Issue 11.1 Fall 2015

11.1 cover image

 

About the Author

Fred Skolnik was born in New York City and has lived in Israel since 1963. He is best known as the editor in chief of the 22-volume second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, winner of the 2007 Dartmouth Medal. He is also the author of The Other Shore(Aqueous Books, 2011), an epic novel depicting Israeli society at a critical juncture in its recent history. His second novel, Death, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2015. His stories and essays have appeared in over 150 journals, including TriQuarterly, Gargoyle, The MacGuffin, Los Angeles Review, Prism Review, Words & Images, Literary House Review, Montréal Review, Underground Voices, Third Coast, Word Riot, The Recusant,and Polluto. His poetry has appeared in Word Riot, Oak Bend Review, Free Verse, Boston Literary Review and Hacksaw. Under a pen name, he also published two novels in 2014: Rafi's World and The Links in the Chain.

 

Sojourner

 

Fred Skolnik

 

 

I expected to find familiar faces when I returned to the old neighborhood, but to my great disappointment I recognized no one at all. Otherwise nothing had really changed. The apartment building where I'd lived, my old high school and even certain stores were still there. The streets looked the same too, the traffic was still flowing and people were doing what people usually did. It was in a way as though a familiar play was being staged with a different cast of characters.

 

I had gotten off the subway at my old stop. My old high school occupied an entire block with its big, asphalted playing field where you could watch the softball games from the street through the chain link fence as I sometimes had as a child. There was a dirt track ringing the field and a row of baskets fenced off on one side where you could play half-court games. Some boys were playing now so I watched them for a while. I had played there too, on many afternoons. It struck me as extraordinary how things should have gone on this way all these years. I mean boys playing ball, one generation after another on the same playing fields, and the ballgames you saw on TV too, one generation of ballplayers following another, hitting and fielding and running in the same way year after year and decade after decade and the fans too replacing one another and cheering in the same way as they always had. There was something eternal in this, beyond the lives of individual men and women, as though a mold were being filled with a fluid substance and then emptied out and filled again. 


I crossed the street and noted the new commercial premises, trying to reconstruct the old street in my mind. The old catering hall had become a movie house and that was odd. The poolroom was now a video arcade. The supermarket was still there.

 

Further on there was a Chinese restaurant so I had lunch there. It was quite different from the one I remembered in the neighborhood, more ornate, and in a different location too, though I suppose the menu was pretty much the same. I ordered what I usually ordered in Chinese restaurants. The windows were curtained and it was a little dark. Chinese men served the meal, as they always had, but I felt that I wasn't really part of the surroundings, eating in isolation, unconnected to the place. I felt the urge to be outside standing in the street again, as though that would connect me better, but afterwards, when I was in the street and everything was distinctly familiar, all the contours and the general shape of things, I still felt out of place.
  

I walked toward my old street. There had been a luncheonette on the corner, then a grocery, a candy store and a Chinese laundry. The luncheonette now sold appliances. The synagogue farther in had become a church. That was odd too but it was the same building. I stood in the sun for a while. It occurred to me that I had stood in the same spot under the same sun many years ago, seeking the same warmth. It was always I who had to seek the sun. The sun did not seek me, nor did the shadows it cast or the hills and valleys and rivers and oceans. They were fixed in themselves, without reference to the living. It was only I who was passing through.
  

Everything in the neighborhood in fact had a solid look, forged of brick and concrete. Nothing there would bend or break without some herculean effort, huge wrecking balls pounding the walls or the earth itself in upheaval. The grime that clung to the buildings and the sidewalks revealed their venerable age. The tall buildings gave the streets their special character, casting deep shadows late in the afternoon, the hot, still air creating a mood of the sweetest tranquility as the day wound down. All this would endure.
  

Of course it would endure in me too for a time. It would be part of me as long as I was alive, though only as an effect. The thing itself was outside of me and would remain there long after I was gone, producing the same effects in those who came to take my place. In the empty theater of the world the stage was always set.         
  

I walked to the end of the street and then I made a complete circuit of the block, which I found to be very satisfying. Around the corner there was a another big apartment house like my own where I'd watched some ambulance attendants taking out a body in a body bag when I was just a child and afterwards we all went into the lobby with a feeling of dread and there was a smell of rotten oranges there that I would come to associate with death in later years, and then the park across the street on the other side of the block and around the corner again to my own street with all its stores. The park was full of memories too, of a still earlier time, when young mothers in nylon stockings and high heels pushed their baby carriages and strollers up the slight incline from the entrance to where the benches were and spent the morning in the sun chatting among themselves.
  

