[Here's the conclusion of B.N.'s story The Lost Train. if you missed any installments, you can click on "The Lost Train" label to see them all. Enjoy!]
FIVE. THE WANDERING OF THE SOUL
There are stones like souls, that are flung down on the streets. But once the new houses are built, then one will fit them into holy stones. Then the marriages within the houses turn to bliss and the children to angels.
Meta Tannenbaum
Late at night I still sometimes think that what I learned to want was the love that drove men into the foreign legion, the will power to lose trains in forests, to hear the jingle of a choke chain, and to be a woman in a seaside town who never needed to understand why anybody would ever say something like, "There but for the grace of God go I." So when I go downstairs, out the door, and stand on the front lawn in my nightgown I feel for an instant that I've come close. People taking the train to Scranton could look out of their small windows at the house as they sped past, and feel that all was well in the house.
In the morning, between 10:30 and 11:10 A.M., I will introduce my fourth grade class to the three stages of transformation. An elaboration, and a possible understanding—some multicolored chalk pictures drawn on the green blackboard, 'the egg, the larva, and the chrysalis." Each stage ensures a strictly scientific and explainable transformation and redemption. Each child will imitate me with lines traced onto construction paper, cutting carefully with safety scissors the different stages of a life.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
Showing posts with label The Lost Train. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Lost Train. Show all posts
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
THE LOST TRAIN (part 3)
FOUR. TWO LANGUAGES
There are those who can utter words in truth so that the words shine that shines of itself. And there are those whose words are only like a window that has no light of its own, but only shines forth out of the light that it admits.
The Bratslaver
By 5:00 A.M. I was so restless that I got up and sat in the chair next to bed and watched Adam sleep. He lay there with the sheets coiled around his waist and twisted through his legs like a rope climber.
As a child I would lie in my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest. At night there was something reassuring about the street sounds of the city. The radio next to my bed played softly and outside my window the cabs, cars, and couples all stirred. If I left my bed, went into the kitchen and stood there in the doorway, my grandmother wouldn't notice me until I said, "I'm going back to bed now." Later, my grandmother would be in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, waving the smoke away from her face.
We played this game. At eight o'clock I went to bed with a glass of milk, a glass of water, and four cookies. Then, after about an hour, my grandmother would say that I could sneak out of my room for a quick snack as long as the landlord didn't catch me. The landlord became an omnipotent figure in our household. He knew every move we made, and had a rule about children being out of bed, eating snacks, after eight o'clock. My grandmother said that if we were caught doing this, we risked eviction and the loss of all our possessions. Then we would have to go on the subway to a stop that she pronounced with contempt. Outsmarting the landlord gave me my first sense of power.
Up and down the street it used to be, "Nu, Meta what can I do for you. Oh you look so beautiful—you could even shorten that skirt a bit." There were the neighborhood men with names like Max, Isador, Abe, Herschel. Their sons named Marvin, Barry, and Sammy. I never really understood why our neighbors on the block sometimes felt a shy need to explain my grandmother. More than once someone pulled me aside and said things like: "We understand, and accept. I mean who knows what we would do. All I have to say, is 'There but for the grace of God go I.'"
At the fruit stand Meta stuck her thumb through the top of a melon. "Nu, look at this, half-rotted and he wants full price," she would say loud enough for all the other shoppers to hear. "Hey Herschel what about giving a widow and orphan a few pennies off on your rotten melon." The response was always the same. "Take the melon, take two."
In restaurants she poured all the sugar, salt, and pepper into small paper bags hidden inside her large bag. She took all bread, den, and some utensils from the table. Still they always gave free bowls of soup and extra large helpings of rice or noodle pudding. Sometimes she said under her breath, "See, even they know who I am."
Once, when my grandmother was out on a shopping expedition down Canal Street, I brought Sheila Katz home with ma I showed her all the secrets of the apartment. The closets stuffed with canned food and toilet paper, the crated boxes of soap, the Flow Blue China-the music clock with tiny figurines going around on the top every hour. I explained how rare and valuable they were, and as Sheila looked in awe I again felt a warm sense of control. Later that winter, I began to take my friends on tours through the apartment. I told them the building was built by J.P. Morgan. After his indictment, and her death, I was forced to admit that it was built by Grosso Construction. It was about that time that I swore I would not marry Barry, Sammy, or Marvin.
