Israel (19 page)

“Yes, what is it?” Miss Grissome asked. She tucked her papers into a drawer and folded her hands on the desktop.

Abe awkwardly shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he explained. He took the receipt from his breast pocket, carefully unfolded it and placed it upon Miss Grissome's desk. She stared at it with unmistakable gloom.

“Mr. Herodetzky, we all made sacrifices during the strike. I myself am earning far less money here than I could as a bookkeeper in an accounting firm.”

Abe had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. He decided to make another start of it. “I lent this
money, you understand.” He tapped the receipt with his finger.

“You must understand that we have a duty to each other to pull together.” She glanced at the smudged, tattered receipt, partially torn at the folds. When she looked back at Abe, her small, weak pale blue eyes swam like fish in an aquarium behind the thick glass of her spectacles. “You come in here presenting this paper that I can hardly read, signed by somebody I've never heard of, demanding two hundred dollars? I hardly know what to say.”

“It's my money. I lent it,” Abe heard himself rasping.

“You say you did, but frankly, Mr. Herodetzky”—her smile was as thin as a straight razor and just as lethal—“where a man of your station in life could come upon two hundred dollars escapes me.”

“I earned it.” His tone was so plaintive that she momentarily believed him, but as she contemplated the scrawny laborer in his too-large shabby suit, her initial concern turned into contempt.

“I saved every penny of it out of my wages,” Abe was saying. “Two years it took me.”

“I hardly think so,” Miss Grissome sniffed. “But for the sake of argument let's say that you did donate some money to the union—”

“It wasn't donated, it was lent.”

Miss Grissome smacked her desk top with the flat of her hand. “I am just about out of patience with you, sir! If you gave that money, it was donated, just the way restaurants donated free meals, and college students went from door to door soliciting donations. Why, do you know that the workers who settled early with their employers donated fifteen percent of their earnings to the strike fund? Over a quarter of a million dollars was collected in that manner. If you somehow managed to raise some money for the cause, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking for it back. Hasn't your union done enough for you?”

“The paper,” Abe pleaded, “read the receipt. It's there before you.”

“I have read it, Mr. Herodetzky.” She shook her head. “Whoever gave you this, he had no right to do so, do you understand? No right whatsoever. He would be in great legal trouble with us—we'd have him arrested for fraud—if I believed your story in the first place, which I don't.” She crumpled the receipt and tossed it into her wastebasket.

“Give that back to me!” Abe started around the desk to retrieve his receipt.

“Trouble here, ma'am?”

Abe spun to confront the guard he'd passed at the entrance.

“I do hope not,” Miss Grissome said, her voice quivering with anger. “This man was just leaving. Would you please show him out?”

Abe tried to think, but the touch of the guard's thick fingers on his sleeve panicked him. He felt himself being led away from Miss Grissome's desk, and the only English he could seem to remember was, “My money, my money!”

“Come on, mister,” the guard urged. Abe moved along the corridor in a dreamy haze, only barely aware of the office personnel watching him from their doorways. Then he was in the foyer, and then he was on the other side of the pebbled-glass door. The empty hotel corridor seemed to tick with silence.

Abe suddenly realized that Miss Grissome had to have a ledger where all contributions were noted. Somewhere there had to be a record of his two hundred with de Fazio's name.

I should have thought of this before, Abe stormed at himself. As he re-entered the suite he wondered to himself in Russian why he'd let that supercilious woman frazzle him so.

He was hardly through the door before the guard
moved to block him. The big man stood with his arms crossed. “On your way. I don't want to hurt you.”

“I just want to see that woman once more,” Abe said, trying to sidestep the man. “I thought of something—”

“Get out.”

Abe was petrified, but he stood his ground. He held his hands up before him in a placating gesture—all the while trying to sidle past the big man.

The violence came with obscene abruptness. Abe distractedly wondered how some were able to marshal their reflexes to defend against such attacks.

The guard carried him by the scruff of his neck, as he would a kitten, and propelled him out of the office. Abe saw the man shove open the glass door with his free arm. He caught a glimpse of the guard's hamlike fist drawing back and sickening pain thudded into his lower back.

