Читать книгу The Sea Beach Line - Ben Nadler - Страница 10

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MY NEXT DESTINATION AFTER Coney Island was Sheepshead Bay, Alojzy’s old neighborhood. For the past few years, I had done my best to avoid thinking about Alojzy too much. He was out there somewhere, and he was my father. I was safer because he was in the world. But he wasn’t around, and it was easier to push him to the back of my mind. Now, since receiving his postcard, he had been pulled back to the surface. Images of him filled my mind as I left the museum, but I couldn’t be sure how much of those were my own memories, and how much were me assimilating Goldov’s memories. I didn’t want to mix up my own image of Alojzy with one painted by the failed artist. My own memories were so fragile, I didn’t know how much cross-contamination they could withstand. Visiting the neighborhood where so many of my happy memories of Alojzy were situated would help me ground them.

As I walked back up the boardwalk, two freighters passed by. I pulled out Alojzy’s postcard, which I kept in the same envelope as Goldov’s note, and held the picture up against the ocean. The view didn’t line up. Alojzy hadn’t drawn the picture in Coney Island. I stayed on the boardwalk until it ended. Passing up through Brighton, I bought two pirozhki stuffed with kapusta off a folding table outside a grocery store. The smell of cabbage and grease reminded me of days spent with Alojzy. I followed below the train tracks at first, but as I got closer to the bay, my memory of the local geography began to return. Walking up West End Avenue, I noticed strange bits of steel and brick sticking out of the trees down past the flat end of the bay. I couldn’t figure out what they could be. Brooklyn was full of things that did not make sense and were not explained; this was part of the reason it had been such a source of wonder to me as a kid.

When I got close to the trees, I realized I was looking at the Holocaust Memorial Park. The monument had not been completed when my father lived down here. The local Jews were still arguing then about the details of its construction. My father had agreed with a popular sentiment in the neighborhood: it was wrong for the city to try to include the Roma in the monument’s lengthy text. Why should the Jews be disgraced by having to share their history with some damn Gypsies? All in all, though, Alojzy was not impressed with the whole idea of the monument. He found the American Jewish obsession with the Holocaust sentimental and indulgent.

I walked through a row of trees and entered the park. Dozens of rough-hewn gravestones were scattered through the park’s center, each one bearing the story of some atrocity or death camp or partisan leader, in whichever language—English, Hebrew, Russian, or Yiddish—the donor had felt most comfortable. Little round stones rested on some of the gravestones. Around the top of the column, the word “remember” was written in all four languages. In the center, oversized strands of fake razor wire threaded around a spiraled column. The column was made to look like the bombed-out ruins of something old and brick, but was clearly one molded, red cement piece. Alojzy had seen real bombed ruins as an Israeli soldier during the War of Attrition. And though he never spoke of it, Warsaw must have still been full of rubble from World War II when he was a child. It was no surprise he had so little patience for such a fabrication, which contained the narrative but not the pain.

Two old men sat on a park bench arguing in Russian. These were the types of men Alojzy sat and chatted with. They spoke slowly, considering their positions, and I was able to make out the gist of the discussion, a debate about the likelihood of the city filling the bay in with cement. Their paranoid fantasy was completely real to them.

Emmons Avenue led me along the bay. The bay was connected to the ocean, and the whole wide world of adventure and chaos, but as it was squared off against the avenue, it still held the safety and domestic comfort of a residential block. It seemed as if the bay was once just another street, but on a whim a miracle worker had turned it into a body of water. Moses had turned the Nile to blood. Surely some lesser prophet could turn pavement to brackish water. Boats sailed in from the ocean, and anchored parallel to the cars double-parked on Emmons. Once they got out past Breezy Point, nothing stood between the sailboats and the coasts of Morocco and Andalusia. A wooden footbridge curved over the bay. On the far side were the mafia castles of Manhattan Beach, with their columns and towers.

Beside and below me, ducks and swans swam together. There was plenty of food for all, even though most of the food was just garbage. A fisherman sat in a low beach chair, drinking from a carton of orange juice. He had three fishing rods—two big ocean rods and a little five-foot freshwater rod—propped against the railing, their lines stretched taut out into the water.

I remembered the first time I visited Sheepshead Bay, when I was eleven. My mother, sister, and I had been out in Nassau County for about a year and a half. It had been two years since we last saw Alojzy, at our old apartment on East Ninety-Second Street. Neither my mother nor my sister mentioned Alojzy, and so I didn’t either.