When she visited, my grandmother sat in my kitchen fingering a brown construction paper caterpillar I made for our classroom bulletin board. I was laying out colored chalk that I would use to introduce a new science unit called "The Insect World." Her attention was focused on a small fourth page UPI filler article "Mass Grave Uncovered in Russia."
"See, they come back like unopened mail," she said.
I imagined them as the people dug out of the ruins of Pompeii, or the fens of Northern Europe, caught in the attitudes of daily life—arms outstretched, or the palm of one hand resting under one cheek as they lay on their sides, girls asleep with their hands between their legs. Perfectly preserved young men with beards of soft stubble, the contents of their last meal still full in their stomachs. Their skin tanned bronze from the effects of the peat bog. The women's breasts flattened. And somehow I could not connect my grandmother with the dead. Even though I sat with the body until it was buried. I watched as each finger was wrapped in white gauze, and there and then it was just a lifeless corpse—as if a shadow had passed over and stopped. Now it seemed the shadow dispersed like thin trails of smoke. She died the first winter I went away from home. All through her illness a cousin of hers had called me in the college dorm. I remember holding the receiver of the black pay phone a little away from my ear and watching from the window as Amherst filled with snow.
"Enough, already. Please come home. Do you know what you're doing?" she said. I did not know.
When the sewer workers uncovered that pit, all of those people's shadows were lifted—and suddenly they were free to rejoin the life they left—finish their noon meal, lovemaking, letter writing. But they preferred to remain lying out in the open air with their eyes fixed on the sun overhead. And to say, See, here we are all rare hybrids. Flowers that open once in fifty years for only a few hours. I never went home, even though the cousin phoned at least once a day.
“Do you know what you've done?" the cousin asked when she died.
I kept bits and pieces of my grandmother's things. I have copies of Huckleberry Finn in Yiddish, the Flow Blue China, a few bars of old yellowed soap.
I’m not sure why I hurt her like that.
AT THE MECHANIC'S three pit bulls pester their mother to nurse. When she snaps at the most aggressive brown one, the white and black one jumps. Afterward, on the way home, I'm sure the car hasn't been fixed. When I pull up alongside Adam at the traffic light he is drumming the dashboard with one hand, and through the half-open window I can hear him singing My Baby Does The Hanky Panky."
That night in bed I expected Adam to turn to me. As I sat in the chair next to the bed I concocted brief scenarios for Hannibal: he has gained admission to the training school for seeing eye dogs; he graduates in the top of his class and spends the rest of his days leading people through life; he's been taken in by a family with children; he is fiercely protective of them; he joins with a pack of wild dogs; he is the leader; they run deer for sport and food—run them until their fine-boned, elegant legs give way and crumble beneath them—they fall in heaps in a dark forest. I've thought a lot about that story my grandmother used to tell. I wonder what happened when somebody noticed they lost a train.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for the conclusion!]
There are those who can utter words in truth so that the words shine that shines of itself. And there are those whose words are only like a window that has no light of its own, but only shines forth out of the light that it admits.
The Bratslaver
By 5:00 A.M. I was so restless that I got up and sat in the chair next to bed and watched Adam sleep. He lay there with the sheets coiled around his waist and twisted through his legs like a rope climber.
As a child I would lie in my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest. At night there was something reassuring about the street sounds of the city. The radio next to my bed played softly and outside my window the cabs, cars, and couples all stirred. If I left my bed, went into the kitchen and stood there in the doorway, my grandmother wouldn't notice me until I said, "I'm going back to bed now." Later, my grandmother would be in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, waving the smoke away from her face.
