The Museum of Extraordinary Things(16)

But it was too late. I had already seen the light spilling down around me. The night was aglow. I wanted to look through the lens of his camera. I wanted it so badly I felt an ache in my chest. There was another world I had never known, one of great beauty that could make me forget what I had seen in my short time on earth.



I LEFT HOME a few weeks later. I had very little to take with me. My new coat, a pair of boots I’d bought for myself, the watch that had once belonged to the factory owner’s son. That was something I would never give away, for it reminded me why I’d made the decision to go my own way. I left a packet of cash underneath my father’s prayer book; whether or not he used it was his decision. I took up the feather quilt from the floor and folded it, knowing I’d never sleep on it again. I thought of my mother’s hands at work. Then I stopped thinking about her. It was not possible to hold on to ashes. In my dreams I had always walked out of the past, and it shut behind me, a door I couldn’t unlock. Now I intended to do the same in my waking life. At the factory, other boys my age were working for the labor movement, trying to change the world, but I couldn’t even see their world; it seemed a prison to me. Hochman had treated me fairly, and I knew he had high hopes for me, but I never told him I was leaving. I didn’t feel the need. If he were as adept at locating the missing as he claimed, he would know where I had gone.



The photographer’s name had been printed on the wooden chest that held his equipment: Moses Levy. He was one of us, from the Ukraine, and our world was small enough for me to track him down. Finding people was what I did, after all. As it turned out, Hochman’s secretary, Solomon, was the one who led me to Levy. In his files I found the address of Levy’s studio. The photographer’s services were often used when there was a wedding. Thinking back, I believed I had seen him at the Hall of Love, a stooped, elegant figure setting up his camera. Levy had been considered to be a great artist in Russia but was now forced to take marriage portraits simply to make a living.

I found my way to Chelsea, heading toward the river, for it was here that the great man lived and worked, in a workshop loft above a livery stable. I climbed the stairs, but when I knocked on the studio door there was no answer. I’d never found the lost by giving up, so I knocked harder. I was already impulsive, not easily dissuaded or turned away, and my methods for getting what I wanted could be considered obnoxious. I knew how to rattle people, how to make them respond when all they wanted was to slip away from my prodding. I kept rapping at the door. After a while it opened a crack and the old man peered out with his fierce eye. Perhaps he recognized me, or perhaps I was simply an annoyance like any other.

“Get out,” he growled. “I didn’t ask you here!”

But I felt he had, for he had shown me the light. In doing so he had opened another world for me, one beyond the darkness I had found on Ludlow Street and in all of my wanderings. Ever since that night upriver I had been able to catch a few restful hours of sleep, something that had always been so difficult for me. I now dreamed of photography, and because of this I looked forward to sleep for the first time.

In my dreams the world was mine to create, something brand new.

I bunked in the livery below the photographer’s rooms at first, paying off the stable owner so that I might stretch out in the straw beside the horses. “You’d better not make me regret this,” the landlord said to me, clearly concerned for his horses, for there were more horse thieves in New York City than there were in all of the western territories. I promised I wouldn’t, and luckily he believed me. It was the dead of winter by now and exceptionally cold. I had developed a hacking cough. At thirteen I appeared disheveled, maybe even dangerous. I had recently reached my full height of six foot two inches, and was so thin my wrist bones were knobby. I was made of sinew and muscle, even though I was starving, thinner than ever. My dark hair reached to my shoulders, as was our people’s practice, but on my first night in the stable I cut it off with a pair of shears, so short my scalp showed through. I did this to seal my commitment to my new life. I now looked nothing like my own people, who grew their hair and beards to show their faith and their obedience to God. I drank from the horses’ trough, and when I was hungry enough, I tramped down to the Twenty-third Street dock and caught oil-laden fish that I cooked over an open fire in the alleyway behind the stable. I suppose I could be heard hacking in the night. Most likely I kept the photographer awake. Snow fell and dusted the cobblestones on the streets, and in their sleep the horses groaned and I groaned along with them, miserable, nearly desperate.

Then one morning the great man himself, Moses Levy, came down with a cup of tea and some bread and cheese. Even before I thanked him, I begged to be his apprentice.

“You don’t think your father will miss you?” he asked when I told him of how we had left the Ukraine, a village not far from his own, and how we had worked at factories until our fingers bled, and how I had left without saying good-bye. I omitted the more questionable section of my life as one of Hochman’s boys, for in that profession I felt less like a detective than a rat and a snitch.

“He doesn’t know me, how can he miss me? I have my own life,” I insisted, exactly as I’d insisted to Hochman when I first stepped away from my original life and changed my fate. I wolfed down the food that had been offered me. “I make my own decisions,” I assured Levy.