The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  It was nearly dusk, and Dov was tending the shop alone. He pumped the foot pedal to start the grinding wheel and held the blades of Agneta’s scissors against the stone. He was more aware at first of the work than of the pretty peasant customer.

  “I liked using the grinder,” he told us. “It’s the one thing I was good at. My father said he’d never seen such a schlemiel at working tin.”

  He tested the scissor blades with his finger, then ground them a bit more and buffed them with a clean rag until they gleamed in the thin light of a late January afternoon. “Perfect, see?” he said, and demonstrated by snipping a piece of paper and displaying the crisp edges. Agneta, who was shortsighted, leaned close to look, close enough that he smelled her: a scent of rough soap, the dried rosemary she’d carried in bunches to the market, and sixteen-year-old girl.

  “Show me on this.” Plucking a parcel from the basket she carried over her arm, she unwrapped the brown paper and freed a corner of the fabric, a bright blue that matched her eyes; it was soft to his touch when he held it and aimed the scissors at it. “No, silly, not that much!” she cried, and snatched the wool from him, her fingers grazing his, her blue eyes teasing.

  Emboldened, he handed her the scissors, their touch lasting perhaps two seconds this time. “You do it.”

  Agneta folded the fabric back into the brown paper and reached behind her for the braid that fell halfway to her waist. Flourishing her rosemary-scented blond hair between them, she sliced a dozen strands from the end of her braid and held them out to Dov.

  “You understand, girls? Agneta was a goy, a Christian. She thought she could say anything she wanted, because I was nobody, a Jew.”

  Dov Grinshtayn didn’t believe in such distinctions, however. He intended to abolish them; everyone did at the socialist meetings he snuck off to. And he was a strong, good-looking boy, fonder of walking in the forest and (luckily, as it turned out) swimming in the river than spending all day shut up in the rabbi’s study hall. In a photograph taken in New York a few years later, his jaw is firm, his shoulders solid, and his eyes, under thick, wavy black hair … Even though the photo is slightly out of focus, you can see the challenge in his eyes. The kind of look I pictured him giving Agneta.

  “Here,” she said when he just stood there instead of reaching for the lock of hair. “Take it.”

  “Why would I want it?”

  “To think of me.” She tossed her head, even as the disdained hair grew damp with sweat from her fingers.

  “Why would I want to think of you?”

  Her jest turned against her, Agneta’s smile lost its courage and became the sucked-in lips of a child fighting tears. And Dov experienced in one telescoped moment everything that was fine and everything that was mean in himself. “Ai, I felt sorry for upsetting her. But living in America, girls, you have no idea. Christian boys used to beat us up; they did it in plain sight of adults and got away with it. Sometimes mobs of Christians attacked all the Jews. It was called a pogrom. Every minute of your life, you were afraid.”

  Given the perpetual anxiety of being at the mercy of the Christian peasants, Dov couldn’t help but savor his taste of power over one Christian girl … until tears brimmed in her eyes. Then his heart melted. Gravely he held out his hand. Agneta pressed the lock of hair into his palm. He twisted the hair into a triangle of paper and slipped it in his pocket.

  They spoke now only of their transaction.

  “Are they sharp enough?”

  “Yes, they’re fine.”

  “Shall I wrap them?”

  But every word carried poetry in its arms.

  “Agneta, what’s taking you so long, girl?” A man’s voice at the door, thick as if he’d just come from the tavern, and that was when Dov learned her name.

  “Coming, Father,” she called.

  “Wait. Take …,” Dov said, before he had any idea what to give her. “Here!” A pencil from his pocket, almost new and hardly chewed at all.

  “Oh.” She looked at the pencil as if she didn’t know how to use one. Was she even literate, this girl who was going to hurl him into exile? She thrust the pencil into her basket and scurried out the door.

  She came back two weeks later with a pot to mend, but the shop was busy, and he had to focus on the work under finicky Berel’s eye. Nervous, he burned his fingers with solder, but that hardly aroused his father’s suspicion, as it happened all the time.

