Boxer, Beetle (7 page)

‘Tell me, Seth,’ said Berg after the prayer, ‘how long have you been boxing?’

Sinner shrugged. ‘Since I can remember.’

‘Max, tell them how you found him,’ said Kölmel.

‘I don’t want to embarrass the boy,’ said Frink, looking at Sinner, but Sinner made no response, so Frink went on, ‘Well, this was when he was twelve years old. Some rich bloke in a big black Bentley – no idea why he was in our bit of town – but he’d given Sinner – Seth, I should say – he’d given Seth a shilling to watch his car for an hour, with another shilling promised when he got back. After ten minutes the boy just sidled off. Probably spotted something he could pinch,’ he added, smiling at Sinner, who again made no response. ‘When he got back, some pimply steamer was sitting on the bonnet, smoking. Must have been eighteen or nineteen. And Sinner wanted his second shilling. He told the other bloke to leave. He didn’t leave. So Sinner just jumped on him. I seen the whole thing from the dairy across the road. Had to run over and pull him away or I don’t know what might have gone off. Blood all over the both of ’em. Told Sinner he ought to be a boxer.’

After Berg had questioned Frink and Sinner a bit more, Siedelman said, ‘And you are not worried that the sport is a little …
goyishe midas
?’ Sinner didn’t know what that meant. ‘Lashing out to shed another Jew’s blood.’

‘Come on now, Shmuel,’ said Berg. ‘You take the Jews out of boxing and there is no more boxing. We should be proud of that. And it is no coincidence, I think. We know how to
keep a diet. We know how to keep a fast. We know how to keep clean. We know how to keep good habits. Of course we make good boxers. Have you never seen Barney Ross, Shmuel? I taught him for his bar mitzvah. These days he gets into the ring with the talaith on his shoulders and the tvillan on his arms. He unwinds them slowly and kisses them and puts them in a velvet bag which he gives to his trainer, and everyone in the crowd stays silent as if they were at shul. It is a beautiful thing to behold. Whereas I hear he doesn’t even have the Star on his trunks, our Mr Roach?’

‘We’ll fix that, Rabbi,’ said Kölmel.

‘I love to see Jews fight,’ said Pearl. ‘It is not our scripture that says to turn the other cheek. We are all Darwinians now, aren’t we, gentlemen? And survival of the fittest means you have to learn how to throw a punch.’

‘Oh, leave Darwin out of it,’ said Siedelman. ‘I’ve found that if a gentile talks a lot about Darwin, it’s a pretty good sign he hates Jews.’

‘Darwin was a Jew himself, you know,’ said Berg.

‘He was not,’ said Siedelman.

Berg laughed. ‘No, he was not. But read your Talmud. Every seven years, Hashem used to change all the animals into other animals. You know that, Seth? You know that, once, boys and girls were one, and now are two?’ Sinner had never heard of this but he found it interesting. Everyone else had barely started on their food, but he’d already cleared his plate and was now twirling his knife back and forth around his thumb. ‘And it says in the Zohar that apes are the descendants of sinful men. We got there first, you see, as usual.’

‘Moses was most certainly a Darwinian,’ concurred Pearl. ‘What did he want for his tribe but that they should come out on top? That their offspring should own the world?’

‘The Christians, they panic,’ said Berg. ‘They find fossils that are older than ten thousand years, and they have to
pretend they don’t exist. But Jews find them, and they know it is proof that there were other worlds before our own. The Torah can get along with science.’

‘You know, Rabbi, before Darwin the Christians had the Argument from Design,’ said Pearl. ‘They said, “Look at the beautiful butterflies in that meadow! That can only be the Lord’s work.” And the Hebrew just said, “What the hell is a meadow?”’ Most of the men guffawed. Frink laughed nervously, knowing he was out of his depth. ‘We have always lived in cities, ever since we lived in the desert,’ Pearl continued. ‘Everything we ever see, a man made. We never had time for the Argument from Design. We don’t need it for our faith. We don’t care that it’s on the trash heap now.’

‘And the man that made those cities will soon be you, Balfour,’ said Siedelman.

‘I’m not sure about that, Rabbi.’

‘I hear you are doing very well, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel.

‘I often tell Balfour about Nicholas Hawksmoor,’ said Berg. ‘He built churches in London. You must know Christ Church in Spitalfields?’

‘See it every day,’ said Frink, glad for the chance to contribute. ‘Lovely old thing.’

