A Bird's Eye (3 page)

My room was the smallest in the house, hardly big enough for more than the bed. A small window overlooked the trash heap in the back garden. Kneeling, I could see my mother coming up from the cellar steps, hands black with coal dust. A smudge on her forehead darker than the birthmark. Kids taunted me because of her mark and reluctantly I had to defend her honour. I usually lost.

It was October 1938, and I was fourteen years old. The windowpane had frost at the edges. I traced my name with a dirty fingernail. From downstairs came the slam of a door. My mother made so much noise, I always knew where she was in the house. My father made almost none, a shadow with no more weight than a single inhalation of breath. Right now he was no doubt at the kitchen table, waiting for his breakfast.

“Benjamin!” My mother calling. “If you don't come now, I throw your eggs in the garbage.”

I finished buttoning my shirt, glancing idly at the row of toys on the one shelf above the bed. Monkey. Fish. Lion tamer. Bear on a chain. Child riding on a crocodile. I had always owned them. When I was younger, my father had demonstrated them to me (not allowing me to wind them myself), but they hadn't been touched for years. There was one, a mechanical bird, that he told me was supposed to be his finest creation. Like the others, it was made out of tin and other metals, but with eyes made of glass, dark eyes that looked as if they saw everything and nothing at the same time. It had the shape and colour of a crow but also something of the jay and swallow, an imaginary merging of types. Its wings, folded in repose against its body, were larger in proportion than an actual bird's, as was its long and pointed beak that somehow looked as if it were smiling. Inside it was a clockwork timing mechanism that set the wings flapping for one minute. Then the wings would halt, stretched out in a gliding position, to start up again a minute later. During the glide, a rush of air was supposed to enter an open slit under the tail and turn a miniature paddlewheel inside, ratcheting up the spring again. My father's idea was that the bird would stay up until the parts wore out, or it crashed into something, or the weather forced it down. As a child I had imagined it staying up for months and even years, flying over roofs and schoolyards and streetcar tracks and dance halls and dark alleys. And as it flew, my father told me, every so often its mouth would open and it would emit a screeching laugh. But it was the only one of his toys that he didn't wind up for me, that he had never allowed to come to “life.” He was too afraid that it would drive itself into the ground, or hit a church steeple, or destroy itself in some other way. It was too beautiful to wreck, he said. Actually, as a young boy, I thought it was a little frightening, with those dark, fathomless eyes. Now, however, I hardly noticed it. I didn't care about any of them, and the skill that my father once had meant nothing to me.

I hurried out of my room, slid down the banister, sprinted past the dim wallpaper curling at the bottom. My father was drinking his coffee and reading yesterday's newspaper, which he had picked up somewhere. There was a headline about the chancellor of Germany and a photograph of a crowd in a square.

“Can I have the funnies?”

“After I read them,” he grunted.

My mother dropped our plates onto the table. “If they taste like rubber, I don't care. Take some toast.”

“I want a cup of coffee.”

“You're fourteen.”

“Give the boy some coffee.”

“Ah, he speaks! Almost never, but when he does, what words of wisdom spill out. You want coffee, Benjamin? Fine. And tonight you can have whisky. Now I have to go. The stall won't open without me.” She wiped her hands on her apron as she pulled it off. “Benny, you make sure you go to school today. And Jacob, I am afraid to ask what you are going to do.”

“So don't ask.”

“Tell me.”

“I'm going to read this newspaper.”

“Out of work three months.”

“You haven't heard? I'm not the only one.”

“There is always work. A day here and there.”

“Not suitable work for a man of my talents.”

“You have no talents. I have been thinking. We can take in another boarder. It will be more work for me, of course. Benjamin, ask Mr. Speisman for more hours after school.”

“I already asked him. He said he has to cut back my hours.”

“More good news.”

“Hitler wants to kill us all,” my father said, rattling the paper.

“With your help,” said my mother, “we'll starve before he has a chance.”

