childhood or before. My mom mostly did her own thing—like running around to workshops and gallery openings with her art collector friends—but she and Bernie seemed happy enough together. Weekends, Bernie obliged my mother by driving her to craft fairs in yuppie-hippie towns throughout the Southwest where she sold her candles.
The paperback was a 1963 Jewish Publication Society translation from the original Yiddish. According to the blurb on the back, the author—whose real identity was unknown—published three books in Warsaw under the pen name of Benjamin IV, between 1926 and 1938. The Yeshiva Bocher was the only one that survived.
It told the story of a cocky young yeshiva student who spends a Shabbos dinner at the home of his rabbi. The rabbi has another guest, a visiting Torah master. The student drinks too much wine and steps outside to relieve himself. On his way back to the house, the tsar’s army sweeps him up and takes him off to fight in the Crimean War. He serves for several years, becoming an expert rifleman. He kills twenty Englishmen, and just as many Frenchmen, though some of those may have actually been Sardinians. By the time he has killed his fifth man, he has forgotten every word of Aramaic. By the time he has killed his tenth man, he has forgotten every word of Hebrew. By the time he has killed his twentieth man, he has forgotten every word of Yiddish.
On the journey back to Russia, Black Sea privateers capture him and sell him to the Turks as a slave. He works his way up from the quarry to a position in the palace, where he seduces an Ottoman princess, who frees him so he can become her husband. A woman like that cannot be trusted, though. She betrays him in their sixth year of marriage, and plots with her Azeri lover to kill him.
At the last moment, he escapes by switching his poisoned wine for his wife’s untainted glass and then takes to wandering. The onetime yeshiva bocher, now well into his fourth decade, was walking down the road toward Isfahan when I heard the key in the lock. I glanced at the digital display on Becca’s DVD player. Nine thirty-three p.m. I turned to the kitchen counter to make sure I’d finished cleaning up. Becca was proud of her marble counters and said even water could stain them disastrously. Her house, her conception of reality. Luckily, I had remembered to clean up.
It was Andrew, not my sister, who came through the door. He had a place of his own down in Hell’s Kitchen, but slept over here with Becca most nights, so it wasn’t a surprise to see him. He’d taken off his tie, and the collar of his striped shirt was unbuttoned. There was something slightly sweaty and crumpled about him, but it was hard to pin down because he walked in the door standing up straight, like always. The man had a confident posture and a strong physique, which his closely tailored suits made clear. He blinked twice when he saw me, then grinned.
“Hey there, Edel the Kid.” He called me that because I was Becca’s kid brother and because I’d been kicked out of school for illegal activities. He meant it in a friendly way, and to be honest, I liked the outlaw sound of the nickname. It wasn’t really a joke. Toward the end of my drug use, I had crossed the line from mischief and experimentation to actual crimes. I was lucky not to have been caught in possession and sent to jail. I was glad that hadn’t happened, but didn’t regret my actions.
“Hi, Andrew,” I said. He had said his buddies all called him Wolfie—his last name was Wolfson—and I should too, but I couldn’t bring myself to call him anything but Andrew. He swung his briefcase and a black plastic bag up onto the kitchen counter, and extracted a six-pack of imported beer from the latter.
“Brew?” He tipped a bottle my way.
“Sure, why not.” He tossed me the beer, which I caught with two hands. My catch was overwrought and embarrassing, and Andrew grimaced. Maybe I had closed my eyes. I just didn’t want to drop it, and get beer and broken glass all over Becca’s freshly waxed parquet floor.
Andrew became aware of his grimace, and forced it back to a grin. He wasn’t a bad guy. He tried his best. The same traits he found alluring in Becca—a slight, boyish frame, soft brown eyes that never met anyone else’s, a general refusal to laugh at good-natured jokes—he found simply off-putting in me. Still, he tried to treat me in a big-brotherly way, because I was his girl’s little brother.
“How was work?” I asked him. The beer was a nice gesture, and I wanted to meet it with one of my own.
“Rough.”
“Yeah?”
“Some of these guys are really gunning for me. It’s a cutthroat business.” I wasn’t exactly sure what business he was in. A hedge fund involved funds. So finance, I guessed. But not stocks. Something different. “But I can hold my own.”
“Sure you can, man.”
“Yeah. Yes, sir. It’s a lot of stone-cold bastards out there, though.”
“It’s true. I see them everywhere I go.”
Andrew coughed out a chuckle. It was genuine, but I couldn’t tell if it was directed at me or at the bastards.
“Yeah, I bet you do.”
He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Some cartoon characters were sitting around a bar, drinking bottles of beer and telling jokes.
“This okay?” he asked.
“Fine by me.”
We watched for a little while until Becca came in the door. She looked tired, but she smiled when she saw us sitting together on the couch.
“I see how it is,” she teased. “The boys were sitting around drinking beer while I was slaving away at the office.”
“Nah, babe,” Andrew said, grinning and standing up to give her a kiss. “I just got in myself. Kicking back with a cold one after a long day. I’m gonna grab another. You want one?”
“No,” she said, “I’m okay.” She wasn’t much of a drinker.
“Edel?”
“No, thanks. I’m actually going to hit the hay in a minute.” Drinking five or six more beers sounded good, actually, but I wanted Becca to see I was being responsible and doing my best to stay sober and sane. I couldn’t keep going around in circles. I took my empty bottle and teacup into the kitchen and rinsed them out. “I have an early morning.” There was no way of knowing when Mendy would be on the street, but I figured I should get down as early as I could.
“Oh yeah?” Becca said. “You have a job interview?” I had considered telling Becca about my encounter with Goldov, and the few things I’d learned about Alojzy, but I decided to keep them to myself until I knew what it all meant. Becca would probably just tell me that Goldov sounded shady, and I should stay away from people like that.
“Yeah. Something like that. An appointment, actually; I’m going to talk to a guy down by NYU.”
“Okay.” Becca looked skeptical, but didn’t press it.
“Knock ’em dead, kid.” Andrew said.
“Thanks. Night, guys.”
I headed into the alcove where I slept beside Becca’s elliptical machine. She’d offered me the couch when I arrived, but it was too soft for me. I also didn’t want to force myself into the middle of Becca’s space. It was better to be tucked out of the way in my sleeping bag, on the hardwood floor, braced between the walls.
When you smoke weed every day, you
