The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  He started to look toward me. Then someone else called him, and he hurried in the other direction. I followed him—to Barbara.

  “This is Danny Berlov. He’s in my class,” my sister said possessively.

  But Barbara didn’t need to lay claim to him. Danny had already chosen. He was hers.

  DANNY BERLOV WAS POOR AND HAD NO MOTHER. EVERYONE KNEW that. Danny’s father taught Yiddish classes at the Yiddische Folkschule on Soto Street and tutored religious boys in Hebrew, and what kind of living was that? He and Danny lived in two rented rooms that had a sink but no tub; on Friday afternoons, they went to the Monte Carlo Baths.

  Danny’s family hadn’t always been poor, though. His grandfather was the richest man in …

  Whatever he said, his accent, which had nearly vanished now that we were in the first grade, suddenly thickened.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Vilna. It’s in Lithuania.”

  “Oh.” I had never heard of Lithuania, but I understood it was one of those places that people’s parents or grandparents had come from, like Romania. I also sensed that if I challenged Danny, he might clam up.

  And I was thrilled to have Danny to myself. He often came over to play with Barbara and me, but on this particular rainy February afternoon, Barbara was confined to bed with a cold. Even better, with the drizzle keeping Danny and me inside, Mama gave me permission to use the Zenith radio. Bought a month earlier with Papa’s 1928 New Year’s bonus and some money from Zayde, the Zenith in its handsome walnut console was a magical addition to our house. I made a show of turning the radio on and finding a station playing beautiful piano music.

  That was when Danny mentioned his rich grandfather.

  “Josef Berlov, his name was.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a fur trader. He had the biggest house in Vilna. With a Zenith radio in every room.”

  THAT WAS ALL DANNY said the first time. Gradually, though, the story gained detail and luster, and it became not just the tale of the Berlov family’s former riches but the tragic explanation for Danny’s absent mother.

  Being a fur trader, I learned, meant that Josef Berlov traveled around the countryside buying the skins of minks, sables, and rabbits from people who trapped them, and he sold the skins to furriers in the city, who made them into coats. Even though the trappers were Christians, they liked and respected Josef because he could beat any man at arm wrestling, and he was always fair in business with them. They loved his horse, too, a fast brown stallion named Star. Danny’s father, Gershon, sometimes went with his father if he didn’t have to be in school. He had his own horse, a pinto named Frisky because he was hard to ride, except Gershon could always calm him down.

  The trappers liked Josef so much they saved their best skins for him. That was what made him rich. He supplied finer skins than any other trader, and the furriers paid him whatever he asked. In fact, they made just a few coats every year using only skins that he brought them, instead of mixing them with inferior skins. These 100 percent Berlov coats were very special and expensive. If someone died and hadn’t put in writing who was supposed to get his Berlov coat, the family argued over it for years.

  One day a messenger arrived at Josef’s house from the king of Vilna. The king wanted to have a Berlov sable coat made, and he insisted on picking each individual skin himself. Josef and Gershon, who was now a young man, carried four big bundles of sable skins to the palace. The palace was very grand, with door handles made of gold, and the room where they were taken to meet the king was bigger than most people’s entire houses.

  Josef, who had the gift of being at ease everywhere, from the simple huts of the trappers to palaces, smiled and said hello to the king. Gershon wasn’t nervous, either. But then a girl ran into the huge room, laughing—the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Stunned by her beauty, Gershon dropped his bundles. Sable skins spilled over the floor. He had to get on his knees to gather them up, his face burning as the girl laughed more. But it wasn’t a mean laugh; she was just a merry girl. She was also wise and kind. Quickly she knelt on the floor beside him and helped him pick up the furs. “Beautiful,” she said, holding a piece of lustrous sable up to her cheek. Then she met Gershon’s eyes.

  The girl was the king’s daughter, Princess Verena; the sable coat was being made for her. A king’s daughter and a Jewish boy? Even if he was the son of the richest man in Vilna, it was impossible. Ah, but impossible or not, they fell in love. When Gershon came to deliver Verena’s coat, she jumped onto Frisky with him, and they fled into the woods. The trappers, who loved Gershon and knew of the princess’s kindness, protected their secret. They lived in a tiny cottage, and for a year they were very happy. That was when Danny was born. But that winter Verena fell ill. The cold was terrible, and Gershon wrapped her sable coat around her. Still, she couldn’t stop shivering. He added his own coat and his body, but Verena turned to ice in his arms.

