The Book of Intimate Grammar

20

Once, at Komi, at the end of the day’s work in the quarry, a stranger turned to Papa and asked to speak to him later that night, outside the barracks. Papa had qualms about him, but the man looked so puny, he figured he could beat him if it came to that.

The man’s name was Molochinko, and he was one of the Urkas, the criminal element, who were brutal as animals, the only prisoners ever to attempt an escape across the frozen steppes. When a group of them broke out, they would take along a couple of lucky “politicals,” this being — Papa traced a bitter smile across the wall — a political’s only hope of leaving the camp alive. Molochinko informed Papa that a couple of Urkas were planning to break out the following night, and he had been chosen to go with them, since he looked strong enough to carry the provisions they would need on such an arduous trek. Papa was terror-stricken, but he agreed to join them. He had managed to survive two winters in Komi; a third, he knew, would kill him, and he would die again each day till then regretting the lost opportunity. That’s how I was. Papa hacked at the wall, arching the muscles of his back like steel!

Crowds of big black clouds peeked into Edna’s window, their cheeks swelling furiously over childish mouths. And one moonlit night the Urkas made their getaway. They had lavishly bribed the guards, who in any case did not believe they would survive in the taiga. After a few hours’ march by the light of the icy moon, Molochinko sprained hisankle and had to stop. The Urkas huddled together and quietly conferred while the three politicals stood apart, in vague trepidation. At last the Urka chief, a murderer from Lithuania, announced that they would abandon Molochinko there. No one protested, and they set off again, but a little farther on Papa dropped out and sneaked back to the casualty: What could I do, I felt sorry for the mutt.

Molochinko was staggered to see him and wept in gratitude, clutching Papa’s hands with his iron claws. The taiga wolves had caught his scent and were prowling nearby in the darkness. Papa lifted Molochinko onto his shoulders and carried him for days. After almost a week without any food, Papa cut himself with a knife and let Molochinko lick his blood. Molochinko sucked his arm, gazing up like an overgrown calf. When he finished he blurted out that the Urkas took politicals along to use for meat on the journey, and fell to his knees, begging Papa’s forgiveness for having tricked him into joining the escape, with the excuse that he hadn’t really known him at the time.

Now the hammer boomed to a heavy cadence, louder than the storm outside. And so, for weeks — or was it months, who knows — Papa and Molochinko roamed the taiga. They lost their way, and the howling wolves that trailed them expectantly drove them half insane. Once they came across a skeleton with the cap of a political lying beside it. Molochinko crossed himself and peered at Papa anxiously. The sledgehammer reverberated, hard and dull, pausing each time like a cannon saluting the dead. There was nothing but pine forest and tundra as far as the eye could see. They slogged around in circles, up to their knees in the snow, stranded on the vast palm of Nature, terrified of disappearing without a trace in these infinite expanses. If not for Molochinko, said Papa, I would have sunk in the snow and waited for the Angel of Death.

Ai, Molochinko. Papa struck again, while Edna cringed in anticipation of what she read on his rippling back. Molochinko was a petty thief, a sardine from Odessa. He was arrested for stealing a consignment of streetlamps, so they sent him to the Hotel Komi for the rest of his life. Papa chuckled to himself, and Edna saw Molochinko on the wall, sketched with a few crude strokes as a shapeless but sprightly man full of merriment and chatter. Uh-huh, nodded Papa, that’s him all right.

Molochinko spouted witty anecdotes, hollow abstractions; he joked obscenely, flattered Papa, and exasperated him, working hard to maintaina kind of standard of human emotion in the heart of the ice. Together they learned to hunt birds with a slingshot and eat them raw, those brightly feathered birds, Miss Bloom, that sang so prettily, it was a shame to eat them, and once they had to fight a pack of dogs off a deer carcass. And there were herds of wild horses, small and lithe, galloping fleetly over the horizon. At night he and Molochinko would sleep in a tree, tying themselves to the trunk by a rope like criminals hanging from the gallows. One night Papa awoke with a feverish start, and saw that the taiga, glowing pale in the moonlight, was aswarm with crouching wolves that gazed patiently up at him like masked humans with cold, indifferent eyes, the faceless members of a thousand committees, who sent the likes of him to die in the taiga, and he began to beg them for mercy, he was a man like them, he wanted to live, to love a woman, but then he woke out of the trance, realizing he was delirious. Actually I was more afraid of Molochinko than I was of the wolves, because if he’d seen how weak I was, he would have butchered me on the spot, that’s right.

