He has a museum of
items appertaining to the Jew. A Jew’s harp, of course: four in fact, one
dating from the 18th century, its tongue still miraculously intact.
Three dried specimens of the Jew’s Ear fungus. He would like to have a living
one, has tried on more than one occasion to keep one alive, but they grow only
on certain trees and his apartment is small, with no garden. On his windowsill,
however, high above Manhattan,
careful tending has allowed a large pot of Jew’s Mallow to thrive; its furled
yellow flowers return year after year. He does not know why it is better to
have a living specimen than a dead one, only that it is so.
Other items have been
easier to obtain and store. A lump of black, sticky Jew’s pitch in the lined
drawer of the bureau by the window. In the next drawer down, a glass jar of
Jew’s frankincense. Atop the bureau, a large and beautiful Jew’s Stone sea
urchin spine. He loves to hold it in his hands, to admire the smooth underside,
the place where it turns from rough beige to a tender and delicious pink. He
finds he is tempted to lick it, like ice cream.
Sometimes, perhaps
once every two or three months, he places all these items together, in such a
way that he can take them in with one sweep of his eye. In order not to disturb
the mallow, the arrangement is generally made by dragging a coffee table to the
window and placing all the other objects carefully on it. The four harps, three
fungus specimens, the asphalt and benzoine, the sea urchin. When the collection
has been set out in its order, he brings a chair from the kitchen and sits,
observing his possessions. The observation brings him pleasure. It generally
continues for several hours. He notes the differences and similarities between
these objects, grouping and regrouping them in his mind. At these surveying
times, he likes to comment – to himself, only to himself – that there is
another item in the collection. A living item. A Jew. Himself.
He desires, therefore,
a Jewfish. He has illustrations and photographs of these monstrous fish but,
although educational, they do not count. He would like a live one but cannot
see how such a thing could be accomplished. A stuffed Jewfish, though. He makes
enquiries with several taxidermists and angling stores. They tell him his
request is virtually impossible; Jewfish are very difficult to mount. Would he
perhaps be interested in a plastic replica? He insists. It must, at least, have
lived once. They note down his details, promising to telephone if there is
news.
In the meantime, at
home, he pores over representations of the Jewfish, learning its habits and
signifiers. The Jewfish is friendly. Fascinated by divers, it will often swim
alongside a boat. The Jewfish is endangered; in the waters of America it is
no longer permitted to kill the Jewfish. It continues to exist only due to the
mercy of others. Nonetheless, the Jewfish is dangerous. Legends abound. Jewfish
of 10 or 12 feet long are regularly spotted; it is supposed that larger fish
certainly exist. A story circulates of a missing diver whose underwater camera
is discovered. When developed, it reveals one last image: the face of an
enormous Jewfish, head on. He is unsurprised by these facts. He is pleased to
cut them from magazines and paste them into a book, to make them his own.
***
During the day, he
works. His job is to make deliveries for the Bleen the Grocer’s, two blocks
down from his apartment. He likes the work. His role is to take down long lists
of groceries over the telephone and then to walk from aisle to aisle, finding
the items and placing them safely into a cardboard box. Heavy things must not
go on top of frail ones. Soft things must not be crushed at the side. When the
boxes are ready he takes them, one by one, to the homes of the people who
ordered them. He has a small cart with wheels to drag along. People are almost
always pleased to see him when he and his cart arrive. He has worked this job
since he was a young man and Mr Bleen was still alive. Now Mrs Bleen runs the
store. She is very fat and sweats a lot, especially in the summer, dabbing her
face with a handkerchief and drinking tall glasses of iced tea.
He starts early and
finishes early. He’s usually home by 3. In the afternoons he reads the
newspaper, before dinner. The newspaper is important, he’s looking out for
things. His mother left him a long list of things to look out for. Some of them
are stories about Jews, some of them aren’t. In the beginning, after his mother
died, he had to read over the list many times a day, but now it’s automatic.
When he finds one of these stories, he cuts it out with scissors and puts it
into a file. The apartment is full of these files. Sometimes he takes out his
list and looks at it again, just to make sure he’s doing everything correctly.
He’s cutting out some articles, and watching for other ones, very important
ones, which never come. But if they did come, he’d know what to do. It’s all
written down.
For dinner every
night, he eats something from Mrs Bleen’s store. She gives him the dented cans,
the cheese with a little mold, the fruit that’s past date. He likes this way of
deciding what to eat – otherwise, there’d be too much choice. He has money. As
well as the apartment, his parents left him two bank accounts, one to take
money out of and one to leave alone. The bank sends him a letter every month,
telling him how they’re getting along. The second account is growing, while the
first one isn’t getting any smaller. This pleases him. It’s important to have
money. That’s one of the first things on the list.