  He was luckier on the next market day. When he passed the stalls in the town square, on his way to deliver tin pails to the dairy, he spotted her and caught her eye. She slipped off and followed him. In a stand of beech trees, he and Agneta were alone at last.

  “Did you kiss?” we asked. We went to the movies. We knew what happened when people were in love; not that we saw this kind of behavior between Mama and Papa!

  “The ideas you girls have. Once, I kissed her.” But they didn’t dare linger and risk being seen. And she had important things to tell him: how to recognize her farm, at what time she came out to feed the chickens, and that she had a secret place in the woods at the edge of the farm, where no one else ever went.

  Since their first meeting, Dov had saved bits of tin and wire, scraps left from trimming pots or punching holes in colanders. He’d snuck the leavings into his pocket, where he also kept the lock of Agneta’s hair. Once he had enough scraps, he devoted himself to tinsmithing as never before. His father was right, he had little talent. But despite his lack of skill, not long after he’d first kissed Agneta, he was ready. The next Shabbos, when he had the afternoon free, he walked by her farm three times. Each time, he continued a hundred yards past the house, then turned and—heart pounding, terrified that every one of her four brothers had seen him—passed again. At long last, Agneta came out carrying her bucket of chicken feed. She raced into the chicken house and a moment later, never glancing his way, hurried toward the woods. She stayed within the fence; Dov paralleled her on the road. Once they were out of sight of the house, he climbed over the fence to her … and gave her his gift, a tin menagerie.

  “Oh!” Agneta clapped her hands. “Oh!” She marveled over the rooster with a flared comb, the curly-tailed lamb, and the horse. But she most adored the ungainly creature, a lion, that he’d done his best to copy from a drawing in a magazine. He had given it a mane by soldering thirty bits of wire to the massive head as if each wire were an individual hair. He kissed Agneta a few more times that day, and two weeks later when they met in the woods again.

  Some dozen kisses were all they had (at least all Zayde admitted to) before the lion betrayed them. Agneta found the spiky-maned beast so strange and wonderful, she couldn’t resist showing it to her closest friends. Soon her brothers found out, and where could she have gotten tin animals but from the Jew tinsmith? Gnarled old Berel? Ridiculous. But didn’t Berel have an apprentice, a son? They grilled Agneta; I imagined her tears and blood from her fingers drenching the tin lion she wouldn’t let them rip from her grasp. Then they came after Dov.

  Zayde’s family got warning barely in time for him to pack a small bag and for his mother to make a secret pocket in the lining of his coat and sew in three gold coins. The money seemed a fortune until he had to use one entire coin to bribe his way across the Austro-Hungarian border. Then came the train ticket to Rotterdam. With little money left, he shoveled coal to pay off his steamship passage. Two weeks of sweating and vomiting in the pits of hell, and he stumbled rubber-legged onto Castle Garden, the island at the tip of Manhattan where immigrants were processed then, sure of two things: he would never have anything more to do with boats, and he would never work tin again.

  The first vow he had to break almost immediately, but just once, and briefly, to take the barge from Castle Garden to the mainland. The second one he kept for forty-five years, until Monday, October 28, 1929. And breaking it led to one of the times when the story of my family collided with history—the story of the whole world.

  “I’m not a tinsmith, I’m an idea man,”
Zayde would insist when Barbara and I begged for our own tin animals.

  Our father had another way of describing him. “He’s a luftmensch,” he used to say to Mama in Yiddish, the language of secrets. We knew luft meant “air” and mensch was “man,” and at first we thought the word, and the fact that Papa half whispered it, meant Zayde was an airplane pilot; maybe he had flown missions that still couldn’t be talked about, even years after the Great War. Zayde had done so many things in America—sewing suspenders and then pants, having a garlic route, rolling cigars, even having his own cigar factory. And after the family moved to Los Angeles because our grandmother, who died before we were born, had consumption, Zayde built the West: he had an egg ranch that supplied eggs to half of Los Angeles, and he played his part in the housing boom by buying and selling furniture. “There’s always money to be made,” he said. Now he sold books, except that when we asked to visit his bookstore, the way we sometimes went to Uncle Leo’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, everyone shook their heads and acted mysterious. With Zayde having had so many different jobs, some of them hushed and secret, why couldn’t he have been a pilot, too?

