Shadow Baby (11 page)

He pulled his safety glasses over his eyes and touched the tip of the solder iron to the tin. Gray metal-melt trickled down the side.

“This. Making useful and beautiful objects of metal. This, and the memory of my mother in a dark room, singing to my younger brother.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“That’s it.”

“That’s not one thing, that’s two.”

“Then I’m a lucky man,” he said.

T
here came a night when the old man broke through into the root cellar. From then on he led a secret life. Solitary confinement by day, prison kitchen by night. In the early hours of
each morning, this brave man made his way into the prison kitchen. Careful never to take more than would be noticed, he built up his strength with raw turnips, raw potatoes, and leftover bread. He used the prison sink to bathe in. He shaved with a kitchen knife and the light of the moon. He did calisthenics to keep his muscles strong. Every night he stretched and stretched to stay limber.

When he had completed his nightly foray, the old man covered his tunnel opening with a wooden crate full of potatoes and headed back to the hole.

He never gave up.

He did not allow himself to think beyond the moment. He did not allow himself to think of the day beyond the present day, the weeks stretching into months, into years, into a lifetime.

He never once thought: my youth has passed me by and I will die in this hole, an old, old man.

He thought instead of his tin snips, his forge, his solder iron, and his mother in a dark room, singing.

After ten years they opened the wooden cover to the hole and brought him up into the light of day. Blinking and squinting at the sunlight that he had not seen more than a glimpse of for a decade, Georg Kominsky regained his freedom. He lives on in the hearts and minds of his fellow prisoners, a symbol of the human spirit determined to survive at all odds.

“W
hat would you like to do tonight?” the old man said one Wednesday night when I arrived. I looked out the window above the old man’s sink. The choir members hadn’t even turned the lights on in the Twin Churches. We had two hours.

“I would like to have some hot chocolate,” I said.

I got out one of my hot chocolate packets from the cupboard. In the beginning, the old man bought me hot chocolate packets from Jewell’s. But when I figured out that he was poor I insisted on bringing my own. I used to get hot chocolate packets free at the bank, at the little refreshment table in the corner where the armchairs are. There’s a coffeemaker and a small wicker basket of tea bags, coffee bags, and hot chocolate packets. There are wooden stirrers and fake cream, which must be spelled creme or kreme. You cannot use the word
cream
if it’s not real cream. That’s the law.

They frown on nongrownups who avail themselves of the little refreshment table, but I used to take the packets anyway.

“It’s for a good cause,” I said once to the bank lady when I saw her giving me the once-over.

The old man was a good cause.

I don’t go in the bank anymore.

I put hot water on the miniature stove and waited for it to boil. It’s a fallacy that a watched pot never boils. I’ve proved it wrong many a time. While I was watching the pot and thinking about the young Georg Kominsky tunneling for ten years through dirt, the old man washed the supper dishes. The old man could stand in one place and reach the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, and the dish cupboard. He had just enough dishes. Two mugs. Three plates. Three bowls. Three forks. Three spoons. One table knife and one little sharp knife. He didn’t need any more knives because the old man rarely ate anything that required cutting. You might think that having three plates and bowls is having one too many, but you would be wrong. What about the serving plate and the serving bowl? You’ve got to have an extra to serve from.

The old man had white plates with orange borders. Sad to say, orange is my least favorite color. The only way I like orange is as it occurs in nature, for example, orange poppies in gardens, orange tiger lilies by the side of the road, orange and black Monarch butterflies, orange Indian paintbrush in the field. When orange occurs elsewhere, as in borders on white plates, it is abhorrent. It is a crime against nature. That is my belief.

“Where did you get your white plates with the orange borders?” I asked the old man as he was drying them. He used to dry every dish separately. Forks, spoons, everything. He was fastidious about his dish drying.

“Scavenging night,” he said.

The old man was a wonderful scavenger. I sometimes accompanied him on scavenging expeditions. He had a sixth sense.

“You’ve got to have the eye,” he said.