Alojzy had sent my sister and me a few postcards from places like St. Louis and Las Vegas when we still lived in Manhattan. He was never much for writing, and aside from a few words here and there, he mainly filled the backs of the cards with little sketches of him and us, or of the places he was writing from. We hadn’t received any since moving out of the city, and it didn’t seem that the old postcards had survived the move. Maybe he didn’t know our new address. We had Bernie, who was childless until we came along, and was more attentive than many actual fathers. He was more consistently attentive than Alojzy had ever been, in fact, so we didn’t feel a glaring absence. But I still missed Alojzy.

People where we lived liked to talk about Israel a lot. It was some sort of fantasy world, not quite real, but terribly important, where they were a stronger and purer type of people. The word was spoken with slow reverence, and conversation ceased when the region was mentioned on the news. People walked around fearlessly in their green Israel Defense Forces T-shirts, as if the thin fabric were bulletproof. They stuffed cash into preprinted envelopes in the belief that it would blossom into trees as soon as it arrived in Eretz Yisrael.

When I heard the word “Israel,” I saw my father, because he had actually lived and even fought in a war there. He was the only real thing I could associate with the place. But I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t part of the fantasy too.

Bernie called my sister and me into the dining room. We came in to find him and my mother sitting at the table. We ate there on holidays or when we had company; otherwise we sat at the table in the kitchen. The only person who used the room on a regular basis was Bernie, who would spread the files he brought home from the office out on the table in the evening. My mother warned Becca and me against entering the room when Bernie had his files out, for fear that we would disturb one of his carefully sorted piles. She would shout at us if we even made too much noise in another room of the house while he was working, but he himself never complained. He just smiled half a smile, without looking up from the screen of his laptop or the sheets of numbers in front of him.

When Becca and I came into the dining room that day, though, nothing was on the table except my mother’s mug of tea, and a paper towel to protect the finish of the wood from the tea’s heat. The mug was still full to the brim, and the paper towel was shredded into little pieces. Becca and I sat down facing our parents. Were we in trouble? We must have been, because my mother was silent. But I hadn’t done anything.

“Your mother,” started Bernie—we looked at her, but her grinding fury was terrifying, and we looked back at Bernie—“and I have been in touch with your father. I should say, he’s gotten in touch with us. He’s back in New York now, in Brooklyn, and he would like to see you kids.”

“You don’t have to see him,” my mother interjected. “Don’t feel bad if you don’t want to. There’s nothing he’s done for you that you need to feel obligated.”

“No,” said Bernie, “you don’t need to feel obligated. You needn’t feel obligated one way or the other. This is a decision you have to make for yourselves. He’s invited you to spend next weekend with him. If you need some time to think about it—”

“I don’t want to go,” said Becca, who was fifteen and getting pretty good at saying things with indifferent confidence. “I’d rather spend the weekend with my friends. It’s Sarah’s party, and you said I could—”

“That’s fine,” said Bernie.

“I think you made the right decision,” said my mom. “There’s no reason, considering how well you guys have adjusted, that you need to—”

“I’d like to go,” I said. I didn’t know if this was true or not. I missed Alojzy, and going alone without Becca seemed scary. But they were dangling something in front of me—something they didn’t really want me to have—and I had to snatch at it. “I’d like to see him.” Becca glared at me, like I’d said it just to spite her. My mother frowned, but nodded in acceptance. Bernie smiled his usual distant smile behind his round glasses and neatly clipped beard.

Bernie was going to drive me to Brooklyn the following weekend, but he got called in to work. Alojzy didn’t have a car at the time. My mom made different excuses for why she couldn’t take me. In the end, Bernie and Alojzy worked it out that I would take the Long Island Rail Road into Brooklyn.

No one was waiting for me when I got off the train at Atlantic Terminal. I leaned against a pole and listened to a hip-hop radio station on my headphones, trying my best to look cool and tough so no one would bother me.

Nearly an hour passed, and I became afraid, then sure, that Alojzy wouldn’t come. Maybe if Becca were with me, because he couldn’t leave his królewna alone at night. But he wouldn’t come just for me. He had better things to do. Business that came up, that he had to take care of. Maybe he’d never meant to come. Maybe he wasn’t even in the city. Maybe Bernie had misunderstood. Maybe I had misunderstood.