  It was Auntie Pearl, Papa’s youngest sister, who told us the truth. And Barbara who turned it into catastrophe.

  Both of us adored Auntie Pearl, a flapper with bobbed brown hair, daring skirts that barely covered her plump knees, and merry eyes. Pearl sewed most of our clothes, and on that Monday in October 1929, Barbara and I had gone to her apartment after school so she could finish our navy winter skirts. I was standing on a box so Pearl could pin the hem of my skirt, when something about Charles Lindbergh came on the radio.

  “Does Zayde know Mr. Lindbergh?” I said.

  “Charles Lindbergh, the pilot?”

  I nodded.

  “What has your zayde been telling you?” Pearl laughed, but not in a happy way. She and Zayde hadn’t spoken for the past two years, not since a scandal so huge that even though the adults whispered, they couldn’t keep Barbara and me from hearing. Pearl’s husband, our uncle Gabriel Davidoff, had left her for another woman, a goy! A worse scandal followed. For a girl as young as Pearl, even a girl who’d been married, it wasn’t respectable to live on her own. But Pearl hadn’t moved back in with her family. Instead, she’d stayed in the apartment where she’d lived with Gabe and started a custom tailoring business. Zayde now refused to see her.

  “Nothing,” I said, sorry I’d brought it up. We weren’t supposed to say anything about Zayde to Pearl, just as we had to pretend around him that a new skirt or jacket had been bought at the store.

  But Barbara, who’d already had her navy skirt pinned, piped up, “Isn’t Zayde a luftmensch?”

  This time Pearl’s laughter was genuine, booming so hard she dropped the pins and rocked back onto the floor. “A luftmensch! A luftmensch!”

  “That’s what Papa says,” I said when she’d quieted down to a few chuckles.

  “I’ll bet he does.” Pearl, who moved quickly and sharply even though she was a bit zaftig, gathered her legs under her and hopped up. “Barbara, honey, pick up those pins for me. And Elaine, hold still. Just a few more and we’re done.”

  Pearl waited until she finished pinning my hem and I changed back into my old skirt (also navy, which Mama considered an appropriate color for young girls—and it had the advantage of not showing dirt). Then she told us to sit in her tiny living room, she and Barbara on the frayed gray love seat and I on the room’s one chair.

  Pearl lit a cigarette, another of her scandalous habits. “Darlings, do you know what a luftmensch is?” she said.

  “Isn’t it a pilot?” I said.

  “Of an airplane? Whatever made you think … oh, of course, ‘air man,’ how clever of you. But a luftmensch doesn’t fly in the air. It’s a person who you can’t imagine how they make a living. It’s like they live on nothing but air. Someone who’s always got this big scheme or that big scheme, but the schemes never work out. A luftmensch …” She stared at the ash growing on the end of her cigarette, and her voice turned bitter; the harshness from my usually cheerful aunt upset me almost as much as what she said. “He borrows money from all the relatives to start a cigar factory that’s going to make them rich, but surprise, the man who promised to sell him tobacco at a huge discount takes the money and disappears. He brags about how he’s going to send his children to university, even his daughters, or that he’ll be the egg king of Los Angeles. The egg king! More like egg on his face … Oh, girls! I didn’t mean …”

  I don’t know about Barbara, but I was crying, and Pearl must have suddenly realized she wasn’t recounting the litany of broken promises to her friends, adults who understood why Zayde might live on the air of dreams.

  “It’s just that people like your zayde,” Pearl said, “they come to America and try different things. But it’s not easy. No matter what they heard about America in the old country, look outside—do you see any streets paved with gold?”

  “Papa showed us the egg ranch!” Barbara said, focusing with an eight-year-old’s moral absolutism not on the nuances of immigrant hopes but on the black and white of whether we’d been lied to. “Uncle Leo took us on a drive into the San Fernando Valley, and Papa showed us where the ranch was.”