‘Yes, although I hear sadly a little neglected now,’ said Berg. ‘Now, they say Hawksmoor worshipped the devil. They say if you draw lines between his churches on a map you get a pentagram, or some such. To Balfour I say, you must be New York’s Hawksmoor. You must build your expressways and your parks so that they invoke kabbalah – perhaps the sephirot, the Tree of Life – and nobody but the Jews will know. Would that not be a wonderful thing?’

‘I have enough trouble getting anything done as it is, Rabbi.’

‘What exactly is your job, son?’ said Frink.

‘I work at the New York City Planning Commission, sir.’

‘Balfour is going to clean up the Lower East Side,’ said Siedelman.

‘That’s my ambition, at least,’ said Pearl.

‘Clean it up?’ said Frink.

‘Well, I hope that before long we can get rid of slums and the Hoovervilles. Move people into rational, modern developments, where children won’t have to play out in the street, and no one will live next door to a liquor store or a pool hall, and good families will have some space and some privacy.’

‘That sounds superb, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel. ‘But who pays for it?’

‘The city.’

‘In that case, with all due respect, aren’t there a lot of guys who’d do all the same stuff without taking it out of my taxes?’

‘Oh, yes, always those precious taxes that have to be protected like little babies,’ said Berg.

‘Who else will do it?’ said Siedelman. ‘We can’t leave it to the celebrated “free market”.’

‘No,’ said Pearl. ‘Mayor LaGuardia and I are very much in agreement on that.’

‘The Empire State Building’s so empty they have to pay a college graduate to go around flushing all the toilets every day so the porcelain won’t stain,’ said Siedelman, ‘and meanwhile in Arkansas they have families living in caves and eating weeds. When you put your faith in business, that’s what you get. Soon it will be here like it is in Germany. After they lost the war, they had the inflation, the get-rich-quick schemes, the American money coming in, and then the crash. … My friends who live there write me to say that by now it is as if nothing is real any more. Money is a lie, a fantasy, and so it seems like everything else is too. That is why you can make a fortune there selling miracle toothpaste to aristocrats and generals. All that is solid. … No offence meant, by the way, Balfour.’

‘None taken,’ said Pearl. ‘My grandfather’s toothpaste formula made no claim to miracles.’

‘So you think it’s City Hall’s job to fix things up?’ said Kölmel.

‘Not at all,’ said Pearl.

Siedelman looked surprised. ‘I don’t understand, Mr Pearl. I thought we were in agreement. If it’s not business, then. …’

‘Real change,’ said Pearl, ‘at any scale, is the responsibility of the strong individual. Certainly not of government. And certainly not of the market.’

‘The market has no morals,’ said Siedelman.

‘No, it does not,’ said Berg. ‘No values at all. And I must say that before that strong individual Herr Hitler made his entrance, I used to feel that a tyranny of values was better, at least, than a tyranny of no values. But today, it is not so clear to me.’

‘When you’ve seen what we can achieve, I think you may reconsider, Rabbi,’ said Pearl. ‘Of course, the Lower East Side is only the beginning. I’ve seen the Jews in New York and I’ve seen the Jews in London, and I don’t know who has it worse. Talented boys like Seth should not have to grow up in squalor.’

‘I like where I live,’ said Sinner. Everyone turned to him. He sat sprawled in his chair in such a way that, even though he was the smallest man in the room, he seemed, as usual, to take up the most space.

Pearl smiled thinly. ‘I meant no offence.’

‘I’m sure Seth ain’t offended,’ said Frink.

‘Don’t brush the boy off, Balfour,’ said Berg. ‘What exactly is wrong with slums?’

‘They are cramped, criminal, dirty and diseased,’ said Pearl. ‘They are full of whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans intermingled.’

‘Lay off the Negroes,’ interjected Kölmel. ‘They’re the only people in New York who ain’t even a little embarrassed to say they like boxing.’

‘They are irrational and inhuman, these places,’ said Pearl.
‘They are empty of space and light and order. And those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.’

‘Where did you grow up, Mr Pearl?’ said Frink.

‘On East 46th Street. Not far from Grand Central Station.’

‘You’ve never lived in a slum,’ said Berg.

‘No. Nor have I ever lived in an opium den or a whorehouse, but I know enough not to wish them upon my city.’

‘This cunt hates us, Frink,’ said Sinner. Siedelman flinched.

‘Shut your bleeding mouth, boy,’ said Frink quickly.