Just as I was beginning to despair, and considered calling my mother, a body flew at me from the shadow. I stuck out my arms in defense, but failed to block the hard jab to my side.

“Getting big, eh there, fella?” My father jabbed me again in the side with his right, faked a third right, then landed a light left to my chest.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” I said, still not believing it was really him.

“Why would you think this? Never doubt me, boychik.” His voice was strong and true. I wouldn’t doubt him.

“Come on, now, fella.” He put his arm around me, and we walked off toward the subway. Still shaken from his greeting, I chafed from the tightness of his arm around my neck, but did not want him to let go. I was proud to be walking down the street in Brooklyn with him. Of course he had come.

We didn’t talk too much on the train. He asked me how I was doing, how my sister and mother were doing. They were fine, I told him. I was struggling hard to remember that he was my father, the same man who had once lived with us, danced with my mother to the radio in the kitchen, and taken us all to Greenpoint on Sundays to eat cheese dumplings and potato pancakes.

He wasn’t part of a Middle Eastern fantasy. He was a real man, with strong arms and a little potbelly. He tucked in to the Daily News, and I pulled a schoolbook from my backpack.

We picked up a pepperoni pizza and a two-liter bottle of Coke on the way to his apartment from the train station. Alojzy placed the pizza on the coffee table, the only table in his one-bedroom apartment, and we ate straight from the box. We washed our pizza down with mugs of Coke. Alojzy poured arak into his, and the sweet licorice smell filled the room as we ate. Above the couch was a large black poster, bearing the coat of arms–like logo of the rock band Queen. The only other decorations on the wall were a plastic Israeli flag and an old snapshot of the four of us in Central Park, when I was about six and my sister maybe ten. Like the flag, the photo was held on the wall by bits of black electrical tape. When I went into the bathroom to pee, I saw a faded pink bra hanging on the shower curtain rod.

The apartment felt very small at first. It was not really much smaller than our old two-bedroom in Manhattan, but living on Long Island had already warped my sense of scale. There was hardly any furniture besides the coffee table and couch in the main room, and the bed in his bedroom. The rest of the space was packed full of cardboard boxes and stacks of books. They were mostly large hardcovers, in piles so dense and tall I thought of them as integral structures, not stacks of individual objects. I asked Alojzy if these were all books that he had read.

“No, no,” he said. “In my life I’ve left behind two entire libraries. I wouldn’t risk another. I read a book and let it go.”

“So what’s all this?”

“Merchandise. Got to make money, kiddo. You’ll learn that sometime. Hey, take a look at this.” He pulled out an old leather-bound atlas from the middle of a stack and showed me the various places he had lived. I could locate Israel by myself, but wasn’t quite sure where Poland was. It turned out it was tucked in the shadow of the USSR.

My father had a small TV, which sat on one of the stacks of books, and we watched the TGIF lineup of sitcoms on ABC. I followed the plots, while my father made comments about the teenage actresses.

“Your girlfriend look anything like that?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“A good-looking guy like you? Not even one girlfriend? I find that very hard to believe. You got your papa’s charm. You must drive the girls crazy.” After a few shows, and a few more araks for my father, he turned off the TV.

“Look, I know I ain’t been around lately, buddy.”

“Okay.” I wished the TV was still on.

“No, it’s not okay. It’s gonna change. Because I’m your papa. But listen: It’s never been that I don’t love. I’m father, of course I love. It’s just, I’ve had my life. You see, I am the wandering Jew of Europe.” He saw my confusion. “It’s an old story about a curse. But it’s a true story, about the life I’ve had to lead.” I didn’t say anything. I was only eleven and didn’t know how to respond to a whole life. “Izzy, buddy,” he said. “We’re friends?”

“Sure we’re friends.” I didn’t want him to doubt me.

“Becca couldn’t come with you?”

“No,” I said, worried he would see through the lie. “She wanted to. She had a school thing she couldn’t miss.”

“Oh. Well. Tell her what I tell you.”

“Sure.” I knew I wouldn’t, but I wanted to please him.

“But you and me, fella, we’re friends.”

“Yes.” We were. He knew it and I knew it. He clicked the TV back on.

“I was thinking,” he said a few minutes later, “in the morning we could go crabbing?”

“What’s crabbing?”

