End of the Jews Page 8

  Marcus and Devon remain standing. “No thank you, ma’am,” says Devon. “We ate after the concert.”

  “Well, I see you already have drinks.” Rayna drifts into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of the same red they’re drinking, then settles herself in an easy chair. “How long will you be visiting our city?” Nina lowers herself back onto the couch, watching her mother with suspicion.

  Devon has moved to the other chair. “Just another two days. We’re finishing a tour for the State Department. Before this, we were in Budapest; next are Sofia, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb, then back home. I wish we could stay longer. Prague is very beautiful.”

  Rayna crosses her legs, stately even in her sleepwear. The conversation hits a momentary lull, and Marcus leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped. “Your daughter is exceptionally talented, Dr. Hricek. As I’m sure you’re well aware.”

  He has the air of a man getting at something, and they all wait for him to go on. “She just showed us her portfolio. It’s quite remarkable. The fact that she’s achieved so much without the benefit of formal training is all the more impressive.”

  Nina cannot think of anywhere to cast her gaze. She is afraid to look at Rayna’s face and find out just what level of turmoil her mother’s placidity masks, too shy to watch Marcus praise her, and reluctant to find out where Devon’s eyes have wandered.

  “We were just discussing what she might accomplish given proper instruction.”

  Rayna weighs the question with a sharp sideways nod, as if dislodging water from her ear, and takes a sip of wine. “If she has achieved so much without schooling, isn’t it possible a teacher would ruin her?”

  “I don’t think so. Nina is coming to a point, it seems to me, where her skills need to catch up to her talent. She needs to learn the technical side of photography—that and go into the field, find a project about which she is passionate.”

  “I see. Well, why don’t you take her back to America with you? There’s no one who can teach her here.”

  “Mom!”

  Rayna looks at Devon. “I’ve read about you, Mr. Marbury. You discover young musicians all over the world, no?” She turns to Nina. “He started an orchestra in New York just so he could give them all jobs,” Rayna says matter-of-factly, then continues with her guests. “If you think Nina is that talented—and I am not surprised, although I have not had the honor of viewing her portfolio—then I want you to help her, Mr. Marbury. Mr. Flanagan. If you can.”

  Nina stands and forces herself to smile. “Why do you tease me, Mother?” she asks, hoping the question sounds passably cavalier despite the strain in her voice, the heat emanating from her eyes. “She’s joking. She knows leaving the country is impossible. And I know Marcus is only talking, not planning my future.”

  Nina steps nimbly around the coffee table and into the middle of the room. “I’m sorry about this,” she says with a laugh that’s almost a sob. “For years, my mother has been warning me against America. I don’t know why she’s suddenly so eager to imagine I can disappear with you two.”

  “When your child dreams of leaving, you do not give up so easily on finding her a way,” Rayna says almost to herself. “But perhaps Nina is right and I’ve misunderstood. After all, my daughter is not a musician. There is no work for her in your Global Youth Jazz Orchestra, Mr. Marbury.”

  “Not in the orchestra, no. But you’re right, Dr. Hricek. When I see talent, I make room. And right now, I’m going to make room for an assistant photographer.”

  “Jesus Christ! Is anybody listening? I can’t leave this fucking country, Devon.” Who is this woman masquerading as her mother? Who are these strange men, so unperturbed by the notion of carrying her across the world to start another life?

  Rayna looks into her lap. “It is perhaps not so impossible as you think.”

  “What does that mean?” Nina demands.

  Rayna sighs, blinks long.

  “Mother…” Nina says, her voice a gathering storm.

  “I have a travel visa for you. For the airport. It’s a forgery, of course, but if you go with them, I think it will work. No one will doubt American musicians from the State Department.”

  Nina walks across the room and sits before her mother. Questions blow through her mind like wisps of cloud, dissipating before she can mold them into words. With her eyes, she implores Rayna to explain, and as they stare at each other, the hardness into which Rayna’s features have set looks suddenly heroic. The message in the lines etched on her face blurs and revises itself as Nina watches, perplexed by this creature about whom she now feels she knows so little. And about whom, she realizes with a stab of raw alarm, she may be losing the chance to learn.