We played this game. At eight o'clock I went to bed with a glass of milk, a glass of water, and four cookies. Then, after about an hour, my grandmother would say that I could sneak out of my room for a quick snack as long as the landlord didn't catch me. The landlord became an omnipotent figure in our household. He knew every move we made, and had a rule about children being out of bed, eating snacks, after eight o'clock. My grandmother said that if we were caught doing this, we risked eviction and the loss of all our possessions. Then we would have to go on the subway to a stop that she pronounced with contempt. Outsmarting the landlord gave me my first sense of power.
Up and down the street it used to be, "Nu, Meta what can I do for you. Oh you look so beautiful—you could even shorten that skirt a bit." There were the neighborhood men with names like Max, Isador, Abe, Herschel. Their sons named Marvin, Barry, and Sammy. I never really understood why our neighbors on the block sometimes felt a shy need to explain my grandmother. More than once someone pulled me aside and said things like: "We understand, and accept. I mean who knows what we would do. All I have to say, is 'There but for the grace of God go I.'"
At the fruit stand Meta stuck her thumb through the top of a melon. "Nu, look at this, half-rotted and he wants full price," she would say loud enough for all the other shoppers to hear. "Hey Herschel what about giving a widow and orphan a few pennies off on your rotten melon." The response was always the same. "Take the melon, take two."
In restaurants she poured all the sugar, salt, and pepper into small paper bags hidden inside her large bag. She took all bread, den, and some utensils from the table. Still they always gave free bowls of soup and extra large helpings of rice or noodle pudding. Sometimes she said under her breath, "See, even they know who I am."
Once, when my grandmother was out on a shopping expedition down Canal Street, I brought Sheila Katz home with ma I showed her all the secrets of the apartment. The closets stuffed with canned food and toilet paper, the crated boxes of soap, the Flow Blue China-the music clock with tiny figurines going around on the top every hour. I explained how rare and valuable they were, and as Sheila looked in awe I again felt a warm sense of control. Later that winter, I began to take my friends on tours through the apartment. I told them the building was built by J.P. Morgan. After his indictment, and her death, I was forced to admit that it was built by Grosso Construction. It was about that time that I swore I would not marry Barry, Sammy, or Marvin.
When she visited, my grandmother sat in my kitchen fingering a brown construction paper caterpillar I made for our classroom bulletin board. I was laying out colored chalk that I would use to introduce a new science unit called "The Insect World." Her attention was focused on a small fourth page UPI filler article "Mass Grave Uncovered in Russia."
"See, they come back like unopened mail," she said.
I imagined them as the people dug out of the ruins of Pompeii, or the fens of Northern Europe, caught in the attitudes of daily life—arms outstretched, or the palm of one hand resting under one cheek as they lay on their sides, girls asleep with their hands between their legs. Perfectly preserved young men with beards of soft stubble, the contents of their last meal still full in their stomachs. Their skin tanned bronze from the effects of the peat bog. The women's breasts flattened. And somehow I could not connect my grandmother with the dead. Even though I sat with the body until it was buried. I watched as each finger was wrapped in white gauze, and there and then it was just a lifeless corpse—as if a shadow had passed over and stopped. Now it seemed the shadow dispersed like thin trails of smoke. She died the first winter I went away from home. All through her illness a cousin of hers had called me in the college dorm. I remember holding the receiver of the black pay phone a little away from my ear and watching from the window as Amherst filled with snow.
"Enough, already. Please come home. Do you know what you're doing?" she said. I did not know.
When the sewer workers uncovered that pit, all of those people's shadows were lifted—and suddenly they were free to rejoin the life they left—finish their noon meal, lovemaking, letter writing. But they preferred to remain lying out in the open air with their eyes fixed on the sun overhead. And to say, See, here we are all rare hybrids. Flowers that open once in fifty years for only a few hours. I never went home, even though the cousin phoned at least once a day.
“Do you know what you've done?" the cousin asked when she died.
I kept bits and pieces of my grandmother's things. I have copies of Huckleberry Finn in Yiddish, the Flow Blue China, a few bars of old yellowed soap.
I’m not sure why I hurt her like that.
AT THE MECHANIC'S three pit bulls pester their mother to nurse. When she snaps at the most aggressive brown one, the white and black one jumps. Afterward, on the way home, I'm sure the car hasn't been fixed. When I pull up alongside Adam at the traffic light he is drumming the dashboard with one hand, and through the half-open window I can hear him singing My Baby Does The Hanky Panky."
