Coney Read online

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2000 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, New York 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Amram Ducovny

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-242-4

  For Moishe and Velia then …

  For Varda now

  Contents

  Copyright

  In the Cherry Tree: August 30, 1937

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  In the Cherry Tree: February 1, 1936

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  In the Cherry Tree: January 16, 1937

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  In the Cherry Tree: November 5, 1938

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  In the Cherry Tree: April 18, 1937

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  In the Cherry Tree: July 4, 1936

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  In the Cherry Tree: December 11, 1937

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  In the Cherry Tree: February 29, 1936

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  In the Cherry Tree: August 6, 1939

  Chapter 36

  April 1945

  IN THE CHERRY TREE: AUGUST 30, 1937

  Aba: Heshele, what do you know of Franz Kafka?

  Harry: I think he is a writer.

  Aba: No, he is a journalist. A reporter of facts.

  Harry: Like the ones in the movies who are looking for scoops? Like Clark Gable?

  Aba: Exactly. Kafka is a Jewish Clark Gable. His soul is as handsome as Mr. Gable’s face.

  Harry: In what newspaper does he write? Is it the Morning Journal? Does my father know him?

  Aba: Yes, your father knows him. But it is not Kafka who reports. It is his soul.

  Harry: I don’t understand.

  Aba: All right, an example: A few days ago Kafka’s soul reported on a meeting between Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler. Himmler told his Führer of the results of a model reorganization plan of the concentration camps in Germany, to which the Nazis send Jews, Communists and homosexuals. Kafka faithfully recorded Himmler’s gift for detail and pride in his management of the four camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Lichtenburg, a camp exclusively for women. Himmler was particularly expansive and meticulous in describing the latest, Buchenwald, a triumphant example of, and here Kafka gives Himmler’s exact words, “functional unity and capacity.” This philosophy requires little shelter, minimal food and no medical facilities. The goal is to have a prisoner lose at least fifty percent of his weight, with no reduction in his work output. Sickness is abolished. To guard these dangerous people, Colonel Karl Koch has fifteen hundred SS troops. Hitler was greatly pleased. He presented his master planner with a medal.

  Harry: Why does Hitler hate the Jews?

  Aba: It is a journalistic vendetta. Kafka wrote Mein Kampf before Hitler.

  Harry: I don’t understand.

  Aba: I envy you.

  JANUARY 1939

  CHAPTER

  1

  HARRY TOOK THE HIGH GROUND. BELOW, THE PACK MOVED LIKE phantoms through the shadow cast by his perch.

  He squinted to bring into focus his faulty vision. He wore no glasses because his mother insisted that he feigned myopia to cause her worry and expense. As he spotted each dog, he joyfully called its name. The roll call matched yesterday’s. No carcass fed the scavengers of the sky.

  The five dogs inched forward, huddled, fur blending, reminding Harry of the brown-black blotched brushes rhythmically stroked across customers’ shoes by Negro shoeshine boys.

  Bear was the leader, having ousted Smiley three weeks ago in a fight that had raged for more than two hours. Smiley had limped away, whimpering like a funeral mourner, yet maintaining the puffed cheeks and slight show of teeth that named him. Harry had laughed at this slapstick, then regretted callousness to a friend’s pain. But it had been too late. How could you take back a laugh?

  Bear’s challenge had pleased Harry because it altered the rut of predictability. Bear was a female. Never before had there been a female leader of the pack.

  Bear now crossed over the shadow line into the cold morning sunlight. Her stiff, stubble-short, black fur seemed raised in perpetual anger. Her flat bear’s snout sniffed the ground. The others jockeyed for closeness to her.

  Harry’s favorite was The Weasel King. WK, as Harry affectionately called him, was a majestic dog, measuring at least seven handspans. The slightest breeze rippled his silky, charcoal-gray coat. A Great Dane’s head and long, vicious teeth froze humans or changed their path. But the dog was an utter coward. He cringed at a nip by any of the others: Curly, a half-bald, two-hand spanner; Lindy, who was missing a hind leg; or Hauptman, the unlikely issue of surely a German shepherd and perhaps a spaniel. WK was the last to tear at kills.

  Bear broke into a run. The prey was a fleshless cat whose mangy coat was a black-and-white pattern botched by a novice knitter. Its jowly male head probably outweighed its body.

  The cat’s hackles sprang. Body arched and hissing, it leapt straight up. Bear, jaws agape, left her feet and hurtled forward, clamping down on the slim neck before both hit the ground.

  Harry strained to hear the mystical sounds of life on the brink of death. The cat’s guttural shrieks and outraged hisses. The pack’s low growls, punctuated by piercing whelps, as the victim sank claws and teeth into its executioners’ flesh.

  The pack ripped at close quarters. Had the prey been a rat, the dogs would have been wary, herding it at a safe distance from its feared teeth, until Bear saw a clear shot at breaking its neck. Harry preferred a rat battle. He could predict and second-guess strategy.

  Bear let loose a coyote howl and began to eat. Not until her snout and mouth were layered with fur and blood did the others burrow into the entrails. WK held back, then discreetly nuzzled his head between bodies.

