Burial (2 page)

‘Oh, God protect me,' she said. She didn't know what to do. She approached the oil-painting and tried to pull it down into a normal hanging position, but when she did so it immediately swung back to the horizontal. She tried again, but again it swung back.

‘
Who's here
?' she screamed, her voice as shrill as wet fingers dragged down windowpanes.

She pushed her way back to the living room. Empty, shadowy, but still permeated with that sour offensive smell.

‘
Who's here
' she screamed again.

She ran around the apartment. The bedroom, with its pink quilted bed. The bathroom. Her frightened face suddenly met her in the mirror, and refused to smile. The spare room, where they kept the rowing-machine. The unused, unloved rowing-machine. Michael's den, crowded with books and pennants and golf clubs.

‘Who's here?' she whispered. Her hands trailed along the walls, touching, pressing, as if to reassure herself that she was walking through real and solid surroundings.

She returned to the dining room. The furniture remained where it was, crowded against the wall. She stared at it for a very long time, breathless. Then she took hold of one of the dining chairs, and carried it back to the centre of the room, and set it down. She watched it, half-expecting it to tumble back to the wall, but it stayed where it was. She found another dining chair, and carried that back to the centre of the room, too, and set that down next to the first chair.

‘Nobody's here,' she told herself. ‘Only me. It's my furniture, it goes where I want it to go.'

It's my foinitcher. She hated her accent. She had taken elocution lessons, but she couldn't shake it completely. Maybe her friends didn't hear it, but she always did. Dere was a little goil who had a little coil. Besides, she didn't want to talk, not now. Somebody may be listening. Somebody
may be hiding. And so long as she talked, she wouldn't be able to hear him. She wouldn't be able to hear him breathing. She wouldn't be able to hear him creeping up behind her back.

She turned, quickly. There was nobody there. There was nothing to do but to drag all the furniture back (apart from the sideboard, she'd have to leave that to Michael and Erwin, and probably to Freddie Benson, too).

She managed to push the table back, and straighten out the rug. Two of her best crystal glasses were broken, snapped-off stems. The flower-seller's donkey was missing an ear; and her best lace tablecloth was soaked in wine and water. The glass-fronted bookcase had opened, and there were heaps of books on the floor.
Exodus
by Leon Uris;
The Promised Land
by Moses Rischin;
The Golden Tradition
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Michael's bibles, almost. She knelt down and picked them up.

The Golden Tradition
had fallen face down, spread open. As she closed it, she saw that the two open pages were blank. She turned to the next page, then to the next, and to the next. Then she riffled through the book from beginning to end. All of the pages were blank.

Maybe a notebook, she thought. A book of days. But then she picked up
Exodus
and she had read that copy of
Exodus
herself, that very same copy, and all the pages of
Exodus
were blank, too.

Desperately, she picked up book after book. Not a word inside any of them. They had all been wiped clean, as if they had never been printed. She stood up stiffly wiping her hands together.
I'm sick. Something's wrong with me. Either I'm sick or I'm asleep. Maybe I fell asleep while I was cooking. There was so much to do, after all. If I go back to bed and lie down, and then maybe open my eyes … maybe this will all be a dream
.

She
knew
this had to be a dream. She would never have broken her best crystal glasses, except in a dream. She
would never have broken her donkey's ear. She would never have let the
Shabbes
candles go out.

She set up the
menorah
on the table, took a book of matches out of her apron pocket, and relit the candles, closing her eyes briefly with every fresh flame, praying for Henry and Anne and Leo with every new flame; and for Michael, and Erwin, and for herself.

After she had lit the seventh flame, she opened her eyes. The shadows from the candles were dancing on the wall. But over on the right-hand side, one shadow remained completely still — not dancing, not even trembling, like the shadows of the chair backs. A dark, hunched shape that could have been the outline of a horse's head or a kind of badly distorted goat.