That night in bed I expected Adam to turn to me. As I sat in the chair next to the bed I concocted brief scenarios for Hannibal: he has gained admission to the training school for seeing eye dogs; he graduates in the top of his class and spends the rest of his days leading people through life; he's been taken in by a family with children; he is fiercely protective of them; he joins with a pack of wild dogs; he is the leader; they run deer for sport and food—run them until their fine-boned, elegant legs give way and crumble beneath them—they fall in heaps in a dark forest. I've thought a lot about that story my grandmother used to tell. I wonder what happened when somebody noticed they lost a train.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for the conclusion!]
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
THE LOST TRAIN (part 2)
[Here's Part 2 of B.N.'s story The Lost Train - enjoy!]
TWO. KINDS OF HUMAN SPIRITS
There are two kinds of spirit, and they are like backward and forward. There is one spirit that man attains in the course of time. But there is another spirit that overwhelms man in great abundance, in great haste, swifter than a moment, for it is beyond time and for this spirit no time is needed.
The Bratslaver
The second time my grandmother visited me I turned around and switched the light on: she was at the kitchen table sipping coffee and picking up toast crumbs with the tip of her finger. She was still a young and deft woman. She wore a familiar blue summer dress with a white eyelet Peter- Pan collar.
What I had learned to appreciate about her was that she saw many things as the consequence of simple over-indulgence. Too much sleep, she said, caused vivid late afternoon dreams, too much salt made people weepy, especially women during their menstruation. In this way life became a finely balanced effort—a thing that could be controlled. Life then required—demanded—attention to the certainties and to the discounting of uncertainties. In this world cars never faltered. And this struck me as so much blind faith that it compelled my respect.
THREE. BEHOLDING THE WORLD
As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.
The Baal Shem Tov
Watching from the window the day my grandmother left Warsaw, she could see that on the street below a crowd was moving toward the train depot. She always began the story like this: "In the month of Adar, the year 5701, I had just finished a translation of Lear for the Yiddish theater. My rendition of Cordelia was particularly moving. I must admit that I wrote it with myself in mind. But Etka Bloom had that all sewn up, since she was engaged to the director's son.
"Suddenly the city was mythical. A walled city like a Jericho, Jerusalem, Troy—sentry guards at the gates. The shoe factory was confiscated. Part of it was dismantled brick by brick and sent further into Europe. When they sealed off our ghetto, it was actually good for my work. The distractions were cut in half, and the streets grew more familiar each time I stepped out.
"People were ordered to present themselves at the train depot—some were just grabbed off the street or out of shops. This was 'relocation.' The trains departed twice a day and were always full. We had no idea of our destination. Some people said we were going out to the Polish countryside; others said differently.
"By two o'clock that afternoon, seventy-five of us were loaded into one of the train cars and the doors were shut. By three, the main began to slowly pull out of the depot. At first we traveled east and it seemed we were heading for the countryside, near the Russian border.
"There were small slit windows near to the top of the cars—no glass and too high to see out of, too narrow to show much—branches of cold winter light grew through them. A man gave me a lift up with hands clasped together under my feet. From the window I saw the snow-covered Polish countryside. And people shouted: 'What do you see? Can you tell anything?' I said I saw people walking in pairs near the tracks, couples with children, and the children waved 'bye train.' I saw nobody from the window, but I wanted a vision—a picture of happiness.
"The train lurched and swayed on. In the car with the people from the ghetto were three Poles—criminals. One a petty thief, another a whoremaster, and a third a black market merchant. They said we were going to Maidanek or Auschwitz. They had friends who had made this trip before. But our train never went to Maidanek or Auschwitz. It got lost on the way.
"An engineer must have fallen asleep, and never thrown the switch to route us from one track to another. We headed in the wrong direction all night —exactly what direction it was we did not know, just that it was wrong.
