The Boatmaker (10 page)

He pushes the door open and enters a large room with counters on two sides. Behind one counter is an arched opening filled by a beaded curtain. The room is bare, with nothing on the countertops, nothing on the shelves behind.

The boatmaker knows he's in the right place. He feels he should be ashamed to be here, but he isn't. He is focused only on what he came to do—and what will happen afterward. He pulls the door closed behind him, walks to the counter and sets down his compass.

A man comes through the arched opening, pushing aside the beads. He is tall and thin, dressed in black and wearing a skullcap. Light brown curls dangle in front of his ears like corkscrew shavings left behind by a plane. The boatmaker is startled: He has never seen such curls on a man. What surprises him even more is how closely the man resembles the face on the banknotes. The king doesn't have curls dangling in front of his ears, but apart from that the men could be brothers, with their long faces and dark eyes behind oval lenses.

The man in the skullcap moves to the counter, appraising the boatmaker and his shrouded parcel with the eyes of someone who has seen everything that is for sale in the world and knows how to evaluate each item to the penny. He reaches out with long white fingers to remove the handkerchief. The boatmaker's hand shoots out, takes the man's wrist and stops him before he can touch the linen. The shopkeeper pulls his hand back, curling his lips at the unclean touch. The boatmaker unwraps the handkerchief and stows it in his jacket.

“You don't have to do business here,” the shopkeeper says. When the boatmaker stares at him without saying anything, he adds: “We don't need your compass.”

“I came here to sell it.”

The Jew looks at the boatmaker as if he were a wild animal in a zoo: dangerous but safely behind iron bars. He picks up the compass, examines it and sets it down on the counter. He pulls a loupe out of his pocket, pushes his glasses onto his forehead and uses the loupe to peer into the glass dome. His eyes come alive and the look of having seen everything the world offers for sale disappears.

He puts the loupe away, lifts the compass above his head to examine the underside, the hanging bolts. “One of these is bent. Did you rip it off your boat?”

The man pulls his glasses back down onto his long nose. Behind the oval lenses, he looks at the boatmaker as if he can see every drink that has poured into him since he put in at Big Island, every beating he has taken, the talk with the Warden, even the way he had to reach for his mug with both hands.

“This
is
yours, isn't it? It didn't by chance come from someone else's boat? We don't accept stolen goods here. We follow the law to the letter.”

The boatmaker says nothing. His mother's handkerchief is a lump inside his jacket. He stares. The man in the skullcap stares back.

“Not talkative, I see. Not from Big Island either. Well, that's as it may be. And this compass may be yours, and it may not. I would guess it is. A Stenysson. Lovely piece of work. A miniature version of the ones they make for the big ships. Don't see many of these hereabouts. Not much call for them.”

The shopkeeper goes quiet, calculating what he knows about the compass and the boatmaker, fitting each figure into the right account. Then he names an amount.

The boatmaker says nothing, but his small erect figure gives assent. The shopkeeper turns and pushes through the beaded curtain. The boatmaker flicks at an itch near the crust of blood on his cheek. He doesn't
want to scratch it and make blood flow. But he can't help touching his face. Crumbs of dried blood fall to the floor.

The storekeeper comes back and places some bills on the smooth wood of the counter, along with a few coins. The boatmaker picks up the bills without counting them, turns and walks out of the shop, leaving the coins.

The shopkeeper looks at the retreating back, the round bald spot, the worn corduroy jacket. What a savage, he thinks, almost without human language, not so different from an animal, a beast of the field, lowing to its fellows, with no soul and no knowledge of Ha-Shem. Then again, he thinks, I live in a land of savages.

