Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 40 July 5, 1991 1) Date: Thu, 04 Jul 91 14:17 PDT From: KESSLER Subject: RE "ISAAC" this is not the hard story, this is a sweetly numinous one, originally published as "The Blessing," but not dubbed Isaac, perhaps a mistake, for my next book, SIREN SONGS, in 1992, which will be bound in with CLASSICAL ILLUSIONS, my publisher thinks (McPherson & Co). CLASSICAL ILLUSIONS came out in 1985, 28 stories , and a good number were Jewish, not Greek. so here is ISAAC: ISAAC by Jascha Kessler Gray, cold skies. Old streets. Vacant lots and swamp smell. Brooklyn. A visit. Immigrants, relatives on my father's side. An old linoleum on the splintery floor, roach-brown gashes where it has been scuffed away. Oilcloth on the kitchen table, and flies on the oil- cloth. The feeling of dirt. Not poverty, but dirt. A smell of unwashed bodies, or clothes, or feet. Another kind of smell, bitter and sour. An old man sitting by himself at the window of an empty room. The window gazes onto an alley of broken bottles and rusted cans, a stained mattress, its clump s of stuffing dribbling out. A scabby mutt pokes its muzzle through clotted, gelatinous newspa pers and a rancid compost of cabbage stalks, pigeon feathers, blackened, shrivelling orange rinds. The room holds only a sagging iron cot, bowlegged and rusty, unmade sheets, rou gh blanket, dingy pillow. The old man, wearing a black coat down to his ankles on this damp, rheumy day and a heavy black homburg tipped back on his bald, spotted head, the old man beckons me int o that room with a lifted hand, crooked fingers urging me towards him. He seems huge. He seems a massive shadow hulking over the plain wooden chair in which he sits, unmoving but for the fingers waggling at me. I stand with locked knees, holding back, stubborn. My father shoves me forward, his knuckles harsh between my shoul- der blades, and shuts the door behind me. It is only today that I realize the family was in the other rooms. I could hear them laughing, talking loudly: dinner was about to be served. But then, there seemed to be no sound at all. Still hesitating, I lean stiffened against the door that my father has closed firmly behind me. I am betrayed. The silence thickens about me. And the old man, without moving or eve n half- turning round, beckons me. He seems to stare at the windowsill. I hold my breath. Is he blind? His long white beard is stained and blotchy gray around the mouth, streaked tobacco-yellow down the chin. His thick lower lip hangs pendulous. The mouth is open; but he is not breathing; or he's breathing so slowly it's terrible to listen for the sound of his breath. White payis join the beard from a fringe of shaggy hair ringing his skull, hair white though singed yellow and gray, those sidelocks dangling from beneath the scurfy brim of his hat. His coat has a coll ar of dull black lambswool, patchy and faded by age. His high black shoes are cracked, worn paper-thin, tied with extra string around the ankles. I can see his long underwear splaying over the tops of his shoes, gray and dirty cuffs of frayed cotton. Still he beckons me. I can scarcely move. Because I am aware that I had already seen something even while I was led to that door, and it had frightened me. I force myself to inch down the small room that seems to loom like a high-ceilinged, endless corridor leading towards...what? I cannot imagine what, although I know somehow. And as I inch ahead I seem to hear a small, still voice, a muffled buzzing some-where in the silence. Then I see. He is watching flies on the windowsill. And I realize that in his other hand he holds upright a long, narrow, shining knife. His left beckons to me; his right holds that blade. I see how the light glitters on its edge. How keen it is. My heart is swollen; it pants in my chest. My heart hurts. But I go to him, scared, driven by a will not mine, to face what I must face, an urge stron- ger than fear. And at last I stand beside him. His hands seem a giant's. Huge-knuckled hands with folds of fine skin over the lumpy, black ropes of veins. Those hands cannot possibly belong to thi s old crippled man sitting hunched in hoary age: those hands are not stiff: those hands are alive and unafraid. I realize then that although he's aware of me next to him, he is not thinking about me, and certainly not thinking I could be nauseated by his unwashed age, his garlic and nicotine, his musty clothes, the sour felt, and damp, greasy, furry stink. His lap is strewn with shreds of tobacco and ashes of burnt paper. On the floor lies a bag of Bull Durham with his blew drawstring and yellow tag, and a packet of Zig Zag cigarette papers. Dozens of bent stubs are littered on the floor about his chair, one acridly smoking by his heel. And still he shows no sign of recognizing me; although that left arm is held up, its fingers moving ever so slightly, moving me closer. His hand now settles on my shoulder, a dead weight, and grips me hard. I freeze. It is flies --he contemplates flies. One crawls along the sill, pausing yet continuing as though impelled towards him: cautious, fearful, alert, hesi- tating, hopping back and starting again. I see what the old man is doing. Before him lies a lump of sugar surrounded by more of them. Dead, though not crushed, flies. Fragments, rather; bits and pieces: heads, wings, legs lies plattered everywhere, some still twitching, curling and snapping as if in agony. As this latest victim, hungering, anxious, timid, nears the sugar, something seems to trouble it. It should flit off; yet it cannot. It is fixed on that sugar. It smells the sweetness. Desire holds it there. It stops and strokes its face. Preens its wings. That pause proves fatal. The knife hovering in the air somewhere far beyond its ken slashes invisibly down, so swift and subtle that no sound, no tremor warns of its coming, and its edge, honed to razor thinness, slices the fly neatly in half. No mess of squashed thorax or mush of fly guts. How does he do it? What knife is that, and what hand? The old man half turns his face to me, and smiles. A sweet, kindly smile. A smile that was there already, had I been able to glimpse it. His contemplation had always been a smiling one. His hand had not lost, his right hand had not lost its cunning; nor yet his bleared eyes their sharpness. And now the left hand with which he had drawn me to him is lifted and laid upon my head, which it covers with his warm, dry and heavy palm. It is a kind hand, soft and knowing. It strokes my hair lightly, gentle despite its size and weight. Pleased, he smiles a little wider from the corners of his tobacco-fouled lips, and says, "Tzott!" And his eyes beneath those shaggy, yellowed brows open wide with a quiet hilarity. Later I learned he was my father's great-uncle, and had been a famous schochet. The throats of innumerable lambs, bulls, heifers and calves, rams and ewes, chick- ens, geese, and turkeys had been honored by him swift- ly, painlessly --slit by that same airy knife whose work is ritually done before it is ever seen to lift and flash, the hand descending before the heart has beaten even once. He was retired, a refugee, an old man, an old, old man squatting by the window sill, waiting out his last days in that decayed, rented house next to a dank and foggy Brooklyn canal. I know this now. And I also know that for years I had forgotten those smiling eyes, the kind hand laid upon my head as though in benediction, and that blessing of ironic triumph on his lips, if blessing it was - if it was even meant for me. "Tzott!" ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.40