***
His mother died from a
cancerous growth on her face: a malignant melanoma. The doctor told him the
name and he looked it up in the dictionary. It was good that she died of
cancer, slowly, and not suddenly like his father, because it gave her time to think
of, and write, the list.
She stressed the
importance of the list to him many times. She told him that she loved him, and
that was the reason for it. She said:
“We have seen terrible
things, your father and I.”
As though his father
were still alive and standing behind her, silent as ever.
The list explains that
certain things are important: it’s important to have a lot of money in the
bank. It’s important to read the newspaper. It’s important to know what to look
for. She has listed 17 pages of things to look for. She wrote them out over
several months, thinking of a few more each day and adding them. In some
places, where she thought of a lot of things that have to do with each other,
her writing has crawled out into the margins of the pages, tiny letters bunched
up against each other. They say things like:
-
if you
should read that a man has been refused a job because he is a Jew
-
if you
should read that Jews are a threat to the country, or to the world
-
if you
should read a call for any Jewish practice to be outlawed (she lists 53
possible practices)
-
if you
should read that Jews may not wear certain garments, or that they must wear
certain garments
This last one is
marked with a star, which means it is very
important.
The list also tells
him what to do if he does find any of the very important things. It has to do
with money and with travel. If it has to be done, it must be done quickly.
In the first few
months after she died, he spent a lot of time reading the list and looking up all the words in the dictionary.
He wanted to make sure he’d understood everything properly. Even when he knew
the entries off by heart, he liked to look again, just to see they were still
the same. It was then that he thought of looking up the word “Jew”. The entry
was long. It began: “a person of Hebrew descent or religion; an Israelite
(hist; offensive) a usurer, miser” and went on to describe the Jew’s mallow,
the Jew’s harp and on and on to the Jewfish. He felt excited when he first
found that entry. He read it many times until he had it memorized. He felt that
he might be very close to something.
***
It is high summer when
he receives the call from an angling store. They have a stuffed Jewfish, taken
as part of clearance stock from a store in Buffalo. If he’s still interested he’d better
get there quick; three other collectors want to buy it. He takes the subway
down after he finishes work.
The Jewfish is
beautiful. It is three feet six inches long. Its skin is striped and mottled
green-brown and yellow. Its body is wide, barely tapering at all until the
graceful split tail. Along the top of
its back runs a ridge of fin, like close-cropped hair. Two large, oval fins
dangle down from the middle of its body, with a smaller, sleeker one toward the
back. Its mouth gapes open, dark pink within. Its power is evident in its size,
in its thick muscles, in the position of its mounting: head slightly tilted,
tail curled to one side, ready to strike.
In the store, six or
seven men are simply standing, looking at the fish. One mutters: “but how was
it done? Not a trace of grease,” and falls silent again. Another raises his
hand to touch the fish’s skin. The other men watch him as he approaches, ready
to touch, but he is unable to complete the motion. His arm falls limply back to
his side. The men look.
He does not stare so
long or so hard as these men do. He knows there will be time to look later, in
private. He asks the price of the clerk behind the desk. The men gasp, and then
nod, when they hear the figure. He is unsurprised by it. He has brought the
money, in cash. The men stare at him and then back at the Jewfish. He arranges
a date for delivery, giving his address in a loud, clear voice. The Jewfish
gazes ahead, its eyes black.
***
That night, he dreams
of the Jewfish and of his parents. He dreams that they are one, that he is the
child of the fish. In the dream, the Jewfish tells him fishy secrets, in lists
which emerge as bubbles from its mouth. He must catch the bubbles and decipher
them. One of the bubbles contains a hook, but he can’t worry about that now. He
goes on and on trying to catch them, while the fish looks impassively forward,
breathing out every form of knowledge.
When he wakes up, he
realizes that he forgot to read yesterday’s newspaper. It still lies folded on
the dining table. This frightens him. At work, he finds it difficult to
concentrate – some of the items go into the wrong boxes and the customers are
angry. In the afternoon, when he has finished work, he has to decide what to
do. Should he read today’s newspaper first or yesterday’s? What if he missed
something important yesterday, something which is written down on the list and
marked with a star? He decides he should start with yesterday’s paper: that way
he’ll know whether or not something important happened yesterday.
