A Change of Skin Read online

  Becky moaned and you hugged her around the waist. You felt her trembling sweaty hands and both of you shut your eyes and hid a little more, moved back a little more toward the farthest corner in this brown room illuminated by light that came from the gas pilots and from outside, the street lamps and store windows, and fell upon you like light in a theater, outlining Becky’s profile, forming a faint aura around her hair so severely and cleanly drawn back with only a few loose hairs straggling and catching the light, the faint light that showed the flower vases dimly, the crocheted doilies pinned to the back of the velvet sofa, the vague swaying of the bead curtain between the living room and the kitchen-dining room.

  “Mother, I tell you it is only the cat.”

  “The cat or a cat? Which are you saying?”

  “It’s the cat from next door. Joseph’s cat.”

  “Hug me, Betele. Hug me tight.”

  “But, Mother, it’s only the cat.”

  “You’ve said that already and you didn’t say it right. You did not say the truth. A cat isn’t here and it isn’t ours. Either there is cats or there is a cat, but the cat is not here.”

  “Mama, I don’t know.”

  “Hug me tight. Can’t you notice that I’m…”

  “Please put on a light.”

  “Come and hug me. Tell me…”

  “Yes, Mama. I’m afraid. I’m scared and I’m glad to be with you, the two of us together…”

  “You’re scared?”

  “Yes, I’m very scared.”

  “You are sure it’s a cat?”

  “Yes. Don’t you hear it miaowing?”

  “And it stinks, Betele, doesn’t it stink? Oh, hug me. It stinks from wetting. Don’t say it doesn’t. You smell it too, don’t you smell it?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “They’re going to find us, Betele!”

  “Please, Mama. Put on a light and don’t be afraid.”

  “It is eleven o’clock in the evening. And your father hasn’t come back yet. So why should I put on a light? Tell me, who puts on a light at eleven o’clock in the evening if the father is at home? And tell me, who would be afraid at eleven o’clock in the evening if…”

  “Look, Mama! See, I was right, it’s Joseph’s cat!”

  “Shameless! Chutzpah! Out, out with you, out of my house!”

  And sometimes Gershon would take you down to the street without telling Becky. He would take your hand and you would go down the stairs with him and he would lift you to his shoulders with a smile and you would make yourself comfortable there and look up at the black iron fire escapes like webs down the black sides of the brick buildings, as black as if fire had already happened and the fire escapes had served for nothing.

  “Superstitio et perfidia.”

  You put your penny in the slot and out came a hard candy round like a marble and you sucked it.

  “Mitzvah. A good deed every day.”

  “Gershon! Salt and buy some herring for dinner!”

  You sucked the sugar-covered ball and clung to your father’s head and left behind the fire escapes. You smelled cheeses and garlic. Then a better smell, oranges and apples. Dogs barked and canaries chirruped. Vegetable shops. Hat shops. Tobacco shops. Delicatessens. Furriers. Shops where capes and silk and colored chintz were sold. The fluttering breasts of pigeons. And dogs, dogs that barked and barked and barked.

  “They have destroyed the beautiful forests of New York and built the ugliest neighborhoods in the world. Thank you, our leaders.”

  The light, Elizabeth. The light in the dark living room where you could not see but had to imagine the bead curtain, the crocheted cushions, the flower vases, and light came in cross beams from the street and filled the room with false auras. And when the light ran away you had to go looking for it, or, better, looking, with an unconscious gratitude, for its origins: to a place on the Hudson where the river was silver, to the stained fog and green of the Palisades, to the yellow wind that came from where the worn gold sky, a gaseous gold, floated over lower Manhattan. Sometimes you would go down that way with a feeling of adventure. As far as the fish markets of Fulton Street. As far as South Street, Peck Slip, Chinatown, where the river is full of sound and the barges of freight cars pass and the tugboats that are towing no barge whistle and whistle because they are idle and free, and the cars passing over the bridge make a swift music, and the rumble of the elevated, a sound so repetitious, regular, so different.

  You see, Dragoness, it is also my city of sun and fog.

