Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

GEORGE GERSHWIN’S STAIRWAY TO  PARADISE
–In Memory of Julius Nisenson
Sometimes Pine Hill Memorial Gardens sounded like a disco with dozens of bands playing a different song simultaneously at full blast.  If you were lucky enough to walk past its rows of headstones on a relatively quiet day, you might be able to distinguish a few melodies: a jazzy version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” emanating from the vicinity of one Hiram L. Jansen’s (1899-1980) final resting place, or Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose” from where one Rose Emily Rosecroft lay below.
Linda Silber first discovered this phenomenon not long after the funeral of her Uncle Dan, inventor, amateur musician, the uncle she had most loved.
A few months before his death, having just returned from leading a group of  tourists around Turkey and Greece,  Linda visited Dan at his house in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  Probably  sheer coincidence, but the moment she entered the living room,  he began to play “Loved Walked In” on the old upright he had practically built himself in the basement, along with his other wooden creations.  Including something that looked, despite the attached wires, much like a coffin and still gave Linda, now well past 50, the creeps.  No matter how often Dan explained calmly that he had designed it specially so there would be no surprises after he passed on.
George Gershwin would have been 101 years old had he been alive that day.  Uncle Dan, whose white hair flowed to his shoulders, was not only three years older than Gershwin but still adept at the keyboard though he’d never had a lesson in his life and his blue eyes were rapidly fading so it’s unlikely he could tell the black keys from the white except by touch.
Ever since she could remember,  Uncle Dan had played that same song.  At every family  event back when the rest of the family was alive;  every wedding and excuse for a party.  Never “Summertime” or “Fascinating Rhythm,” never, never “The Rhapsody in Blue”–which he considered trite because it had been played so much.
Linda knew that despite his fine health for a man his age, time had to be running out;  if she were ever going to learn just what it was about that song, she’d better hurry and ask. Not that she didn’t like it though she preferred “Someone to Watch Over Me”–preferably the Sarah Vaughan  version.
“Do I really?” Dan asked, squinting hard out the window as if something he’d never seen before was hidden just behind the October evening’s blue-violet sky. “That’s strange. I’ve never thought about it.   Guess it just comes naturally to my fingers. . .”
“Gimme a break.  There must be a better reason.    Some memory, maybe?”
He shook his head, began to play the song again, eyes now closed and his body swaying slightly as if at prayer.
“You can’t fool me.  I bet it’s got something to do with a woman.  A woman from long ago, right?”
“Wrong.  The only woman in my life was your Aunt Grace, may she rest in peace, and she hated how I kept playing that song. Said it was like I was reciting one line over and over from her favorite poem, ‘Hiawatha.’  Which she herself would sometimes do just because she knew how I hated that damn poem.   But I was ashamed to tell her the reason I kept playing the song.  Afraid she’d be so furious she’d leave me.”
“OK, then it must have something to do with a man. Not that I mean to imply. . .”
Dan laughed.  “You’re still one hell of a smart kid.  But the man died a long time ago and it wasn’t exactly a matter of love.  In fact, if you want to know the truth, he cheated me.”
So who was it this time ?  Uncle Aaron, the one who owned the shirt factory?  Cousin Lester who promised to invest in one of his inventions–the push-button radio, or was it the hundred year light bulb?  Linda bit her tongue to stop from reciting the litany of other relatives, all now dead, as well as old friends and neighbors who’d also cheated her uncle.  Why bother now?
A self-taught scientist, Dan had invented so many now commonplace objects nobody could make a complete inventory.  The rotisserie.  The electric can opener.  The little latches on curtain rods that help lift and lower one of his other inventions, the Venetian blind.  The self-renewing water pump.  Even a gadget to keep a glass upright against the force of gravity, which NASA used in early space flights.  Until, as usual, someone else came along who had copied his unpatented work and passed it off as his own.  And making a tidy sum of which Dan  never saw a dime.    The same as with all the other inventions: to his late wife’s sorrow,  Dan had no patience  for matters of business; he wanted to spend every spare minute inventing, even if it meant they had to live on Aunt Grace’s meager salary as a schoolteacher.
“No.  Not family.  Somebody far more famous than family.”
“Oh?”
“A  genius.  The greatest synthesizer of classical and jazz.  I speak, my dear,  of the great George Gershwin.”
“Gimme a break.  I’m too old for teasing.”
“I kid you not.That son of a bitch stole the tune for ‘Love Walked In’ and never once acknowledged he’d first heard it one day, it must have been 1925 or so,  when I was fooling around at the piano back in Brooklyn.   The Gershwins lived right next door to us then.  I knew the whole family,  Morris and Rose, Ira, Arthur, even little Frankie.”