  Gershon moved to America because it was a country that didn’t have kings or queens and therefore held no danger that he would meet a princess who might remind him of his lost love. He decided to live in Los Angeles so that he would never lose his and Verena’s son to the cold. And he could no longer bear the touch of fur or of any heavy, rich fabric. That was why he wore only simple cotton shirts and threadbare pants now, instead of the fine clothes he could afford.

  ——

  BY THE TIME I was nine or ten, I had heard Danny’s story multiple times. And I’d noticed it wasn’t always the same. Sometimes Princess Verena ran away from the palace on her own horse. Sometimes the king threw Gershon’s father in prison and the family lost all its money. In some tellings, one of the trappers, an evil man whom nobody liked, betrayed them, and they had to run away from the king’s soldiers, and that was when Danny’s mother died of the cold.

  It hadn’t escaped me that the plot sounded just like a fairy tale or that the Lithuanian horses had names straight out of cowboy movies. And I heard Mama whisper to Pearl in Yiddish, “You know, the wife just took off one day.”

  I had also gotten to know the story’s hero, Gershon Berlov. Mama took to inviting him and Danny to our Friday night dinners and beach outings, at first out of sympathy for Barbara’s and my motherless playmate and soon out of fondness for the Yiddish teacher, with whom she and Zayde could relax into the mamaloschen, the mother tongue. “Poor Mr. Berlov,” Mama referred to him with a sigh, and not only because he was raising Danny on his own. Among Boyle Heights’ up-and-coming merchants and manufacturers, Mr. Berlov was a shtetl Jew, shuffling down the street, his shoulders hunched and his suit shiny with wear. If only I could say he made up for his lack of worldliness by being a born teacher, one of those people who blazed to life like a searchlight heralding a movie premiere the moment he entered a classroom. But his classes at the Yiddische Folkschule—which I insisted on attending, despite Papa’s objections to studying the language of superstition and poverty when we were privileged to speak the tongue of Shakespeare—ricocheted between boredom and the chaos that erupted when one kid’s naughtiness infected a few others, and with unstoppable momentum we all spun out of control.

  Danny, however, did shine like a beacon, like the king’s son hidden in a rude woodcutter’s hut, clothed in rags, who grows up unable to disguise his inherent nobility. Even as I saw holes in his story, I didn’t challenge him because I recognized the truth of Danny Berlov as deposed royalty.

  And I lived in a world of tales about the old country, a mythic place that gave rise to stories whose details might flicker and shift, but always there was a core of truth. Look at Zayde and Agneta! Zayde really had made those tin animals. I saw beneath the surface fantasy in Danny’s stories to their emotional authenticity—as Barbara, with her quickness to judge, couldn’t have done. That was another reason I didn’t question Danny: because he told his story to me alone. It was our secret, a continuation of the bond we’d formed the first day we met, between the stacks of wood down the street from Sony
a’s. The rough pine had long since become the Eppermans’ house, but now Danny and I talked in a corner of the school playground or in my house if no one was in earshot. Or we went for long walks at Ocean Park, which on summer weekends became “Boyle Heights on the sea.”

  Our walks drove Barbara wild. “Where were you? I looked all over,” she accused us when we reappeared after one walk at the family encampment of chairs and beach umbrellas.

  Danny grinned. “We were wearing invisibility capes.”

  “You were gone for an hour. You need to tell someone if you’re going to be gone for an hour at the beach.” She glanced toward the umbrellas, hoping for adult support.

  We had a different adult contingent every time, depending on whether Papa had the day off from work, and if Aunt Pearl or Zayde—though never, after Pearl’s divorce, both of them together—joined us. The two constants were Mama and Mr. Berlov, who turned out to be a surprisingly enthusiastic beach-goer. Taking off his shoes and socks and rolling his trouser legs, he would sit in a sagging yellow canvas chair and chat with Mama or Zayde in Yiddish, or just lean back blissfully and stretch his thin, hairy toes into the sun, as if he could never get warm enough—perhaps remembering that winter when Princess Verena died.

