The Secret Lives of People in Love (9 page)

As night unraveled through the streets of Brooklyn, the sign outside Serge’s shoe repair shop glowed. The red neon burned through evening and into early morning. Anyone pacing the city, anyone lingering in the palm of a streetlight could not ignore the dazzle and low growl of bright gas pumped through tubes like blood in the shape of letters—a promise to all who passed that certain things never need go unmended.

Below the neon sign, Serge’s display consisted of several pairs of shoes whose owners had never returned. Serge had painstakingly reconstructed them into sullen models of their former selves.

Under a shelf of dusty Russian magazines was a broken chair for customers to wait while Serge hammered, glued, and stitched. The smell of glue was often overpowering, but it was a thick, fragrant odor that hypnotized customers into waiting quietly in their socks.

The broken chair would not have supported the full weight of a person, but by some miracle had remained intact, beautifully ancient,
with one leg suspended an inch above the carpet, as though immersed in a never-ending dream of walking.

Serge was a large Russian with a face like old leather and eyes that over time had been dulled by life. When he was a young man, his hairy arms and beastlike stature were enough to pique the interests of men who enjoyed fistfights. But Serge always backed away from the sly remarks of drunkards, so they assumed him dull-witted or a coward, of which he was neither.

Serge was learning English slowly like an old man entering a sea. He enjoyed it because there were so many secrets entrenched within the meanings and in the pronunciation of each strange word.

Like butterflies, new words flew from Serge’s mouth and fluttered about the classroom for everyone to admire.

Serge had taken an English class at a local Russian Orthodox Church, designed after its famous cousin in Saint Petersburg. Serge often overheard neighborhood children discussing the rumor that the church had partly been constructed out of chocolate.

One evening in class, after the teacher had asked everybody’s profession, she winked at Serge and explained to the class how the word for the bottom of a shoe and the name for a person’s spirit were pronounced without any difference.

That night Serge lay awake beneath a full moon in his bed. His curtains were ivory squares that washed his crumbling apartment white, turning furniture to old wedding cake.

He repeated the word he’d learned in class. He said it out loud from the soft canyon of his pillow. Night had passed, but it was not yet morning.

Serge stopped going to class three weeks later because he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He arrived early for his final class and explained to the teacher that it may have been the glue he used in his shop, but he just couldn’t stop falling asleep. She was sad to see him leave and advised him to read newspapers in English. Other students drifted in, and within twenty minutes, Serge fell into a deep pool of sleep and then quickly resurfaced in a dream. He was back in Russia. There was a light wind. He entered his family house, and several birds escaped through the open door slapping his head with their wings.

As his classmates practiced the sounds and shapes of their desires, Serge climbed the dark stairs of the house his grandfather had repaired as a teenager. The house had once been the center of village life, where Serge’s grandfather held great parties with tall cakes, apple beer, and incense that hung from the fireplace in tight, dry bundles.

A river curled across the property, and Serge’s grandfather died one day beside it, while drawing a bird, which he abandoned to a life without flight. Serge had been watching him from the parlor window and, like several village children running through the orchard, had thought the old man to be dozing.

For two blissful years, Serge lived in the old house with his wife, a dark-haired seamstress from a village across the mountain where water froze all year-round.

She died in childbirth almost one year after Serge’s grandfather. The birth of his daughter was the saddest-happiest day of his life.

The grand old house soon declined, and within a short time only several of its rooms were comfortably habitable. Their only visitors
were a motley group of animals that crept up to the back door at dusk. Serge deposited scraps in several piles to prevent disputes. Serge held his daughter up to the kitchen window so she could see.

While Serge’s mostly Russian classmates chained letters to one another, he continued to dream and breathlessly reached the top floor of a house now boarded up and empty. From down the hall, he could hear his daughter crying, but when he tried to move in her direction, an invisible force held him in place. Like all parents, Serge recognized the nuances of his daughter’s anguish, and of all the things she could have been crying for; the dream—in a stroke of illusory genius—had merely soiled her diaper.