  “We are going to go to America. We are going to be men.”

  You and your brother Jake sat on Gershon’s knees and Gershon slowly turned the thick yellowed pages of the old album and did not have to point at things. Look, just look at that already! Oh, no, not that! You and your brother Jake laughed and laughed. The streets without pavement, deep with mud, lined with wooden houses. In the distance towers crowned by bulbous cupolas. A man with a long beard and high boots and a long black gaberdine coat. On his chest a yellow wheel.

  “Yellow.”

  “Yid. Hey, Yid. Hep, hep.”

  “Ein Jude und ein Schwein dürfen hier nicht herein.”

  “Is it you?”

  “It’s you!”

  You and Jake laughed and Gershon turned the pages and you could not believe that the man with sideburns and beard and the gaberdine coat and the young man in a vest and derby with a pearl in his tie were the same person. Then you turned to him and saw the other Gershon smiling and touching his tongue to the gap in his teeth. Wearing a striped shirt without a collar and checked trousers and loosed suspenders. Barefoot. The cuffs of his shirts too long but raised by Becky’s needle and thread.

  “Even his back is straighter. Look, even his face changed!”

  “Haven’t you been struck by the restraint of human gesture and expression in the Greek stelae?”

  * * *

  Δ The Volkswagen pulled away with growling gears and Franz said that down the road there was a restaurant he liked. “Beer. Sausages, mustard.”

  Isabel looked out the window. Mexico’s midland, semi-tropical, a road of straw huts with inclined thatch roofs, of low-flying vultures, of little boys wearing tattered short shirts with their small genitals showing and their bellies swollen out, little boys forgotten by parents who worked in blue shirts and muddy sandals, stooped over in the rice fields shoveling along with their hands the water that had to pass evenly the length of the meandering channels. And then the land changed. The Volkswagen descended the rim of the tableland into the zone of heat, from the high desert to the low coastal region.

  Franz drove swiftly, expertly, slowing and accelerating smoothly, gearing down for turns, shifting up again without a jerk. It was his car and he knew it like his hand. A foreigner, like you, Dragoness. And like you blond and graying but with a blondness that was almost white. His skin, in contrast, was burned dark by the sun. A face of precise firm lines: short nose, smooth forehead, smooth cheeks, firm jaw protruding a little. White, even teeth. Rather thin lips that smiled with restraint. A German, Dragoness, as German as they come.

  * * *

  Δ He had used to love music and architecture, he said. Both. Music perhaps even more than the other, though it was architecture he studied. He lived with his friend Ulrich in a rented room on a winding narrow street. The gables of the houses facing across the street almost touched and made the street dark. You were too close to them, you could not get back far enough to admire their old baroque façades properly. More accurately, they were façades that had been added as decorations to the still older, medieval structures beneath. Smooth ancient stone, covered by yellow or rose plaster that today was falling off, allowing the original gray to be seen. And the city, a German city, was full of yellow plaster palaces with golden domes and striated columns, capricious eaves, niches filled with vines and cherubim, labyrinthine halls, patinaed mirrors.

  Flies buzzed in and out through the open window. They irritated you. Franz was say
ing, “We had little money. Almost none. So we roomed together. It cut our expenses in half.”

  It halved also the effort and time needed to cook their meals on the electric hot plate and make up the bed and straighten the room. They took turns with the bed, Franz using it one week, Ulrich the next. The one who was bedless bunked on a narrow divan that creaked all night and forced him to sleep with his feet on a stool (Ulrich) or propped on the arm of the divan (Franz). Splitting its cost, they bought one wooden drawing table and a high stool. Rolls of paper were strewn around the floor, and the room smelled of India ink, of gutta-percha gum, of glue. On the papered walls they thumbtacked reproductions of classical architectural models: the Parthenon, Saint Sophia, Charlemagne’s chapel at Aixla-Chapelle. Monday through Saturday they got up early. Franz would go out in the hall to fill a basin with cold water from the faucet while Ulrich rubbed his eyes and groggily warmed the coffeepot. They washed their faces mechanically and drank their coffee as they dressed.