  “Yeah, I can tell how worried they were,” Danny teased, glancing at the only adult present, Mr. Berlov, who lounged with his eyes closed and drew contentedly on a cigarette. Mama was off splashing with Audrey at the water’s edge, and Papa was swimming his mile.

  “Well, what about Elaine?” Barbara jerked her chin toward me. “She’s my sister. What if she drowned?”

  “Does Elaine look drowned? Do you think she’s a ghost?”

  “I don’t know. Elaine, are you a ghost?”

  “Um …” I’d just taken a big bite of a peach, and the juice dribbled down my chin.

  “Ghosts don’t eat peaches,” Danny said.

  “Really? The last time you were in heaven, Danny Berlov, what did they eat?”

  “Ghosts eat …” Danny’s eyes gleamed. “Worms!” We were ten years old, after all. “They get big plates of fat, juicy worms, and they eat ’em when they’re still alive and wiggling.”

  “You eat worms!” Barbara cried, and took off toward the water, Danny sprinting after her.

  I ran, too, laughing wildly as if I were the rowdiest, most fun-loving member of this happy trio. Instead of the outsider.

  Why did I feel excluded, after having spent an hour with Danny by myself? Bantering was the special thing Danny did with my sister. They bickered over everything, from what they thought of their teachers to what candy bar was best, Hershey’s (his choice) or Milky Way (hers), or their favorite movies—she liked Westerns, and he preferred gangster movies. Still, no matter how passionately Danny fought with Barbara, wasn’t I the sister to whom he confided his tragic stories? And he never minded my being around when they argued; if anything, both of them liked having an audience. Whereas Danny told me about Gershon and Princess Verena only in private.

  By that time, too, I had emerged from Barbara’s shadow and claimed my own place in the world. If she was quick on her feet, able to fire off a retort to any insult, school had revealed me to have a quick mind. I was a child for whom the clumps of letters in our first-grade reader had leaped from the page and proclaimed themselves as cat, father, or run. Numbers, too, obligingly added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided themselves under my pencil. Even in Mr. Berlov’s run-amok classes at the Folkschule, I learned enough Yiddish to understand when adults whispered in it, a skill I kept to myself.

  Just as Barbara had her own set of friends, vivacious girls who took after-school dramatics classes, I gravitated to girls like Lucy Meringoff, with whom I competed amicably for the top grades in our class. Lucy and I knew every cranny of the Benjamin Franklin Library; the librarians greeted us by name whenever we mounted the white marble steps into the library for fresh armloads of books. Novels, poetry, history, biography—I loved them all for their enticing, sideways-printed spines, for the way they unfolded in my hands to reveal lives and events and language. I enjoyed the graceful type, even the whiff of mold on older volumes. As the principal had predicted on my first day of school, I had blossomed into myself—intellectually curious and praised not only for rote learning but for what my teachers called comprehension. No wonder Danny trusted me with his most tender secrets.

  Oh, but Barbara was fun. No one else generated excitement the way she did, coming up with adventures and convincing everyone to go along. She started our neighborhood games and even got the adults to fall in with some of her plans. For instance, the year we were ten, she wanted to camp out on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena on New Year’s Eve so we’d have front-row seats for the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. She persuaded Papa, Aunt Pearl, and even Mr. Berlov to go. Mama, who stayed at home with Audrey, bundled us up in our warmest jackets and made us take every blanket from the house. For the first time, I stayed awake until midnight, drinking cocoa and telling ghost stories with Barbara and Danny, and the next day, the flower-covered floats in the Rose Parade were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

  Even when it was just Barbara and me, I never got bored. And I sometimes got in trouble, like when we took Mama’s just-washed sheets from the line and built a fort in the yard. Once, though I protested all the way, I trotted after her to stand on the bank of the Los Angeles River when it surged with water during the rainy season. I couldn’t stop thinking about Micky Altschul, the Boyle Heights legend who’d been swept away by the river in flood. Still, seeing the river in its glory as La Reina de la Puebla de Los Angeles was terrifying and thrilling. Barbara let out a yell of excitement, and I yelled, too, trying to outroar the river. It was worth the slaps we got when Mama somehow found out. On my own, I might have been a tediously good child, scolded only for spending too much time with my nose in books—and perhaps a tedious, line-toeing adult. Would I have become such a rabble-rouser if Barbara hadn’t brought out the mischief in me?

