The Age of Perpetual Light Read online

But no. It must be pressed to her own mouth—in eagerness, in worry?—because her words are muffled when she says, “Then get it.”

  Through the opening I have made in my bag, I feel the bottom of the wooden base, rounded and solid as a hoof, the sharp edge of one of its brass knobs, the short neck barely thin enough to let my fingertips meet when they wrap around it, the soft edge of the fleece that still covers the glass. I slip the mitten off. I lift it out.

  Sitting up in the bed, I hold the Edison lamp in my lap. I can feel her searching for it, her gaze probing the darker part of the dark that is me, my shape that she knows must contain the bulb somewhere in it. I reach towards the vague shape of her, searching with my hand for hers. She is closer than I think; my fingertips touch her: such soft fabric curved over such softness beneath. Her breast. Barely touching, there my fingers hover, waiting for her to jerk away. Instead, touching the back of my hand: her fingertips. The fronts of her fingers lay themselves against the backs of mine. She presses.

  For a long time we stay like that. I can hear, from somewhere outside, a whip-poor-will let loose its call. Above us, in the ceiling, a faint scrabbling: some small night creature’s tiny nails. Across the room, her boy breathes on. Then I stop listening. Her other hand is on my knee. Brushing over the blanket, it drifts onto my thigh, up my thigh. I hold my breath. Her fingers find my hip, crawl up the soft rolls of my belly. Until with my free hand I find them and guide them.

  Beneath my fingers I feel hers curve around the bulb. She slides them first one way along the glass, then back the other, discovering its smoothness, its roundness, with as much care and awe as the first stroking of a baby’s head. My own hand on her breast moves to match hers, my fingers feeling the nipple hard between them, hard as the spike of glass that rises off the top of the bulb. When she touches that, her hand stops. Mine does too.

  “The glass blower,” I whisper. “Where they pull the globe off the pipe.”

  “I wish I could see it,” she says.

  “It needs another part,” I tell her.

  “To glow?”

  “To make the electricity. A generator.”

  “Electricity?”

  “A dynamo.”

  “Like this?” And her hand that had been cupped over mine leaves my fingers alone on her breast. A touch on my chest. I let her fingers search. When they find the flasch, they stop. Holding it, she says, “Isn’t that what you told the children? That it is the electricity inside them, in their hair when they rub it, that makes it glow?”

  I nod. She must feel it in the necklace. Because the next thing I know her breast has slipped away from my hand and her head is in the blanket at my lap, the hard, round top of her head rubbing back and forth against the wool, and then her face is pressed to me, her hair feathery all over my chest, tickling, tingling. I can see it floaty, wild, in the faint green light that is the phosphorous in the flasch at my neck beginning to glow. In the pale green I watch her turn to look at the lamp on my lap. For a moment it is there, curved and pointed like the domes on the churches back home in Russia, the glass of the globe showing the wires inside like a casement displaying some rare, tiny plant—such delicate branches, such strange straight roots—and I can feel through my nightshirt her cheek pressed against my chest. I can feel her smile. Slowly, the reflection of the flasch—small green sliver curved by the curve of the glass—fades. The lamp disappears back into darkness. There is the scratching of the animal from the ceiling. From across the room the breathing of the boy. I wait for the night bird’s call.

  “Where did you get this?” she whispers.

  “In Reading,” I say. “I found one last month—”

  “No,” she says. “This.” A slight tug on my necklace.

  “My tatte,” I tell her. “He gave it to me when I left.”

  “Your home?”

  “Russia.” I shut my eyes. Though it was already dark it seems I can feel each tug she makes even better, each movement of her fingers over the flasch.

  “Did he write this?” she asks.

  “Ja.”

  “For you?”

  “He had it engraved on the cap of every bottle.”

  “What does it say?”

  I tell her.

  There it is: whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.

  When it is done, she asks, “He was an apothecary?”

  The bird lets loose its call again—whip-poor-will—and I want to say is, I want to tell her he is an apothecary, but I find I cannot make a sound.

  “Ecclesiastes,” she says.

  I nod.

