In the Land of the Living Read Free Page B

read anything, even the Cleveland Press or Morgen Freiheit .
    There were enough bedrooms for the boys to sleep separately—which was desirable considering the odor and quantity of Burt’s farts. But Burt didn’t even have to say anything. When it got late enough to go to sleep, Isidore and Burt dragged his mattress into the room with the other beds and they stayed all together in one room as it had been at the foster home. Their father didn’t know or care where they slept, and the other bedrooms remained empty, without any shades on the windows.
    To eyes less jaded than Isidore’s, the new photographs on the wall of the dining room might have hinted at new developments in Ezer’s soul, but Isidore perceived immediately that his father was unchanged. For one thing, while new to the dining room wall, the photos were otherwise old. One showed Ezer and his brother, Hermann, but Ezer had evidently cut the picture in half and thrown his brother away so that it was just Ezer by himself now, reaching off the edge of the world toward a space that had formerly been Hermann, but was now just the brown underboard of the picture frame. There was another of Ezer and Sophia, which had a magic force about it, as though it had caused something new to exist that didn’t before, but again, his parents’ youth, while new to Isidore’s eyes, in fact belonged to the past. His mother was not smiling and her skin looked the color of porcelain and hard—another lie. Ezer looked smart and radical in it, like a 1930s socialist playwright or somebody like that. Aunt Mara said he’d wanted to be a Yiddish-school teacher and in fact had tried to get certified once and, before he met Sophia, Mara said, he’d even acted a bit in the Yiddish theater in New York.
    There was a picture of Ezer’s father, Nachem, on the wall also, with a visage remnant from another era and cold-blooded, just exactly like the haunting, cold, reptilian visage of a crocodile with eyes that move but do not seem to see. The crocodile on the wall had made and sold barrels. It had been that cooper and father of eleven whose bed the Russian officer had slept in, that man whom the Russian officer had driven into the basement with his wife and eleven children and threatened to shoot in the head when the cooper stuck it through the cellar door to ask for water while the soldiers were at cards.
    Perhaps it was that crocodilian old cooper whose iron grip on past and future had stunted Ezer’s means of expression in English. True, Ezer had no ambition anymore and never tried to learn English really well, but it also seemed that for him there was hardly any need for those tenses apart from the present; for past was merely the stain of injury on the film of the present; and future the corresponding photogravure of permanent resentment. He couldn’t change himself any more than he could change the expression of that old cooper on the wall.
    Their neighbor, Mrs. Polanska, said she was sorry for Ezer. “He just needs a lady friend to help keep the house,” she said, but suggestions as to who were not forthcoming.
    Like the Bitch, perhaps? She had not seemed like much of a housekeeper. Mrs. Polanska and her shtetl ways! She couldn’t help Isidore, or his brothers, either. He had to take care of his little brother, Dennis, and of his older brother, who told Isidore he was the closest thing he had to a mother. They didn’t even have a cousin or an uncle worth half a pancake. Their foster mother would write, she said, and Isidore believed her. Yet he had known from the day the green car with the bad antenna rolled up their drive: he had his own mind and his own body and his sense of humor and a belief in something better, if only mind and body and humor hungered after it hard enough—and that was it.
    Before he had finished grade school, Isidore had learned not to try to change his father, but to circumnavigate him instead. False apology, the oldest of their strategies, remained