Abe found himself on the carpeted floor on his hands and knees. He settled down on his belly, inhaling the musty odor of the worn carpet's nap, and waited for the agony to fade.

From somewhere above him came the guard's gruff voice. “It's my job to see that there's no trouble here. I can't risk my job. You stay out, mister, else I'll really bust you up.”

God's angel, sent to drive Adam and Eve from Eden, Abe thought almost wryly, for the assault had drained his nervousness, leaving him feeling oddly hollow inside. The pain was fading. Behind him the glass door clicked shut. The dust in the carpet made him sneeze.

He sat up. His palms were red and stinging, raw from the friction of the carpet. The baggy knees of his trousers were torn. “Not enough I got to lose the money,” he complained to the empty corridor.

Slowly, wearily, he got to his feet. It was going to be dreadful, but he had no choice. Steadfastly he went to the closed door.
He had to see Miss Grissome and ask about that ledger.

The door was locked. Abe rested his sweaty forehead against the cool pebbled glass. “Hah,” he murmured to the guard on the other side, “so you're afraid of me.”

He began to laugh. The sound of it in his throat was soft, diffident, but it was definitely a laugh. I might as well laugh, as cry, Abe thought. The money is lost.

He would not tell anyone what had happened. He would lie to the steward. He would tell him everything went just fine.

Abe wandered the seventh floor until he found the stairwell. He could not bear the thought of that smirking elevator attendant.

The deserted stairwell was very warm. It was still summer in New York, one of the hottest Septembers ever. It had to be as hot within these unventilated confines as it was in the sweatshop.

The sweatshop—back there again, and for how long?

Between the sixth and fifth floors Abe found himself growing dizzy. His vision darkened and he had to clutch at the banister to keep from falling. He doubled over and vomited, and through it all he was petrified that someone might hear. They would think he was a derelict, seeing his torn pants. They would think he was a drunk and call the police. He would be arrested and thrown in jail.

His spasms subsided. Gasping, he scuttled like a crab down to the ground floor. His side was aching terribly and his mouth tasted terrible.

At the ground floor another staircase descended into the basement and the gentlemen's washroom. The attendant, a black, eyed him stonily but said nothing. Abe stepped into a cubicle and locked the door behind him. He stripped off his suit jacket, lowered his trousers and twisted around to examine his aching lower back. There was a large purple bruise over his kidney. Abe wondered if he'd been injured
internally. He hitched up his trousers, put down the lid on the toilet and sat with his head in his hands, wondering what he was going to do.

One thing was certain, he would hold to his decision not to tell Stefano. Miss Grissome's words kept echoing in his mind—“Whoever signed that receipt committed fraud.” Stefano could end up in prison if Abe made trouble. Abe could not be responsible for ruining his life.

Could he expect Stefano to pay him back? “Come see me if the union gives you trouble,” he had said. The idea initially attracted him, but he discarded it as unworkable. It would take years to pay back such a sum. Sure, Stefano would commit himself to it, for he was a man of his word, but how many months would it be before that commitment turned to resentment? The other workers would find out about it, and before very long Abe would be treated like a Shylock even by his fellow Jews.

No, Abe thought, there are some things in life more important than money.

He left the cubicle, rolled up the sleeves of his sweat-slick shirt and went to a basin to wash his face. He cupped water in his hands and rinsed the foul taste out of his mouth, not caring if the attendant was watching and disapproving.

The attendant wore no expression at all as he handed Abe a towel. Abe thanked him and dried off. He saw the man's dark eyes flick down to his torn trouser knees.

“I fell.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” the man said. He cocked his head. “You with the union, sir? The union's a good thing.” He held Abe's jacket for him.

Abe knew that he was supposed to tip, but he had just enough money in his pocket for carfare downtown. He hurried out of the washroom, calling out a thank you over his shoulder without looking back.

He made a beeline through the lobby, eyes straight
ahead, and after an eternity found himself out on the sidewalk. On the street at least if someone noticed his torn pants they wouldn't speak to him about it.