“But why the hell would he want to steal when he wrote so much himself?”
“Probably because of Paulette Goddard.”
“What in the world. . .”
“He was in love with her, but she spurned him. Besides she was married to Chaplin at the time.  Maybe he thought the song would change her mind.  Just around then I was courting your Aunt Grace.  And I was making up this song to impress her.  Funny, but it wasn’t until years later that Gershwin actually used it,  and he had the nerve to change my words. Or Ira did. ”
“Well, you should be proud anyway.  But you know my favorite is “Someone to Watch Over Me. . “
“Nah.  Nice tune but I don’t like the words. Especially for a woman.  As if she was a kid who couldn’t look after herself.   Smart women like you don’t need need to be watched over. . .”
It occurred to Linda that was exactly what she’d counted on her Uncle Dan for all these years: someone to watch over her even if she was 6, 000 miles away on a trek or deep sea diving jaunt, testing some new place for her travel agency.  Even if months went by without any contact between them. . .  Early on, he’d replaced the father she’d lost in the War and the mother lost soon after to a stroke brought on, all her doctors agreed, by inconsolable despair.  Linda, in turn, replaced the child he and Aunt Grace never had, though she was officially being raised by another aunt and uncle, the long deceased Harry and June who lived in the Bronx and had a bratty kid named Paula.
Not only would Dan take Linda on the subway as often as possible all the way to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play baseball,  but to Carnegie Hall every Sunday afternoon, where many times they saw the great Toscanini conduct and heard everyone from Rubinstein to Heifetz. Always Dan would call their talents miraculous.  So miraculous nobody could explain such genius.  A miracle’s a miracle, period.  Sometimes Paula would join them, making Linda furious. What did that brat care about baseball or music?  Paula not only had parents but by age nine her breasts were large enough to warrant a brassiere, not one of those “training bras.” Worse, she would giggle and blow pink bubbles from her Fleer’s Dubble-Bubble all through a concert. But always Dan would say in that quiet way of his that they had to be fair to Paula; after all, she was family, too.
Later on the afternoon of Linda’s last visit Dan  surprised her by playing “Stairway to Paradise,” hitting each note perfectly and even jazzing up the rhythm.  “Much better lyrics.  Gershwin must have been in a good mood when he wrote that one.  Full of hope.  An essential, my dear, as I’ve told you many times.  If you stop wishing, you stop living.  Just think of it, a stairway all the way up to the stars, a stairway to paradise…”  They  both sang a few bars of the song,  Dan adding particular gusto to the line, “I’m gonna get there at any price. . .”
What could Uncle Dan be  wishing for at age 104?   Recognition at last for his inventions?  Pay-outs from all those who had cheated him?  All of those bastards were long dead.  A  confession from the late Gershwin about stealing “Love Walked In?”  But Dan, dreamer that he was, would never get into silly “mysticism,” Ouija boards and Tarot, all that stuff his late wife had taken so seriously she’d started the first and last Blavatsky Club in Bridgeport.  Maybe he wished only for a peaceful death?
Which is exactly what happened a few months later.  Linda got the word while testing for her clients a snowmobiling tour of Iceland– from Paula, now the widowed mother of two sons, one crazier than the other.
What a shock to read Uncle Dan’s obituary in the New York Times.  It mentioned not only some of his inventions but gave him credit for composing “ ‘Love Walked In’ : a song formerly attributed to George Gershwin.” Linda had no idea how the Times knew;  Paula didn’t have enough imagination to say such a thing, and certainly she herself hadn’t called in the information.  Uncle Dan  was dead.  So what good would credit for the song, if indeed credit was justified, do at this point?  Yes, much as Linda loved her late uncle she had her doubts about that Gershwin story.
A few people at the funeral,  neighbors mostly,  mentioned the obit.  Neither Linda nor Paula, Dan’s closest surviving relatives, said a word.   But Paula’s younger son Alex, who’d just served time for cocaine dealing which Paula insisted was a miscarriage of justice for which she would sue the State of New York, did say something about how “cool” it all was about Gershwin.  Her older son, thank god, was doing business in Paris– according to Paula–though Linda suspected that if he wasn’t in Sing Sing he’d probably been committed to Creedmore.
She reminded Alex this was not the time and place for such frivolity, which made Paula scowl and Alex begin, of all things, to sing what he pretended was the tune for “Summertime,” but which was really some hip-hop crapola to which he applied a few of  Ira Gershwin’s words.  All of this while the rabbi, who’d never once met Uncle Dan, praised him for his contributions to the community  (Dan had been a card-carrying loner all his life, adding further to his late wife’s sorrow) and for his generous support of the State of Israel.