  “I remember him putting on his shoes. Sitting on the couch holding his cup in one hand. With the other hand pulling on his shoe without loosening the laces.”

  They would wrap in their mufflers and run out, hurrying to catch the 7:12 trolley, smiling as they trotted down the winding street, their breath clouds puffing before them. Caps tilted, mufflers up over their mouths, hands stuffed in their pockets, they would wait for the trolley and then swing aboard and stand outside on the platform swaying to keep balance as it moved away with a jerk and stopped with a jolt. The shaking trolley that carried them from the crowded streets to openness. Past the trolley yards. The park with its rusty statues and its fountains that now during the winter had no water. The art museum and the wide avenues beyond. Then a foggy plain and finally the school of architecture. There they separated. Ulrich was one year ahead of Franz. They met again at noon in the student tavern, the one arriving first grabbing a table, by force if necessary, and holding it until the other appeared, in the meantime ordering their standard meal: two sausages, cabbage, beer, a cream pastry they divided. And until then, all morning, they would rise to their feet as the professor entered the classroom. Four professors each morning, different names but the same pomp: black coat, striped trousers, wing collar, spats over high shoes.

  “Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel,” you interrupted, Dragoness, laughing. “Do you remember it? I saw it as a girl in the neighborhood movie. All of us wanted to be exactly like Marlene. What was she called?”

  “Lola,” said Franz, smiling. “Lola-Lola. And he was Professor Unrat. Professor Trash. Yes, Jannings made our professors into commonplace and very ordinary mortals.”

  But from his high seat in the lecture amphitheater, one of two hundred shivering students who clouded the air with the vapor of their breathing, Franz saw his professor as anything but ordinary, saw him as cold as the room, as aloof as he was distant. On the blackboard he swiftly traced calculations for a foundation. He related how Brunelleschi had climbed the vault of the Pantheon in Rome, removed some stones, and discovered the secret of the double structures sustaining each other reciprocally, and then had made his contemporaries marvel at his dome in Florence. He defended classical principles against the innovations proposed by Gropius and the Bauhaus group. To question the professor was forbidden. And he always entered with great solemnity, inclined his head briefly to the standing students, and launched off on a lecture

  “… He had given over and over without changing a word for twenty or thirty years.”

  With your hand you brushed at a fly that was circling your nude bodies.

  “Don’t you want me to close the window, Franz?”

  “No, leave it open. It’s hot.”

  They had to eat lunch hurriedly because other students were waiting for the tables. Cigarette haze, smells of beer and human breath, smells made thick because the ceiling of the tavern was very low. After lunch they worked through the afternoon in a hall with high windows and dozens of inclined drawing tables. On Thursdays the tables were folded up and stacked against the wall and the hall was converted into a gymnasium and in long sweatshirts and black shorts and tennis shoes they jumped and sweated performing calisthenics, and lifted weights. They started home at five in the afternoon, walking. Despite the cold and darkness that the far-apart lampposts did not lighten, they enjoyed that long walk across a plain dotted with linden trees. Sometimes they bought roasted chestnuts at a stand mysteriously planted there far from traffic, far from people, and walked on chewing the dry sweet meat of the nuts. Spring came and their routine did not change. But now they felt freed from so many things, from their mufflers, from the bite of the cold, the need to jump up and down in one spot to keep their blood circulating, to warm their hands in front of their open mouths. A freedom one never felt in Mexico, for one never had those needs.

  “Yes. I miss the change of seasons too.”

  “I remember one spring. Not the year. I remember it because Ulrich got a check for his twenty-first birthday.”

  A great, an enormous event. Ulrich considered the situation very seriously. One day he cut classes and went shopping and when Franz returned to their room that evening there against the wall, white as an igloo, was an electric refrigerator. Ulrich smiled a little worriedly, almost shamefaced. He scratched his head. In those days he wore his hair very short and he was very blond. His spectacles glittered as he opened the door of the refrigerator. Sausages, spare-ribs, bottles of beer, and a tall thin bottle of wine.