I don’t have the eye yet, but I’m trying. I’m training my eyes to be like the old man. It’s difficult for two reasons: (a) I know how to read and he didn’t, and (b) he saw possibility everywhere.

When you know how to read you can never get away from it. Your eye goes to words first and everything else second. The old man was not hampered by the knowledge of letters. His eye could roam free. He could take in the big picture, whereas I am bound to words first and foremost. Now that I know this I some times try to remember being a baby, before I was trapped by words. What was it like? I ask myself. I narrow my eyes and try not to see words and printing and letters. It’s hopeless. I’m a reader.

While he dried the dishes I asked him my death row question again.

“I will ask you a variation of the question you never answered,” I said. “Electric chair or life in solitary confinement with worms in your meal bucket every night and only a scrap of horse blanket to sleep on: which would you choose?”

He hung his dish towel over the oven door handle to dry. He always hung it in exactly the same way.

“Are they my only choices?”

“They are your only choices.”

“I ask because there are many other ways to live and die.”

“There are more ways to live and die, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your universe,” I said. “But you are allowed only two. Which do you choose?”

“Which would
you
choose?”

He used to do that sometimes, turn the tables.

“I believe, sir, that you were the one asked the question,” I said.

The old man finished washing and drying his dishes. No answer was forthcoming.

“It’s scavenging night tonight,” he said. “Do you want to go looking with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you need anything special?”

Yes, I thought. I need a sister. I need my Baby Girl.

“How about cookie cutters?” I said. “Small metal objects that are useful as well as beautiful.”

Tamar has a small cheesecloth bag of cookie cutters in our junk drawer at home. We don’t use them. We don’t make cookies. Tamar doesn’t believe in sweet things. She has a streak
of asceticism in her. She would not admit to it, but she does. If they do it the way it should be done, monks and nuns are ascetics. They live alone in cells. Absolutely bare. Stripped of everything worldly, which means anything colorful, anything frivolous, anything that is not essential to the sustainment of life. If they do it right, monks and nuns go to sleep on hard cots with one blanket in a cell that has one cross hanging on the wall, preferably at the head of their narrow single bed with its one, scratchy, thin, brown, wool blanket, similar to the kind of scrap of horse blanket that the young Georg Kominsky slept with in solitary confinement.

Our small cheesecloth bag of metal cookie cutters contains a bell, a heart, and a star. That’s it. You can’t get much more basic than that. To my knowledge, they have never been used. The most sugar the antisugar Tamar allows is a teaspoonful on her Cheerios. She’s a thin woman, Tamar. Some might call her scrawny.

T
he old man saw possibility. The old man saw potential in things that I could not. Tinfoil, for instance. A person like the person I used to be would rip off just enough tinfoil to wrap the leftover with, wrap it, and stick it in the refrigerator. But the old man made tinfoil swans out of his leftovers.

“That’s a waste of good tinfoil,” Tamar said the one time I tried to make something pretty out of two leftover boiled potatoes at home.

I was not doing a good job of it. I tried for a swan first, but that didn’t work. Then I tried for a heart shape, but it was lopsided, so I settled for a roll with twisted tinfoil tails.

“It’s an abstract sculpture,” I said.

“It’s an abstract waste,” she said.

If I had tried to argue with Tamar about the tinfoil abstract sculpture, I would have said that my abstract sculpture was useful because it protected the boiled potatoes. And that it was beautiful because it was an abstract sculpture. The waste of a few square inches of tinfoil is secondary to the beauty. That’s what I would have said, had I tried to argue with Tamar. But the fact is, she’s unarguable.

It is not common to find, for example, beautiful cookie cutters set out in the trash. Instead, the old man and I used to find pre–cookie cutters: strips of thin scrap metal behind the service station, for example, or old tin milk crates stacked up behind the Sterns Co-op. The old man had the eye. He could tell what had the potential to become a cookie cutter and what had a different destiny. I could see his eyes going from one trash pile to another. He looked and he kept on looking. Then he would pick something up and put it in the Jewell’s bag.