“Like fishing. You know. But for crabs instead.”

“Okay. Sure.” I still didn’t exactly understand what we’d be doing, but other boys’ fathers took them fishing. “That sounds fun.”

Leaving the bay now, I headed up Shore Parkway, passing a sushi restaurant that had not been there before and an Irish pub that had always been there. Just under the exit ramp from Shore Parkway was a small side street, also called Shore Parkway. This was where my father had lived, all those years ago. I had spent a lot of time here. Becca didn’t come with me very often. It had been an obligation for her, but for me it had been a refuge.

The street I turned down did not match my memories. Everything looked different. Had I forgotten which block Alojzy lived on? No, this was the right address, and the exit ramp was in the right position in relation to where I stood. Alojzy’s building was gone. In its place was a new building, a box coated in lumpy plaster, with blue trim and shiny railings on the narrow balconies that faced the ramp.

I stared at the new building, half hoping that time would run backward if I waited long enough. That the new building would be torn down, my father’s old building rebuilt with a wrecking ball. I pictured the boards falling off the third-floor window and the light flicking on and off, then Alojzy pushing open the front door and inviting me in.

I remembered waking up in my father’s apartment that first morning, after I fell asleep watching TV with him, how normal it had felt. Waking up on my father’s couch in Brooklyn felt far more natural than waking up in my own bed out on Long Island.

For breakfast, my father put out slices of black bread. This bread was far denser than the bread I was used to eating, and though it seemed a little stale, he didn’t offer to toast it. I vaguely remembered eating bread like this when I was younger, but I’d grown used to eating fluffy grocery store wheat bread. I smeared on lots of butter—at home we were only allowed margarine—and used all the muscles in my throat to choke the morsels down.

When we were ready to go, Alojzy hoisted an army surplus pack full of gear onto his back, and handed me an empty cooler to carry.

“What about the rods?” I asked.

“Rods?”

“We’re going, like, fishing. Right?”

“No rods, fella. For crabs you use traps.” He tapped his pack.

We walked down the Coney Island boardwalk. I’d been there a few times with my family, but only in the afternoon. Families didn’t hang around Coney after dark back then. Now, in the early morning, it was pretty much deserted, aside from a few old Russian women who looked like they were rushing even though they were strolling, a shirtless man drinking a tall can of beer, and some homeless people who’d crawled out from under the boardwalk, squinting at the sunlight.

We turned off the boardwalk and up the T-shaped fishing pier that stretched much farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than I could swim. A pile of break rocks extended out from the shore, parallel to the pier, and we stopped just across from where they ended.

“Here,” said Al, kneeling down to reach into his backpack. He pulled out two hooped wire baskets and a greasy brown paper bag.

“What’s in there?”

“Chicken necks.” He showed me the yellow-gray mottled lump before he began fastening it to the bottom of one of the baskets with a piece of twine.

“Those are the real necks of chickens?”

“Of course.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Butcher shop. Where else? It’s good crab bait. Cheap meat. Crabs are bottom feeders. They love this kind of meat.” He scored the necks with his pocketknife, so that the yellow skin separated and the pink flesh was exposed.

“Do people eat them?”

“Sure, if they’re hungry. You eat chicken, don’t you?”

“Yeah, chicken wings. Not chicken necks. People cook them up like chicken wings?”

“No, there’s not so much meat for that. It’s more for a stew. Listen, trust me, if you’re hungry enough, you’d be happy to eat chicken-neck stew. Maybe today you’ll find this out, if we don’t catch any crabs.” My face must have betrayed my fear, because Alojzy let out a deep laugh.

He tied the baskets onto some braided lines, and tied the other ends of the line onto the railing of the pier. The rail was full of grooves worn by similar lines, which made me think that what we were doing wasn’t so strange.

Alojzy showed me how to toss the trap out over the water like a Frisbee. The baskets opened fully in the air, then fell straight into the water. We gave it a couple minutes to give the crabs time to smell the bait. When we finally pulled the baskets up, I was sure that I felt the weight of crabs in mine, but as soon as the basket rose into the air, I realized it had just been the pressure of the water.

We threw the baskets back in. In the distance was a big boat, stacked high with different-colored shipping containers. Beyond that, I could make out a distant coastline.

“What’s that out there?”

“There? A boat.”

“No, not that, the land.” I could make out a mass in the distance. “Is that New Jersey?”

