The Master Butcher's Singing Club Read Free Page A

of paper to him. She made him tug just a little to get it. He thanked her, in German, and she replied with a manufactured tragic pout that he was too weary to notice. The amount was legible, anyway. He understood it, knew how much money he would have to add to the meager amount he still possessed. He put the paper in his pocket and then found a pillar against which to stand.
    He took up this position, the back brim of his father’s hat just touching the grooved stone behind, and then he lifted the suitcase in his arms, unlatched the lid, and lowered it enough so that he could see just over the opened top. For the remaining hours of the day and then on into the dusk, during which the smoky radiance through the high windows intensified and then diminished to a feeble gray, he stood. Motionless, he seemed not so much rooted as suspended, as though he’d been lowered by strings that still held him poised. That was perhaps the visual effect of his hunger. For it crawled in him to lighten him, opened him from the inside. His gut yawned. Yet he remained impassive and somehow buoyant in the dark. He had rehearsed on the boat across the price he would ask for the sausages, and at once he sold seven, not perhaps because they were so irresistible but because, even in that city of every possible sight the image of the man holding open in his tireless arms the sausage-filled suitcase,
which looked heavy by the way, arrested quite a few. From time to time, a shaft of the fading light plucked his calm and idealized features from the gloom. So he sold, just as he’d known he would, out of his depth of silence as much as the quality of what he carried, though he believed most certainly, and with a firm drama, that his father’s were, no argument, the best sausages upon the earth.
    Maybe they were. The next morning some who bought one the daybefore came back for two. And more people that same afternoon. Other than sleeping on a platform bench with the closed suitcase in his lap, visiting the washroom, or drinking the surprisingly cold, sweet city water, Fidelis had remained at his post. Those who noticed, and there were a few among the swirling crowd, wondered at his endurance. How did his arms support that open suitcase hour after hour? The suitcase, which also contained his treasured knives, was heavier than it looked, yet he held it lightly. As the day went on, his stillness seemed an unquestionable form of self-torture. But it wasn’t, for Fidelis, the way it seemed to an observer. Standing there was not so difficult. It was almost a relief, after the constant motion of the sea. And the strength required to hold the suitcase in one position all that time was nothing to him, even though he was weakened by not eating.
    Hunger had been with him forever, it seemed, and hunger was with him now. He’d learned its routine and knew, on the second day, not having eaten since the scrap of a last meal on the boat, that he must have food. No matter how reluctant he was to spend his money, the time had come. Fidelis shut the suitcase, from which sausages had noticeably disappeared, and he walked straight across the station, the familiar, famished buzz in his ears, to a small diner set into the side of a wall. There, at a stool, the suitcase clasped between his feet, he chose three bowls of the cheapest stew—tough beef, potatoes, carrots, gravy—and ate with the intent patience he’d developed when relieving a period of starvation. The waitress brought him extra bread, and when he indicated that he couldn’t pay for it and she insisted that he keep the bread, he thanked her with a gulp of surprise. The goodwill of most of the people here amazed him, but then, he reminded himself, they were neither starving in the main nor recently and thoroughly defeated and detested outside their diminished borders. So they could afford, he decided, the ordinary kindnesses, the gift of bread.
    He paid, recalculating the slight diminishment toward his goal,