At last, after endless days of wandering, they reached the outskirts of a tiny village. Edna Bloom took her thumb out of her mouth and listened intently. Papa’s chest heaved like a bellows, and Aron cocked his eye: the low clouds overhanging the window seemed to have rallied to a secret cry; they puffed their cheeks and spat, as if trying to put out a forbidden flame. Papa and Molochinko lay low: the villagers were ignorant serfs who subsisted by growing beets and stealing the logs that floated down the river. Papa smashed the wall, tucking his head between his shoulders to hide from the resounding boom: the entire building groaned like a ship ramming into an iceberg, the naked plane tree screeched like a topmast; three days later, Papa and the robber of streetlamps discovered a woman locked up in the farthermost hut of the village. The captive’s husband worked outside the village and forbade his wife to leave their home. Twice a day some old crone would pass her a bowl of pottage through a hatch at the back. The two men ogled the slender arm reaching out to take the dish. Go to him now, murmured Edna all of a sudden. Go to him, wipe the sweat from his brow, bring him a glass of water. Without ulterior motives. Just to let him know there’s another human being in the room.

The following night Papa kneeled down on the frozen ground, and Molochinko climbed on his back and slipped in through the hatch. Papacould hear a muffled cry of surprise inside. Then a thud and a curse. Then silence, panting, and a startled groan. And silence again. And gentle weeping. Papa crouched in the darkness, in the shadow of the hut. Then, after a pause, he heard a harmonica tweedling inside, slowly and shyly at first, then mounting and bursting with life — Aron’s eyes were opened now: Come on, it’s time to go, I have homework to do, what’s taking so long? In the early dawn Molochinko shook his shoulder to wake him and they hurried back to the forest. In his hands he held a quarter of a sausage, a whole potato, and a chicken egg. A smile of pride spread over his lips. He held his fingers under Papa’s nose. Papa sniffed the fingers and shivered, then grabbed them and licked them and sucked them, unconscious that his feet were taking him back to the hut: Molochinko had to hit him over the head to bring him to his senses. And that’s the truth, Miss Bloom, I’m sorry to say.

Molochinko babbled frenziedly, explaining that the door was latched shut and the serf had the key. That the hatch was too small for Papa to climb through. But inside, he told him, there was fresh food and enough provisions to keep them going for days, and the woman, aiaiai,he drew two undulating curves in the air. Papa hung on to the robber’s every word and asked a thousand times if there might not be some way of getting him into the hut. Again the taiga seemed to him like a massive prison where his youth would wither in the bud.

Papa gulped hard, as though swallowing the bitter memory. Then he started hammering again. Edna listened, but the blows sounded hollow, reluctant somehow. Why did he have to break his story off? Pale and pouting, Edna stood up. She paced the room, nearly tripping over Aron, advancing toward Papa, then stumbling backward, till suddenly she was sitting at the piano; not bothering to wipe the dust away, her fingers flitted over the keyboard, searching for something, scanning her repertoire. Aron listened with his mouth open: what a strange, wispy melody. A slow, disorderly tinkling that burst wildly into song. He had heard it before. Papa too stood motionless, then nodded his heavy head as he followed the slippery tune with his lips, lighting after it, amazed at how it spurted out of the piano, and suddenly he could feel it hovering over his face, twisting and frolicking; he stuck out his tongue and snatched it up and licked it, beaming as it clung to his puffy lips, and he flourished his hammer and struck again with a silent whistle, the one that irritates Mama, and even kept time with his foot till Ednasmiled to herself and slowly shut the piano: We don’t need you anymore, we found what we were looking for …

The following night they returned to the hut. And they did it again: inside, Molochinko copulated with the woman, while outside, Papa kneeled, his ear to the wall, listening for their groans of pleasure, for the dregs of a passionate moan. Molochinko came out with a great supply of words for him. The way she smiled; the tender flesh of her inner thigh; her soft flowing hair … Papa listened, swallowing his spit. Molochinko allowed him to sniff his fingertips: Remember now, no biting.

And then one night … Papa hammered gently, with a trembling heart, and Aron jumped up and threw the blanket off: Why does she always have to cover me up, why do I come here day after day, it’s a miracle my head doesn’t explode from all the hammering, how long can you sit and watch someone tearing down a wall, and he tiptoed out, afraid they might stop him in his tracks with a resounding shout, or the boom of the sledge, and force him back to listen, and so, sidling up to the door, he stood there dizzily, with his hand on the knob: Maybe I got up too suddenly, it’ll pass, another second and I’ll be out of here and I’ll never come back, what a bore.