  Rayna blots her eyes with the hem of her sweater, gives a forlorn chuckle.

  “Is this always how it is?” she asks Devon.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Mom?”

  Rayna raises her eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “How long have you had it?”

  She reaches to take the handkerchief Marcus is holding out to her, looks up at the ceiling, and pats the corners of her eyes.

  “About two years.” Rayna wraps the cloth around her hand as if it were a tourniquet.

  Nina makes her voice level, inflectionless. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “When the time was right. When something happened.”

  Nina looks over at Devon and Marcus, sitting as invisibly as they can so as not to intrude, and the blankness of her future swells before her like an unexpected mountain coming into view on the horizon. How can she do this—put her faith in strangers when she’s been taught to trust no one? When even family has betrayed her? How can she even consider it?

  “Where will I live?” she blurts.

  “We’ll work something out,” says Devon, and for the first time since Nina opened her portfolio, that smirk is back in place. Relax, Pigfoot, it reads, I got you covered. Nina finds her sense of adventure, of absurdity, of faith, suddenly and thoroughly bolstered—perhaps because she can’t help but believe in Devon, and be thrilled that he believes in her, or perhaps because his smirk is intended to both fortify and challenge. Not to buck up and smile back means she’s not taking up the gauntlet.

  “Make me a promise,” her mother says, and Nina’s eyes cut to her. Tension has reclaimed its rightful place in the set of Rayna’s jaw; she looks once again like the woman Nina has learned to avoid. Rayna’s gaze flickers over Devon and Marcus, and Nina realizes her mother’s dilemma. Whatever she wants to say is too private for their ears, but she cannot ask them to step into the kitchen.

  “What is it?” Nina asks in Czech.

  Rayna relaxes slightly upon hearing her own tongue. “Promise me,” she answers in the same language, with the air of someone who knows she asks too much, who understands that distance can corrode the hold of any oath, “that you will not look for your father.”

  Perhaps this is why the visa has gone unmentioned, hidden in some secret crevice of the sagging house. Rayna has not known how she could hope to extract such a pledge from her daughter, tried to imagine what leverage she could bring to bear, come up with nothing. And yet here she is, setting her daughter free anyway. Nina can see no option but to love her for it.

  Enough of Nina is already drifting toward the future that she pauses before answering to wonder what Devon and Marcus might think is being discussed. Do they flatter themselves that Rayna is begging her daughter to vow not to sleep with either of these charming, eminent gentlemen? Or worse, do they assume that she is counseling Nina to maintain some kind of racist wariness of their motives? Or perhaps her new patrons are too understanding to be curious at all?

  If it is what her mother asks, it is what Nina must grant.

  “I promise,” she says, wondering.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  RISK ONE bends at the waist, hefts a stolen supermarket crate onto the jutting shelf of his hip, and prepares to climb the basement st
airs of 19 Algonquin Road. An unwieldy system of conveyor belts once ferried this crate from the checkout counter of the Fairfield, Connecticut, Stop & Shop to the minivan-jammed parking lot, where patrons claim their groceries by matching the numbers stenciled on the sides of the sturdy plastic-bodied units, reinforced with metal corners and wood crossbars, to those printed on their receipts. Six months ago, local b-boys noted that the crates were perfectly sized to hold LPs. They have been disappearing ever since.

  It was RISK who set off the crime spree, ending an hour-long stake-out by springing from the shotgun seat of DJ Zone’s mom’s Buick to yank crate 8o8, specifically, out of orbit as it shuttled toward the bowels of the store. The numerals reference the vaunted Roland TR-8o8 drum machine, a small push-button appliance that produces a tremorous and celebrated simulated kick drum. It is the sound anchoring the classic recordings of the mid-eighties, the period during which RISK first discovered hip-hop through late-night radio, Style Wars on cable access, and black kids with cousins dwelling fifty miles south, in New York City.

  It is the fall of ’89 now, in more ways than one. Professor Griff has given his infamous anti-Semitic interview, setting off a shitstorm of protests and boycotts. Chuck D has announced Public Enemy’s breakup, retracted that statement, retreated from that retraction. A year ago, the Hip-Hop Nation was surging unstoppably forward, but now the future of the world’s most important group is in doubt, and nostalgia blues the air.