Linda wanted a few minutes alone with her uncle, so after everyone left, she lingered at the freshly dug grave,  wishing him well.  May nobody in heaven steal his ideas, that sort of thing,  though she really didn’t believe in any kind of after-life.  She wept  when she realized that with Dan gone, she, indeed, had nobody to watch over her, even in fantasy, even with her deep down awareness that at her age she was competent enough to lead her life unwatched, thank you.
At first she thought she was imagining she heard a piano rendition of “Love Walked In” very much like the way her uncle used to play the song.  Or maybe his death had affected her more than she cared to admit?  Only after Alex walked over in that swaggering way of his did Linda begin to realize that the music was coming–if not from the coffin itself–someplace very close to where her uncle had just been buried.
“ It’s just like Pere Lechaise,” Alex said, laughing as if he was smoking dope and watching “Saturday Night Live” back when it used to be really funny.
“Like what?” Linda wished he’d leave, with his shaggy green hair and collection of tattoos, so she could have a few more moments alone with  Dan.
“The famous cemetery in Paris.  Where they’re all buried.  Piaf, Oscar Wilde–  and Jim Morrison.”
“Who’s he?”
“You’re kidding. You mean to say you never heard of Jim Morrison and The Doors?  How he O-deed in Paris and they let him be buried in Pere Le Chaise even though he was American and all the hippies meet by his grave and toss him joints and bottles of wine.  Every half hour or so someone plays a cassette of his music.  Really, really cool. . .”
A few days later Linda was contacted by the manager of Pine Hill Memorial Gardens who said they were baffled by the music…couldn’t she do something?  Apparently Dan had rigged up a cassette with a timer somewhere inside his coffin.
Of course. She now remembered how he had insisted on designing his own coffin.  Would she give  permission for them to open his grave so they could remove the device?  It was distracting to their other “ clients.”
Of course she refused.  Even threatened to sue  if they took any action on their own. But they went ahead and did so anyway.  A lot of good it did, though, because though they managed to undo the elaborate wiring of Uncle Dan’s cassette,  soon others began to imitate the device.   Probably one of the diggers gave away the secret–even in death someone was stealing ideas from Uncle Dan!  The next thing you knew the families of everyone buried in Pine Hill were shamed into buying a song for their dead. All they had to provide was the name of an appropriate song and a mere $300 to the digger, one Sam Grabowski, who even had a website: www. deadsongs. com.   If they acted before the end of the month, they could  take advantage of a special opening offer, paying only $230 plus the cost of materials.  For a mere extra two grand, they could be assured the music would continue to play indefinitely. . . And pretty soon you could hear music playing from under the headstones at not only Pine Hill but dozens of other cemeteries.
Wouldn’t you know that not long afterwards  a letter addressed to Dan was forwarded to his niece?  It was from a man in California and included a check for several hundred thousand dollars.  The man, who insisted on anonymity, admitted he was the one who’d stolen the idea for the push-button radio and managed to enrich himself enormously.  But he now felt great remorse and hoped that her uncle would not only forgive him but enjoy the money.  Obviously the man didn’t read the New York Times.
Since Dan had made Linda his primary heir,  leaving only the old Bridgeport house to Paula, she decided to keep the check.  She would use it to start a counseling center for inventors, telling them precisely how to keep the products of their genius from being exploited by the greedy,  teaching not just about patents but the importance of learning techniques of business management, no matter how much they scorned that sort of thing and wanted to spend every spare minute inventing. . .
She was sure Uncle Dan  would be pleased with the decision, as much as he would be dismayed by the epidemic of “underground music” now sweeping the nation’s cemeteries.  The fad would just have to play itself out, so to speak. Ironically, Uncle Dan himself had no music, the diggers having dismantled his rendition of “Love Walked In.” Even Paula agreed it was unfair, but not nearly so unfair as Dan’s will.
Just how it happened remains a mystery. But one spring day Linda visited her uncle’s grave and from directly underneath heard the unmistakable sounds of a piano playing “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.”  Not only that, but someone was singing the words. Not Sarah Vaughan, not Ella Fitzgerald,  but a woman with a pretty decent voice, later joined in harmony by a man whose voice resembled that of Gershwin himself, as preserved on an old gramophone record.
So what if the whole story about Gershwin stealing “Love Walked In” was true or not? Or how Uncle Dan had gotten back his music.  A miracle’s a miracle, as he would have been the first to say.
