac,” Rayna said, cuddling back toward me. I put my arm around her.

“Good night, Rayna.”

Soon I was asleep, dreaming I was a lion running along the Nile with a lioness. An elbow to the gut ripped me back to the waking world. My eyes opened, and I tried to make sense of the blows. Rayna was fighting against me. She struggled to throw my arm off, nearly wrenching it from its socket, and scratched at my face, moaning with fear like someone suppressing a scream.

Before I knew what to think, I was defending myself, fighting back, pushing her away from me. Had I done something to her in my sleep? Had I rubbed against her? Tried to mount her? No. No. I didn't believe I had. We were still in the same position, more or less, that we had been in when we went to sleep: I on my side, she curled up in front of me, cupped in my arm, though now she was twisting toward and away from me. I had fallen asleep with my arm draped over her and hadn't moved. Things had only changed for her. My arm was not holding her any longer, but holding her down.

Her eyes were half-open but I could tell she didn't see my face. Who was I to her? Her murderer? The man who had thrown her from the Sea Beach Railway? I had woken up in her nightmare. When ghosts dream, are they back in their real world? But she wasn't a ghost. How could I think of her that way, when her nails were digging into my
face? This terror went far beyond any ghost story. I grabbed her arm. She fought harder. Whoever I was, I was now a man who grabbed her arm, restrained and shook her. She sat up straight and opened her eyes, recognizing my face now.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I think you were having a bad dream. It's still night.” She blinked, disoriented, and lay back down. If she didn't remember where she'd just been, it was best to let it go for the moment. We couldn't ignore these matters forever, but for now, I was just happy that her nightmare had passed. I moved away, so I was not touching her in any way, and closed my eyes. Soon we were both back to sleep, a deep sleep, thank God, where neither of us dreamed.