  Even the new Boogie Down Productions album, which dropped two months late and forced RISK to spend all of June and July running hopefully to, and walking dejectedly from, the record store: he loves it, already has it memorized, but he can’t front. It’s no By All Means Necessary. Everybody’s come up short, by inches or by yards: It’s a Big Daddy Thing isn’t as good as Long Live the Kane, Walking with a Panther sucks compared to Bigger and Deffer, Unfinished Business lacks the butter funk of Strictly Business. ’88 has calcified into a fist-size fossil that sits in RISK ONE’s belly. You could sharpen a knife on it, if you had one. It’s almost funny, the way his b-boy generation—seventeen like RISK, eighteen like Zone, nineteen and twenty like their mentors—cops a collective creak-kneed squat to genuflect before a past so recently departed that the Nikes they were wearing when they met it still aren’t scuffed. Not beyond some cursory toothbrush-and-bleach repair work, anyway.

  RISK’s shoulders ache as he half-times the shag-carpeted staircase like a toddler, foot meeting foot, lugging what must be fifty pounds of vinyl. He surfaces in the hallway, where the air is always slightly hotter and thicker than in the cement basement, as if the house is breathing right in your face.

  Before he can even set his burden down, his mother calls his name—like a hunter sighting the first, whatever, duck over the bluff and squeezing off, thinks RISK, suddenly tired behind the eyes. From the sound of it, she’s upstairs, in her bedroom, where she’ll remain through the impending interrogation. The members of RISK’s family address each other face-to-face only if circumstance happens to place them in proximity. Otherwise, they shout through the thin floors, walls, ceilings of a house that has seemed unbearably small since RISK was ten.

  “What?” he rumbles back in a voice he hopes is either too low-toned to be heard across the distance or hostile enough to put her off. Crate 808 thuds to the linoleum floor, rattling the twin Gemini decks stacked there—199 bucks for the pair in J&R Music World’s mail-order catalog, the lowest you can go if you want pitch control and a flashy S-shaped tone arm. They’re mockeries of the real thing, quarter-priced knockoffs of the Technics SL-1200. Try to cut without laying a nickel atop the cartridge and the record’s guaranteed to skip like a schoolgirl. But on the flip side, as Zone likes to point out, if you can get reasonably busy on a pair of Gems, you’ll murder Tech 12s. Should you ever get the chance.

  This could be the first RISK-seeking missile his mother has launched, or the fifth. The basement is semisoundproof, a bunker, which is why RISK annexed it. Between the cement walls and the humming furnace, the Colorado River burble of the washing machine and the white noise of the dryer, you can hear nothing from above save footsteps. RISK sleeps down there now, on a foldout couch across from his turntables. On occasion, he even chances getting high: perches on the couch before the top-latching window buttressing the ceiling and blows his smoke through a sheet of fabric softener affixed to a cardboard paper towel tube, thinking all the while of the teddy bear who capers in the fabric softener company’s TV commercials. The sellout cousin of the Grateful Dead’s menagerie, no doubt.

  “Come here,” Linda demands—perhaps having heard his answer, perhaps not. This game. What is she, Jabba the Hutt, incapable of locomotion?

  “What?” RISK parries. “I’m running late.” Accurate as a kind of general life summary, if not in terms of his current timetable.

  “Come here.”

  He sighs, gallops up the staircase, presents himself at the jamb of her door. Linda sits propped against the headboard of her bed, legs crossed before her, one slip-on sandal dangling from her foot. A folded rectangle of newspaper obscures her face: last Sunday’s New York Times wedding section. The sunlight streaming through the windows is supplemented by forty or fifty thousand watts beaming from a bedside lamp. You could perform surgery in here. Linda doesn’t believe in mood lighting, or any activity it might imply, and she delights in liberating others from the bonds of dimness. How many times in the history of their history has she entered a room for the sole purpose of upgrading the visibility—declaring “Have some light” in the same chipper tone she might use to tell a starving child “Have some pizza,” flicking every switch and then departing, leaving RISK awash in so much luminescence that he half-expects a crackly bullhorn voice to tell him he’s surrounded, order him to throw his weapons down and come out with his hands up?

