It was in a gray year, on a day like a scuffed knee, pulsing and threatening to bleed, when Feyvish was out to walk. Strange sounds haunted the neighborhood, carrying that threat, the awful smell of it, the misted blood that put him so on edge. To calm himself, he walked with his eyes down and watched the concrete cracks unravel in a clumsy telling of a familiar story. The sidewalk took an arc around a tree, and he thought of the person who must have laid this pavement many years ago, so considerate of a sapling.
This neighborhood should have such noble judges, thought Feyvish up the street from his home. It was an attractive street, a heymishe stretch of neighborhood with a mix of two-story houses hugging close to the road and four-floor flats set back behind shared courts, where windows looked in on tiny hills and rings of pavement wed to old shade trees.
Jews had been trickling this way for long enough to remember the saplings, Feyvl’s family included, but now the area was full to bursting. Rife with Jews, many as the stars, only stars don’t complain for lack of space. They were stepping on their neighbors’ feet, on their backs, and otherwise demonstrating all the unseemly talents and impatience rehearsed in the shadows of such a gloomy year.
Down the block came a small crowd. As they neared, the strange sound that swirled through the street seemed to condense about them. The gathering noise blew at him like black wind. What was that sound? He lifted his eyes enough to give them a nod and a flat smile. That’s when Feyvish saw their perplexing faces, how grim they looked—and yet, they were laughing. Cold, ghastly laughter. Caught up in it, they did not notice him. He gave another nod, this time paired with a wave. No response. They threatened to swallow him in their gaping mouths. Their laughs were stagnant, sustained; their square of the sidewalk overtook his, forcing him aside into the dirty road.
After the cackling stormcloud passed, he came to the shallow steps of the synagogue. There sat another Jew reclining, shirtsleeves unbuttoned, his elbows propped on the step behind him. He was squinting into the sky, seemingly lost in a search for the limp white splash of the sun. Feyvish slowed his walk, drawing his gaze up the steps, letting it ricochet off the front of the synagogue with its many tight windows like the glitter of sapphires, until he was also staring east and away to the sun’s vacant eyelids. A memory came to him of warm middle afternoons standing by these same steps, sharing with friends, close since childhood, the kind of talk that brings a person into dearer understanding of their own place here.
“What’s becoming of our little world, Feyvish?” asked the Jew on the steps, his voice so recognizable it could well have escaped from this memory. He turned slowly and looked from the man’s crossed ankles, stretched out before him, up to his familiar squint. “I saw what happened to you,” the other continued, breaking his long stare to face Feyvish. “They practically threw you into the street!”
This seemed a touch dramatic, but something in the delivery rang a bell for Feyvish. He threw out his hands in recognition. Of course—this was Shomer. “Hello, Shomer!”
“Hello Feyvish.”
“Yes, hello.” Feyvish hesitated a long while, and the pale gray that had saturated all things began to brighten on his face into an impertinent red. How many years had it been since the two had shared even these many words? How long since they’d been in the same place by more than just coincidence?
“Well, I wouldn’t be embarrassed by a pack of nudniks like them.” Shomer’s voice had an aggressive tinge, which Feyvish recalled intimately as he stood in its radiant heat.
“It was nothing,” he responded. “Maybe I felt I should step to the side. At any rate, it brings me thoughts of brighter times, coming across you here.” He offered up a smile.
“Where else should I be? It’s temple, Feyvl. I might as well be a bird in the nest.”
Hardly the case, Feyvish thought, but knew he’d do better to reserve judgment for the sake of his estranged friend. In point of fact, there had been no sign of Shomer on the stairs, no Shomer in shul, going back much farther than just this sorry year. He was barely in the neighborhood, at least anywhere that Feyvish was interested in.
“Those freaks were in a trance when they passed me here,” Shomer continued, and it came out strangely softer than anything else he’d said.
“Yes, a trance! Their faces bleached.”
“Bleached! Exactly. And I know just where they were coming from, by the sound of that awful laugh.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t you?”
They stared at each other, having leaned in very close by this point. But Feyvish could think of nothing that might send God’s happy souls into the trenches of a laughter so hollow. He waited for Shomer to answer his own riddle.