School was a form of torture, devised by evil beings. I dreamed of being Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, the Green Hornet. Or someone with special powers, like Superman. If I could have one special power, what would it be? Strength? Flight? Definitely invisibility. Invisibility would allow me to put thumbtacks on Miss Patrick's chair for her to sit her big ass on. It would let me sneak into Doreen Kessler's older sister's bedroom when she was changing and see her titties. I could slip in at suppertime and my parents would stare in amazement as the fork and knife floated in the air and the food disappeared from my plate.

I was restless, small, quick. Physically more like my uncle Hayim, whom I knew even though I'd been forbidden even to speak with him. My father complained that I had
shpilkas
, ants in the pants. At school I could hardly keep my knees under my desk, my hands from playing with a pencil stub. I would close my fingers around the pencil and imagine that I could make it dematerialize like Mandrake the Magician. But my mind was more like my father's had once been, always devising, always imagining a better way.

I heard my name and looked up. Miss Patrick was staring impatiently at me.

“Benjamin, march up to the blackboard right now.”

I made my chair screech as I pushed it back. Only Mandrake could save me.

My father did not believe in anything anymore — not in himself, not in family, and certainly not in the deity to which his father had prayed so fervently as he rocked on his heels. But every so often he made me go to the small
shul
on Brunswick Avenue, whether for my sake or for his I did not know.

“I don't see why I have to go. It's just mumbo-­
jumbo.”

He cuffed me on the side of my head. I shook it off, then dragged my foot, pretending it was broken. I spent most of my time doing what adults themselves had no faith in. Already I believed only what I could figure out about the world.

“Walk properly,” my father said, giving me a shake. In his hand was the worn velvet bag. A woman leaned out a second-storey window, her breasts pressed to the side of the frame as she reached around to wipe the next glass. The
shul
was in a small house. Hebrew painted on the glass door. Inside was an old sour smell, a drone of voices. My father gave me a tallis and the two of us draped them around our necks, he muttering a prayer. We stood at the back and I watched the men sway, stoop-shouldered. I couldn't resist the strange effect of the chanting, how it turned these salesmen and shopkeepers into something that felt holy. What was it? The room, the atmosphere, the sound, the silk and the embroidered letters, the lighting. A powerful effect causing a certain trick of the heart, that's what caught my attention. And afterwards, I knew, they would once more turn back into salesmen and shopkeepers.

Last year a gang of Protestant toughs pelted us with eggs on our way home. My father didn't even chase them. In his case, he had been transformed back into a bum. That's how I saw him, as less than nothing.

My mother wore wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, a man's heavy overcoat, a washed-out kerchief over her hair. She shooed a pigeon with a deformed foot away from the bin of buckwheat. She sold barley, rice, cornmeal, spices from large jars: cardamom, turmeric, paprika, their intense, dusty colours. She stood under the corrugated overhang while Vogel, the vegetable seller across the way, played Al Jolson on his Silvertone. Before that it was Eddie Cantor, Molly Picon, “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha.” Old records — Vogel hadn't bought anything new in years. By now the Jewish singers had chased the Italian melodies from her head. She hadn't spoken to her relatives since marrying my father. It was ten years since she had used her own savings to buy the stall, her husband growing even less reliable with time. For two years, until kindergarten, I had sat on a small wooden crate eating chickpeas and watching the world pass, believing that Nassau and Augusta streets were the crossroads of the world and that my mother was its queen.

Mr. Kober, age seventy-seven, came by. His wife's legs were no good. Bella poured kasha into a paper bag and he watched carefully as she weighed it. Counted out the pennies. Three months, a husband out of work. In almost a year Jacob had not touched her. As if she wanted him. Sometimes, when he was out late at one of his card games, she would make her own pleasure. Then say to herself,
Enough, cow, go to sleep
.

She took the pencil from behind her ear and printed on a flat paper bag:

ROOM AND BOARD

$8 Month

Nice Room, Good Meals

These days, maybe eight dollars was too much. She crossed it out and wrote “six,” then tacked the note above the bins.

I was too old to visit her at the stall anymore; I didn't want to be seen by any kid I knew. I still believed that there was some little hope for me. A lifeline might be thrown, from where I had no idea, but if I watched for it and was quick, I could maybe catch it.