Temple of My Familiar Read Free Page B

his skin. In truth, he could not see how anyone could object to that. A more luminous, clean-brown anything was hard to imagine. ‘Even if you only liked calfskin gloves,’ said Uncle Isaac, ‘even if you only admired a nice pair of oxblood-colored loafers! Even if you only loved Hershey bars!’ And he would laugh.
    “This man, as it turned out,” said Arveyda, “was a musician, who worked on Ellis Island as a janitor to support himself and his family.
    “Soon everyone else in the barrack had been pronounced free of disease and left, and there were just the two of them. They talked, using their hands, eyes, strange sounds, and hops and skips, about music. The colored man’s name was Ulysses, and after Isaac left Ellis Island he never saw or heard of him again. But he always remembered that on his last day in that place, just when he thought he’d go mad from the isolation and boredom, Ulysses brought the news, long before there was any official announcement to him, of his impending release, and brought him also a news magazine full of pictures of the world he was about to enter, in which not a single face that looked like Ulysses’ appeared. Uncle Isaac said he searched each photograph carefully, a cold dread settling in his chest; what sort of world was this, in which his very present friend did not appear? And then, from the pocket of his baggy brown coat, with its frayed holes at the elbows, Ulysses had produced and offered to him a bright red apple. This gift was Ulysses’ handshake and hug. And it left Mr. Isaac hungry. For, unable to embrace a colored person—Ulysses warned him it was practically illegal to do so—what was he to offer? Nothing was yet his.”
    Carlotta smoothed the hair that poufed above Arveyda’s ear. She kissed him on the eyes. No barrier like that for her, she thought, happily. Ever. Ever. None. None. It made her feel terribly free, and she laid herself full length against his comforting warmth, the sheen of his skin seeming to add a shimmer to her own. She nestled against all this goodness , which felt to her to be the very flesh of the earth. How foolish, how pitiful people were, she thought, not to know enough to try to get next to what could only do them good.
    “It was a magic apple,” said Arveyda, smiling into her hair. “This was before the time of poisoned, drug-filled apples. Musicians used to carry only healthful things. Really.” He laughed. “There was even a time when musicians did not smoke reefer. Although probably never a time when they didn’t drink wine.”
    Carlotta smiled with him.
    “There was even a time”—Arveyda looked down mischievously into her face—“and I know you won’t believe this, when music was played softly, to be heard. Only dead people need loud music, you know. I call loud rock ‘Dracula music’ because you look out, and there are all those dead and deaf and soulless zombies clod-hopping across the floor. Even colored people are zombies these days. It’s enough to shrivel up your short hairs.”
    “You were talking about fruit,” said Carlotta, giggling.
    “So I was,” said Arveyda. “So, Uncle Isaac bit into the apple and thought about his future. In Palestine he’d peddled orchard fruit and garden vegetables with his father, a hirsute, pious man. He would try the same thing in America. His basket grew into a cart, his cart into a stand, his stand into a store. He became a success. But he was not happy, even after realizing his youthful ambition to study ‘in university’ and to learn to play the violin. He missed the heat and the peaches and the Arabs. For Arabs had lived all around him in Palestine, just as colored people lived all around him in Terre Haute. Many of the dead he’d left behind, his friends, were Arabs.
    “When he learned there would be a Jewish state, he accepted it as an excuse to go back. But he was really going back to the sun, the dates, the almonds, the oranges, the grapes, the sound of the Arab