  But Barbara didn’t just have a gift for mischief. My sister could be dangerous.

  One afternoon in November 1932, not long after Roosevelt was elected president—we were eleven, and in the sixth grade—we went with Danny to Chafkin’s grocery store. Barbara and I had a shopping list from Mama, and Mrs. Chafkin helped us find what we needed. After she figured out what everything cost, she took the strip of cardboard with our family’s name on it from the collection of such strips hanging behind the counter and wrote down the amount to add to the total Mama and Papa would pay at the end of the month.

  “There you go, girls.” Mrs. Chafkin handed us the groceries and two pieces of bubble gum. She gave Danny a piece of gum, too, but ignored the items he’d placed on the counter—two cans of soup, a five-pound sack of potatoes, and a pint of milk.

  “I want to get these,” Danny said.

  Mrs. Chafkin had seemed a little nervous when she was helping Barbara and me. Now discomfort streamed from her, though all she did was call out, “Eddie?”

  Eddie was Mrs. Chafkin’s energetic son, who had come into the business after graduating from high school a few years earlier. (Eddie Chafkin would eventually build a supermarket empire and become Los Angeles’s leading promoter of Israel Bonds.) He hurried out from the back office.

  “Danny Berlov,” Mrs. Chafkin whispered, as if her voice had gotten trapped in her throat.

  Eddie Chafkin glanced at the groceries on the counter. “Danny, have you got money to pay for these?”

  None of us ever carried more than a nickel or two. “Put it on my father’s tab,” Danny said.

  “Your father needs to come talk to us about his bill.” Eddie took out the strip of cardboard with Gershon Berlov written on it and pointed to a black X next to the name.

  “My father, he always forgets!” Danny laughed, but his cheeks flamed. “I’ll tell him, and I’ll just get this for tonight.” He pushed one can of soup toward Eddie, who stood with his arms crossed. Everyone knew that, as
well as being named for a dead ancestor whose Hebrew name was something like Efraim or Eliezer, Eddie Chafkin’s parents had also named him for King Edward VII of England, and he always acted hoity-toity.

  “That’s not enough for dinner,” Mrs. Chafkin said. “How about a few potatoes, too?” She took three potatoes from the sack Danny had placed on the counter and put them and the can of soup in a bag. Then she added the milk, too. “You’ll need this for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  “Ma!” I heard Eddie say as we went out the door.

  Taut with shame, Danny mumbled that he had to get home. He hugged the small sack of groceries to his chest and ran.

  “I hate Eddie Chafkin,” Barbara muttered.

  “Me too.”

  Of course, we understood what had just happened. Everyone was being hurt by the Depression, which had started with the stock market crash three years earlier and kept getting worse and worse. The Great Depression, as it was already being called, was a cataclysm in the larger world from which the adults were powerless to insulate us. All over Boyle Heights, people we knew—family friends, the fathers of classmates—had lost their jobs. Walking down the street, I’d seen neighbors with everything they owned—clothes, pots and pans, family pictures, whatever furniture they hadn’t already pawned—put out on the curbside, the people hovering beside their possessions, some weeping, some holding their spines so straight they seemed about to crack. And it was never a surprise to walk into our kitchen and see a man with shabby clothes and downcast eyes eating the soup and bread Mama had given him when he knocked at the door and asked if she had anything to spare.

  At least we had some soup to give them. Although Papa had had to take a salary cut, and lately Mama seemed tense all the time, some people still bought shoes, and Papa hadn’t lost his job. But poor Mr. Berlov … who could afford the luxury of his Yiddish classes? He tried to come up with other ways to earn money, but he didn’t have an enterprising personality, not like the Soy Bread Man, who walked downtown every morning and bought a dozen loaves of soy bread, then walked back to sell them in the neighborhood … and attracted everyone’s attention because, when he came down the street selling the bread, he walked backward.