Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Oh God of our fathers,” the cantor began. His plummy voice broke. “God,” he began again, and this time he kept talking, though his face glistened like glass. “We of Congregation Beth Shalom accept this sacred scroll, the only remnant of Your worshippers of the village of Slavkov, whose every inhabitant perished in Majdanek. Whenever we read from this Torah we will think of our vanished brothers and sisters and their dear children. God, may we be worthy of this inheritance.”

He began a Hebrew prayer, which I might have followed, but I was thinking of what I’d learned in confirmation class about the village of Slavkov. Its Jews were artisans and peddlers and money lenders. Some of them read the Holy Books all day long in the House of Study. Then I thought about things I only guessed: some of them drank too much and others coveted their neighbor’s silver and one or two of them lay with peasant women. A few little boys plotted to set their cheder on fire. On Sunday nights a group of men gathered in a storefront, putting troubles aside for a few hours, consulting the wise numeracy of a pack of cards.

The cantor ended his prayer. He handed the scroll to the rabbi. The rabbi held it vertically in his arms. He turned toward the ark. The president of the congregation opened the ark. The rabbi placed the Czech Torah beside our everyday one.

The congregation sobbed. I sobbed, too, weeping over a confusion of disconnected things, vehr vaist : Margie who missed her mother and the rabbi who lived alone; childless Mrs. Cantor and forsaken Mrs. Sam; the sons and daughters of the Jews of Slavkov, who had dreamed of love and were ashes now. My cheeks flamed. I gripped the pew in front of me, looked at my knuckles, looked up, and met the usurer’s rueful gaze.

IN THE TOWN SQUARE Fergus was trying out his rudimentary Czech. “Stores are on the ground floors,” he remarked. “People above.”

“I speak only English,” snapped the news vendor, in German. His left hand rested on the awning of his wheelbarrow. Index and middle fingers were missing — their ghosts pointed at Fergus’s throat.

“The cobblestones were light gray once. Dark gray now,” Fergus persisted.

“I have other magazines in the bottom of the barrow,” the news vendor said, in French.

Fergus shook his head, though without censure. An old church stood aslant in the middle of the square. The minute hand of its clock twitched every sixty seconds. Would you go mad, hearing that forever? Would you come to need it, like kisses? A line of customers stuttered into the bakery, and the greengrocer moved sideways and sideways, sprinkling water on his cabbages. Under the October sun the whole little enterprise — church, stores, peaked facades — glistened as if shellacked.

“Good-bye,” Fergus said to the news vendor.

“Au revoir, Toyman.”

Fergus walked away, smiling.

He was a division head of ToyFolk. He came to a new place after a site had been selected, and he supervised the building of the factory and the hiring of the workers, and managed the facility for a while — ten years, usually; well, it never seemed that long.

The knitting shop — what a careful pyramid of yarns. A cat with a passion for some middle ball could set the whole thing tumbling. The druggist’s window displayed old-fashioned brass scales. Then came the premises of an estate agent. A middle-aged woman sat composedly at a typewriter; a young woman peered into a computer screen with an expression of dismay.

And this next place? Perhaps the window meant to be revealing, but it had too many small panes. There was merchandise inside — women’s accessories? He thought of Barbara, and of his daughters and daughter-in-law; and he went in.

Bells fixed to the door announced his presence. Something flipped onto his head and then bounced onto his shoes. A knitted clown.

“Oh!” said a woman’s voice.

“Ah,’’ said a man’s.

Fergus picked up the clown and remained squatting, examining the miniature buttons of wood that ran down the torso. Each button had been carved by hand. He cradled the toy in his own hand, two fingers supporting the head. Finally he stood up, creaking just a little, and looked around.

Dolls. Dolls crowding each other on shelves like slaves on shipboard. Dolls democratically sharing a pram. Dolls of all sizes sitting one atop the other, the largest on a rocker, exhaustedly supporting the rest.

Noah’s ark, the animals assembled on deck to wait for the dove.

Jack-in-the-boxes. Punch and Judy, on their sides, locked in each other’s arms. A pint-size printing press.

Teddies … His eyes didn’t sting, really; they remembered stinging. They remembered his children asleep, favorites crooked in their elbows. They remembered the plush of his own bear.

The man who had said “Ah” and the woman who had said “Oh” stood in front of a case of toys. They were in their middle forties. Barbara had been at her lanky best then — the rigors of child rearing past, the predations of age still ahead. For this woman, now staring at him with such assurance, beauty must be an old habit. Her pale face was surrounded by hair once blond and now transparent. Her chin was delicately cleft as if by a master chiseler. The irises of her gunmetal eyes were rimmed with a darker shade. She wore a flowered skirt, a blouse of a different flowered pattern, a shawl embroidered with yet another species.

The man’s eyes were a gentle blue. He had a courtier’s small beard, but he was dressed in black garments that suggested the peasant — baggy trousers, a loose vest over a T-shirt.

Fergus walked toward a shelf of windup toys. He stepped sideways. In a case, tiny ballerinas posed before a mirror, and through the mirror he saw that a curtained archway led to a stockroom.

He glided again, and now the mirror gave him the handsome man and woman in their awful clothes.

“Is this a store?” he asked, turning toward them. “A museum?”

“We are a secondhand toy shop,” the man answered. His accent was French. “That makes us a kind of museum. Most travelers come in only to look. But we get the occasional collector.”

“We started out as a collection ourselves,” the woman said. Her accent was Gallic, too. “We are also a workshop.”

The man shrugged. “I turn out some wooden things.”

“Bernard repairs appliances for the entire population.”

“Anna exaggerates.”

“My name is Fergus.”

Bernard nodded. “The American. The president of ToyFolk.”

“This town has no secrets,” Anna explained.

Fergus laughed. “Not president. A division head.”

“ToyFolk will bring prosperity,” Anna said. “Everybody says so. Will you have some tea?”

Each new posting had brought its special friends. In Burgundy he and Barbara had hit it off with a cartoonist who raised sheep. In Lancashire they spent every Sunday with the dentist and his wife, disorganized, comical, their three children just the ages of Fergus and Barbara’s own. In the Canaries the mayor, a bachelor, cleaved to them with nervous ardor. And now came this pair, served up like a final course. Toy people. What a blast.

“We always have brought prosperity,” Fergus said, smiling at his hosts from the chair they had unfolded. Anna sat on a foot-stool; Bernard said he preferred to stand. “When we move on things are better than they were — they seem so, anyway. Delicious tea — blackberry?”

“Yes. And your family?” Anna asked.

“Kids all married, living in different states. Barbara joins me next week; she’s in Minneapolis visiting our grandchild.”

“I like your action figures,” Bernard said abruptly. “They remind me of my lead soldiers. Only instead of pouring lead your factory molds plastic — yes?”