A Castle in Brooklyn(56)

“What do you say, my friend? When are you making me a partner?”

Jacob took another sip of his tea, feeling the burn on his tongue. He said nothing.

After the couple left the home, Jacob helped Esther clear the coffee table and wash the last of the dishes before going to bed. Neither spoke of the evening. But after the new software system was installed and two more contracts were closed, Morris continued to ask, daily, about when he would become partner, and Jacob finally silenced him. Perhaps running a business alone wasn’t as bad as it seemed.



The rhythmic motion of the great train rocked Jacob to sleep. Once again, in the dream he was seated on his mother’s lap, cuddled into her chest as she read the words of his favorite fairy tales. It did not matter that he wasn’t listening too carefully to the story, as long as he could take in her clean scent, as long as the brightly colored drawings of castles and forests continued to fascinate him. Her voice was melodic, like a song, a lullaby that soothed him to a peaceful sleep that he fell into soon after she had begun reading. He wished he could stay there forever. He was awakened by a screech, and then a sudden jolt.

“These engineers can’t drive. They are always putting on the brakes.”

Jacob opened his eyes and rubbed out the clouds. At first he had forgotten where he was, but soon the image of the boy next to him began to take form. He looked at his watch and again checked the large, overstuffed bag at his feet.

“Nearly an hour left to go until we reach Hamburg, Zalman. If you are hungry, I have another cheese sandwich in my bag.”

The boy shook his head and ran his fingers through his light wavy hair. I can’t properly call him a boy, he is nearly a man, Jacob thought as he observed his friend’s serious eyes, the stern set of his lips, his chin. He wondered if he, too, had aged as much in the intervening years since they’d first met in Frau Blanc’s barn. He wondered, too, about what lay ahead when he stepped off the train only to board a ship from which he would step off once again, this time in America.

He didn’t voice his concerns to Zalman, of course. To speak too much was to take the chance that a torrent of regrets, a storm of long-stifled emotion, would burst forth. And that was a risk Jacob was unwilling to take.

“Are you sure we are doing the right thing?”

It was the third time since they had left the apartment in Berlin early that morning that Zalman had asked the question. And Jacob always had the same answer for him.

“It’s absolutely the right thing. It is the only thing. Neither of us has anything left to hold us in this place. Not a father, not a mother, not even a straggly cat! We cannot even visit a cemetery, lay a rock on a grave. There are only crumbled buildings and ashes here. Not for us, two Jewish boys with hardly a penny between us, and no one left in the world.”

“Well . . .” Zalman paused. “At least we have each other.”

Jacob set his eyes upon the boy again as a smile came to his lips.

“Yes,” he said, “we will always have that.”



Jacob opened his eyes just as the announcement came over the loudspeaker. He gathered his things and got off the subway at the stop in Mill Basin. During the five-minute walk, he relived the dream he had just had. Like all the other times, it had seemed so real, as if it were yesterday. And yet it was over thirty years ago since he had taken that last ride with Zalman, who had accompanied him to the ship that would take him to his new life in America. It would be nearly a year later that Zalman would follow him to stay with cousins before he would leave him once again.

In the dream he had been content, had no animosity toward his companion. No, it had been a good dream. A dream about two friends traveling toward a new life filled with hope. Not like the dreams he had when he fell into a troubled sleep most nights as he dreamed of sitting in airplanes that fell out of the sky and climbing giant ladders whose rungs shattered with each step. Always in these dreams Jacob was running, running to escape an angry inferno, or running toward someone, a child whose face he dared not see, a child falling from a mountaintop whose hand he had clasped only to have it slip away, to lose him in the murky depths far below. These were the dreams that dominated his night as Jacob lay in his bed, so that upon awakening, he would reach for his Esther and bring her close to him, holding on to her for dear life, afraid that she, too, might fall from his grasp.

But now, as Jacob lingered on the five-minute walk to his home, he tried not to recall those nightmares and to focus only on the beautiful evening. And he tried to recall the dream he had just awakened from on the subway, in which Zalman had appeared not as a rival, a treacherous enemy, but as the friend and the brother he had always been.

Jacob weaved slowly among the commuters emerging from the station, not stopping to purchase the evening paper or pick up a pack of mint Life Savers from a nearby newsstand.

He didn’t hate Zalman. He never had. If Jacob had taken the time to search deep within his heart, he would admit that it was Zalman, not he, who had saved their lives. If not for Zalman, Jacob would have been just another solitary defeated young man in hiding, or worse. But Zalman had given him purpose. The child for those first few weeks had brought an innocence back into his life, and along with it a sense of anticipation, that things would be better. Jacob knew, too, that as the older, more experienced one, he would have to be the boy’s protector, so that when the crucial time came, he would not think of his own fears, but only of the boy. He could not save his father, his brother, not even his mother. But maybe he could save the boy. After all that had occurred, Jacob realized that if not for Zalman, he himself would have fallen, only to lie buried with the others for eternity. Zalman had been the strong one.