  “Just as a fly in the ointment …”

  “Dead flies,” I correct her. “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor.”

  “So doth …” she says.

  “A little folly …” I say.

  “Him,” she says, “that is in reputation for honor and wisdom.”

  “Wisdom,” I say, “and honor.”

  Her face leaves my chest and rubs at the blanket again. When it returns her hair is all static, again making the flasch glow. But when I look down she is not looking at the lamp. She is looking up at my face.

  “Why did you leave?” she whispers.

  “My tatte?”

  “Your family.”

  Above, the animal scrabbles. Somewhere outside a cow lows. I let the glow die down.

  “That story,” I say. “About the piss in the bags. It wasn’t true.”

  “I know,” she whispers.

  I tell her, “There was a soldier, a boy, Avrom, who … It was so cold. On the coldest nights it was always us put on guard duty.”

  “You and Avrom?”

  “Any of us,” I say. “Us Jews. It was so cold the snot in our noses froze into tiny knives. They pricked our nostrils. Our noses were always bleeding. And the blut if it froze on your lips would take the skin away when you peeled it off. This is what happened to this Avrom. And the next night, his mouth was so raw, he asked the ofizir to please not make him go out. The ofizir said to him he would give him something to make him warm.”

  “Nein,” she whispers.

  “All over him. Some of the other ofizirim too. Until he was soaked. It was warm. He was steaming. For a moment. Then they made him go out.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she says.

  “I found him.”

  “Don’t.”

  Beside us, across the room, there is the slow, steady breathing of her boy. I can tell she is listening to it because I feel her breathing slow again to match it. I try to make mine match hers, too.

  “You didn’t think you would live,” she asks, “till your time was done?”

  “In the army?”

  “Till you got out?”

  “I am a Jew,” I tell her. “There is no getting out. We are drafted for life.” I try a quiet laugh. It comes out a loud breath. Her head shakes with it against my chest. “That’s okay,” I say. “We weren’t expected to live long.”

  “So you fled?”

  “Ja.”

  “How?”

  “With the help of my family.”

  “How?” she whispers, again.

  “You know,” I tell her, “my name is not really Yankel.” The cow has quit its lowing. The bird must have flown somewhere else. The ceiling above us is silent.

  “What is it?” she says.

  And, in the quiet, before I can say anything, we both hear: “Mamm?”

  Across the room, against the dark wall, I can just make out his shape. Is he sitting up? Is he still even in his bed?

  Then she is off of mine, her weight gone from the mattress, her hand gone from mine, her hair from my chest, the touch of her face, of her breath, gone. Her shape disappears into the blackness at the other side of the room. Listening to her whisper to her son, I try to find her figure as if my eyes are connected to my ears. But I cannot. So I can only listen to her talk to him, until he is quiet again and I can hear the soft rustling of her moving around his bed, tucking
his blankets back in.

  I say nothing until again there comes in the darkness across the room the strip of moonlit hallway. Then, before she can shut the door, I say her name: “Esther.”

  She pauses.

  I wait.

  Finally: “Ya, Mr. Yushrov?”

  “Do you have another?” I say.

  Her silence, her waiting.

  “Another blanket?” I ask. “Do you perhaps have a spare one for me?”

  This is how it was when I found him: He was pissing on his own hands. It was a clear day, windy. I wasn’t supposed to relieve him from his shift till night, but as soon as I could gather enough warm clothes I snuck out. It wasn’t long before I saw him. A dark figure against the glaring snow. He was standing away from the edge of the pine forest, out in the sun. In cold like that, the sun was useless—a white sore in the hide of the sky—but it showed the steam rising off his knuckles, off the spattered snow. By the time I got to him the steam was gone. The piss had become a thin sheen of ice on his hands. He couldn’t move them. He couldn’t put his poz back in his pants. He didn’t know who I was. Below him, his mittens were two black holes in the snow. Here, I told him, I have dry mittens for you. He didn’t want them. He said his hands felt much better now. When I tried to make him put them on, he swung at me. The movement toppled him into the snow and the noise was terrible: all his clothes were stiff with ice; they crackled as he crushed them beneath him. He lay there, in the snow, his hands bare, his beard clumped with ice, the skin of his face the bluish gray of overcooked meat left out to chill. It was puffy as if the ofizir had beaten every inch of it with his fists. I tried to lift him. He scrambled away. And, as I watched, he began to take off his clothes. That was the worst thing: watching him, unable to move his fingers, unable to make his arms work, struggle out of his coat, flail and tear at his belt, shake his hat off, attacking his clothes with his teeth like some rabid animal turning on its own flesh. I tried to stop him. I failed. The last I saw of him he was staggering away, naked, a furious dark shape of a man, and then just a dark shape, and then nothing. What was he charging after? What did he think was after him?