… One night Papa caught a glimpse of the crone in the next hut peering out the window. He decided not to wait for Molochinko and went back to their hideout in the forest. The robber of streetlamps returned around dawn, bragging and swaggering without cease. An unfamiliar urge for vengeance seeped into Papa’s heart. An ancient outrage. He said nothing to Molochinko about the old crone next door. The enraptured lover described the bright-colored cap the woman had started knitting him, and the holy icon over the bed which she piously turned to the wall each time, and the fullness of her lips as she blew on the harmonica — there was a look on Papa’s face that made Molochinko uneasy, and he slowed down but couldn’t stop entirely: her breasts, he said, raising a hand to caress them, so warm and soft beneath his cheeks, sending out their milky vapor; and Papa’s eyes never left Molochinko, stunned by the murderous hatred in his heart, the hatred of the meek for the braggart, the hatred of Cain for Abel.

The night after, I crouched outside the hut again as usual; there were eyes in the back of my head, though, and Molochinko jumped up onme, hippety-hop, and in through the hatch, and I turned and ran in the opposite direction; I was an animal in those days, for better or worse I was an animal, that’s how I got out of the ice, Miss Edna; he was pounding with his whole body now, pressing his chest and loins against the wall, and Aron thrust the door open and fled, down four steps at a time, home through the rain, through the darkness, straight into bed with all his clothes on, with the blanket over his head, training himself in secret like a sumo. And so, Miss Bloom, Miss Edna, I ran for maybe half the night, till I couldn’t hear the dogs barking or the people shouting anymore, but all night long I saw the smoke rising out of the hut, and I never even knew the woman, only her smell.

With all his might he smashed the wall. A last chunk of stone was stuck between the bricks and he waved his hammer at it. Another bolt of lightning zigzagged across the sky, but lassitude leaked in between the raindrops, as though all the spunk had gone out of winter. Papa bellowed hoarsely and struck again. And again. Edna sprawled in her armchair, all-seeing though her eyes were shut tight, with an unfamiliar violence whirling up from the abyss inside her, causing her little frame to tremble and shake; a spark flew out of the somber sky, and a bolt of lightning spat fire, but the rain had relented. Papa groaned again and paused: the rest of the wall caved in. Lightning hissed with rancor and recoiled, and there was a moment’s silence. Then the clouds began to fade into the distance, withering as they mounted higher, like an assembly of grumbly old men.

Somewhere a window opened. The lamps in the street went on. The apartment was filled with a gentle light. Papa sank down, utterly exhausted. He raised his heavy head in search of Edna and was surprised to find her crouching under the piano, her arms crossed over her knees. Her eyes caressed him with tender compassion. And he smiled at her apologetically, as though waking from a dream, reflecting how young she looked, how fragile, not much older than his Aron.

“This wall is finished,” he said at last in a husky voice.

Edna stood up and stumbled and sank down again. She laced her fingers as tightly as she could to stop the trembling. Papa approached and stood limply before her, waiting for her to say something. When he looked he saw her bashful smile, the gleam of mischief in her eyes, and her finger pointing at the kitchen wall.

“Hinda will want more money,” he said. This was his first mention of Mama, and the way he said her name filled Edna with glee, as though the two of them had become conspirators against her.

She thought a moment. Her bank clerk, a little man who behaved like a tall one and always tried to flirt with her, had warned: profits on the fund that paid for her annual summer trip were poor this year; she shuddered at the thought, but suddenly imagined the way he moved his hips, and something inside her, a bucking bronco, whinnied and stamped before the gaping bespectacled eyes of the clerk. “A hundred and twenty,” she said in a scintillating voice.

“No, no,” said Aron’s father. “That’s too much. It isn’t a very big wall.”

“But it may be tricky. It’s probably crawling with electric wires.” She smiled.

“Excuse me for asking, Miss Bloom, but where do you get all the money?”

She smiled a little smile, cryptically feminine, the kind of smile she’d always despised. It succeeded nicely. She smiled again.

“It’s late now,” said Papa, peering out the window. The gloomy clouds were drifting away, gnawing each other spitefully. Papa weighed the hammer in his hand and brandished it at the window. “We can’t start today,” he said, “we have to wait until tomorrow, if that’s okay with you, Miss Bloom.”

“Tomorrow is Friday,” she answered, still smiling. “And my name is Edna.”

He blinked at her, distraught, recalling something faraway, impossible, staring wildly at the swift yellow animal flapping her tail, and Edna was amazed to see that even his eyes were throbbing. Like a giant he towered over her, her narrow waist, her slender thighs, and on the wall outside that led to her entrance some brat, maybe Zacky Smitanka, had scribbled a nasty jingle about a bull and a mouse who want to play house, the coarseness of which estranged them. Suddenly, Papa swerved around, waved his hammer high, and struck a blow at the kitchen wall. Aron shivered in his sleep. The hammer remained at Edna’s over the Sabbath, implanted like an ax inside her wall, where it vibrated uninterruptedly, emitting shock waves in concentric circles.