In the mind of the shopkeeper, the people of Big Island are no better and no worse than Gentiles anywhere, among whom the Jews have always been condemned to live. From Abraham in Mesopotamia to Joseph in Egypt, from the destruction of the Second Temple to the harlots of Paris or Berlin. They are all savages. This one is a little stranger than most, that's all. He did have a fine compass, though, a beautiful instrument. Which is odd. Assuming it isn't stolen. If it is stolen, that will be found out soon enough. And the way he wouldn't let me touch the handkerchief, which was embroidered after some strange Gentile fashion. Perhaps the handkerchief is a fetish of some kind, a thing sacred to the savage.

Without thinking, the shopkeeper lifts the strings that extend from under his dark jacket and brushes them to his lips. He picks up the compass and carries it through the curtained archway into the room behind. After sliding a ladder along the cases, he puts the compass on a high shelf, among other valuable items that have parted company with their owners.

As he puts the compass on the shelf, the shopkeeper stops thinking about the boatmaker. Long experience and deep study have taught him not to waste time trying to understand the ways of those who live beyond the Word and apart from Ha-Shem. They may seem close to beasts, like this strange little man with his round bald spot, or dignified and cultured like the men he does business with on the Mainland: experienced and tolerant, some of them as world-weary as Jews themselves. But deep down, he knows that, whether they are wearing overalls smelling of cow dung or bespoke suits scented with expensive cologne, they are nothing but animals: hot breath without mind, unsanctified clay. He comes down the ladder feeling the need to wash his hands, read a midrash and pray to Ha-Shem from the depths of exile.

CHAPTER 8

After pawning his compass, the boatmaker wanders until he finds a place to sleep in the brush by the side of a dusty road. He has enough money to stay anywhere on Big Island, eat wherever they serve food. But he isn't willing to spend any of it on anything but what he pawned the compass for.

He wakes up under the bushes to the sound of wagon wheels. The sun is up and it's hot, hotter than it ever gets on Small Island. He rises, stretches, feels the sealskin bag strapped to his chest, money and handkerchief inside. The purple moon around his eye has faded. The scab on his cheek has shrunk to a scratch.

He undoes his overalls. Yawning and stretching, he lets a hot stream run against the folded bark of a tree and then shakes out the last drops. Even though he's had nothing to eat since the day before, he's not hungry or thirsty. He stretches again and walks out onto the road that leads to the Mandrake.

When the boatmaker reaches the inn, the pine table sitting out in front is empty. He realizes it must be very early. He walks up to the inn and opens the door. Inside it's dark, cool and quiet.

Leaving the front door open, he walks toward the stairs, their scalloped edges showing walnut grain. He goes up slowly, a step at a time, trying to make his feet quiet. But a door under the stairs opens, and the innkeeper comes out of the office where he sleeps in the same nightshirt he wears during the day. The only difference is that at night he adds a nightcap, equally unclean, with a long tail. The innkeeper doesn't care about his appearance. But he does care deeply about the cashbox under his bed. On the floor next to the metal box is a large, well-oiled shotgun. Box and gun are rarely parted.

The innkeeper steps out and comes close enough to the foot of the stairs to recognize the boatmaker in his corduroy jacket and overalls. He goes back into the office, pulls the door closed behind him and touches box and gun with a big toe before climbing back in bed for a few more hours of half-sleep in the endless daylight.

On the top floor there are only a couple of doors and no noise coming from behind any of them. The boatmaker walks up to hers and pulls it open. She's asleep,
wearing a cream-colored shift under sheets that look the same as when he left.

He enters and walks across the room to the desk built into the far wall. Like the stairs, the desk is made of walnut. A lot of walnut was used in building the Mandrake, which means it was originally a respectable establishment: a summer hotel with striped awnings, men in linen suits drinking and playing croquet in the garden behind the main building, watched by women under parasols. The boatmaker leans back on the desk, waiting for his presence in the room to penetrate her sleep.

She turns over once or twice, mumbling things he can't catch, then opens her eyes and looks straight at him. At first, she's frightened. There's something strange and different about the boatmaker, the way he's looking at her, his unannounced presence in her room while she slept. Then she relaxes, pleased that her power has brought him back. He must have found money somewhere, she thinks. He wouldn't have the nerve to return without it. Unlike her husband, the woman of the town has little regard for money in itself. But she does like the elegant things it buys. And most of all she enjoys receiving it as a tribute to her power over men. They draw near her offering it, eager to be enslaved. Their submission pleases her. The money itself is nothing.