‘He practically said so,’ said Sinner, glaring at Pearl across the table.

‘I’m sorry about the kid, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel.

‘Not at all,’ said Pearl, glaring back at Sinner.

‘But Seth makes a good point, I think, in his way,’ said Berg. ‘That all you wish to do is rescue these poor slum-dwellers, Balfour, we quite understand. But it is not always so easy to separate a contempt for the streets on which a man was born from a contempt for the man himself. You have heard that silly Christian expression: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” But Jews know that a sin is not something that you can cut out of a man like a polyp. And nor is the memory of his home, filthy as it may be.’ Berg paused. ‘You do not hate Seth, but wish he had not grown up in a slum. There are other reformers like you, I dare say, who do not hate Seth, but wish he were taller and had all ten toes. And there are still others who do not hate Seth, but wish he were not a Jew.’

‘I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to imply, Rabbi,’ said Pearl. ‘I merely wish the best for the boy, and for all boys like him.’

‘In the world you seek, there would be no boys like him.’ Berg held up his hand to stop Pearl from interrupting. ‘Let me return to Darwin. Without mutation, as I understand it, there could be no evolution. We would all still be bacteria in the soup. In our cells there are clerks charged with preventing
any error in the paperwork. But it is lucky that these clerks have never done their jobs with too much diligence. If they did not open us to a sort of sin. …’

‘So we are to rejoice when a child is born with no eyes, in case he is to found a blessed new tribe of the blind.’

‘No. For human beings, I think, Hashem’s work is done. But your clockwork towers, immaculately replicated one by one until they cover the earth and the bed of the sea, so that nothing at all is unplanned – how can anything ever change for the better?’

‘That is a change for the better.’

‘But I wonder if it is not a shortsighted one. The slums are not like a blind child. Nor, I admit, are they like a healthy child. They are like a child with a bent spine, a cleft lip and angels’ wings.’

‘Yes, I’m sure the slums look very romantic from up here in your brownstone.’

‘I grew up in a tenement a few streets from here, Balfour, as you well know. Even there, we could never have predicted young Seth. And people are happier to live in a place where not everything can be predicted. Things arise, beautiful things, things that would not be understood, and so would not be allowed, in your spotless paradise, where they fear the angels’ wings even more than they fear the bent spine and the cleft lip. You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.’

‘If you could hear yourself, Rabbi,’ said Pearl.

‘Yes, yes, I know I am behind the times,’ said Berg. Although his irony was clear, it brought the exchange to a close. No one wanted a raging argument. But from time to time, for the rest of the meal, Sinner and Pearl would still stare sullenly at one another.

The evening ended with sweet pastries that Berg bought from the local bakery because they were beyond the capabilities of
his cook, and then cigars. Forgetting about Sinner, who sat blowing prodigious smoke rings, the Rabbi got up to get a bottle of cognac, and Frink had to call him back to the table on a pretext. Dinner parties on Cherry Street tended to linger on late into the night, but at half past ten Pearl made his apologies, saying he had on his desk a pile of bills from the state legislature. Leaving, he shook hands with all five men. Sinner’s handshake was particularly vigorous.

‘So tell me more about this clown that Sinner is fighting next week,’ said Berg as the maid cleared the table for a second time. ‘Aloysius Somebody.’

‘Aloysius Fielding,’ said Kölmel. ‘Won’t be any trouble. Long as our kid shows a little bit of discipline. Right, Seth?’

‘You’ll make your name, Sinner,’ said Frink. ‘Straight into the big leagues.’

‘How much are the tickets?’ said Berg.

‘Two dollars, if you can’t get an Annie Oakley,’ said Kölmel.

‘I think I can stretch to that.’

‘Whose is this?’ said Sinner. He was holding up a Bulova men’s wristwatch with a black strap. ‘It was on the floor.’

‘Oh, that’s Balfour’s,’ said Siedelman.

‘Why would he have taken off his watch?’ said Berg. ‘Oh dear. Can we catch him up?’

‘He’ll be on the subway by now.’

‘We’ll telephone. His wife may be at home.’

‘She’s at her mother’s house on Long Island.’

‘His maid, then,’ said Berg. He took down his huge leather-bound address book, which his friends sometimes referred to as
The Book of Life (Lower East Side Edition)
even though most of its hundreds of crinkled pages were long out of date. Sinner leaned over to watch as his finger slid down past Paliakov, Papirny, Pasternak, Patsuk and Pazy to Pearl.