A Castle in Brooklyn(20)

Of course, Zalman already knew the answer. He had been asked the same question for so many years, and now, only a month after his return, he was listening to Jacob’s story once again. But just to appease his friend, he shrugged and waited for the response.

“Seven years! Seven long years of building! Each stick of wood, each block of gold and metal, went into that temple! But I, no—we, we will build our castle in less than one!” And with that exclamation, Jacob would sit back in his armchair, put his two large hands together as if in prayer, and close his eyes. Zalman had no doubt that behind the eyelids Jacob was envisioning the home.

Once during the time of darkness, as they weaved tales in the hayloft, Zalman had asked him why he didn’t tell more of his favored stories of King Solomon’s life. The tale of how the ruler had settled an argument between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a baby. How Solomon proposed he slice the child in two to settle the discussion, and only when one woman gave up her claim to the baby to spare it from harm did he wisely determine who the real mother was. But with a wave of the hand, Jacob dismissed these and other tales of his hero as of little consequence compared to Solomon’s other tangible achievement. Nor did he have any interest in talking about his namesake from the Bible, Jacob, who was not nearly as successful, or as commanding, as King Solomon.

“I wish my parents had given me another name,” he declared that one time. “Jacob was the name of my mother’s father, a thief and a swindler, an accountant of little merit who stole money from the glassmakers he worked for. He was not yet fifty when one evening on his way home from secretly filling his pockets at work, he encountered a couple of robbers who sliced him from neck to navel, leaving him bleeding in the street, his pockets turned inside out. I don’t doubt that the crooks had some tip about this Jacob’s underhanded dealings. Anyway, the point is that Solomon would have been a much better name.”

Though Zalman was tempted to ask more about Jacob’s family—he himself had let loose the details of his life, which flowed from him easily—something told him he should not push. So instead Zalman listened as Jacob finished his tale of Solomon still another time. He didn’t mind it. Seeing the look of excitement sweep across his friend’s face as he relaxed and placed his hands together gave Zalman a contented feeling as well.

Zalman hadn’t planned for this: being here, in the stuffy Brooklyn apartment with the windows shut tightly and the drapes closed so that he couldn’t see the face of the sun most mornings. The clattering of garbage cans, the blaring of horns in the street below instead of the nostalgic lowing of a cow, the rooster’s insistent crow splitting the temperate air. He hadn’t planned on it, but he hadn’t planned on breaking his arm in two places, either, as he was making his way down from the hayloft where his shoe, still muddy from a rainfall the night before, seemed to have taken on a mind of its own, causing Zalman to go one way, his leg the other; and within a minute’s time, he was six feet below on the straw-and dirt-covered ground, tasting the blood from a split lip instead of savoring the oatmeal and strawberries he had been craving only seconds earlier.

Broken in two places. The physical pain in his arm had seemed unendurable at times, the heavy immobile cast too constricting; all this, he knew, was to be expected. But Zalman had not planned for a different kind of pain—the pain of another loss. He thought he had become immune to it after the war and the iron door that had slammed down for good between himself and his family in death. At first it seemed like a hole in his heart, or a missing limb or a faded memory, and then there was a heaviness that took its place, and no matter how hard he tried to occupy his time with physical labor or engage in lighthearted conversation with the others at the farm, it was the heaviness, as if a quiet stone had settled deep inside his spirit, that never went away. And now there was the realization of yet another leave-taking, another loss. He hadn’t counted on it. He had endured fear, starvation, but how does anyone plan for an accident?

Finally, after an operation and two months when it became clear that he would no longer be useful on the farm, Zalman came to a sad realization. The farmer himself didn’t want him to go, suggesting he conduct the business of the farm, the paperwork, driving the eggs and produce for sale to the market in town, but in the end his efforts proved useless. The farmer knew that Zalman’s future prospects were no longer in Minnesota. As for Miriam, who did not plead or otherwise attempt to get him to change his mind, she stood quietly on the porch, shielding her eyes from the sun that last day in May, just before he set out for the train. He took her hand in his, the delicate fingers, their nails cut short, and held it for the first time, as if some romance had passed between the two, nothing but a promise, a hint of a future that could be, but now never would.

“I wish you great success,” she said as he let go of her hand and, with his good arm, reached to touch the stitches on the collar of his blue sweater.

There was the long ride across the plains, the high grass and rambling hills and sky that opened to rain, oceans of rain in biblical proportions at dawn, and a silent darkness that painted the mountaintops in violet hues come evening. For Zalman, the days on board the train—the ride with its endless churning of wheels, and the tracks that seemed to move him forward toward eternity—began to converge into one long, dreary memory.

It was only when the doors to the car opened and he saw not the uniformed men waving truncheons, pulling back their barking dogs, but the faces of Jacob and Esther, who were waving now as they caught sight of him, that Zalman relaxed and thought maybe, just maybe, he could see a glimpse into his future.