She reaches back, plumps the pillow, arranges it under her. Locks her fingers behind her head and looks at him as if she had no doubt that when she woke on this day, just past Midsummer's Eve, she would find him in her room, leaning on the edge of her desk.

At the sight of her, luxuriating and complacent, the boatmaker's anger rises up. She is playing with him, he thinks, happy to see her prey. She seems to be licking her lips. He feels the redness swell until it reaches his eyes, and he can barely see. His body feels clumsy, immensely strong. He feels as if he's not wearing his clothes but is caged within them. He tears at his brown corduroy jacket and opens the sealskin bag.

Reaching into his bag, he pushes the handkerchief aside and takes out his money: all the bills from the pawnbroker, along with the coins that were left when he stumbled away from the Mandrake. He raises the money over his head, turns, and brings his hand down on the desk. The coins leap and fly into the room. The bills flutter like summer rain, falling on the floor and on the worn sheets molded to the body of the woman of the town. She is no longer smiling; she is frightened. He pulls the rest of his clothes off and stands naked, the core of his body white, his arms and face sunburned.

“Here's the money you wanted!” he shouts.

“Hush. You'll wake everyone.”

He crosses the room in two steps and rips the sheet from her. She lies back, giving in to his anger. He takes the scalloped neck of her nightgown in his right hand and pulls. A strip of fabric comes away from neck to hem, uncovering her. He drops the fabric and slaps her hard across the face with his right hand. She says nothing, but looks at him, flushed and out of breath like a boxer.

For four days they stay in her room, eating nothing, drinking only from the bottles the innkeeper leaves outside the door. It is as if they are demons living on nothing but each other's flesh. When they were together before, their lovemaking was often rough, but not all the time. Sometimes he felt tender, even admired her as a woman who knows things no woman on Small Island knows. Whose relationship with the keeper of the inn is different from any relationship between man and woman on Small Island. Whose beauty has awed him from the moment he saw her.

Now all that has been left behind, and they are demons in a death struggle, caged, tearing each other to pieces, each piece with its own pulse, the way the pulse remains in every fragment of a heart that has been cut in pieces. Even when he is inside her, it is a death match. He is much harsher than before. And she is just as harsh, digging
her nails into him as soon as he stops holding her wrists together, biting whatever is within reach until his blood flows.

They don't stop, day or night. In this room, the clock has only one hour. It is always the same time, whether they are on the floor or on the bed or he is bending her over the desk. Money mixes with clothes, bodies, blood, seed, streamers of nightgown, sheets. They stop briefly, then begin again as if they had never stopped. She sleeps from time to time, while he leans over, watching. He does not allow himself sleep. He is sure that if he falls asleep, she will kill him.

The whole time they are together he is in a rage, convinced that she is laughing at him, peasant of Small Island. And she is fighting to keep him away from her heart. To keep the coating of ice intact, deep and thick as in the deadest time of winter.

On the fourth day, when he stands naked and looks down at the tangle of clothes on the floor, her body at the center like a bird in its nest, she knows she has lost. She knows what he will say before he opens his mouth, then feels it rip her open just as he ripped her nightgown from neckline to hem.

“I'm going,” he says, looking straight at her, his face and arms red-brown, the rest of him white, framing a bush of brown, red and gold. “The money's gone. That's
what you wanted, isn't it?
Money.
It's yours. All of it.” He gestures to the tangle on the floor.

She wants to open her mouth and tell him it's not about money. It never was about the money. He can stay as long as he wants. She won't ask him to leave. She will take care of her customers elsewhere and then come to him in this little room, and they will be together in their disorder, where they have everything they need. She wants to tell him this. But her mouth will not open.