  Giant waves crashing onto hard sand jerked Harry’s attention to the horizon where he spotted a becalmed ship no larger than a bathtub toy. Harry was not fooled. The ship was huge. Stood on its bow or aft, it was the height of a Wall Street skyscraper. Each of its three funnels measured three times the diameter of a manhole cover. The wisps of black above it were actually billowing coal smoke, the residue of rapid locomotion whose wake swelled the ten-foot-high waves pounding the beach beneath him.

  Planted on the bridge of the Bremen, Captain Heinz Ziegenbaum, the perpetrator of the ruse, scanned the shore through binoculars and smiled smugly at having tricked Harry, his hated adversary.

  Harry leapt onto his new bicycle. As his legs pumped, he assured them that they could surpass the power of the golden pistons propelling the Bremen. He ga
ined on the liner, dead even with the aft.

  “Almost sneaked by me,” he shouted to Ziegenbaum, “you Nazi rat!”

  Ziegenbaum muttered, “Ach du lieber.” His binoculars fell to his chest. “More coal!” he screamed. “We can’t let that little Jew beat us again.”

  All races against giant liners were grave tests. The gentlemanly British captains were overmatched. The French provided an astonished “Sacre bleu,” while the Italians spat a “ Va fangool.” The Americans delighted in saluting a valiant victor. But he dared not lose to the Germans. If he did, what would Aba say when he and Aba sat together on the lowest thick branch of the cherry tree and spoke of important things?

  He drew even with amidships. It would be close. He was running out of room. He wished for a racer instead of his fat Schwinn. The sharp January air stabbed at his throat. His panting exhalations hovered like personal clouds. He was gaining, gaining, gaining. He was winning!

  The sparkle of a silver sun reflector warned him, but too late to brake. He wrenched the handle bars to the left and began to fly. He landed into darkness.

  When light returned, two faces peered down at him. He recognized one. The other belonged in a dream. It was almost a perfect rectangle, the square chin about as wide as the forehead. Long cheeks flowed like overspreading pancake batter. A half-finger of flat nose and rust-colored eyes resembling BB gun pellets seemed tiny afterthoughts. Harry blinked.

  An old woman tapped a heavily veined hand against her leathery cheek.

  “Oy, he’s alive.” she said.

  “No thanks to you,” said the other, uncovering crowded yellow teeth. “Who the hell sits right in the middle of the boardwalk sunning? You either sit in the back or front.”

  “Listen, Mr. Midget, don’t you tell me where to sit. I was living here by Coney before you was born.”

  Harry cocked his head for perspective. No, he was not a midget. He was a dwarf.

  “Shove it lady,” said the dwarf. “You OK kid?”

  Harry mentally traveled his body. His right knee stung. His palms tingled. A bump on his head pulsated. He did not wish to touch it. He smiled at the dwarf.

  “I think I’m alright. What happened?”

  “Well kid you was peddlin’ like to beat Georgiani in the six-day bike race and lookin’ out to the ocean, so you don’t see this dumb old crow sittin’ right in the middle of the boardwalk, like she owned it. You skid and the bike bucks from the back like a horse and you take off like a big-assed bird. You ripped your knickers.”

  The woman stroked his forehead. Her palm was rough. He felt dirty. He did not like old people to touch him. They were rotting.

  “I think you hit your head. Your Mama should take you by the hospital,” she said.

  The dwarf shoved her hand away and smoothed Harry’s forehead and hair. His touch was warm, almost hot.

  “They should take you to the hospital for crazy ladies,” he said to the woman. “Why don’t you haul your ass somewhere safe and let me talk to the kid.” He winked a BB at Harry.

  “Dirty-mouth midget. You belong by a hospital.”

  She walked away, shoulders alternately thrusting forward, expressing utter disdain.

  Preparing to stand up, Harry rolled onto his side and spotted his bike. It had crashed into one of the ten-foot-high concrete, clam-shaped drinking fountains which were spaced along the boardwalk.

  “Jesus, my bike,” he said.

  The dwarf’s Mt. Rushmore head, set on a thin neck, jerked from side to side. It seemed in danger of falling off.

  “Looks pretty bad,” the dwarf said. “Front fender twisted, probably kaput. Front wheel bent. Useless. Chain housing pret-zeled. Chain off. Could be OK. Looks like the handlebars survived. At least Schwinn can do one thing right.”

  The confident, professional diagnosis reminded Harry of a concession owner evaluating winter storm damage and the repairs needed to open a new season. The dwarf stroked his chin.

  “Could cost as much as seven dollars, if it’s worth fixin’, which I personally wouldn’t.”

  Inside Harry’s forehead, where, Aba said, Harry saw important things, bikes leaned against a wall.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t you run the bike store near the Half-Moon Hotel? I ride by there to look at your racers.”

  “Own it.”

  “Could you take a look at my bike?”

  “Sure kid. My name’s Woody.

  “Harry.”

  The dwarf offered Harry a hand to pull up on. Harry instinctively grabbed it but then began to release, fearing that his full weight would topple the dwarf. Suddenly his fingers were mashed as he was yanked to his feet. His knee throbbed.

  Harry calculated Woody’s height at about three and a half feet, two feet below him.