“This has possibility,” he said.

Or he said nothing.

There was an abundance of plastic bags that particular night. Thin, filmy plastic bags, the kind you put vegetables in at Jewell’s. They were blowing around the trailer park. Patches of white on branches. One puffed up at me like a ghost.

“Why are there so many plastic bags blowing around here?” I asked.

The old man didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer anyway. Some questions demand answers; others are rhetorical. I decided to ask a series of rhetorical questions.

“Rhetorical question number one: Why do people choose to let their plastic bags blow around in the wind? Two, would it
kill them to put their vegetables all in one brown paper bag instead of a series of plastic bags, one vegetable species in each? Three, do these plastic bag people ever stop to think about the ten thousand years it takes a plastic bag to degrade?”

“Clara,” the old man said.

That’s all he said. What he meant was: quiet down, please.

I quieted down. We walked up Route 365 into the village of Sterns. Jewell’s Grocery was closed, as was Crystal’s Diner. The old man spotted a big olive oil can behind Crystal’s. There was a picture of Italian hills and an olive tree on the front of the can. It had a big dent. I once remarked on the greenness of the oil I was observing Crystal mix with vinegar.

“That’s because it’s pure olive oil,” Crystal said. “I use it because my grandmother was
¹
/16 Greek. That’s the only part of me that’s not Polack, the
¹
/64 of me that’s Greek.”

“That’s one of Crystal’s olive oil cans,” I said. “Someone ran over it, looks like.”

The old man nodded. He turned it around in his hands, looking at it from all angles. I could tell he was considering. He was mulling over the possibilities in his mind.

“I can see the wheels turning,” I said. “Get it?”

“This has possibility,” he said.

When he said that, I took the dented olive oil can and studied it myself, for the possibility. I’m training my eye. It’s slow going.

The old man:
Dented olive oil can
=
pre–cookie cutter
.

Me:
Dented olive oil can
=
?

You have to look closely. You have to concentrate. You have to have the ability to see another destiny for something, a fate far removed from its original one. That’s what the old man was good at.

“Okay,” I said.

I never disagreed with the old man. You’re not allowed to argue or disagree when you’re an apprentice. You have to have the utmost faith that the master knows full well what he is doing. All things will be revealed to the apprentice in the fullness of time.

The old man held the dented olive oil can in one hand and we walked back to his trailer. The lady two trailers down looked out her window when we passed. She didn’t wave. She never waved. Many was the time I considered giving up waving at her, but I kept on. You never know. There may come a time.

The old man washed the can with soap and water and got his tin snips. We sat down at the table and he snipped the can open down each side. He set the dented side apart and laid the others out before us. I watched everything he did. I used to observe every move the old man made when he worked on something. That’s how apprentices learn. That’s how Paul Revere became the silversmith he was, back in the colonial days. First he was an apprentice, then he was a journeyman, then he was a master.

“Tamar will be here in twenty minutes,” I said.

“All right,” he said.

The old man tilted his head and studied the pieces of tin. He studied tin, and I studied him. His tin snips lay on the table. That, and his solder iron, were the only two things he brought with him from his country that doesn’t exist anymore. They were the only things that stayed with him to the end.

The old man also had a small forge. He kept the forge, along with a vise, in back of his trailer, on the patch of land that ran along Nine Mile Creek. That way the smoke didn’t
bother anyone. When the old man wanted to do some blacksmithing, he used his forge. I used to sit on the bank of Nine Mile Creek and watch the smoke spiral up into the air.

The old man bought the forge and the vise at an auction in North Sterns. Mr. Jewell drove him up there. I know that because I once overheard Mr. Jewell ask the old man how the forge was holding up.

“Good,” the old man said.

“The vise too?”

“The vise too.”

Later I asked Mr. Jewell how he knew about the forge and the vise.

“Because, Miss Clara Winter, I drove him up to the auction where he bought them,” Mr. Jewell said.