“Oh, it’s terrible what they’re doing up the street there,” Shomer looked to his left, pointing with his nose, far along in the direction Feyvish had been heading. “It’s that frightful show they’ve been putting on.”
He had heard about this, in fact. Somehow it had strayed from his mind, even with everyone watching it, and how it made them act. “This show—if that’s what you call it—how long have they been at it?”
Shomer shrugged his shoulders, blinked a few times. “Weeks?”
Feyvish started to let out a low sigh, but Shomer caught him in the middle of it, pinning a finger to his chest.
“Now, they’ve gone and rehearsed their act. You can’t really expect them to walk away and not perform, just because a few of us down this way object.”
“People object because it’s objectionable!” Feyvish felt his cry echo back to him like an agreement from the synagogue wall.
Up the street, one man, apparently an artist, painted splattery red lines on the public walk using the blood of another, who stood before him, back exposed, while the first man beat him viciously with a stick. It was a daily event, and their hot new performance piece had set the quiet fuse of whispers alight.
“You know how it goes, right? They whale on each other for hours and then they go home for the evening,” said Shomer.
“They whale on each other? Not how I heard it.”
“Or the one guy hits the other, whatever. It’s not for me.”
“But you’ve been?” asked Feyvish. “To see it?”
Shomer wrinkled his nose the way he would at a bad smell. “Everyone’s been.”
As if on cue, another handful of onlookers shuffled past bearing unusual expressions. They looked angry with each other for what they’d gone to witness, and yet foggy, resolute on doing nothing to change it. The awfulness from up the road had begun stinking its way down into the neighborhood.
____
Later in the month, things had only become more distressing. Grotesque laughter was scrawled out on the air in illegible sobs. Even worse, neighbors were lashing out, Jews enacting onto one another a hatred that could not belong to them. Nonetheless, they held fast to it. Feyvish didn’t feel right about hiding away in his home, so his walks became more frequent. One evening, he overheard a pair of young girls whispering as he passed.
“Did you see him when he whipped around and growled like that?”
“Just like an animal! And then he made like he was going to grab the end of the stick.”
“I was afraid the whole thing might turn around. What a relief when they got back to the hitting.”
He hurried away in a huff after that.
Surprisingly, he began to see Shomer while on his walks, lingering. In the halls where people drank, talked, and argued, he saw him smoking, looking gruff and grim. Feyvish would stop in, but he wouldn’t approach him. Instead, they would both listen, from opposite sides of the room, for any glint of meaning in the rumble of the public. Conversations around town had gone shallow as the performance garnered a wider audience. Now there was only one thing that could electrify them.
“Nasty, the way the scabs on his back were swelling up today,” one old-timer announced, enthused.
“What I find nasty,” someone else called, “is that you sound so happy about it. Are you really this excited to watch blood blisters burst?”
“Like you wouldn’t pay to see it yourself!”
Feyvish shuddered. He looked to Shomer, who had always been the type to tell someone they were wrong, especially another Jew. But there he was, pastel shadow in an oil painting of God’s light, rattled complicit by the spectacle their town had made of such needless violence. Their arguments stopped at the flesh—a convenience the neighborhood had learned from its new favorite art display—and Shomer’s smoke puffed and gathered under the brim of his hat.
Sometimes, he saw more than just mockery and squabbling: A boy running loose like a startled deer, away from a house with its front window shattered. Grown men filing out after him, seizing his arms, his wild legs, bashing him into the ground. The fearsome, seething punishment. Real rage.
One night, Feyvish wandered the garden courtyards beneath the apartments. Those lawns where the Jews used to pour out on Shabbes morning, toes in the grass, ready to praise God, had rarely interested Shomer. But now, where children had always done make-believe theater, Feyvish saw him. The spirit of that little idyll had flowed away to join the evaporated waters of creation. It was empty. But it was a refuge, insulated from the undead laughter and the falsity of concern, the obsession with the show that had run the children’s troupes out of town—it seemed nobody was a child now. Just as well for Shomer, who sought quiet, who lay on the steps, who smoked amid the crowds, and occupied all the holiest places in the neighborhood.
Feyvish spotted him, examining the trees.
And his shoes were off.
