Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (13 page)

H
ARRY HAD A SNAPSHOT
of Nusan slipped into the frame of a mirror over his dresser. It was not the mirror he shaved in every morning, but it was almost that. It was the mirror he inspected his shave in, the mirror he straightened his shirt in. Even though he had no office, nowhere to go, really, Harry dressed every morning in a fresh starched shirt. He loved the stiffness of them, the way they looked like an unstarted day, a fresh skin. He had always imagined that when he got married his wife would iron and starch shirts for him. But long before they got near a chuppah, Ruth had announced, "I am not doing shirts," and said it in a way that was non-negotiable. She had noticed Harry's shirt habit, and it was not going to be her life's work. So he got them done at a 20 percent discount from the Chinese man in exchange for a rent deal on a storefront in his Tenth Street building.

As Harry put on his stiff, crisp shirt and straightened it in the mirror, he would always see the snapshot of his brother, Nusan, weighing about eighty pounds in a baggy suit on a street in Paris, wearing a smile without the least hint of humor in it.

Nathan was sure that Nusan had come to New York because his brother was there. Nusan always referred to Harry as "my brother," and if he was angry, if he was having a bad day, he would add the phrase "my only living relative," which always perplexed Nathan, since he was Nusan's blood nephew.

Since both brothers grew up speaking Yiddish, it would have been logical that they still spoke Yiddish to each other. But they didn't. They didn't speak very much to each other at all. When they did, it was usually in English. When Nusan did speak Yiddish, it was only to mutter a phrase, some idiom that was more a riddle than a statement.

He frequently grumbled to his brother,
"Aach, tokhes oyfn tish."
Literally, this means "ass on the table," and if it had any meaning beyond that, Nathan never learned it. When Nusan said it to him, Nathan would nod in response as though it were irrefutable.

Nusan made clear that he thought Harry lived a comfortable life of which he disapproved. But this was more an expression of Nusan's resentment than the cause of it. It seemed as though Nusan wanted to be poor to upset his brother. And it did upset Harry that Nusan was living in a sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment on Rivington Street on the air shaft, a cluttered little cave that he had settled into when he arrived in New York. His rent was now up to less than $60 a month, which probably made it one of the cheapest apartments in Manhattan.

Harry kept trying to give Nusan a better apartment. Harry told him it was an investment. "You'll be doing me a favor," he argued. "With the tax break I'll be making money"

But Nusan always had the same strange answer: "I do not take blood money." If Harry knew what he meant by this, no one else did. When Nathan was younger, he assumed that his father was looking after Nusan. But as he got older, it became apparent to Nathan when he went to see his uncle how alone he was, how grateful he was for the company, for someone to go out with. Gradually Nathan realized that Nusan was
his
responsibility Harry never complained, never said anything about it, but he probably did not enjoy Nusan's company, the blood money references, the other hostile statements. Yet Nusan's photograph was tucked in his mirror.

There was a lot Nathan and Mordy didn't know. Almost nothing had been explained to them. Nathan was not even sure how he knew that Nusan was a camp survivor. It seemed as if he'd been born knowing it. Can knowledge become coded in DNA? Will knowledge of the Holocaust become genetically encoded? Worse, will the experience? Will Jews genetically know the Holocaust the way salmon know the river of their birth?

The building on Rivington Street where Nusan lived had a smell of fried food and sweat and sometimes cats. The Dominicans had brightened the neighborhood with the blue and red squares of their flag, enlivened it with restaurants serving hot island food, made it bounce with their brassy merengue music splashing out of windows. Gang insignias were sprayed on the walls of Nusan's building and the walls of the Portuguese grocer across the street who had been there before the Spanish people. An unreadable swirling design in spray paint blocked the view from the wire-reinforced glass entrance to Nusan's building. Once the door to Nusan's apartment was opened, a different, overpowering, unidentified smell took over. It may have been just sour air. Even on the hottest summer days, when the old air conditioners in the other apartments were all rumbling and coughing like the distant sound of a busy small-craft airstrip, Nusan had his windows shut, Brahms swelling and the Mets striking out.