"When the sun rose I was lifted again to the window. By now the winter landscape of Europe had given way to midsummer and a full green countryside. About eleven that morning, the train stopped. From all the cars up and down the tracks there were bangs on the walls, and shouts. When the doors opened, we stood blinking in the light. Two young men jumped down and began to lift the others out.
"We stood there next to the tracks for a few seconds. People walked alongside the other cars looking for a familiar face. They shouted: 'Does anybody here know Lena the pharmacist?' 'Aaron the dry goods seller?' 'My wife Etty—a redhead?' Here were all the lost people of the lost train. After a few minutes we noticed what had brought our train to a halt. About one hundred meters farther down, in a field, the track just stopped suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere. There were other people already there. When they saw us they walked out from behind a grove of trees on the edge of the field. I heard them speaking French and Dutch, Greek and Italian—every language. Soon there seemed to be no difference between our languages. We all laughed at our own surprise at how we had outsmarted the world.
"The first few nights we slept in the train cars, but soon we dismantled them and used the wood to build small houses. And we lived that way until the war ended. Years later I heard that Etka Bloom after three weeks in the camp stopped washing and drank her bowls of water—she died after five days. I can act, she always said. But she could not imagine."
I knew the story by heart. Grandmother was always telling it with an air of superiority whenever she met a Jew from Warsaw.
Now when she visits and I look over at her she is younger than I remember her, younger than any of the pictures reveal. Her hair is dark brown with waves that give way to curls around her face. Her front teeth are chipped in an inverted v.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for part 3!]
TWO. KINDS OF HUMAN SPIRITS
There are two kinds of spirit, and they are like backward and forward. There is one spirit that man attains in the course of time. But there is another spirit that overwhelms man in great abundance, in great haste, swifter than a moment, for it is beyond time and for this spirit no time is needed.
The Bratslaver
The second time my grandmother visited me I turned around and switched the light on: she was at the kitchen table sipping coffee and picking up toast crumbs with the tip of her finger. She was still a young and deft woman. She wore a familiar blue summer dress with a white eyelet Peter- Pan collar.
What I had learned to appreciate about her was that she saw many things as the consequence of simple over-indulgence. Too much sleep, she said, caused vivid late afternoon dreams, too much salt made people weepy, especially women during their menstruation. In this way life became a finely balanced effort—a thing that could be controlled. Life then required—demanded—attention to the certainties and to the discounting of uncertainties. In this world cars never faltered. And this struck me as so much blind faith that it compelled my respect.
THREE. BEHOLDING THE WORLD
As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.
The Baal Shem Tov
Watching from the window the day my grandmother left Warsaw, she could see that on the street below a crowd was moving toward the train depot. She always began the story like this: "In the month of Adar, the year 5701, I had just finished a translation of Lear for the Yiddish theater. My rendition of Cordelia was particularly moving. I must admit that I wrote it with myself in mind. But Etka Bloom had that all sewn up, since she was engaged to the director's son.
"Suddenly the city was mythical. A walled city like a Jericho, Jerusalem, Troy—sentry guards at the gates. The shoe factory was confiscated. Part of it was dismantled brick by brick and sent further into Europe. When they sealed off our ghetto, it was actually good for my work. The distractions were cut in half, and the streets grew more familiar each time I stepped out.
"People were ordered to present themselves at the train depot—some were just grabbed off the street or out of shops. This was 'relocation.' The trains departed twice a day and were always full. We had no idea of our destination. Some people said we were going out to the Polish countryside; others said differently.
"By two o'clock that afternoon, seventy-five of us were loaded into one of the train cars and the doors were shut. By three, the main began to slowly pull out of the depot. At first we traveled east and it seemed we were heading for the countryside, near the Russian border.
"There were small slit windows near to the top of the cars—no glass and too high to see out of, too narrow to show much—branches of cold winter light grew through them. A man gave me a lift up with hands clasped together under my feet. From the window I saw the snow-covered Polish countryside. And people shouted: 'What do you see? Can you tell anything?' I said I saw people walking in pairs near the tracks, couples with children, and the children waved 'bye train.' I saw nobody from the window, but I wanted a vision—a picture of happiness.
