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That wasn't remotely like the icepick look
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handful_ofdust: Happy Hanukkah, merry late Christmas, I'm going to hell. Also, bed. The funeral is tomorrow.
He does not light candles. Not for Shabbes, not for the dead, not for some nights that are no darker than all the rest in December when the wind furls off the Mississippi with the same raw chill as the East River and he buttons up his overcoat with more than his usual neatness, the cold at the back of his collar like the grip of a hand. It is the tenement cold of chilblains and snotty noses, of thin shoulders cricked with shivering in hand-me-down sweaters and knickerbockers that are clean, but starting in on the latest round of darns as winter wears on toward a slushy, peel-strewn spring; it is the cold of hiding for hours on damp-creaking stairs with a stolen book under his shirt, a neighbor's dime novel or a doctor's reference in close-set Fraktur or one of his father's new editions of Aleichem, hardly missed since the accident; it is the cold of a gun in his hand for the first time, not at all the accommodating fit of a dip-nibbed pen or even folded, clipped bills, and with his fingers in a cramp from double-entry figures and seizing like a head shot with adrenaline, he still knows how lucky he was not to finish somewhere colder yet. A few lights on his windowsill will not hold it off, nor hurry the sun back, nor give him a lodestar in his own rootless goles, this life of talkative jazzmen and lazily amused hoteliers that might be the far side of the moon from Orchard and Rivington, though perhaps not so different from a fight-ridden Jerusalem. He is not a Zionist; he dreams of farming in Palestine exactly as much as he wishes his parents had stayed in Kempen or stopped in Hamburg, where he fails every time to imagine himself white-aproned behind a shop counter or murmuring over Mishnah in his yeshiva bokher's black, some impossibly innocent life that would no doubt have ended, like most of Europe, in a shell of smoking mud. His memory, which he thinks of like his spectacles, small, cold, clear, and steel-rimmed, has room for all the dead he needs to remember, and a man who does not work Saturdays in his profession is a man who on Sunday is shortly found dead. He could have stayed in New York City if all he wanted out of life was a quick grave.
He could have given himself one here in St. Louis, though he would have to make an effort for it now. Having made up his mind to live, he has set about it as thoroughly and efficiently as every other course he undertakes: and there perhaps is the last reason he does not observe the holidays or daven, keep any more scrupulous kosher than the avoidance of treyf or look in on a synagogue even during the Days of Awe, the Day of Atonement when God balances the books of creation like the accountant he himself is still accused of looking (although if God is a twenty-seven-year-old career criminal with anise-chip eyes, a goyishe golem of a lover and a fastidious line in cufflinks, he knows a few rabbis back at the Rumanishe shul who would be very surprised to hear it). The world is full of commandments and fences, safeguards and compromises. He cannot live by the mitzves of his parents, but neither will he pick and choose: no to sunset, yes to murder—he must hold to nothing in order to hold to anything at all and if someday he breaks across his stubborn killer's, calculator's mentshlekhkeyt, then he will break and it will be no one's doing but his own. Sometimes he feels like a wandering soul someone said Kaddish for a long time ago, detached from any law but the curb of its own desire. More often he knows better: a dybbuk desires nothing more than flesh and spirit to cleave to, and he has enough trouble with bodies living and dead, untidy, contradictory, unreliable things that they are. He is not sure he was ever a good man. He cannot be what he is best suited for and still a good Jew. He has never felt bad about it one way or the other. Someday, maybe: that will be the grave.
But he strikes a match anyway, a fingernail flame curving whitely in the cold window's glass, and holds it, thinking of his sisters, until the light burns out.
handful_ofdust: Happy Hanukkah, merry late Christmas, I'm going to hell. Also, bed. The funeral is tomorrow.He does not light candles. Not for Shabbes, not for the dead, not for some nights that are no darker than all the rest in December when the wind furls off the Mississippi with the same raw chill as the East River and he buttons up his overcoat with more than his usual neatness, the cold at the back of his collar like the grip of a hand. It is the tenement cold of chilblains and snotty noses, of thin shoulders cricked with shivering in hand-me-down sweaters and knickerbockers that are clean, but starting in on the latest round of darns as winter wears on toward a slushy, peel-strewn spring; it is the cold of hiding for hours on damp-creaking stairs with a stolen book under his shirt, a neighbor's dime novel or a doctor's reference in close-set Fraktur or one of his father's new editions of Aleichem, hardly missed since the accident; it is the cold of a gun in his hand for the first time, not at all the accommodating fit of a dip-nibbed pen or even folded, clipped bills, and with his fingers in a cramp from double-entry figures and seizing like a head shot with adrenaline, he still knows how lucky he was not to finish somewhere colder yet. A few lights on his windowsill will not hold it off, nor hurry the sun back, nor give him a lodestar in his own rootless goles, this life of talkative jazzmen and lazily amused hoteliers that might be the far side of the moon from Orchard and Rivington, though perhaps not so different from a fight-ridden Jerusalem. He is not a Zionist; he dreams of farming in Palestine exactly as much as he wishes his parents had stayed in Kempen or stopped in Hamburg, where he fails every time to imagine himself white-aproned behind a shop counter or murmuring over Mishnah in his yeshiva bokher's black, some impossibly innocent life that would no doubt have ended, like most of Europe, in a shell of smoking mud. His memory, which he thinks of like his spectacles, small, cold, clear, and steel-rimmed, has room for all the dead he needs to remember, and a man who does not work Saturdays in his profession is a man who on Sunday is shortly found dead. He could have stayed in New York City if all he wanted out of life was a quick grave.
He could have given himself one here in St. Louis, though he would have to make an effort for it now. Having made up his mind to live, he has set about it as thoroughly and efficiently as every other course he undertakes: and there perhaps is the last reason he does not observe the holidays or daven, keep any more scrupulous kosher than the avoidance of treyf or look in on a synagogue even during the Days of Awe, the Day of Atonement when God balances the books of creation like the accountant he himself is still accused of looking (although if God is a twenty-seven-year-old career criminal with anise-chip eyes, a goyishe golem of a lover and a fastidious line in cufflinks, he knows a few rabbis back at the Rumanishe shul who would be very surprised to hear it). The world is full of commandments and fences, safeguards and compromises. He cannot live by the mitzves of his parents, but neither will he pick and choose: no to sunset, yes to murder—he must hold to nothing in order to hold to anything at all and if someday he breaks across his stubborn killer's, calculator's mentshlekhkeyt, then he will break and it will be no one's doing but his own. Sometimes he feels like a wandering soul someone said Kaddish for a long time ago, detached from any law but the curb of its own desire. More often he knows better: a dybbuk desires nothing more than flesh and spirit to cleave to, and he has enough trouble with bodies living and dead, untidy, contradictory, unreliable things that they are. He is not sure he was ever a good man. He cannot be what he is best suited for and still a good Jew. He has never felt bad about it one way or the other. Someday, maybe: that will be the grave.
But he strikes a match anyway, a fingernail flame curving whitely in the cold window's glass, and holds it, thinking of his sisters, until the light burns out.