Serge had often spent whole nights perched over her crib like a gargoyle, afraid for the worst. In Greek myth, Death and Sleep are brothers.

Had it not been for his daughter’s crying, Serge would have been afraid and the dream would have been a nightmare—an expression Serge loved because night was like a horse that tore through the forest of memory.

As Serge cupped the doorknob and entered, the crying from down the hall abruptly ceased. In darkness on the broken chair from Serge’s shoe repair shop was his grandfather.

As he approached the suited figure, the old man’s left foot ascended through a constellation of dust. His eyes glowed like two small moons; his sole had come unstitched.

Under the spell of the dream, Serge knelt down to inspect the damage. His tools appeared.

Only once in his life had Serge repaired a sole that bore the weight
of a foot. His grandfather once confessed that such an operation required such skilled stitching and steadiness of hand that it should only be attempted as an act of trust—and reminded Serge of the peasants who tended the feet of Jesus.

Serge’s grandfather had not only repaired shoes but also crafted them from pungent sheets of leather and small hunks of oak.

One snowy morning in 1903, a guard from the palace of Prince Romanov rode into the village, his legs numb with frostbite. Across his shoulder in a black satchel threaded with gold were thousands of rubles and a cast of the six-year-old prince’s feet.

The guard dismounted wearily and then announced to the growing crowd how the great gilded hall of the royal palace had resounded with the name of
their
local shoemaker. Serge’s grandfather was summoned immediately from his smoky cottage on the edge of town. On his arrival, the guard fell to his knees and begged him to make the shoes his masters had sent him to procure. Serge’s grandfather helped him up from the muddy puddle and then listened as the guard explained how, with so much money in his satchel, it was unlikely he’d make it back to the palace alive, and in the event of his disappearance, his wife and child would have to live with eternal shame.

Serge’s grandfather was kind, and he assured the guard that he would make the shoes and that for the time it took to craft each piece he would share their home. The palace guard lived in the shoemaker’s cottage for two months and, over steaming potatoes, told stories of bravery and last words from the frozen battlefields of Russia’s battlefronts.

As Serge stitched his grandfather’s phantom shoe, the old man van
ished, leaving behind only a few crumbs of soil on the floorboards. The dream, however, remained intact, and he could hear the old man descending the staircase—the chair dragging behind him and clapping each step.

When Serge awoke, class was almost at an end, and the dream slipped from his memory like a pebble sucked back into the sea.

Several months after the dream in that last English class, Serge sat quietly on a b63 bus, watching various workmen settle into their labor for the day. The bus swerved to avoid craterlike potholes. Serge balanced an elaborate lunch on his lap. He had ordered it the night before from a Polish restaurant on the corner of his block. It was a special day, and on the seat next to him was his finest suit wrapped in paper and tied with string.

Although the day’s heat was still settling, dark bruises drifted across the sky, stopping above the river to admire themselves. It was a day Serge had been looking forward to all winter, and after opening the shop he unlocked the nightly drop box and set to work on the first pair of shoes—looking up only to greet customers with unusual verve.

It was the day of Brooklyn’s only apple festival, and for blocks, in apartments of all shapes and sizes, children were cleaning out buckets and stuffing their pockets with bags in preparation for the evening affair. The ragged homeless had gathered on the corner and were idly watching the stream of commuters disappear into the subway, occasionally asking one of them for a cigarette.

By early afternoon, rain lashed the front window. It was thick and sticky in the shop, especially when the machines were running at full tilt. Moisture in the air prevented the glue from sticking with its usual
tenacity. Serge wiped the sweat from his forehead with a corner of his apron. He counted how many pairs of shoes were left to fix and then conducted a triage, placing the most critical repairs at the front of the line.

Each finished pair was wrapped in a white muslin cloth and hung from one of thirty nails hammered unevenly into the back wall with a Russian bootheel.