"The train lurched and swayed on. In the car with the people from the ghetto were three Poles—criminals. One a petty thief, another a whoremaster, and a third a black market merchant. They said we were going to Maidanek or Auschwitz. They had friends who had made this trip before. But our train never went to Maidanek or Auschwitz. It got lost on the way.
"An engineer must have fallen asleep, and never thrown the switch to route us from one track to another. We headed in the wrong direction all night —exactly what direction it was we did not know, just that it was wrong.
"When the sun rose I was lifted again to the window. By now the winter landscape of Europe had given way to midsummer and a full green countryside. About eleven that morning, the train stopped. From all the cars up and down the tracks there were bangs on the walls, and shouts. When the doors opened, we stood blinking in the light. Two young men jumped down and began to lift the others out.
"We stood there next to the tracks for a few seconds. People walked alongside the other cars looking for a familiar face. They shouted: 'Does anybody here know Lena the pharmacist?' 'Aaron the dry goods seller?' 'My wife Etty—a redhead?' Here were all the lost people of the lost train. After a few minutes we noticed what had brought our train to a halt. About one hundred meters farther down, in a field, the track just stopped suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere. There were other people already there. When they saw us they walked out from behind a grove of trees on the edge of the field. I heard them speaking French and Dutch, Greek and Italian—every language. Soon there seemed to be no difference between our languages. We all laughed at our own surprise at how we had outsmarted the world.
"The first few nights we slept in the train cars, but soon we dismantled them and used the wood to build small houses. And we lived that way until the war ended. Years later I heard that Etka Bloom after three weeks in the camp stopped washing and drank her bowls of water—she died after five days. I can act, she always said. But she could not imagine."
I knew the story by heart. Grandmother was always telling it with an air of superiority whenever she met a Jew from Warsaw.
Now when she visits and I look over at her she is younger than I remember her, younger than any of the pictures reveal. Her hair is dark brown with waves that give way to curls around her face. Her front teeth are chipped in an inverted v.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for part 3!]
Monday, August 30, 2010
THE LOST TRAIN (part 1)
[Over the next four days we'll be serializing B.N.'s short story The Lost Train. Hope you enjoy it!]
THE LOST TRAIN
God never does the same thing twice. When a soul returns, another spirit becomes its companion.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
As translated from the Yiddish by my grandmother, Meta Tannenbaum
ONE. THE WORLD
The world is like a revolving die, and everything turns over, and man changes to angel and angel to man, and the head to the foot and the foot to the head. So all things turn over and revolve and are changed: what is above to what is beneath and what is beneath to what is above. For in root all is one, and in the transformation and return of things redemption is insured.
The Bratslaver
The first time my grandmother visited me after she was dead and in her grave, I had just gotten off the phone with the mechanic and was standing next to the sink scraping hardened egg from a plate with a knife. She stood by the table in a red dress with a white collar, resembling exactly how she looked most of my childhood. My life on that morning tallied up to one runaway dog (not answering to the name Hannibal), a man named Adam I could sleep better without but needed at the moment to drive me to pick up the car from the mechanic's, and twenty-three fourth grade themes needing grades, entitled: "Me, My Family, and My Community," written on rough woody paper that aged in my hands.
I knew what she would say about this. "From hunger it looks. Can't rub two nickels together to get a dime, you run around like a poisoned rat. After I die everything goes out the cow's ass." She had a way of making sure that everything somehow had her at the center.
It all started with my grandmother's belief that spirits would come to visit their relatives and past lovers after they moved into a new home. Every time we moved, she would spend the first six weeks watching and waiting for them. So she willed it—a visit to my house in what she called the "country” where western New York begins to give way to Pennsylvania coal mines, a house cheapened by its proximity to the railroad tracks, haunted by high-pitched whistles every four hours. This "country" wasn't the achievement that the Catskills were—a name she dropped out with a click of the tongue—but rather an undistinguished landscape where people shopped at Sears and ate casseroles. Husbands grew fat on beer in this landscape, and their wives put down roots sitting at the kitchen table.
