Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Tamar saw the legs when she herself drifted upward on her way home from play rehearsal. She didn’t scream. She turned and ran down to Joe’s and beat on the door. Joe opened it. After a glance at her open mouth and pointing finger, he bounded up the stairs, removing his jacket as he ran. Mrs. Goldfanger, needlessly telling Mr. Goldfanger not to move, followed Joe. Tamar followed Mrs. Goldfanger. The Moroccan woman heard the footfalls of this small army and opened her door and started up the stairs, her children surrounding her. Tamar’s grandmother, whose head cold had kept her in bed all day, opened her door. She was wearing an ancient bathrobe with a belt. The widower descended from his flat.

The Moroccan husband, coming home from work, pushed through the vestibule. He saw at first two open apartment doors, his own and the Goldfangers’. Mr. Goldfanger sat on the flowered couch, finishing off a snifter of brandy, though spilling most of it. The Moroccan husband saw his wife, halfway up the stairs, rising from a nest of their children. He then saw Tamar with her arm around Mrs. Goldfanger. He brushed past them all. Tamar’s grandmother stood in her doorway, costumed as a Chasid. Now he saw his old flecked jacket in a heap on the floor; now he saw the soprano, flat on the landing where Joe had hauled her. The soprano’s skirt was hiked up and one shoe had come off. A siren wailed.

They were none of them unused to death. The children had lost a beloved older cousin in a recent skirmish. Television kept them familiar with highway carnage. The Moroccan father had fought in one war, and the widower in several, and Tamar’s parents had also served. During her stint in the army the Moroccan mother had been elevated to assistant intelligence officer, a job she executed skillfully while seeming to laze about. Tamar would be inducted after high school, unless she joined her parents in the States as they urged her to do. Three years earlier her most envied friend had been blown up in a coffee shop. The two old ladies had sat at many deathbeds.

Joe kneeled over the corpse, attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then he said she was gone, and cried.

JOE AND HIS FAMILY changed nothing in the soprano’s apartment. They even kept the shawls. The little girl used them to cover her dolls. She went to the local school. She looked like a daughter of privilege in the plaid skirts of the nuns’ academy she had refused to attend. She played with the Moroccan daughter. She was picking up Hebrew quickly.

The widower continued his chess matches with Joe. When Joe was working — he continued his attentive care of Mr. Goldfanger — they played as before in the Goldfangers’ apartment. When Joe was at home they played there. Mrs. Joe cooked a spicy stew. After a while the widower inquired as to the ingredients — meat, it turned out, and sweet potatoes, and nuts. After a further while the widower asked for the recipes. His own cuisine took a promising turn.

They played at a low teak table, elaborately carved. Like the rest of the furniture, it had originated in Latin America and had accompanied the soprano into exile. The walls were still decorated with photographs of the deceased at various stages in her career. The child sat on the floor next to the table like a third player, following the moves.

Mrs. Goldfanger worried that the change in Joe’s fortune would alter their relationship. Of course she was happy for him, though she did think … she did think … well, couldn’t the apartment have been left to a family member?

“There was no family,” Tamar’s grandmother said.

“And she was of sound mind, I suppose,” Mrs. Goldfanger said, sighing.

“Thoroughly.”

In fact very little in the building changed. Though Joe lived in the apartment that had been bequeathed to his wife, he was always available for night duty. Sometimes he made dinner on those evenings, though more often his wife cooked; and the Moroccan children dropped in, and the widower, and sometimes Tamar, and sometimes even Tamar’s grandmother; and when Mrs. Goldfanger came home it was as if a little party were being conducted on her premises. Mr. Goldfanger had always liked a crowd. He became restless only on the brief occasions when Joe left the room; as soon as Joe returned, and their eyes met, he settled into his usual calm vacancy.

As the treaty was renewed and expanded and a citizenship clause inserted, more of Joe’s countrymen arrived, to take a wider variety of jobs. One, it is said, became a skilled schnorrer. The noun allog entered the accommodating vocabulary. The word became disconnected from the idea of chieftain; but it gained the connotation, at least in Jerusalem, of Resident Indispensable. In heedless Tel Aviv it sometimes refers to the janitor.

WHEN OUR SYNAGOGUE was at last selected to become the new home of a Torah from Czechoslovakia — a Torah whose old village had been obliterated — the Committee of the Scroll issued an announcement, green letters on ivory, very dignified. Our presence was requested, the card said, at a Ceremony of Acceptance at two in the afternoon on Sunday the sixteenth of November, nineteen hundred and seventy-five.

Nothing in the invitation suggested that the Committee of the Scroll had chafed under the dictatorship of its chairwoman, the cantor’s wife. But my parents and I heard all about it from our neighbor Sam, a committee member. Sam said that the cantor’s wife wanted the Ceremony of Acceptance to take place on a Friday night or a Saturday morning — not on the pale Sabbath of the gentiles. The group united against her. Here in America’s heartland Sunday was the proper day for special ceremonies, they said. Also we’d get better attendance — faculty from the university, interested non-Jews, maybe even the mayor. Then the sexton expressed dismay that the Torah would enter the premises three weeks before the date of the ceremony.

It would lie in the basement — a corpse! he cried — because the Leibovich-Sutton nuptials were scheduled for the first Sunday after its arrival and the Lehrman-Grossman ones for the second.

But what could anyone do? — weddings must never be postponed. Sam and the sexton cleared out a little room off the social hall directly under the sanctuary, and the rabbi blessed the room; and they fitted its door with a lock. The congregation continued its busy life.

Lots of activities went on weekly in our synagogue. The Talmud class met on Monday nights. Hebrew for Adults was taught on Tuesdays. Wednesdays belonged to committees. On Thursdays from six to eight a university professor conducted a seminar on Chasidic thought. Friday nights and Saturday mornings were devoted to worship, and on Sundays children straggled into the hateful old school building next to the new sanctuary. Parents had to pay for Sunday school (some also paid their kids); the other courses were free and open to anyone.

On a Monday morning the Czech Torah arrived by plane. The cantor, the rabbi, the sexton, and Sam laid it reverently in the little cleared-out room. They locked the room, and there it remained, its presence unsuspected by the Talmud class, the Hebrew students, the scholars of Chasidism, and the committees. Perhaps the sexton visited it sometimes. The Torah study group left it entirely alone.

THE TORAH STUDY GROUP was not open to anyone. It met on Sunday nights, in private homes, usually at our house but sometimes at the cantor’s apartment. His flat had a formal dining room, my father told me: panels and dark wallpaper and a weak chandelier. When the Torah study group assembled at the cantor’s long mahogany table, no one sat at the head or the foot. The men huddled near the center, three to a side. The cantor’s wife insisted on protecting the table with a lace cloth. The complicated geometry of the cloth was distracting, even more distracting than my mother’s habit of dealing in a singsong voice when the Torah study group met at our house.