When the Night is New, Marvin Rabinovitch [intellectual books to read .txt] 📗

hat on her own head.

“Oofoo mee kahn,” he rasped.

“That’s Hebrew for make yourselves scarce,” the woman translated. By this time, half a dozen members of their group had edged up to back the duo. Yashe had no choice but to comply.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said, stamping across the greensward.

“It’s not important,” she said.

“Yes it is. I live just two blocks away.”

She trailed him reluctantly, of two minds about turning around and going home by herself. Indecisiveness had always been her weakness and inertia kept her at his heels, though she dreaded the toxic mood that had possessed him and what awaited at his home.

They cut across the park to the walled playground fronting Brebeuf Street and on the other side marched south along the unevenly laid flagstones of the ancient sidewalk. Here peddlers on horse-drawn wagons still plied their trade and the cobbled lanes were filled with steaming piles of ordure.

Yashe’s family occupied a coldwater flat at the top of a triplex walkup. The staircase at the front of the building was gaptoothed with the lack of three risers in succession, so that Yashe brought Adele around the back way through a circuitous alley with standing suds-frothed pools of water attesting the nonexistence of drains for laundry and ablutions. He led the way up a spiral metal ladder in a close, foul-smelling, four-walled wooden shaft and onto a tiny gallery hung so thickly with washing that it felt like a poop deck on a sailing ship with all its canvas set.

They entered the flat through a shed-like rear antechamber where a squat coal stove lifted a pair of cylindrical elbowed arms to penetrate the low ceiling and void its production of smoke into the outer air. The door to the rest of the flat was locked from the outside. Yashe jiggled the handle, to no avail, then pounded with rage on the thin plywood panel.

“C’mon in there, I know there’s somebody home. What ‘s the idea?”

“Maybe they’re worried about thieves,” Adele suggested timidly.

“Yeah,” came the sardonic answer, “As if there’s something to steal.”

At last, the mechanism responded to a hand on the other side of the door. A key was turned, the latch was lifted, hinges creaked and a crack of light appeared in the doorway. The board swung open, revealing the ripe figure of a woman in her late twenties. In contrast with her well-rounded form, the woman’s face was thin and angular with a yellow tinge as if from incipient hepatitis. Her mouth was a smear of carmine lipstick and her eyebrows were plucked to pencil thinness. The eyes were what struck Adele with particular force. They stared out of her face with unwinking enmity at whatever happened to be in their line of sight. At first it was Yashe, and she could not repress a sneer at the sight of him. Then her gaze moved to Adele. One eyebrow, an almost hairless punctuation mark with which to parse her facial expression, rose with unfriendly amusement.

“Are you inviting people over for a party, little brother?” she asked, not moving from the doorway and blocking their entrance. “I think you forgot to order fiddlers and refreshments.”

“Let me through, Shaiva,” Yashe ordered, and roughly shouldered his way past her. The woman gave way with lithe nimbleness, though not without suggesting by sly body language that she had avoided by very little being pushed aside by his brutal advance. A sour smile twisted her painted mouth.

“As courtly as ever, brother dear. I hope your little friend is used to your gentle ways.”

Adele held her hand out with a show of courage and introduced herself, hoping to mollify this dragon at the gate.

“Adele, huh. That’s not the name I remember from the last time. Well, never mind. I’m Bathsheba, as you probably remember. We got along pretty well, so there shouldn’t be any trouble.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” Adele faltered, “I’ve never been here before.

“I guess it must have been your twin sister,” Bathsheba conceded with a heavy-lidded smile of contempt. “Sisters, I should say.”

“Enough of that, Shaiveh,” Yashe growled. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Adele,” Yashe growled. “She’s full of the poison brewed by the fear that Toby and I will marry before her and she’ll wind up a sour old maid.”

“The ma and the pa will never allow your weddings before mine,” his sister hissed with gorgon venom. “You can have all the chippies you want, but the chupah never before I stand under it!”

The years proved Shaiveh no prophetess, but how could they know that then? Standing before them, full of oracular certainty, she struck Adele as almost unchallengeable. Yashe seemed to feel this as well, for he dropped his eyes and groped for a reply.

“Where’s the pa?” he asked at last.

“Where do you think? Sleeping it off, as usual.”

Old Jeroboam was accustomed to knocking off half a tumbler of 140-proof slivovitz for dessert. He wasn’t a drunk, by any means, as Shaiveh’s comment implied, but the spirits did make him drowsy and bad-tempered. An hour’s shut-eye was enough to restore him. Yashe had been counting on the tipple to do its work when he slipped into the flat.

He tiptoed into the dining alcove. Sure enough, the old man was slumped in his horsehair throne at the end of the scarred mahogany table. A pair of lit tapers in a two-branched candelabrum threw flickering shadows that seemed to cause the lax features above his sparse gray beard to twitch demonically.

The stooped dumpy form of a woman closer in appearance to old age than her middle years was removing dishes from the table. An air of desperate caution seemed to envelope her and her movements embodied the quietness and control of a servant fearful of awakening an irascible master.