  “Feel that strength,” the dwarf said, releasing Harry’s hand after a farewell knuckle squash.

  “Yes,” Harry answered to the wind, not to demean the dwarf by looking down at him.

  “Hey, I’m down here,” Woody directed, tugging at the waist of Harry’s knickers. “This”—he outlined a short shape with his hands, much like a man lustfully invoking a woman’s figure—“didn’t just happen to me. I’m thirty-three years old. I’m used to it. Yeah, I’m used to everything, except bein’ patted on the head. I quit bein’ one of the moon men at Luna Park because of that. Six-year-old kids pattin’ me on the head. Like to take them across my knee and teach ’em some manners.”

  The matted, sandy-colored hair, a square patch of tilled earth, invited patting. It seemed unnatural not to. Aba instructed: Sometimes the natural thing to do is not to do.

  Rolling his bike on its unbent wheel, Harry followed the dwarf’s swayed back and protruding buttocks. Woody’s arms, curved, parenthesizing his body, were the twins of his bowed legs. He listed left and right. Yet, from time to time, Harry skip-jumped to keep up.

  They walked on the boardwalk toward the Half-Moon Hotel, whose blue-tinged dome dominated the nonamusement section of Coney; a pasha’s palace among bungalows. Looming beyond, the motionless Ferris Wheel anticipated summer lovers kissing while the world turned upside down. Beneath it the Cyclone’s sky-riding wooden tracks formed a serpentine road to nowhere. Coney awaited a warm wind to awaken it from its annual Ice Age.

  In winter the boardwalk belonged to a tribe of ancient sun worshippers who, steadying their beach chairs against the shuttered concessions, pressed silver sun reflectors under their chins, channeling life into death masks.

  Woody turned onto the 28th Street access ramp. The Norton’s Point trolley, bound for the Stillwell Avenue subway terminus, clattered into view. Its one passenger sat in the rear of the car. In front, a conductor calibrated the throttle bar. Low-wattage bare bulbs cast a gray mist. A ghost trolley condemned to traverse Coney for eternity traveled endless tracks inside Harry’s forehead.

  “Hey,” the dwarf called, “we’re here.”

  A sandwich-board sign to the side of a glass storefront, read: Woody’s Bikes: New, Used, Rental, Repairs. Cash Only. Inside, the temperature remained below freezing.

  “Hey, Soldier!” the dwarf yelled.

  A man wearing blue overalls and an unraveling woolen khaki-colored hat emerged from behind a tangle of bikes, each missing a wheel or some other essential part.

  “Damn, what is it Woody?” His voice was hoarse and strained as if bruised from fighting its way through his throat.

  “Got a job for you.” The dwarf pointed to Harry’s bike.

  Soldier stroked the handlebars. He smiled at Harry.

  “Damn. Poor bike.” He shook his head sadly.

  “Wait,” Harry said to Woody, “I never said … well, I really don’t have any money.”

  The dwarf waved off further protest.

  “Take the bike, Soldier. Fix it before anythin’ else.”

  Harry relinquished his grip. Soldier cradled the bike’s middle bar, gently lifted it off the ground and disappeared behind the bike graveyard.

  “Don�
�t worry, we can work something out,” the dwarf assured Harry. “Let’s talk.”

  Woody opened a door cut into the back wall which led into a windowless room containing an unmade, legless double bed, a worn morris chair and a free-standing Atwater-Kent radio. The dwarf sat at the edge of the bed, motioning Harry to the chair.

  “So kid, you’re scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Yeah, about what your old man and old lady is goin’ to do to you about the bike. My old man used to beat the shit out of me.”

  Harry was not scared. He felt sorry for his father. The bike had been a present for his fifteenth birthday, three months ago. It represented much money to his parents. His mother had opposed the expenditure and boycotted the presentation. She would fill a year with recriminations.

  “Yeah,” Harry answered. Agreeing with adults, Harry knew, convinced them that you were smart.

  He imagined his father given a choice by the Nazis: spank your child or die. His father chose death.

  “Well, like I said, don’t worry. Soldier will fix your bike so Mr. Schwinn himself couldn’t tell the difference.”

  The dwarf slid forward. His head was between Harry’s knees. Harry wanted to cross his legs, but was unsure if he could swing his leg over the dwarf’s head. Woody rested a hot hand on his thigh, just as Schnozz, the old barker, had done under the boardwalk. Harry checked that each button of his fly was secure in its hole.

  “Got an itch?” the dwarf said. “I got some good stuff for that. I’ll get you some later.”

  Woody’s head swiveled up to engage Harry’s eyes.

  “Listen. I’ll fix your bike, if you do somethin’ for me.”

  Harry could not extract words from his dry throat. He nodded once to indicate understanding and then shook his head from side to side to decline the offer.

  The dwarf imitated his yes-no and laughed.

  Now he whispered, lips drawn to the right: “I’m a bookmaker, see, and a little numbers action too. Anyway, what I’m askin’ in return for me fixin’ your bike is that you ride around pickin’ up bettin’ slips. No big deal. Most of the cops are paid off by the guy I work for. But just in case, who would suspect a nice kid on a bike?”