She stared at it for almost a minute, praying for it to move,
daring
it to move, but while the other shadows flickered and whirled, it remained totally motionless. Brooding; dark; engrossed in its own dreadful stillness. She lifted the
menorah
so that all the shadows would swivel and sink. She moved it from side to side, so that all the shadows would shift from left to right. Still it stayed where it was, hunched, motionless, a shadow that refused to obey all the normal rules of light and shade.

She put down the
menorah
and crossed the room to the wall. She placed her hand flat on the shadow, cautiously at first, then with more confidence. It was definitely a shadow, not just a dark mark on the wallpaper. So how come it always stayed exactly where it was?

It was then that she noticed another, smaller shadow, on the far end of the wall, almost in the corner. This shadow remained motionless, too, although it was much more recognizable as a man. He appeared to be sitting with his back towards her, his head resting on his arm, as if he were thinking about something, or tired.

After a while, the hunched shadow suddenly moved. She
stepped quickly and nervously away from it, one hand raised in front of her to protect herself
although how could a shadow jump off a wall
? Her heart was pumping so hard that she felt sure that everybody in the entire building could hear it, knocking against her ribcage. The shadow moved, dissolved, shifted and then moved again. It was still impossible for her to say what it was. It appeared to have an enormous bulky head, with strings of loose flesh hanging down from it. It reminded her of that terrible movie
The Elephant Man
, which Michael had once insisted they watch together. (‘It's
culture
… you want to watch
The Price Is Right
for the rest of your life?')

Without warning, the hunched shadow lunged across the wall and dropped on top of the figure on the far end of the wall. She watched, mesmerized, as the two shadows appeared to struggle and fight. She kept turning her head, kept looking behind her, to see if there was anything in the dining-room which could be throwing such shadows, but she was alone; she and her furniture, and her flickering seven-branched
menorah
.

It was like watching a struggle being played out in a 1950s detective movie, shadows against a window-shade. Except that this wasn't a window-shade, it was a solid wall, and shadows couldn't be seen through a solid wall.

She was so frightened that she felt like running out of the room, running out of the apartment, bursting into the synagogue and begging Michael to come home. But the hunched-up shadow was tearing the smaller shadow to pieces, lumps and strings and rags, and she had to stay to see what was going to happen.

She didn't hear a scream. The dining room remained silent, except for the pounding of her heart and the noise of the city traffic.

But when the hunched-up shadow tore off what looked like the smaller shadow's head, she
felt
something. She was
sure she
felt
something. A scream as white and as silent as a frozen window; but a scream all the same.

The hunched shadow changed shape. She couldn't understand what it was doing at first, because it was dark and two-dimensional. But then she realized that it had turned around — and not just turned around, but
turned towards her
.

She backed away, two or three steps, then another. This was it. This was time to run. The shadow seemed to swell, as if it were coming closer. There was no sound, only the sensation of something approaching.

She was just about to snatch for the door when one of the dining room chairs dragged itself noisily across the floor, caught her just behind the knees, and sent her colliding against the bookcase. Another chair slid across the floor, then another. Then the table circled around, its feet making an ear-splitting screeching noise on the wood-block flooring, and struck her on the right side of her head, so hard that it almost knocked her out. She tried to struggle up, but the furniture pushed against her, harder and harder, all legs and arms and corners, pinning her against the wall as painfully and effectively as if it had been stacked on top of her.

She gasped for breath. The edge of the table was pressing so relentlessly against her chest that she thought her breastbone was going to crack. A chair-back wedged itself against her shoulder. She cried out ‘
Help! Somebody help me
!!', but Freddie Benson was playing his own guitar in accompaniment to his CD player now, and all she could hear was the deep bass thrumming of Bruce Springsteen.

She couldn't breathe. She felt one rib being pushed in further and further; and then something inside her chest made a sickening noise, halfway between a crackle and a wet sigh. She felt an intensely sharp pain, a pain that made her scream; and when she screamed she screamed out a fine spray of blood.

She felt the furniture bearing down on her harder and harder. She felt as if gravity were pressing her against the wall.