  Why did you leave? she asked. I could say because my mamme told me to go. That summer, when for the first time in a year she came to the camp to see me, she heard it all. And she wanted me gone from there. I could say because my tatte made me, or simply because my breuder gave his life to me so that I could. But how in return can I answer anything but why? Why would I do such a thing if there was any answer but that I had no choice at all?

  So, yes, there is the story of my tatte and the cart full of hay. Yes, of me buried in it, too. The dogs at the checkpoint, the guards at the gate, the sweat of my tatte, the bayonet stabbed into the piles of grass, into my thigh, of my clenched teeth and no sound, of it not mattering—the blood on the blade gave me away—of blackmail and bribes, and finally, at the border, my breuder’s papers, my breuder’s name, yes, there is all of that, but why would I tell it? No. Such tales of the past are better left to the places where they happened, where they matter, where people need them, lands where men walk in the light of lanterns held by those behind them, unable to see farther ahead than where their shaking shadows meet the dark. Here, in America, what does it matter if behind all is black? Ahead, there is always at least a crack of light. Here, what matters is to head always towards it.

  These are the long days of summer. The wineberries line the road. The sun lights them up, bright red buttons, and they do taste like wine, like drops of red wine warmed in the sun. Who else is so lucky as to lunch on them every day? Sometimes I even have half a loaf of fresh-baked bread I traded for that morning. Sometimes a jar of milk from the night before. Resting in the shade of a stone wall, or beneath a butternut tree, I can sing to myself if I wish, or slip silent into my thoughts, or simply sleep, and there is no one there to mind. The corn rises on either side of the road so high that sometimes, pushing my cart along, I cannot see above it. Then, it is as if I am an Israelite on a path opened up through a green sea, always opening before me, mile after mile. The steepest hills I’m grateful for: they keep my legs strong. The hottest days only make me look forward to the night. The nights I sleep where I want: on my own beneath the cart if I’m feeling solitary; if I want company, there is always a family happy to give me a bed. A dozen to choose from. A hundred if I plan ahead. A thousand in a year. And they wonder why I whistle and sing. Even, sometimes, I do it while in the act of making love. Yes, I have a lover, too. More than one. They like me. They like the songs I sing, the gifts I bring them. They give me deals: half off, two for one. And when I’m in town to restock, they let me lease a room above their rooms. And when I’m on the road, they even collect my mail.

  Which is how, one day, almost five months since I last saw her, I get the letter I have been waiting for. Monday the 19th, it says. It says: Ura and overnight in town and dynamo and come after eleven when the children will be asleep.

  So here I am again, on the hill overlooking the Hartzler farm. It is raining so hard that when the lights begin to go out in the windows of the house they seem doused by the downpour, like campfires, drowned to blackness. But, of course, it is Esther blowing out the lamps. One by one, the windows go dark—puff, puff, puff—until the whole house is gone, the darkness risen around it like the waters of a lake. All around me it sounds as if the waters are rushing in, too: from here to the horizon, the drumming on the leaves of the corn is deafening. Closer, beneath it: the gurgling of the gullies dug from wheel ruts in the road. The water sheeting off the brim of my hat, banging away at my shoulders beneath the slicker, splashed by the stomp of a hoof in the mud. A hoof? A hoof. My mule. I have one now, an old mare with bucked shins and worn-out teeth and large twitchy ears that when, on the most steep hills, I hop off my new wagon to walk beside her and urge her on, talking into them, these ears turn to me and seem to grow larger and sometimes I reach out and stroke them. When I nap too long in the sun it is her soft, old muzzle that wakes me. I have named her Reba. “Reba,” I call to her over the noise of the rain, “let’s go down.”

