of grateful savages? What, in any case, was the alternative? He supposed he would have to appeal to some benevolent society for a few dollars with which to rent a hole in the wall, then take a job in the rag trade—the industry in which he’d been told all greenhorns were employed—thus insuring his indenture to pisher wages for the rest of his days. On the other hand, already a smuggler, why not a thief? But still in the process of inventing himself, he decided somewhat grudgingly (nudged by Jocheved) that Max Feinshmeker was a man of his word, and anyway he just wanted to put this nerve-racking chapter behind him.
He paused on the corner of an avenue congested with market stalls, carts sporting garlands of tinware, trussed and flapping geese, bins piled with alps of eyeglasses, felt slippers, and celluloid buttons, wing collars like a nest of albino butterflies. Garbage choked the gutters, creating swamps into which women in brogans chased shoplifting urchins who ducked under the bellies of draft horses dead on their feet. From every fire escape hung the doubled-over carcass of an airing mattress, from every storefront an illustrated placard boasting a giant scissors or molar, its legend inscribed in holy and unholy tongues. Max paused to look left and right, realizing that in weighing his options he had forgotten the Gebirtigs’ directions, if indeed their directions were accurate; he’d lost all track of his whereabouts. Everyone around him was in motion as if desperately searching for something they’d lost, or leastwise bent on their next purchase or sale—everyone, that is, but the lanky golf-capped character in his patched plus-fours lounging in the doorway of a nearby bakery. Hadn’t Max seen the very same character lounging in another doorway a few blocks back? Or was it half a world away? Because, while any comparison to the Balut was invidious, the faces among this coarse congregation might have been the same ones he remembered from Jocheved’s native slum. It was as if, minus the mired motorcar or the manhole cover rattling above a subway like a gyrating coin, he’d traveled this far only to wind up where he’d begun.
In any case, despite Jocheved’s better judgment, he approached the loiterer, inhaling the aromas of baking strudel that reminded Max of how hungry he was, and inquired, “Zayt moykhl, reydstu Yiddish?”
“What other mother tongue would have me?” the loiterer responded in the vernacular, breaking into a grin that threatened to burst the pustules stippling his downy cheeks.
Subduing a shudder, Max asked him please the way to the Western Union. The young man instantly hopped down into the street paved in herring bones and broken glass, taking hold of Max’s arm to point him in a southerly direction. But no sooner had he done so than another youth, a bulkier one with a buzzard’s beak poking from under the bill of his cap, slammed into Max from behind, spinning him like a compass needle one hundred and eighty degrees.
“Klutz!” Max’s companion shouted at the youth, who forged ahead through the press of pedestrians without stopping. He let go of Max in order to make an exaggerated show of straightening his new friend’s disarranged coat. Then issuing somewhat mystifying directions (“You’ll want to turn left at Purim then pass on through the valley of dry bones”), he saluted with a click of the heels, about-faced, and took off like the other into the market melee. Over his shoulder he flung a proverb: “Eyner hot dem baytl,” letting loose a fusillade of laughter as he broke into a run, “der tsveyte hot dos gelt.” One has the wallet, the other the cash.
Max knew before he checked his pocket that the envelope containing the money was gone.
He realized also that he was lost, famished, exhausted, and now a marked man on a foreign shore where he hadn’t a notion of where to turn. Tears welled in his eyes—Jocheved’s tears, of course, but trailing through that dingy quarter it was he that was too reluctant to appeal to another stranger for advice. Regarding exactly what? There seemed nothing left to do but carry on trudging aimlessly until he dropped, which was surely imminent. So this was the Golden Land—this wagon rut where the setting sun was reflected in the beer spilled from a growler by the child sent to fetch it? Across the way a fishmonger spread the gills of a carp until it resembled a striking cobra; an evicted family surrounded by a