“No. Staten Island. Still New York City.”

“Oh. So can you swim there?”

“Me? Sure I can.”

We pulled the traps in again, and to my delight a crab was in one of them. I hadn’t actually believed that we would catch anything. It was a terrible thing we caught, with wart-like growths and splotches of mud across its uneven shell.

“Look! Dad! I caught one!” I usually referred to him as “Alojzy,” or “my father,” but when I was speaking to him the word “Dad” came smoothly and affectionately from my lips.

“Yeah, so I see. Or maybe it caught you? But it’s just a spider crab. No good for eating.” He took the trap from me and turned it upside down, shaking it until the crab fell back into the ocean. I felt a little cheated of my catch, but at the same time was happy to see the thing gone.

Next throw, we pulled up a couple spider crabs each. Alojzy dumped them on the pier and kicked them hard, so that they skidded across to the other side. He walked over and kicked them again, booting them far out into the water. I understood why he did it. They were ugly, and deserved to be kicked.

“We don’t want them on same side as us,” he told me. “They’ll keep coming back now that they know about the bait.”

We moved farther out on the pier, and our luck changed. My father pulled in two rock crabs. They were about the same size as the smaller of the spider crabs but had smoother backs and looked altogether more sanitary. After that, we started pulling them in left and right.

“This is the spot,” my father said. We threw back four because they were too small, and one because it was pregnant. You could see its bloated egg sac hanging from its underside. In the end, we came away with thirteen crabs, five of which I had hauled in myself. Not bad.

My father had been sipping from his thermos all morning, so he needed to take a piss in the restroom on the boardwalk before we headed out. He left me to watch our crabs. Now that we had moved farther out on the pier, we were close to the old men who had been fishing when we arrived. Two of them sat across the pier from me on plastic crates, and passed a small bottle of something purplish back and forth. Their long fishing poles were propped up against the railing. I wondered how they would know if there were a fish on the line. One of the men caught me watching. He gave me what would have been a toothy grin if he’d had any teeth, and raised his bottle in a mocking toast. A lengthy filet knife was tucked in his belt. It looked like a fearsome dagger that could cut me wide-open. I was scared, but then I remembered that my father would be coming back any moment.

On the ride back to his apartment, I sat with the Styrofoam container on my lap. I couldn’t believe that I had a box full of wild sea creatures with me on the train, and I kept lifting the lid to look at them, until my father told me to stop.

When we got home, he took the cooler from me and dumped the crabs into his empty bathtub. A few of them landed on their backs. Alojzy found a flathead screwdriver on the windowsill, and flipped them right side up. A few more adventurous crabs scuttled across the floor of the bathtub. The rest sat where they landed, flicking their little mouths and occasionally flexing their pinchers. One didn’t seem to be moving at all. My father jabbed it with the screwdriver. Its little mouth moved, and some bubbles flitted through the little bit of stagnant water pooled in the bathtub. They were alive. Life was the opposite of death. That they were really alive meant that we were really going to make them dead. A stream of liquid trailed behind one of the scuttlers.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s shit. You don’t know shit when you see it? That’s something you’re going to have to learn, you want to get by in this world.”

Alojzy turned on the faucet, washing the shit and sand down the drain. When they were clean, he grabbed them one by one by the back legs and tossed them into a paper grocery bag. We went into the kitchen, where he put the bag into the freezer.

Alojzy put his one pot on the stove, and twisted together a long tinfoil spiral.

“What’s that?”

“A rack. To hold the crabs.”

He cracked a twenty-four-ounce beer from the fridge, took a good long swig, then poured some into the pot.

“Why did you pour that in there?” I asked.

“We’re going to steam the crabs in the lager.” Lager meant beer? Would I get drunk from eating beer crabs?

“I’m just a kid, I can’t have beer.”

“Feh. When I was your age, already I was drinking beer. That’s the way in Poland.” I tried to picture him at my age, and saw a tough little boy with scars, stubble, and gold chains drinking beer. “Besides, the alcohol boils off.”

“Oh. So can I have a sip of the beer?” I held my hand out for the can.

“No.” He took a swig.

He took the bag of crabs out of the freezer, and dumped them into the pot. I peeked in. They weren’t moving.

“Are they dead?” I asked nervously. Had I helped kill something without even realizing it?

“No, no. You can’t cook dead crab. Bacterias. They are just stunned, slowed down from the freezing.”