WHEN I WAS a child, the essential chemical elements of death on my periodic table were gas, fire, and smoke. I was terrified of the dead. I thought they were all on fire constantly. Almost everybody my grandmother spoke of in her stories went up the chimney in smoke at the end. And she insisted that the closer the embers were packed together, the longer the fire burned, the thicker the smoke. "The ember that sparks and then comes to rest away from the burning log will burn to ash faster than the log," she said. "When the embers begin to go out, you need to take the poker and scrape them all together so that they will not die down." I always saw them like that—burning piles. Auntie Tal's and Uncle Shaul's ashes emptied into the Vistula River and then were carried out to the sea. At night I dreamt they rose out of the ocean dressed in skirts of seaweed. My grandmother would correct my notions of the dead. "The spirit," she said, "does not do anything willy-nilly. Now go back to sleep."
It was on a trip to the Catskills when I was eleven that I first remember trying to imagine a different life in a more subtle town, a Hanover or an Amherst—a soft accent. My name would be Ann or Katharine, the name of a girl on a beach, like in some movie. My imaginings would begin as I lay on the back seat of the car with comic books scattered around, rereading the good part on page seventeen. "Water, Water," I would moan, pretending that I was in the French Foreign Legion. And after having trudged halfway across the Sahara (in order to forget bad love) I would be kidnapped and tortured for information, but would not break. This was how I began to define heartbreak, bravery, and loyalty.
"Esther, shut up that nonsense," she would say.
At the bungalow colony, six weeks' rent paid, she would saunter along the path to the clubhouse in a big straw bat and a short sundress. She liked to show a lot of leg.
For a while she had been a famous translator. She could render books, letters, and articles in and out of languages the way a dancer changes costumes between acts—Polish, German, English, Yiddish, not to mention a host of Slavic languages. Her landmark translation was a comparative study of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the Tales of the Upside-Down Town of Cheim. Not too many people know that she was the only Yiddish translator of both Twain and Washington Irving. But she made her living giving language lessons and doing translations for whoever needed them. People would come to her clutching letters from relatives in America, mail-order brides in Latvia, business partners in Palestine. Often she took great liberties with a text, and the changes she made seemed to her only for the better. Her transformations of a text always began simply, without direction. Once a man came to her needing a translation of a letter from his arranged fiancée in Crakow. The woman had changed her mind and had chosen to marry a newspaper publisher in her town. The man who stood rubbing his bald head seemed so elegant, so deserving, that instead of revealing the true content of the letter, Meta recited a steamy, impassioned love letter from a woman who was faithful and impatient.
Sometimes rich people sent their entire personal libraries for her to translate. Boxes and boxes of books, articles, and publications were carried up the five flights of stairs for her to work over. When a bit of religious or scientific material passed her desk, she took a special delight in translating it. These particularly pleased her; to Talmudic material she inserted unanswerable questions and extensive textual glosses. In those days she wore her dark brown hair in a blunt, shoulder-length cut that framed her large face, a style that seemed both too severe and too plain for her features. Her chin appeared square and her face long. She always worked in her best dress. It made her feel more competent, able to alter the world.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
[Please check in tomorrow for the next installment!]
THE LOST TRAIN
God never does the same thing twice. When a soul returns, another spirit becomes its companion.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
As translated from the Yiddish by my grandmother, Meta Tannenbaum
ONE. THE WORLD
The world is like a revolving die, and everything turns over, and man changes to angel and angel to man, and the head to the foot and the foot to the head. So all things turn over and revolve and are changed: what is above to what is beneath and what is beneath to what is above. For in root all is one, and in the transformation and return of things redemption is insured.
The Bratslaver
The first time my grandmother visited me after she was dead and in her grave, I had just gotten off the phone with the mechanic and was standing next to the sink scraping hardened egg from a plate with a knife. She stood by the table in a red dress with a white collar, resembling exactly how she looked most of my childhood. My life on that morning tallied up to one runaway dog (not answering to the name Hannibal), a man named Adam I could sleep better without but needed at the moment to drive me to pick up the car from the mechanic's, and twenty-three fourth grade themes needing grades, entitled: "Me, My Family, and My Community," written on rough woody paper that aged in my hands.
