Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Here I come,” Tamar called from her balcony. She had run upstairs to get a sweater, she said; to grab a book, she said; really to watch the pas de deux from above, like a princess in her box.

Sometimes they walked to the botanical gardens, sometimes to Liberty Bell Park, and most often to the Goldman Promenade, where they gazed across the forested valley at the walls of the Old City.

In English laced with Hebrew they talked about Tamar’s future in television newscasting or video production.

“Of course I will live in Tel Aviv.”

“I have heard of Tel Aviv. The action is there.”

They talked about Joe’s past — his island country.

“Little bits of islands, really. In the shape of the new moon.”

“Connected?” she wondered.

“There are bridges. Sometimes you need a boat.”

“So much water. You must find us dry.”

“Well… I have heard of the Galilee,” he said, respectfully.

“Do you have reptiles?”

“Oh, many lizards.”

“And jungles?”

“And jungles.”

“I’ve never seen a jungle.”

“Before coming here I’d never seen a desert.”

If Mr. Goldfanger were asleep in his chair, they might talk about him. In Joe’s opinion, Mr. Goldfanger, despite or because of his in-articulateness, knew more than most people. “The secrets of plants. The location of water underground.”

“Some ministry would pay for that information.”

“He is like one of our allogs, grown too old for council duty, but still to be revered.”

“Allog?”

Joe thought for a while. “It means a kind of chieftain.”

“Allog, all’gim,” Tamar said, Hebraizing it. Then she turned it into verbs, passive and active and reflexive. Joe listened patiently.

“The elderly allog, the wise one,” he said, “is consulted on great questions.”

“Allog emeritus,” Tamar said.

Joe was silent again. Then: “I think perhaps you are very clever.” Tamar gave an ashamed whinny. “And the young allog — the one who is still in charge?”

“He makes decisions for the group. Also he acts as troubleshooter. And a sort of confessor, since the churches are not very helpful anymore.”

“Is it true that you examine entrails?” she asked quickly.

“That practice died out when the missionaries came.”

“When was that?”

“In the sixteenth century.”

“JOE WAS EDUCATED BY THE JESUITS,” the soprano said to Tamar’s grandmother. “Another glass of wine?”

Tamar’s grandmother nodded. “Then he was trained as a paramedic,” she said.

“Pharmacist,” the soprano corrected.

A barbed silence followed, gradually softening into a companionable one. There were few jobs for either paramedics or pharmacists on Joe’s little island, the two women agreed when dialogue resumed. Joe’s wife, a teacher, also could not find employment at home. She worked as a housekeeper in Toronto. Each hoped to be able to send for the other, and for the eight-year-old daughter who had been left in the care of her grandparents and was so unhappy with the arrangement that she refused to go to school. “She is on strike,” Joe had said.

“The classroom,” Tamar’s grandmother observed, “is the crucible of reactionaries.”

If Tamar ever went on strike her grandmother would enthusiastically undertake to educate her at home, emphasizing eighteenth-century German philosophy. This prospect kept Tamar in school, most of the time.

BUT SOME OF THE TIME she was repelled by even the thought of her classmates, greedy and self-absorbed … One such day she knocked at the Goldfangers’ door.

“Surprise!”

“No school today?” Joe said calmly.

“No school,” she lied. “Shall we take a walk?”

Mr. Goldfanger was agreeable. They set out. Tamar suggested that, since it was a weekday and everything was open, they visit one of the downtown cafés where you could browse the Net. Joe said that Mr. Goldfanger would not enjoy that activity. Tamar wondered if he had ever been exposed to it. They were walking while they argued. In the end they just pushed the chair along the busy streets.

They stopped in a dry courtyard to eat the lunch Joe had prepared. A fix-it shop and a dusty grocery opened onto the yard, and a place that sold ironware.

“Delicious orange,” Tamar said. “When they did practice hepatoscopy, what did they discover about the future?”

Joe unwrapped a sandwich and handed her half of it. “The discoveries were about the past — about transformations that had occurred. Just one bite, dear man.”

“Transformations? What kind?”

“People into fish. Trees into warriors.”

Men into nursemaids? She waited, but he didn’t say that. Caretakers into guardians, then.

“Girls into scholars,” Joe said with a smile. “What a fat book.”

The fat book was The Ambassadors. She was trying to improve her English reading skills. The first paragraph was as long as the entire Tanach.

Mr. Goldfanger was beginning to smell. Tamar picked up the debris from lunch and walked with it to a Dumpster in one corner of the courtyard. Her approach flushed a few scrawny cats.

She turned from the Dumpster and saw, across the yard, that the two men had been joined by a third. The third was a beggar, the kind with a story. She didn’t need to be within range to hear the familiar patter. Wife recently dead. Children motherless and shoeless and without textbooks; was the foreign gentleman aware that children who couldn’t afford textbooks had been known to commit suicide? She drew nearer until she could hear the spiel directly. How impossible it is to find work in this country which gives all its resources to Ethiopians who are no more Jews than you are, sir. Sir!

Joe was standing now, one hand resting on Mr. Goldfanger’s head. With his own head slightly inclined he listened to the beggar. The fellow wore a junk-pile fedora over his skullcap. He held out his hand in the classic gesture.

Joe dug into his own pocket for shekels. The beggar put them deep into his long coat. Then he extended his palm toward Mr. Goldfanger. Mr. Goldfanger laid his fingers trustingly on the hand of his new partner.

“That will be that,” Joe said to the beggar, his Hebrew not at all shy.

“Sir,” the beggar said, bowing and stepping lightly away.

They walked home in sweet silence. On the corner of Deronda Street they ran into the Moroccan woman, and a few buildings later the widower caught up with them. In the vestibule they collected the mail. Joe got a letter from his daughter.

WINTER CAME, and with it the rains. Joe fitted an umbrella to Mr. Goldfanger’s wheelchair. That served for misty or even drizzly days, but when it poured they had to stay inside. They listened to music while Joe cleaned and darned. The soprano loaned them her own two recordings of arias — LPs, not remastered.

Joe patched a leak for the widower. He fixed a newel. He accepted a spare key to the apartment across the hall and put it into his sewing box. One or another Moroccan child, forgetting his own key, knocked on the door at least once a week. Joe baked cookies while Mr. Goldfanger napped. The kids forgot their keys more often.

ONE AFTERNOON the soprano stopped in at the Goldfangers’ after attending a string-trio recital. Mrs. Goldfanger was playing solitaire and Mr. Goldfanger was watching her. The soprano sipped a brandy and talked for a while with Mrs. Goldfanger, their voices tinkling like glass droplets. Joe, coming in with a plate of cookies, remarked that the visitor looked pale. The summer will correct that, she told him. She refused his customary offer to escort her upstairs.

At her own door, about to insert the key, the soprano was seized. She slumped forward; then, with an effortful spasm, she pushed her hands against the door so that she fell sideways and lay aslant, her bent knees touching each other. Her upper body rested on the stairs leading to the top floor. Her head was in majestic profile.