Nusan saw a synchronism between the dark, somber, Germanic tones of Brahms and the lineup of the New York Mets as they loaded the bases and failed to drive in a run or lost a winning game by an error through the legs. As summer began, they were still in first place in the National League East, but Nusan, with a connoisseur's eye for tragedy, could see the flaws that would doom them. The tall and goofy Darryl Strawberry would lope to the plate and pound the ball out of the park. But Nusan noticed that he hit like that only when the bases were empty. With runners in scoring positions he tended to strike out, revealing a hidden will to fail in spite of his enormous ability. Sportswriters said that he felt the weight of carrying the entire ball club. But Nusan knew this was simply a built-in desire to fail, just as Nusan saw Dwight Gooden's fate awaiting him, even while he pitched shutout innings, in interviews in which he denied using drugs.

The Mets were ill-fated champions. The Yankees had less talent and of late fewer victories, and for the moment the championship was eluding them. But they would be back because they thought like champions, walked with the blessing of winners. Nusan could never be a Yankees fan.

A few years back he discovered the Red Sox, a team so determinedly ill-fated that they had allowed the Mets to beat them in a World Series. How else could the Mets have won? There they were, converging on the infield, leaping on top of one another victoriously and improbably, while Nusan watched to the deep-voiced chorus of Ein Deutsches Requiem. Nusan was fascinated by the sight of the somber Red Sox slouching toward their dugout, not even looking surprised. More cursed than even the Mets. Nusan would have switched instantly, except that the Red Sox were not available on New York television.

Brahms and the Mets were Nusan's summer Saturdays as he sat in the dark in his studio on Rivington, deep notes billowing as the innings went by and the wins and losses accumulated. Still in first place, yes. But Nusan could see the demons waiting. He knew their disguises. He knew a lot about demons.

That was how Nathan found his uncle when he checked in on Sundays. Sometimes he brought Sarah, who had the only really open relationship with Nusan. Nathan wondered if Nusan ever had children. He had heard somewhere that he had had an entire family before the war. But no one would ever ask something like that—except Sarah, who might say anything. She called him Nussy

"Nussy you're smelly," she said one day

And then the rarest of occurrences, a large smile spread Nusan's mustache wide, and his teeth—good teeth—showed. "You're smelly, too, little girl." They both looked delighted with the exchange.

Visiting Nusan was an opportunity for Nathan. He had not been on a subway since the incident on the F train. Was his condition still there, ready to attack him unexpectedly? He hadn't told anyone about it. Maybe it would never happen again. A brief test was available. The F train again, one stop from Houston to Delancey The ride passed quickly and uneventfully; he had been lost in thought and had forgotten to monitor any signs of impending anxiety.

Nathan always let himself in to Nusan's apartment. Nusan had given him a key, supposedly so that Nusan would not have to get up to let him in, but Nathan knew what he was really thinking. He wanted Nathan, his namesake, the proof he was dead, to find the body. And every time Nusan opened the door he braced himself, first for the smell and second for the sight of Nusan dead.

Nusan was always in his chair with his scarf on. If the Mets were playing, an old scratchy record, usually a great classic recording played too many times, would be on and Nusan's pale face would be absolutely blue in the light of the television, possibly one of the last large black-and-white sets in Manhattan. If there was no afternoon Mets game, Nathan would find Nusan in the same chair with a hat on, holding a book inches from his face in the dim lighting.

Sometimes, if he saw Nusan in the neighborhood, Nathan would hurry over to his empty apartment to clean it up a little bit, in the hope it would attract fewer mice and cockroaches. He had filled the apart ment with poison—poison for rodents and poison for insects. But Nusan had entire drawers of stale food. He had a desk drawer crammed with stale chunks of challah from a hundred
motzi.

After his heart attack, his first documented attack, he refused to change his diet, which alternated between the neighborhood's heavy, fatty Jewish food, heavy, fatty Ukrainian food, and heavy, fatty Polish food. Also someone occasionally left him a bag of bialies. Nor would he move from his six-story walk-up. Moving was Harry's idea. Even the doctors said the stairs were healthy for Nusan.