He finally finishes
reading the papers at 10pm. This is after he usually goes to bed, and he hasn’t
eaten anything. But he’s not really hungry. He didn’t find an important story
in the papers, just the usual things, which he’s filed appropriately. He wants
to go to sleep, but he finds that his mind is racing; he can’t make it be
still. He lies on his bed with the lights turned off and thinks about his
mother: not like she was in the last year, when she was sick all the time, but
as he remembers her from when he was a boy. He remembers that sometimes he
would wake in the night and see her standing by the door of his bedroom,
looking at him. Sometimes she would speak words he didn’t understand and which,
later, he couldn’t find in the dictionary. Sometimes his father would be with
her, just looking.
He knows that there
are many things his parents did not tell him, because he could not understand.
They told him so. His mother would say: “some things, my darling, cannot be
understood”. Nonetheless, he feels he would like to understand. He thinks of
the Jewfish, with its mouthful of secrets. He falls asleep.
***
The Jewfish is
delivered at the start of the following week. He arranges in advance to take
the day off work. A crowd gathers to watch as the fish is unloaded from the
truck and maneuvered into the building. Among the crowd, he recognizes several
of the men from the angling store. In the light, the fish is even more
beautiful than he remembers. Its scales appear crisp, as though water had just
ceased to flow off them, its mouth shades from dark pink at the front to deep
red toward the interior. As the fish is lifted from the truck, it seems to
shiver and gasp. Across the street, passers-by stand still – an elderly woman,
a nanny with two small children, a man in a suit with his jacket over his
shoulder and sleeves rolled up – watching its progress into the apartment
building.
In the dark interior
of his apartment, he finds that the fish, though less magnificent, seems more
at home. He has learned that Jewfish enjoy small enclosed spaces more than the
empty regions of the sea. They often lurk in wrecks, or in underwater caves. He
has arranged for the Jewfish to be suspended from the ceiling in the center of
his living room. The workmen complain about the boxes and files; he tries to
explain their importance but realizes that this is impossible.
In the evening, when
the workmen have gone, he is alone with the fish. It is suspended at head
height. When he stands, he can look into its face. If he raises his hand he can
caress the fin which runs along its spine. He reads through the newspaper
carefully, before the unblinking eye of the fish. The newspaper contains
nothing important. He feels that he can detect a slight odor of the sea in the
room. He discovers that he can set the fish swaying from side to side, by
swinging it by its tethers. He finds that he likes to set it moving like this,
then go to the door of the living room and turn off the light. When he looks
back into the room, the fish is still swimming, silently, through the dark air.
***
In the store, over the
next few weeks, he tries to explain to Mrs Bleen about his fish. He can’t make
her understand. She seems to think that he has taken a piece of fried cod and
hung it from his ceiling. She mops her brow and frowns at him, before padding
over to the refrigerator in her bare feet for another bottle of iced tea. The
explanation is made more difficult by his overwhelming reluctance to tell her
that it is a Jewfish. He finds himself saying “a fish”, “a large fish”, “a
beautiful fish”. He cannot understand why he does not wish to divulge its name.
He feels, however, that if she could only see the fish, she might understand.
Certainly, the men who continue to gather at certain times of the day around
the lobby of his building must understand. He often sees them there, simply
waiting: the men from the angling shop, and now some of the passers-by in the
street on the day it was delivered. Once or twice, he sees one of the delivery
men. Standing outside the lobby. Waiting.
He feels this is
significant, that the newspapers must contain the answer. He knows he has been
neglecting the newspapers. Since that first day, there have been five or six
occasions on which he has allowed part of one day’s newspaper to hang over onto
the next day. Once, a newspaper had to wait two days before being read. He
can’t help it. He has been otherwise engaged. Every afternoon now, when he
returns from the store, he sets up his museum collection. The Jew’s Mallow must
be moved to be close to the fish. The coffee table is set up to one side, with
the Jews’ Harps, Jews’ Ears, Jew’s Pitch, Jew’s Frankincense and Jew’s Stone
lined up. The days are unbearably hot. He turns on the air conditioner, and watches
the Jewfish sway in the slight breeze generated by the fan. The room becomes
cool as he contemplates his collection and the day turns to evening.
His mother used to
say: “do not try to understand. It is hopeless. We cannot understand it, we can
only learn to recognize it, and learn what to do when we see it.” His father
agreed, nodding. He finds, after all these years, that he does not agree.
Sitting in the easy chair, the Jewfish staring out of the window in front of
him, with the other items arranged, he feels that he can almost taste it: the
pattern, the order amid the chaos. He feels that, if he were only able to sit
for long enough, he might distill the common essence of all these disparate
objects. Then he would know.
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