A clock in a store window told him that it was after ten. He hurried to catch his streetcar downtown, it had been quite a morning, and the thought of a full day on Allen Street nauseated him all over again, but he couldn't skip work. Not now, not when he was penniless.

He managed to avoid Stefano for the rest of the morning, but during the lunch break the Italian came over. “It all go okay?” he asked.

Abe swallowed hard and nodded. “Fine. Everything is fine.”

“They paid you? No trouble?”

Abe nodded.

“They give you the interest?”

“They gave me everything,” Abe said, too quickly, too harshly. “I'm sorry to sound nasty,” he added. “I'm tired today.”

Defazio stared at him curiously, then shrugged. “Okay, then. I'll see you later, my friend.”

Abe watched him go off. Twenty minutes later he and the other workers were back at their machines. The clatter and hiss of Abe's pressing irons seemed to taunt him with the same chant over and over again: You'll be here forever. The money is gone.

It was a sultry sixty-five-degree evening in November. Haim Kolesnikoff, his heart fluttering with excitement, skipped down the stairs and out the front door of the Jewish National Fund office. He stood on the creaky wooden planking that served as the sidewalk and dug his gold watch out of his satin waistcoat.

It was just after seven. Haim sighed with relief. He would not have to go back to work. His factory manager would have shut the place down for the day. Anyway, Haim was far too excited by the results of the meeting he'd just had with the fund's director, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, to return to his desk.

Haim slid his hands into his pockets and started home. He found himself whistling happily as he strolled along.

Calm down, he warned himself. You may have convinced the Jewish National Fund, and last week you worked things out with the bank, but the hardest part is still ahead of you. You've yet to confront and convince Rosie.

Tel Aviv's streets were bustling; crowds of workers were returning home from their jobs in Jaffa and stopping
to shop. The little city was thriving. More small suburbs were sprouting around the nucleus, where mud and sand were slowly giving way to blacktopped roads and new waist-high toothpick-slender eucalyptus, which somewhat helped to halt the constant shifting of the sand dunes.

As Haim walked past the shops of Zangwill Street, he wondered what Meir Dizengoff would say when he heard of his plans—assuming he could convince Rosie, of course. Meir probably wouldn't much care. He was too busy. These days Dizengoff seemed to be everywhere at once, tending to every aspect of his beloved Tel Aviv. He interviewed the teachers at the Herzlia High School; he hired municipal workers; he scrutinized every blueprint for a proposed building.

That the Old Man had any legal right to control these matters was questionable, but one might as well ask a parent if he had any legal right to meddle in the affairs of his grown offspring. Like the proud papa he so longed to be, he continually extolled Tel Aviv's virtues while ignoring its shortcomings. For example, the straight, shallow shore of the city could not compete for shipping with Jaffa's existing natural bay, and the shifting sands and crumbly stone made building difficult, but these things did not matter to Dizengoff. As far as he was concerned, Tel Aviv was the best place on earth.

Dizengoff had never been cheerful or gregarious, and these days he'd almost totally cut himself off from the original members of the Ahuzzat Bayit. The few who did see him said that he'd soured even more except when it came time for him to address new Jewish immigrants. Then he became the inveterate optimist, expending his considerable charm until his voice was hoarse, encouraging wealthy newcomers to begin building in Tel Aviv and instructing the not-so-wealthy on how to borrow the money to do the same.

Haim had been dropped from Dizengoff's social list,
and at first he was hurt and upset. After all, Meir had been the guest of honor at his wedding and had witnessed the certificate. Eventually, however, Haim came to understand that Dizengoff was wrapped up in a dream. Haim could understand, for he was working hard to bring about a dream of his own.

He passed a shoe store and saw the products of his own factory displayed in the window. His business was successful, as were all the other Jewish businesses in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, including Dizengoff's new shipping company. Tel Aviv welcomed commerce and clamored for more. It was next to impossible to go bankrupt in Tel Aviv, for the city's interdependent business sector considered itself to be one big family.