I knew what she would say about this. "From hunger it looks. Can't rub two nickels together to get a dime, you run around like a poisoned rat. After I die everything goes out the cow's ass." She had a way of making sure that everything somehow had her at the center.
It all started with my grandmother's belief that spirits would come to visit their relatives and past lovers after they moved into a new home. Every time we moved, she would spend the first six weeks watching and waiting for them. So she willed it—a visit to my house in what she called the "country” where western New York begins to give way to Pennsylvania coal mines, a house cheapened by its proximity to the railroad tracks, haunted by high-pitched whistles every four hours. This "country" wasn't the achievement that the Catskills were—a name she dropped out with a click of the tongue—but rather an undistinguished landscape where people shopped at Sears and ate casseroles. Husbands grew fat on beer in this landscape, and their wives put down roots sitting at the kitchen table.
WHEN I WAS a child, the essential chemical elements of death on my periodic table were gas, fire, and smoke. I was terrified of the dead. I thought they were all on fire constantly. Almost everybody my grandmother spoke of in her stories went up the chimney in smoke at the end. And she insisted that the closer the embers were packed together, the longer the fire burned, the thicker the smoke. "The ember that sparks and then comes to rest away from the burning log will burn to ash faster than the log," she said. "When the embers begin to go out, you need to take the poker and scrape them all together so that they will not die down." I always saw them like that—burning piles. Auntie Tal's and Uncle Shaul's ashes emptied into the Vistula River and then were carried out to the sea. At night I dreamt they rose out of the ocean dressed in skirts of seaweed. My grandmother would correct my notions of the dead. "The spirit," she said, "does not do anything willy-nilly. Now go back to sleep."
It was on a trip to the Catskills when I was eleven that I first remember trying to imagine a different life in a more subtle town, a Hanover or an Amherst—a soft accent. My name would be Ann or Katharine, the name of a girl on a beach, like in some movie. My imaginings would begin as I lay on the back seat of the car with comic books scattered around, rereading the good part on page seventeen. "Water, Water," I would moan, pretending that I was in the French Foreign Legion. And after having trudged halfway across the Sahara (in order to forget bad love) I would be kidnapped and tortured for information, but would not break. This was how I began to define heartbreak, bravery, and loyalty.
"Esther, shut up that nonsense," she would say.
At the bungalow colony, six weeks' rent paid, she would saunter along the path to the clubhouse in a big straw bat and a short sundress. She liked to show a lot of leg.
For a while she had been a famous translator. She could render books, letters, and articles in and out of languages the way a dancer changes costumes between acts—Polish, German, English, Yiddish, not to mention a host of Slavic languages. Her landmark translation was a comparative study of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the Tales of the Upside-Down Town of Cheim. Not too many people know that she was the only Yiddish translator of both Twain and Washington Irving. But she made her living giving language lessons and doing translations for whoever needed them. People would come to her clutching letters from relatives in America, mail-order brides in Latvia, business partners in Palestine. Often she took great liberties with a text, and the changes she made seemed to her only for the better. Her transformations of a text always began simply, without direction. Once a man came to her needing a translation of a letter from his arranged fiancée in Crakow. The woman had changed her mind and had chosen to marry a newspaper publisher in her town. The man who stood rubbing his bald head seemed so elegant, so deserving, that instead of revealing the true content of the letter, Meta recited a steamy, impassioned love letter from a woman who was faithful and impatient.
Sometimes rich people sent their entire personal libraries for her to translate. Boxes and boxes of books, articles, and publications were carried up the five flights of stairs for her to work over. When a bit of religious or scientific material passed her desk, she took a special delight in translating it. These particularly pleased her; to Talmudic material she inserted unanswerable questions and extensive textual glosses. In those days she wore her dark brown hair in a blunt, shoulder-length cut that framed her large face, a style that seemed both too severe and too plain for her features. Her chin appeared square and her face long. She always worked in her best dress. It made her feel more competent, able to alter the world.
B.N.
© 1990-present
This story originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review
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