Catching sight of Yashe in the doorway, she stiffened with alarm, though her face lit up with pleasure as well.

“Mein kind, what are you doing here?” she asked in Yiddish. As Yashe opened his mouth to answer, she placed a cautionary forefinger to her lips and signaled him to return to the kitchen where she followed. They embraced awkwardly before Adele. The old woman sent a questioning glance her way.

“A friend of mine, ma,” Yashe explained, but performed no introductions and, beyond a nod of greeting, the two did not acknowledge one another’s presence.

“Der alter is very angry at you, Yashinka,” she said, lowering the dishes carefully into the sink so that they did not clatter. Shaiveh sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of solitaire, pointedly ignoring everyone else in the vicinity.

“He’s always angry,” Yashe said with a shrug. “Since my voice changed, I can’t get a decent word from him. No more child prodigy, no more shmolarehs rolling in, what’s the point of good relations?”

“He says five shmolarehs is missing from his change purse,” Shaiveh muttered in an undertone.

“Toby took that,” Yashe countered, “And it was mine to begin with. The old guy laid his hand on it without even asking.”

“He’s your father, he’s got a right,” Shaiveh declared, though Yashe was well aware that she said so only to be contrary, for she too hated the old bastard, perhaps more than any of them.

“So, Ma,” Yashe said helplessly, letting his arms hang by his sides and turning his hands palms outward. His grin was feeble and he shrugged.

“You need money,” his mother guessed. Her instincts were infallible.

“Can you spare two shmolarehs?” he asked.

“No!” his sister hissed, slamming down the deck of cards with such force that the table jumped. “He wants to take his floozy to the movies, while we barely have enough to eat.”

“You shut your fuckin’ mouth!” Yashe roared, taking a menacing step toward her.

If a hole had opened up at Adele’s feet she would have leaped in without hesitation.

Shaiveh sent her brother a venomous glare. “Big man,” she taunted, “Knows how to curse a defenseless woman, but to earn a steady wage?”

She shook her head, as if to discourage a persistent fly, and went back to her game.

“Nu, my poor Yashkeleh,” Mrs. Heisswasser said, “A few pennies for a beloved son any mother would give. Wait here.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Adele faltered. “Let’s just leave.”

“The first sensible word I’ve heard in the last ten minutes,” Shaiveh rasped.

Yashe raised his fist.

“Hit me, go ahead and hit me!” she shrieked.

A croaking voice spoke in Russified Yiddish from the passageway between the kitchenette and the dining alcove. “What is this infernal racket?”

Quaking with rage, the lord of his domain confronted the four. A black yarmulke rose like a miniature plateau, a truncated fez, from the top of his head, proclaiming, in the manner of a crown, incontestable rulership over all subjects within hearing of his voice.

With ladylike disdain, Shaiveh produced a hanky and blew her nose. The mother froze in her tracks, not daring to make a sound. Adele closed her eyes and willed herself into oblivion. Yashe, to demonstrate insouciance, lit a cigarette.

“What are you doing here?” his father asked, turning a bloodshot eye at the young man. “Why’re you disturbing the household and my innocent sleep.”

“He’s come to return your money,” Shaiveh said with a malicious grin.
Yashe maintained a sullen silence. Tobacco smoke jetted from his nostrils with an almost audible snort.

“In that case he’s welcome,” Jeroboam said. “The bsilla too.”

Adele was not familiar with the Yiddish-Hebrew word for “virgin”, but knew the remark had been sarcastic or insulting or both by the blood that rushed to Yashe’s neck and cheeks.

“Keep your foul tongue off her,” he muttered.

The bearded patriarch nodded his head, as if to confirm the judgment of some inner voice.

“So this is how a shaigetz from the gutter talks to the man who raised him and gave him a Jewish education. Well, I will not return curse for curse.”

He almost smiled at his own forbearance, showing a perfect set of dentures that lent him a look of paradoxical benevolence. Stepping closer to his son, he patted him on the cheek.

“Ach, what a voice he had! I could forgive him anything for that voice.”

Again he patted his son’s cheek, even more gently and affectionately. It was as close to a caress as he ever gave any of his children.

“The voice of an angel,” he whispered, and delivered a slinging slap to both cheeks. “And the soul of a devil. I wish the mohel had cut your throat instead of your shlong.”

To Adele’s astonishment, Yashe burst into tears. She crammed one fist into her mouth to keep from screaming, but a keening wail escaped her throat anyway.

Pavel, the red-haired night attendant at Zvi’s, poked his head through her doorway.

“Everything okay, Delchik?”

In the dim blue light of her nightlamp, the sharp planes of his gaunt, Slavic face stood out in stark relief.

“A bad dream,” she gasped, her voice an unsteady tremolo, the falsetto of an ancient crone, though inside she was still the eighteen-year Adele whom Yashe had courted. Even three quarters of a century later, that brutal smack, resounding pitilessly in the tiny kitchen, had not lost the power to wound her.

“A cup of tea, maybe? To help you sleep.”

For all that, there was still kindness in