A small boy from one of the nearby slums often visited Serge at the shop. Omar lived in a damp apartment with his aunt, who had several children of her own. Omar didn’t know where his parents were, and his aunt refused to tell him until he was eighteen years old. Omar had once pointed out that Serge’s back wall of shoes could easily have been a hiding place for a “spider’s future meals.”

Serge asked Omar to point to out which package looked most suspicious. Omar chose a lumpy white bundle hanging from the farthest, highest nail. Grumbling, Serge took his footstool and plucked it from the nail. He set it in front of Omar and unraveled the cloth. Omar turned up his nose and remarked that it was the biggest fly or the ugliest pair of shoes he had ever seen.

Serge could not remember a time Omar had visited and not pleaded with him to teach him the business of shoes or at the very least let him try his hand on the polishing machine.

“Shoes,” Omar once proclaimed, “are the heart’s messengers.”

Serge chuckled and told him to scram but later wrote the phrase down on some muslin cloth and taped it to the old bathroom mirror.

Omar had not been to the shop since July fourteenth—almost a month. Serge knew this because he marked Omar’s visits on the cal
endar by drawing a pair of round faces: a small head with a smile and a big head with a straight line for a mouth.

Serge’s only other friend was a blind tobacconist from Ukraine called Peter, who when not being beaten by his wife played obsolete military songs on an accordion.

Serge sewed the final stitches on a roller skate, as though he were playing a tiny violin. After breaking and tying the thread, Serge held the skate up to the light and inspected each stitch. One of the wheels began to spin. Serge imagined himself on the wheel, spinning through life, moving through time but never actually getting anywhere.

It only seemed like yesterday that small broken wings of snow had silently fallen against the shop window; only yesterday he’d boiled his daughter’s diapers on a frozen winter morning in Russia. Without memory, time would be no use to mankind, Serge thought.

Many years ago, his grandfather had bought him a pair of ice skates to use on the river when it froze. In the arms of an afternoon snowfall, his grandfather told him that happiness tears the sky to pieces.

Serge could almost feel his grandfather’s hot, smoky breath against his cheek; then a view of the apple orchard; each tree propped on the white tablecloth and the indentations of animals’ feet; the hollow bark of an owl through the white falling drops.

On a tattered poster behind the door of Serge’s shop was a giant shoe elevated above the heads of several shoe mechanics. They were pointing to the sole and marveling. As a young man, Serge had dreamed of coming to America and purchasing a Cadillac or a Lincoln, like the ones important Mafiosi cherished. About the time he married, Serge daydreamed on dry summer afternoons in the orchard with his back
against a tree. The apple trees were always stuffed with birds, and Serge often fell asleep to their evening concert, while his wife dug flower beds barefoot.

He imagined himself cruising down Fifth Avenue, the sparkling dashboard before him, his children reading American magazines in the backseat. Their feet, of course, fitted with the finest Italian leather shoes and their voices light and full of hope.

His wife died a few months later while giving birth to their daughter. Six months and one week after that, doctors from a nearby city explained to Serge that his daughter had a heart full of holes and that she wouldn’t last the summer. The doctors agreed that the only two things capable of saving her life were God and money. Serge immediately put the house up for sale, but by the time it sold, it was too late.

Serge removed a small tongue of gum from the roller skate’s wheel with a razor. He bit his lip so hard that blood ran down his chin and dripped into a pile of laces. Thirty years later, the shame of how he’d wished away all his money on a car still burned his cheeks.

On a windless day in July, Serge’s daughter was lowered into a small hole at the edge of the family apple orchard. A white cross marked the position of her head, upon which gold script told anyone who cared to pass that she was her father’s only daughter and that she loved animals. In the box at her feet, Serge placed the family tools, to give his grandfather something to do while they waited for him.

He hung the roller skates from the longest, most crooked nail.

Outside, birds were pulling nets of song through the streets.

Morning’s dark clouds had dispersed, leaving a blue shell of sky lightly chalked.

With the skates mounted and the street outside noticeably busier, Serge decided to close up and make his way over to the apple harvest.