Feyvish was a forward-thinking Jew. He couldn’t stand any more of this backsliding and reversal: his home filled with unrecognizable faces, the sounds of their joy wrapped up in disgust, all the hollow crowding—and Shomer, the most absent Jew he knew, suddenly ubiquitous on the scene.
“I can’t take it,” Feyvish shouted. It wasn’t yet sunset, but the courtyard was dark, felt dark. “What our little world is becoming, I can’t take it.”
“Sure, you can,” Shomer disagreed, hardly turning from the tree.
“Something’s got to be done.”
“So go do something. I know, go see a performance!” Shomer laughed. At any other time, it would have seemed the deadest, most vacant crater of a laugh, but tonight it sounded almost lively by comparison.
“Someone’s got to say something.”
“Now you’re talking,” Shomer said. Talking had always been his game.
“Now we’re talking. Come eat by mine on Shabbes. You and I, and those two putting on the show, we’ll all talk.”
“You’d invite them to dinner, Feyvl?” Shomer asked, turning fully to face now. But the sun was soon to drop, and Feyvish was already on his way up the street to catch the performers before they disappeared for the night.
He put his eyes to the concrete, and with every step he exhaled a prayer for himself. This is a good idea. The synagogue flew by, a silhouette in his peripheral as he marched. This is a good idea. Now he was cutting through crowds that had turned toward home. Bustle and breath rose like a howling kettle in his ears. The sunken face of a mother scolding her children, pulling them by the wrists as they snickered—it tore at Feyvish. And then there were the men behind it all, the orchestrators of decay, calm as anything: the one swishing his stick through the air, checking his watch, pulling tight the purse-strings on today’s takings; the other pulling his white shirt over his head, its neatly folded creases replacing the bramble of horrendous scars on his back. This is a good idea.
____
Come erev Shabbes, Feyvish was rushing about, cleaning house and beating those same words into the ground. A good idea? This was a fool’s errand at best, and at worst, he could see things turning very ugly. It was never a good idea to court such ugliness on the holiest night of the week.
On the other hand, it had been longer than he’d like to admit since he’d had any dinner guests for Shabbes. Making his preparations that afternoon, things seemed more colorful around the neighborhood than they had all year. Still gray, but full of promise, the way that all the subtle blues promise other colors from under a blue light. With that promise in his pocket, he came back from his walk to the grocer on bouncing feet, trying his best not to notice how agitated the people on the street looked.
When evening was near, he set four places at his large square table, each flanked with a fork and knife, a glass for water, one for wine. He made separate trips to the cupboard for each piece of the Shabbes ritual, attempting to stall his mind. He planned very little of what he would say. He didn’t want to rehearse, or stew in his own words. He wanted to speak from the heart. Everyone knew exactly why they were coming. They knew when to arrive.
When he could think of no small thing left for the table, he turned to the dining room window, where the thick curtain had been drawn for months. He slid it open and let the sunset tumble in. The etched glasses sparkled on the table. At last, a rapid knock came at the front door.
Shomer arrived first. Now I’ve really seen him everywhere, Fevish thought, and smiled to himself. But Shomer wore a skeptical look as he wiped his shoes on the brush and crossed the threshold.
“Good Shabbes.” Shomer sounded out of breath. They went and seated themselves at adjacent sides of the table and waited together.
They tried looking at each other, but neither had anything to say. So they stared out the window. After far too long, Shomer pushed his chair back and paced to each corner of the dining room, sticking his nose into the bookshelf, inspecting the asymmetrical wrinkles on the curtain. He looked at the photographs on the wall, houses and people appearing stately, with expressions on their faces like they were certain they’d be remembered. He returned to his seat as the last light sucked away from the sky.
“We’d better light candles, then,” he said. Feyvish stared vacantly at their rigid wicks, letting his eyes go out of focus until he couldn’t see the two empty seats across from him. He sighed, and snatched the matchbook up from the table.
The meal they shared was understandably unpleasant. The food tasted like nothing against the ragged disappointment Feyvish felt. He’d really convinced himself by the end of the afternoon that those two would show up. He wouldn’t have cared if things had gone over poorly, if only they had even begun.