  “What a feast, Lisbeth!”

  They opened the beer, uncorked the wine, smelled the fried sausages, and ate them smeared with mustard. Hurriedly, by huge mouthfuls, gulping down great swallows of the beer. They ended dancing around the room with enormous steps while singing at the top of their voices. Ulrich did side-splitting imitations of their professors and recited parts of Schiller’s Joan of Arc, a work every German child knows by heart, and in his baritone voice sang arias from Tristan while Franz accompanied him with Isolde’s notes and, in the solos, an imitation of the orchestra. Their fun abruptly ended when they heard a fist pounding on the door very energetically. Franz opened. He looked out and saw nothing. An imperious, deep-toned voice spoke and he looked down and there was the deformed figure of a dwarf, not so tall as his navel, glaring up at him with an infuriated face. He had tight lips surrounded by a mustache, a light but carefully trimmed beard. He was wrapped in a red silk bathrobe that clearly had been custom-tailored for him, for though it was a child’s in size, it had all the details of an adult garment: blue borders embroidered with pagodas and dragons, quilted black lapels, a wide tasseled belt. The dwarf picked up the end of his belt and shook its tassels in front of his nose and in his rich deep voice, really a beautiful voice, informed Franz that they had shattered his repose. One had a right to rest. The landlady had assured him that she kept a quiet and tranquil establishment, not a madhouse. Such a lack of respect for the rights of others was unworthy of beings calling themselves civilized. It was clear that as children they had not been taught even the most elementary courtesy. Franz offered apologies and tried to hide his drunken grin. They would not do it again. He promised. They had not known that the adjoining room was occupied now. “I moved in yesterday,” said the little man. “And tomorrow I am going to move out again if this outrageous uproar doesn’t stop.” Ulrich stepped forward and hoped that their offense would be forgiven and pledged that in the future their deportment would be a model of exemplitude and ended by inviting their new neighbor to have beer with them next Saturday in the afternoon. Without a word the dwarf looked at them, his face still furious, haughtily lifted his large head and turned and went back to his room.

  But the following Saturday at five in the afternoon knuckles tapped lightly on their door. He was there again, tiny in the shadows of the hall. He did not smile but his expression was amiable. He entered holding a visiting card between his gloved fingers. With solemnity he extended it to Ulrich. Franz looked over Ulrich’s shoulder and read: Urs
von Schnepelbrücke. Works of Art. Dolls repaired. Their guest slowly removed his gloves. He glanced inquisitively but briefly around the room. Then he seated himself on the divan. He had to put his hands down on the cushion and raise himself with great effort but finally succeeded and his short legs danced in the air, high-button shoes and gray spats. Now that his gloves were off, they could see his paint-stained hands, as disproportionately large as his enormous head. He waited silently, looking at them, until they remembered their manners and almost in unison gave him their names. Ulrich begged pardon for not having a visiting card to offer. The dwarf nodded and said that he could see their situation at a glance. But poverty is the customary lot of students. It is almost to be expected.

  They were intensely curious about their visitor’s occupation, and while Ulrich took the promised beer from the refrigerator and opened and served it, Franz asked Herr von Schnepelbrücke if he found his new quarters a good place for his work. The dwarf savored the beer a moment and then drank, foaming his mustache. He spoke firmly and precisely: “One does not seek places for one’s work. They come to one naturally. The new apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city are very ugly. Here, on the contrary, I have only to glance out my window to receive inspiration.”

  “Do you paint, sir?”

  He touched his beard. “No, I am merely an illustrator, not a true artist. I have no pretensions to originality. I merely reproduce on canvas. The old buildings, the old streets, so that something will remain after they have been demolished and forgotten.” He lowered his voice and hesitated, as if he were uncertain whether to honor them with his confidences.

  Franz asked whether he did not believe, therefore, that it would be wise to photograph everything.

  “No. A camera has neither patience nor passion,” he replied gravely. “I do each of my paintings twice. Once when I see the scene with the eyes of repose, and again when my vision is exalted. And you may be certain that a great abyss lies between the two views.”