Back on my corner, in front of the appliance store, where prices were apparently always slashed, I wondered what to do next. No one paid any attention to me. I was just someone in the street, and as long as I wasn't moving I might just as well have been a lamp post or a fire hydrant. I was there but I wasn't there. I did not stand in any relation to the street as a living organism in a human landscape. I was only alive to myself. I was a stranger here.
  

I wanted to see my old apartment, but the thought was somewhat daunting, like opening a letter that will seal one's fate. Nothing of course was at stake for me, but there was something momentous in the idea of peeling back the final layer of my childhood and reaching the center of my former life. I spent a few minutes staring at the building but then I went in.
  

The lobby was furnished a little differently but the layout was the same. I took the elevator. It too seemed a little different, so I imagined the old one had been replaced, though it was still an elevator and it took me to my floor and when I got off I instantly felt the shock of recognition, even down to the somewhat stale smell. I walked down the hall and rang my bell with a peculiar feeling.
  

A young woman holding an infant opened the door without even asking who it was. I smiled a little tentatively and explained myself and she let me in without any fuss. She must have been a trusting soul. "Feel free," she said extending her arm by way of invitation.
  

I walked through the rooms. With its different furnishings it took me a moment to get my bearings, but with a certain mental effort I was able to see the old apartment again, reimagine it, as it were, seeing how it had maintained its essential shape though its occupants had changed.
  

"How long have you been living here?" I asked the woman.
  

"Three years," she said.
  

I mentioned some of my old neighbors but she didn't recognize the names and when she described the people living next door and across the hall I understood that they were not the same. I imagined that these apartments had been occupied by many tenants over the years, so that, taken together and from a grand perspective, their lives here were more a part of the history of the building than of themselves. Some would have died, others would simply have moved away. I understood that the life of the young woman too would unfold in unexpected ways and that she too was bound to move away, replaced in turn by another tenant in the great chain in which I was only a link.
  

She offered me a cup of coffee and I reminisced for a while. She seemed somewhat amused by the way things had been in the past though they couldn't have been that much different from the way they were now. I imagined the children would still be playing outside every day and the women would be doing their shopping in the middle of the morning and the televisions would be going all evening long. And I imagined too that there would be certain age-old dramas being played out here, passions flaring, love lost and found, betrayals, awakenings, dreams. I would not be a part of them. I had lost my place in this world.
  

Though I was curious about the woman's life I didn't want to press her with personal questions that might appear unseemly and make her regret having let me in. I wondered if she had other children, what her husband did. It seemed an ordinary household, as ordinary as ours had been, despite the difference in circumstances. We sat in the kitchen. The refrigerator, the stove, the sink were in the same place. When I finished the coffee I stood at the window for a moment and looked down into the street. From there, I saw just a section of it up to the corner and also the roofs of the old synagogue and what had been the Chinese laundry and the rear of the three-story walk-ups with their fire escapes and bedroom windows where people lived above the stores that faced the street. This view held many associations, but they were lodged in me, not in the world. The world was indifferent to them.
  

I asked the woman what kind of neighborhood it was now and she said it was quiet enough, pleasant really, and I was glad of that, because I wished her well. In a strange way I felt connected to her, as part of the neighborhood's history, but also alienated from her, as she would be continuing her journey far into a future that would not belong to me, and her child still farther. And long after they were gone, I imagined, the building would still be standing.  
  

We really didn't have anything else to say to each other so after we chatted a while more I thanked her and took the elevator down. I was a little reluctant to leave the building but saw no point in staying there. The moment of entering my old apartment in its altered context had been less magical than I had thought it would be.
  

I remained on the corner for a long time. My world too would be lost, and yet go on without reference to me, as though I had never lived. I experienced a moment of profound sadness, and wonder too. I had thought it would be the passage of time that I would regret but found that it was not that at all. It was the permanence of things that was so hard to bear. The earth abides, impenetrable in its eternal presence, fixed in its path and in the eternal cycle of life and death, creating the same forms on its crowded surface, imposing the same imperatives on the creatures who inhabit it, and indifferent to us all.  

 

 

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