Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

(the only living son of the 12 children his wife would give birth to)
and was confronted by his father-in-Iaw's blue eyes gazing up at
him. Manusz tried to beat his father-in-Iaw's ghost out of his son,
but it refused to budge. Instead it stared out at Manusz from his
young son's face, mocking, judging, making him wild with aggravation
so that finally Oskar was not allowed to look at his father. His
mother had hoped that her father's troublesome ghost wouldn't be
able to follow them on the difficult, confusing trip to America, but it
was worse in New York between her son and husband than it had
ever been between her husband and father in Hungary.
His mother had hoped Oskar would be a rabbi, which Manusz
thought was a great joke. Every afternoon before he went out,
Manusz Tiklowicz beat his son and then locked him in their apartment
with its nailed-shut windows. Study hard, you wretch, he'd
shout, you monkey, as he walked down the hall.
By the time he was 14, Tiklowicz had taught himself to read
English poetry; with money he earned carting coal for a mikvah on
Ludlow Street, he bought leather-bound books of Shelley, Keats and
Byron. He spent restless nights in the tiny tenement apartment listening
to his coughing, snoring, muttering, whimpering sisters
sleep while he mulled over a line of verse; Beauty is truth, truth
beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. How
easy in the early dawn to pull the nail out of the window frame
and climb up the fire escape and greet a startled Alberto sipping
watery hot milk.
There was no question in Oskar's mind that God didn't exist; he
could no sooner have been the rabbi his mother wanted than a
warlock. He started a coal-carting business with Alberto, and the
two of them dragged the heavy sacks up and down narrow tenement
staircases and fire escapes from dawn until nightfall.
And then, when he cut off his peyess, his father broke his nose.
He overheard a friend of his father's talking about the fur business
in Canada. Oskar decided to go and take Alberto with him.
"It'll be like back in Mauritania," Oskar teased his solemn friend.
"When you rode with Berbers across the Atlas mountains. And, you
know, those Berbers are Jews. Like a lost tribe."
But Alberto followed Oskar to Canada the way he had followed
him through the New York ghetto his entire adolescence without
a second thought like the Sephardic brides weighted down with
silver, their palms tattooed in henna curlicues, their fingertips blood-red,
and cheeks decorated with black kohl triangles, that he had watched
trail after their grooms along the cobbled streets of the Fez mella.
Alberto was Oskar's shadow: a quiet, motherless, fatherless child,
preoccupied with the memories that had followed him from Morocco,
the visions that crawled into his eyes when he slept or breathed in
the smell of horse dung in the hot sun or listened to the clang ting
clang of the blacksmith's hammer on Delancey Street. But Oskar was
a star in the blacked-out sky, allowing light, possibility into the world
for Alberto. Oskar conjured money, supplies; wrote to his mother's
cousin who had a seed-exporting business in Montreal. Then he flew
north to Canada like an eagle, with Alberto under his wing.
The two of them camped and travelled through Upper Ontario the
summer of 1907; they hired a dour Ojibwa man to canoe them from
lake to bog to lake, along freezing, rushing rivers, past beaver dams
and Indian settlements, under swarms of geese, clouds of mosquitoes,
and black flies. They were Champlain and Frontenac, Oskar declared,
pushing along in birch canoes, the wealth of the forests unfolding
before them. They bought beaver pelts from Huron and Ojibwa Indians
and baskets from a Cree woman with a swollen, goitered neck for
Alberto's little sister, Mila. Oskar heard about a nickel mine near Dorset
and they went to visit. Tiklowicz had an uncanny gift for business: it
frightened Alberto a little (his own mother's superstitions with her
Hand of Fathma and magic necklaces of colored glass still lurked inside
him.) He had always known that Oskar had Sight. He could overhear a
sentence, a detail, and know if something would work, if a trapper was
lying, what would make money, what they should do. Oskar gave
their business a name, too, on the third night they camped out: The
Upper Canada Holding Company.
The night they spent on the shores of Lake Erskine was cool. Alberto
waded into the water and caught three rainbow trout. Oskar fried them
in lard with thick slices of yellow onion, black pepper and potatoes. He
made coffee and they drank it sweet with condensed milk and had a
fishy-tasting cake of frying-pan bread. Oskar had borrowed money
from his mother's cousin in Montreal and he had invested it now,
almost all of it, for the Upper Canada Holding Company. They
owned that night, the two of them, a quarter interest in the Dorset
nickel mine they had visited, fifty shares in the Baptiste-Kearney cadmium
mine, a tiny stake in a timber company out of Dwight, and 70
beaver pelts. Almost everything was leveraged against each other, a
house of cards waiting to be pushed over. But Oskar didn't Inind. He
understood what he had invested in.