She shouted ‘
Help
!' again and again; but she thought about all of those times when she had heard other women shouting in the Village — muffled cries of pain and despair — and how she had always ignored them. Other women's agony hadn't been
her
business.

She smelled that deep, sour smell, like a fetid well being opened up. She twisted her head around and saw to her horror that the hunched-up shadow was heaving itself silently towards her, huge-headed, beastly, a living nightmare fashioned out of nothing but darkness.

I could never understand why I always attracted old ladies so much. Old ladies have gushed all over me ever since I was knee high to a high knee. They kissed me, they cooed at me, they patted me so often I was lucky my head didn't end up totally flat on top. They gave me dimes for candy, which I saved up and bet with at the track.

By the time I was nine I suppose it had become second nature to think that old ladies = money, just like e = mc
²
. I ran errands for them, mowed their lawns, painted their fences, all of that Tom Sawyer stuff. In return (apart from paying me) they taught me how to play the stock-market, how to cheat at bridge, and how to blackmail major food companies into sending you heaps of free groceries, all of that old lady stuff. Don't you ever think that old ladies are innocent old dears: they have all day to sit and think of ways to rip off the system, and they do.

It was an old lady called Adelaide Bright who taught me the most profitable skill of all, however: and that was how to tell fortunes. Tea-leaves, crystal balls, star signs, tarot cards … she knew them all and she showed me how they were done.

The first thing she taught me was that tea-leaves and crystal balls and astrological signs are only a ritual, a little bit of hocus-pocus to impress your client. She was one of the best: but she demonstrated without a doubt that you can no more predict somebody's future from the star-sign they were born under than you can predict when a tire is going to blow out from the time of day it was moulded.

Telling the future isn't magic, it's common sense. All you have to do is take a long shrewd look at your customer, come to some logical conclusions, and lie a lot. Oh — and
charge
a lot, too. The more expensive the fortune-telling, the readier your customers will be to believe you. After all, they're going to waste 100 bucks on nonsense?

Adelaide taught me how to sum people up by the way they sat, the way they talked, their nervous habits, the way they laughed. Most of all, she taught me how to read people's personalities by the way they dressed. Two women can be wearing the same outfit, but one of them can be wearing it because it's the very best that she can afford, while another woman can be wearing it because — to her — it's cheap and casual.

‘Look at their shoes,' Adelaide used to remind me. ‘You can read volumes from people's shoes. Are they new but dirty? Are they old but well-repaired? Are they Nike trainers or are they wingtip Oxfords?'

The only thing about which Adelaide was seriously superstitious was the tarot. She thought that the tarot was dangerously misunderstood; not to be played with; and much more powerful than anybody knew. She said the tarot was a window to a land which all of us could remember, but
which none of us had ever visited — or would ever
want
to visit. I didn't know what the hell she meant by that, so I smiled and nodded and listened to what she had to say about detective work.

Adelaide was almost like Sherlock Holmes, the way she could analyze people; and when it came to predicting what was going to happen to them, she was almost always spot-on. She even predicted that old Mr Swietochowska's deli on Ditmas Avenue was going to go out of business, almost to the month, although I later found out that she had a nephew who worked for the planning department at Safeway, and he had told her a clear two years ahead of time that the company was thinking of building a new superstore on the waste lot right next door. But that's what telling fortunes is all about. Observation, logic, memory and common sense. You can tell your
own
fortune if you're honest about yourself, but not many people are.

Even Adelaide wasn't. She smoked a pack-and-a-half of Salem Menthol every day, sometimes more when she was lonely. She said they couldn't hurt her, being menthol. They kept her sinuses clear. On 15 March, 1967, she complained of chest pains and shortness of breath. On 11 April, she died of lung cancer at the Kings County Hospital Center and the only person who went to her funeral was me. It didn't rain. In fact, it was hazy and uncomfortably hot, and I wished that I hadn't worn my raincoat.