“So we’re going to eat them alive?”

“No, of course not. They will die in the steam.”

“I don’t think I want to eat a crab.”

“What? We go to the trouble of catching nice crabs all morning, and you don’t even want to eat them?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t think so.” I had been interested in the crabs as bounty, but the idea of eating whatever was inside these rough shells was physically repellent to me.

“Look at the rich American boy, so soft, so picky. So pachech.” At home, there were no foreign words in conversation, only English. When Alojzy spoke I always understood what he meant, even if I couldn’t always define the words or their language of origin. “Maybe you’d prefer lobster? Well, fine then, more crab for me.”

“Listen, I don’t want lobster either.” I reached for any justification other than the fact that I was a pussy. “People can’t eat shellfish.”

“Oh, can’t they?”

“I mean, shouldn’t. It’s wrong.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“At the synagogue.” They had warned us about pepperoni too, but shellfish seemed far more serious.

“What synagogue? Who took you to the synagogue?”

“Bernie.” Since we’d moved in with Bernie, he’d started taking us to shul with him every Friday evening. He and my mother also sent me to a religious instruction class on Saturday mornings and to a Hebrew class on Wednesday evenings. Alojzy had no time for such institutions.

“Who’s Bernie. Nu?” I wasn’t sure how to answer this question. It felt as if Alojzy and Bernie existed in two completely different worlds, and there would be no way to explain one to the other.

“You know who Bernie is. My stepfather.”

“No. Wrong. Stepfather? What’s that? He’s your mother’s husband.” He turned on the burner. “I’m the only kind of father you got.”

“I know.” I nodded my head in affirmation.

“Good. It’s good that you know.” The beer began to boil. Soon the crabs would die a hard death in the pot. I took a deep breath. It was okay. I went into the cabinet, found some plates and silverware, and began to set the table.

The crabs were surely dying now. Soon they would be dead and cooked. My father and I would crack them open with butter knives and eat their flesh with dessert forks. The meat would be the richest thing I’d ever had in my stomach, and bits of sand we had not managed to wash off would grind down my teeth. The crabs were dead, but I was alive and my father was alive, and we were together.

I had started on a path with Alojzy that day, then later diverged from it. There was a lot more I could have learned if I had stuck with him. He knew secrets of the streets that a thousand years in college couldn’t teach me. He knew the difference between the real stories and the sentimental fabrications. Now I needed to find him, or at least the path he had left for me.

I caught a Manhattan-bound express train at the Sheepshead Bay station, and watched southern Brooklyn intently from the elevated tracks. A man stood on a rooftop, swinging an orange safety flag on the end of a stick. White pigeons circled above him as he called them home to their coop. On the way down to Coney Island, I’d been too busy anticipating my meeting with Goldov to pay attention to the outside world.

In college I knew several kids from Park Slope, and other parts of brownstone Brooklyn, who liked to talk about how much their neighborhoods had changed. But southern Brooklyn was a different world from theirs, and it moved at a slower speed. The area had not changed all that much in the past ten years, aside from the scattered newer condo buildings. Even some of the billboards and faded graffiti on the old rooftops was the same. My fingers remembered tracing the letters on the train window when I was twelve years old.

Kings Highway was the last elevated stop in southern Brooklyn. I looked down on the crowded business district. People lounged in front of stores, while others dashed back and forth across the wide street with plastic shopping bags. Alojzy had spent a lot of time here. He had been right at home on this strip where Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Turkish, and other languages blended together.

For a while, Alojzy had a girlfriend named Karla who sold jewelry in a little stand in the front of a clothing store on Kings Highway and East Thirteenth Street where Orthodox women shopped. The giant jewels on the broaches Karla sold were impressive, though in retrospect they must have been fake. Cut glass, or even plastic. But her smile had been genuine when she saw Alojzy walk into the store. Karla would close her stand, and Alojzy would take us to eat at a kosher deli owned by a family of Egyptian Muslims, who had bought the restaurant when the original owner retired to Florida. Alojzy would joke with the countermen in his limited Arabic and they would give us free knishes.

The train rumbled on past Kings Highway. I was conscious of the rolling of the steel wheels as they followed their tracks. The train went down to street level at Newkirk Avenue, and then into the tunnel after Prospect Park. Brooklyn disappeared, leaving me in darkness.