The two Jews passed the large dish of stew between them, the salt and pepper shakers, and eventually got to talking. Just as it had replaced all other traditions, their conversation turned to the street show.
“You know, I feel almost bad for the guy getting hit,” Shomer said, staring down the hunk of beef on his plate. “But you’ve got to wonder what he did to deserve it.”
“Funny,” Feyvish groaned. “I’d been trying to think what awful thing the one hitting him had done, to earn that shameful role.”
Out through the window, the neighborhood was black. The walls and darkened windows of the surrounding houses were invisible in the murk.
“I don’t know how they have time for anything, mitzvos or crimes, with how often they’re out there. I’ll bet they’re rehearsing as we speak. Do you think that’s why they stood you up?”
Feyvish looked up through his eyebrows at the other man. Then he snapped.
“Enough about the damn show. It’s all anyone talks about! It’s all they think about! I wish I could be the exception, but it’s all I think about, too. It’s no good to be right and alone. It’s about the effect on the community—where is everyone? Where have they gone? Disappeared into this. I thought it was more than just you and I who objected, but now I see the truth. Everybody soaks in it, all day long. The soulless dirt, the hatred, they breathe it in each other’s faces. So it’s just like I told you in the courtyard, I can’t take it anymore.”
“And I told you, you can. You’re a Jew, I’m a Jew, it’s what we are. We take things. You can take it.”
“What are we? God, love, a community? A neighborhood?”
“We’re in a community. We’re in a neighborhood.”
“Not anymore! What’s going on out there, that’s not art. That’s not God.”
“Talk about God,” Shomer returned to his old growl. “Where has God put you in all this, do you think? Do you think this is God’s work you’re up to, inviting three strangers here so you can judge us from the comfort of your dining room table?”
Feyvish leaned back deep in his chair, crossing his arms in disapproval.
“Here’s a man who’s known me all his life, identifying himself as a stranger,” he said, quietly. Shomer stuck his finger out and sucked in air to say something, to spite him, but Feyvish wasn’t going to give him the chance. “And not just a stranger to me, but a stranger to God. Our God. Tell me, is this home for you?”
“Here? Your home?”
“This neighborhood. Is that your synagogue, where I found you dreaming on the stairs not so long ago? Isn’t this the same place where you grew up? I grew up here, too. Your family came here? Mine did, too!”
“I’ve been here,” Shomer hesitated. “I’ve been elsewhere. Does that make me less of a Jew?”
“You said it yourself: you’re a Jew, I’m a Jew. When we came here, when our families came here, we came here with God. God makes this your home. God is here, Shomer. Keeps with the rest of us, through every terrible year, through every horrible show. That’s how you know that you’re right and those two out on the street are doing something wrong. And it’s a relationship, just like you and I have. Wherever else you’ve been, who do you think has been there with you?
“Well, let’s say there’s some other place where it’s easier?”
“Easier?” Suddenly it made sense. Feyvish could picture Shomer on the synagogue steps, how he was so clearly longing, looking east, but still leaning back into the shul that had raised him.
“Where it’s easier to be a Jew.”
“I’m right here, and I have this,” Feyvish clapped his hands together and let them fall to the table. “It’s a relationship. Do you just walk away from that?”
Shomer shrugged with his whole body, collapsing into a mound of sighs.
“Shomer…” Feyvish sounded like he was pleading, but he didn’t care. He was exasperated, he was sad, but he was filled with reasons to keep talking. He leaned in and shook his friend’s shoulder, trying to straighten him up. When that didn’t work, he stood from the table and left the room.
After a moment, he returned with both their hats and jackets. Taking Shomer by the hand, he pulled him from his seat, hung the coat over his shoulders, and led him outside. Shomer let his limp arm get dragged along, resigned. The two circled the house, hand in hand, then stood in the garden facing the window, looking in at the dining room which moments ago had been filled with their shouting. They saw their reflection in the window, their hearts centered on the two lights burning, perfectly even.
“Maybe we won’t find it in there,” Feyvish said. There was a welcome quiet in the neighborhood, and they both took it in. “I promise you, though, we will find what you were looking for.” He turned them about and started to walk along the street, and together they watched as candlelight began to multiply in the windows of the invisible houses all around.
