Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin

“Gershon took them with him.”

You and Jake stood laughing beside Gershon at his stand in the street. He sharpened his razors and now and then shouted: “Razors! Good honest razors!”

You laughed hardest once when he reached out and stopped a man with long hair and a curly beard and asked him: “You still are going to shul?” The man nodded and your father laughed and by the lapels of his coat pulled him closer. With a swift movement of a razor, he cut off a lock of the man’s long hair. He laughed. “See how good they cut? Razors, razors, fine sharp razors!” And the man stood there, stupefied, first touching his shorn hair, then grabbing the oily lock from your father’s hands while howling incomprehensibly in Polish. You and Jake rocked with laughter and Gershon frowned and shouted: “Now he is trying to insult me! Not yet has anyone ever been able to insult me, and now he is trying! How much is it worth to you, eh? Two cents? Three? For three cents’ worth of hair he’s calling me names! Listen, my friend, the man who can insult me has not yet been born! Razors! Razors!” And the Polish Jew walked away caressing his lock of hair and muttering and you and Jake and your father laughed and the man in the next stand, who sold neckties, held his wares up to his customers’ throats and Gershon shouted: “Mordecai, those are ties you are selling, or sausages? Mister, let me tell you, to buy a tie from Mordecai is like to buy a rope from the hangman. Those ties have been stolen.”

Mordecai curses and at the ceremonial meals one Friday a month Mr. Mendelssohn says sadly: “Complaints, complaints, always he has only complaints, Mrs. Jonas. Everything fails him. I have to tell you, Mrs. Jonas, your husband is a schlemiel. There is no point for me to waste my time and my money to try to help him.”

“Mama, what is a schlemiel?” asks Jake as you walk home that night. Rebecca moans. Her felt hat is crooked and sticks out too far over her forehead, making her face of anguish look foolish; her figure, yellow and black, pale in the half-light, look absurd.

“And so long I have known you, I could be wrong? Just a bum, wasting his time with other bums who are there only waiting that a tenth man should be called for prayer. Not from faith. From pure laziness. Without even believing in the words! Waiting, always waiting ever since his teens, for a handout to come along, for the sky to drop easy money.”

You and Jake came out of the closet holding hands, laughing, shivering. Becky stopped in the darkness of the living room, paralyzed, as if she didn’t believe her eyes. But the surface of normality had always to be preserved. She hid her surprise and said only, “Good, it’s late already, they are waiting us, there’ll be pumpernickel, Mr. Mendelssohn knows how much you like pumpernickel. My hat, Bethele, where’s my hat? Please get it for me. I thought you had gone out with your father. So now let’s be going.”

Mr. Mendelssohn talked. Only Mr. Mendelssohn. A shame, Mrs. Jonas, an eternal shame. And the very Jewish merchants who sell these products have been the worst enemies of the kosher laws. An eternal shame, I say. You and Jake ate greedily, rye bread and bagel, your eyes staring at the way Mr. Mendelssohn’s wing collar moved as he swallowed. Mrs. Jonas, the Reform Jew is no less than a renegade. It is good that you at least stand fast. Your children should owe you more than they will suspect. With tears in her eyes, Rebecca nodded.

“You will not make renegades of my children!”

Gershon shrugged. “Renegades? No. Invisible, yes. Just invisible, Becky. Can you understand that?”

“Superstitio et perfidia Judaica.”

Invisible, Dragoness. Ah, yes, all of you.

Franz listened and you lay face down on the hard bed and told him everything. The pillow you had pulled over your head muffled your words. You told him that you loved your beautiful Northeast. Fertile, ripe New England. White winter when you can hear sleigh bells and the old men smoke their corncob pipes standing around the iron stove in the general store, and the children make snowmen with lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. The hills with their silver fir trees, silhouettes drawn in lean ink, the ice-encased poplars. The pond frozen over, couples skating on it wearing red scarves and wool caps, thick stockings and tweed skirts and earmuffs. And the brief afternoons around the open fire are lovely.

That’s what you told Franz, Dragoness?

Yes. Night comes suddenly and you lock yourself in your room to read, lying on old cushions in the seat of a window that looks out on the red barn fences, the undulating low hills striped and spotted with rich black earth, the stables where the horses breathe white vapor. Your brother Jake gives you a ride on his sled from the top of the highest hill. You’re afraid. He laughs at you. He makes you sit on the sled and tells you to hold tight, Lizzie, hold tight, his hobnailed boots kick the hard and lumpy snow and down you go, your arms wrapped around his waist, while flakes of snow, those dancing jewels, arc in two waves of frozen dust on either side, whitening your caps, yours of blue wool, his of black leather with a black celluloid visor, down you go, the wind whipping your cheeks, your nose and your ears and your fingers numb, dodging fence posts, the naked trunks of fir trees, the hummocks of snow-covered bushes.

“Yes, so I took them to Macy’s to see Santa Claus. That bothers you?”

Jake puts the sled away. He drags it sadly to the shed where it will rest until next winter. The shining sled, just painted, with your name on it: LIZ. Now it is rust and peeling paint and your name has long ago disappeared. Puddles of water from melting snow surround the farmhouse. Though a cold wind still lashes the shutters, your mother sets out to paint the house white, the pine siding, the gables, and to paper the rooms within with scenes of old-time country merrymaking, shepherdesses in crinoline carrying crooked staves and surrounded by sheep and by young men who lean against the cypresses and toot on flutes.

“Mr. Mendelssohn’s children spent Christmas on a farm in Connecticut.”

And now, Franz, spring comes. Fine gray rain turns all the country roads to mud and forces us to wear our rubber boots as we tramp around the chicken yard throwing fistfuls of oats to the chickens that run away from us, clucking, with their feathers made smooth and lustrous by the rain.

“In Prague, in 1473, the Jews living outside the Judenstadt decided to move into it and join their brethren. No one forced them. They went into the ghetto voluntarily.”

Spring, the season when your mother sells the hogs she has fattened all winter in their protected pen, feeding them yellow corn and oats, sells them to Mr. Duggan, the owner of the general store (Duggan? Duggan, Dragoness? Well, why not? Duggan), and you and Jake on your way home from school pass the store and sadly look at Porky, Fats, and Beulah lying in the window with red apples in their mouths.

“Can Beth spend the weekend at the farm with us, Mrs. Jonas?”

Restlessness enters through the open windows of the classroom and the attentiveness of winter vanishes. Miss Longfellow (Longfellow, Dragoness? Okay, Longfellow) wears a look of impatience and again and again, rapping the desk with her ruler, orders them to keep their eyes on their books. But she herself, rosy in her print dress and new permanent, can’t keep from glancing at the cherry tree that grows outside the window, and one day, after reading aloud (“The Mississippi is well worth our attention, children. It is not an ordinary river but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable”), she suggests that all of you look at the cherry buds, the most beautiful and softest of all buds, that little by little have sprouted and opened and now, in April, fill the window with whiteness.