"Better people than me have had heart attacks. Why should I have special treatment?" he said. But it seemed the six floors were getting difficult, and he went out less and less frequently. He was getting lonely He was also shrinking back to the weight in the photograph. For the first time since he had moved to America, someone would be able to recognize him from the snapshot in Harry's bedroom.

As Nathan approached Nusan's door, he noted as he always did that Nusan didn't have a mezuzah. But he had often seen Nusan as he entered the apartment give an almost imperceptible tap on the right doorpost as though touching one. No mezuzah, just this unconscious tap on the blank doorpost where it might have been.

Nathan braced himself for the smell as he opened the door. It came over him like a bag dropping over his head to smother him, blocking out air and light as he forced himself into the dark room.

And yet—he could breathe. He was not having an attack. He was just in Nusan's small, dark, foul-smelling apartment. There was a desk and a foldout couch and little more, yet the room seemed full. Nusan had given up unfolding the couch to sleep. A blanket and pillow were crushed in opposite corners. The floor, the couch, the desk, and the windowsills were stacked with newspaper clippings. Nusan was in his chair hunched over a paper, rocking back and forth, his gray hat on his head, looking every bit like a davening Talmudist lovingly reciting a favorite passage.

But Nathan knew that his head was covered not out of respect, but rather from a strange habit in old age of leaving his hat on. Nathan wondered if Nusan's father, his grandfather whom he had never met and who was one of many relatives who was never spoken of, really did cover his head and read passages while davening back and forth. All that was left was a vague notion of wearing a hat while reading.

Nor was Nusan's reading material Talmudic. Every scrap of writing in the apartment was on the same subject—Nazis. No one in the family ever took this very seriously until the case in which Nusan had played an important role. It seemed to be his revelation that the factory worker who had been exposed and deported was only one of three Tre-blinka guards who had been let into the United States.

Nusan had extensive information on all three. Once the case became known, Nusan retreated and let other, better-known figures do the interviews, but he had been the one who followed the trails. In his dark and stinking cave, he was more than a madman. He was a hunter.

Nusan looked up from his papers, stopping his davening motion as Nathan walked in the door. "You are late."

"It's three o'clock. I said I would be over in the afternoon."

"What time is the game?"

"They're playing the Astros in Texas. It's a late game. Gooden is starting," said Nathan, ready for the question.

They left the apartment and slowly made their way to a small Ukrainian place where they ate pirogis that were very much like the kreplach they used to eat at Rabbinowitz's—the same tart cheese filling, the same buttery soft noodle covering, and the same feeling in the stomach, as though small rocks were being placed there.

"Uncle Nusan, do you remember the German pastry shop up in our neighborhood?"

"I should eat German pastry?"

Nusan approached the topic with the same feigned indifference with which Pepe Le Moko approached rodents. But Nathan knew he hadn't forgotten. Nusan was cursed with a perfect memory At least from 1940 on. He never talked about before the war. This was one of the problems between him and Harry When Nusan arrived in New York, they had only prewar memories in common and Nusan wouldn't talk about those things. Nathan wondered if Nusan's problem with Harry was that Harry
was
a prewar memory.

"Remember, I mentioned the shop one time, the Edelweiss. We used to go there when I was little."

"With your father. I don't go to German shops."

"Did you learn anything about the owner?" Nathan asked, almost wincing as he asked it.

"Of the Edelweiss?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you order applesauce with the kreplach."

"Pirogi. This isn't Jewish. I don't want applesauce. Ever heard about him?"

"You get sour cream no matter what you say. So it's a waste to order sour cream."

"It's a waste to order applesauce if you don't eat it."

"A philosopher
Mug vi der velt."
Wise as the world.

"Do you think it would be possible for an SS colonel to be living all these years in the neighborhood?"

"You have no idea what is possible. You don't want to know. Now you're not eating all your sour cream, either?"

"Look, Uncle Nusan, this is not an expensive place. I can get you whatever you want. I think people just say these things because he's German."