  “What?” he says once more. His mother lowers her paper, lips already pursed. RISK feels his own face tighten, despite the fact that he’s been trying to thwart this bit of genetic carry-over before it can settle—training himself to wiggle his jaw from side to side when he feels anger mounting, blow out his cheeks instead of sucking them in.

  RISK would like to steel himself for the fight her expression heralds, slap together a few bullet points of self-defense, but he doesn’t know for which crime he’s on trial. Linda may reach into her nightstand drawer, flick a sandwich bag of weed at him, and demand, “What the fuck is this, Tris?” She may march him downstairs, out the kitchen door, and into the driveway to point out a month-old, heretofore-undiscovered two-inch scratch running along the rear passenger door of her Chrysler Caravan, etched there by a sapling branch RISK grazed while backing out of a clearing in the woods near his high school.

  She may inform him, calm and furious, that she’s just had a call from the police. Even then, RISK will have to stand mute, worrying the carpet with the toe of his shoe, and wait for further details, not knowing if the criminal substance in question is beer or spray paint. In the last six months, his twenty-one-year-old state ID card–holding doppelganger, one Justin P. Mayfield—so christened because RISK believes imaginary people should sound inconspicuous and vaguely Waspy—has purchased ten or fifteen cases of beer and resold them for a buck a can at a series of otherwise-unmemorable parties.

  Meanwhile, the elusive aerosol bandit known as RISK ONE has inflicted several thousand dollars’ worth of damage to property both public and private, from the juicy shoe polish mop tags afflicting the town’s mailboxes to the RK throw-ups lining the Harbor Road Bridge to the burners splashed across the tennis practice walls of all three of the town’s junior highs.

  To say nothing of the heist of crate 808, which, for all RISK knows, may have been captured by the Stop & Shop security cameras and sent straight to the FBI’s Quantico crime lab for computer analysis.

  “You know you’re still not allowed to use my car” is what Linda has subpoenaed him to say.

  “Why?” RISK knows why: a series of blown curfews, plus
a missing hubcap. He doesn’t need the car anyway, as Zone should be arriving any minute. The response is automatic.

  So is the way it makes Linda tense up. This game, she thinks: Why You to Death. Her son is amazing, really. He questions her more in a day than she questioned her parents in the eighteen years she lived with them. He cannot win, but Tris seems to believe that refusing to relent is not quite losing. He follows her from room to room, demanding, “Why? Why? Mom! Why?” until she loses control, spins toward him, screams like a banshee. And even then, Tris reacts like a knight fighting a dragon, sidestepping the blast of fire breath and parrying again.

  No justice, no peace.

  Her son the burgeoning activist, who makes Abe—when he, too, is not fretting about all the stupid shit Tris does, the beer and the vandalism and Lord knows what else—so proud. Who’s been working his way through his father the newspaperman’s shelf of sixties paperbacks, digesting Alinsky, Cleaver, Thompson, Didion. Who stays up late now, refusing to go to bed at Linda’s command, writing political poems on the family IBM. Scary verses full of heroic dead musicians and fiery revolutions that incinerate white middle-class people like herself, judge them guilty of a shallow liberalism and post their heads on sticks to decorate the perimeter of some new sanctified land where Amiri Baraka seems to be emperor.

  How Tris can possibly have the energy to pay attention in school all day, Linda cannot fathom. She lies in bed listening to the familiar clack of keys—it has followed her, seemingly, throughout her life—and worrying that her son’s irresponsibility will catch up with him in the worst way, and he won’t live to see his graduation. That he will hop into a car with some drunken asshole classmate she used to watch play weekend soccer when he was eight years old, and that will be it—blood and gore, tragic six o’clock news coverage, game over. That one of these protest rallies he’s started to take Metro North into the city to attend will get busted up by cops, and her son will have his head bashed in, or end up in a jail cell. Try explaining that one to the college admissions officers.