  Add to the sound of the rain a clanging and a creaking, the splash of the wheels. It is a small wagon, but neatly organized as my discarded cart, as my rucksack before it, small drawers of hardware at its front, and, along its sides, wider ones of neatly folded clothes, shelves to store the iron rods and stew pots too heavy to bring before, slats at the back to pin upright ax handles and shovel heads, feather dusters and brooms. Now, I can stay out on the road for twice as long, take requests, special orders. Beneath the board on which I sit I keep a spot free just for that. Jolting down at Reba’s careful clop I can feel, knocking there, the great weight of the generator.

  What a pity it is dark and everything is under the tarp; how I would have liked for her to see the cart, the mule, and—on the teamster’s seat? Become the teamster?—me. With a mustache to fit the part. All the last months I have grown it, from the mustache of a minor man to one of a giant—a Mr. Tesla’s small dark patch to the huge walrus wonze of Mr. Westinghouse—until, by the end of the summer, it surpassed even the mustache of the man who next will be the president.

  And the day before I bought the cart, I took what had become of my face to the barber. I said to him, Cut just a smidgen. I told him, Shape for me the mustache of a millionaire!

  Mr. Yushrov, he said to me, if there’s one man I know made of the stuff to make it come true …

  The next morning, riding out of Reading on my wagon, behind my mule, I felt it already had. It was so early the new electric lights along the street were still glowing in the dark, and as I passed between them I thought how young I was when I first came to this country. A kinde! I couldn’t even grow a mustache! So long ago: from the ship the city glowed, still flickery with all the thousands of flames in all those thousands of lamps, but in the torch of the new lighthouse—huge, metal, shaped like a woman—the glow was so steady. It was the first electric light that I had ever seen. How fast
time goes! One day I am a lighter of lamps, the next the lamps light themselves. Now, even the smaller cities—Reading, Allentown, Lancaster, Harrisburg—are electrified. At night, wandering between them on my wagon, I can tell where they are by the lighter patches they make of the sky. Between them it is still dark, all blackness of hills and fields and houses gone to sleep. But soon that will change too. Town by town, house by house, until the whole country will be lit. I have seen the way the light spreads from city to city along the coast, inland road by road, like moonlit foam frothing on top of a rushing flood. It is the places between, the patches of darkness, that will be drowned. It is the people like the ones who buy my goods, who hate my mustache because they cannot see that it no longer means what it once did in a world that no longer even is, it is them—the Virklers and Waglers, the Klopfenstiens and Hartzlers—who will go under with it. But I, I will do the only thing there is to do: I will swim to the top, ride the foam, get out in front of the tide.

  For now, though, the places between are still dark, and this night I am in one of them. Maybe one day we will carry our electric lights with us even on our wagons, but not yet. I lead Reba through the rainy blackness towards the dark hulk of the barn, letting her gauge the route in her mule’s way, until we are on the side that is farthest from the house. Luckily, it is leeward, too. The rain slashes at the corn—it sounds like a sea swelling and churning—but leaves us quietly dripping where we’ve stopped. I get down, feel for the front corner of the tarp, untie it, reach in, heave out the dynamo. Holding it like a baby to my chest, I leave the new cart and old Reba at the edge of the rain, and carry the generator into the barn.

  In there, it is even blacker. I listen to the cows shoving each other to get out of the way of whatever has come through the door. I set the dynamo on the ground, reach to my chest, and pull from my shirt the flasch. Any daylight the phosphorus might have stored has long ago leaked out. I try rubbing it on my head, but my hair is wet. It gives me nothing. In the darkness, I turn, feel for the door, slide it shut. I drop to a crouch. Shuffling, I pat the ground for a place thickest with hay, least churned up by hooves. By the time I have reached it, I have lost all sense of how far I am from the dynamo. I sit. I wait.