  “Honey, of course we had the egg ranch. It’s not that Zayde—”

  “Why don’t we have it anymore?” I demanded, suddenly seeing the holes that always gaped in Zayde’s stories. If his businesses were so successful, why did he keep abandoning them? If there was always money to be made, why weren’t we rich? Why, if we needed to go someplace by car, did we have to ask Uncle Leo—the bookstore-owning husband of Papa’s other sister, Sonya—to drive us? Why, as Mama never stopped complaining, did Papa break his back working for Mr. Fine at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, instead of having a business of his own like Leo did?

  “Having a ranch with dozens of chickens,” Pearl said, “it’s not like people who have a little chicken coop behind their house. We didn’t know enough, or we were just unlucky. The chickens got sick and died.”

  “What about the bookstore?” Barbara asked.

  “The bookstore?”

  “Where Zayde works now.”

  “Gevult, what nonsense have they been filling your heads with?”

  Pearl told us the truth gently, but she overestimated our maturity, our ability to balance the wrong done to us with understanding of the fragile pride that had motivated it. Barbara in particular heard what Zayde really did with the passion and violence of betrayal with which children experience any departure from their certainties about important adults in their lives.

  “I’m going there,” Barbara said as soon as we left Pearl’s.

  “We can’t, we aren’t supposed to,” I protested, even as I followed her to Brooklyn Avenue.

  She charged down the street, which was busy with women shopping and newsboys screaming about problems with the stock market.

  “Don’t you want to get buttermilk?” I grabbed her hand. Pearl had given us pennies, and we could treat ourselves to delicious paper cones of buttermilk at the dairy store.

  Barbara stopped for a moment, turned, and thrust her face into mine. “I’m going. You can do what you want!”

  It may sound as if I’m trying to avoid my share of guilt for what happened. Actually, I’m exposing my particular guilt at being a child who was cautious by nature. Everyone is fond of plucky children, kids who launch into adventures, even (within reason) kids who sass back. What about the girl who sits for a long time and watches other children going down the slide, whose legs quiver just from imagining how it will feel to stand at the top of that silver swoop into the unknown? I made up for it in time, I learned bravado—but back then I was my brash sister’s follower.

  Barbara pushed through a nondescript door just past a dress shop—we kids all knew where these places of adult misdoing were located, just as we were aware of the bootleg schnapps Mr. Zakarin concocted in his tub—and ran up a dark, narrow flight of
stairs. Then she paused at the threshold of a room. Standing a few steps behind her, I couldn’t see inside, I could only smell a fug of cigar smoke and hear what sounded like a radio.

  “What can I do for you, sweetheart?” The man who spoke came over, and even though his words were friendly, he posed his thick, squat body in the door in a way that made Barbara take a step backward.

  “Is Dov Greenstein here?” she said.

  The man looked relieved. “You looking for Dov? You’ve come to the wrong place. Say, I’ll get word to him that you want him, okay? You girls go on home now.”

  “Where is he, then?” Barbara said.

  “I told you, be good girls and go home.”

  This man was clearly used to children who were more docile than Barbara. While she declared that we would try every place like this on Brooklyn Avenue, so he might as well tell her which one Zayde worked in, I escaped into the radio broadcast, a baritone voice crooning, “In the fifth, it’s Excelsior, Excelsior takes first at six to one. That’s a six-to-one win for Excelsior. The favorite, Patrician, has to settle for second this time around, and Irish Eyes, beautiful Irish Eyes, comes in third.”

  Barbara got the man to tell her where Zayde worked, and we stormed down Brooklyn and up another tight stairway with what sounded like the same radio broadcast playing at the top. We didn’t hesitate in the doorway this time but burst into a low-ceilinged room that smelled like a combination of cigars and my school classroom. The classroom smell came from a big chalkboard, where a man with a mustache stood writing in a hand that would have gotten an A from my teacher. Excelsior, I read in his perfect script, and Irish Eyes, as I took everything in with a time-slowed-down clarity: the radio perched on a filing cabinet, a tree hung with coats and hats, a droopy-eyed man sitting at a table strewn with dozens of what I recognized as the racing forms sold by the newsboy outside the ice cream parlor. Another messy table abutted the first at a weird angle, as if someone had just shoved both tables into the room and wherever they landed, they stayed.