Linda only hoped he wouldn’t get bored with “Stairway. . .” But probably he was too busy inventing such a stairway, one that would reach clear to the stars above Pine Hill Memorial Gardens,  above the graves, somewhere in Queens or New Jersey or Brooklyn, of all those who had cheated him. And far above the grave of  George Gershwin, wherever the self-taught musical genius lay.  Gershwin, who had died so young. Perhaps still composing his unique meld of classics  and jazz?

***

THE  LUMINARIES  OF  MARIENBAD
“I am Josef  Goebbels.  . .I, too, took the waters at. .  .”
Last summer  I spent a few days in Marienbad  after trying to teach English to a bunch of  kids  in Slovakia who thought America’s greatest contribution to the world were video games, preferably those that mixed violence  with  hardcore sex.    They giggled whenever I told them that’s not what America was like, certainly not back home in Hollis, Ohio, where at the time I taught English as a Second Language in a community college when  not teaching abroad.  But it’s what happened in  Marienbad, not Slovakia, that still addles me.  So I offer these excerpts from  my journals,  hoping you  might  be more able than I to resolve my ambivalence about  those few days:
July 10
How could I have been so foolish to assume this was the setting of the Resnais film?  I’m definitely not in that mythic Marienbad whose architecture is an artifact of the imagination, but in the old Czech spa town where they’re so proud of the many luminaries who took the waters here. Everyone from Chopin to Goethe to Nietzsche to Freud  to  assorted pashas, shahs, and kings.  Nowadays the guests are mostly middle class Germans.
I hate them.  There, I said it.  Even though all of that happened six decades ago and I was only a kid at the time, living safely in  Brooklyn, and no members of my family were in the camps.  Friends tell me  to let go already; I’m much too hung up on the past.  Still I can’t help it.   They also think I’m too damn serious.   At  least I should learn to pretend..  Live for now, not the past.  And forget the future. Cultivate that ironic distance you admire so much in Europe.
They should only know  how paranoid I feel now, how positive I am that the Germans are staring directly at me–though I’m far from being an observant  Jew.   I understand German fairly well,  so I know all they’re talking about are their aches and pains, money, family, weather,  stray dogs.  Sometimes I try to initiate a  conversation, I’m not sure why, but then they cut me off.  Perhaps I’m using some Yiddish words?   They hate me.  Maybe I’m  more paranoid than  I realize?  (To quote my Croatian friend Stefan, whose favorite expression is Nema Problema–no problem–even when Serbs and Croats are killing each other.)
A most serious place, this spa:  no facials, body wraps,  hot tubs.  Among their  offerings: underwater thalassotherapy; oxygen infusions; a pot pourri of “gaseous treatments,”  including the “world famous  Mary’s Gas: It comes out from the depth of the Earth, a remarkable atavism of volcanic acts in the Tertiary which erupts from the Earth’s heart . .   Eruptions of Mary’s Gas are a unique phenomenon to cure all manifestations of human suffering. . .”  There was actually a sign in the treatment center that said This Way to the Gas.  I couldn’t help laughing and wondered if anyone else had noticed.

Yes, Arnold Lutz had noticed.  Arnold, a balding 50ish man,  one of the few other Americans here.   He claims he’s here only because  his elderly mother, a tiny woman with a glass eye,   insisted  he  accompany her.  From the  moment I met him on the hotel verandah,   I knew  he was not my kind.  Something about the  lime tint  of his spectacles, the large Star of David on a chain around his neck., the thick t-shirt with orange birds he wore despite the heat.  Worse, his loud, contentious voice, its shifting accents.  German one minute, French the next, then Polish or Russian, all sounding like parodies.
He spotted me as Jewish right off, I don’t know how, asked me why I was reading Kundera’s Farewell Waltz instead of  Faye Kellerman’s latest, something about murder at a mikvah bath. I told him  Kundera probably set his once  banned novel right here in Marienbad,  but all he said was that K. was probably a Nazi like the rest of them.  Like every  so-called doctor in this place, all former butchers at Terezcin.  The nurses, too. . .
Who the hell is this guy?   Too young  to be a survivor of the camps.   A Soviet émigré?    A former Nazi disguised as a Jew?  I wonder what Stefan would think, but he’s back in Dubrovnik.  He’d probably tell Arnold Lutz to fuck off, right from the git-go, as my Slovakian students  would say, courtesy of the previous English teacher.
On  July 12 they’re having one of those “folkloric” evenings, dancers in “traditional “ costumes, some cute little games with the audience. Schmaltz, Schlag, Scheisse.  I’ve seen them all over the world and you can scarcely tell the  difference between folkloric Thai and, say, Acadian.   But Lutz’s mother asked me to accompany her son.  Seems she can’t stay up  late, “please go with  my Arnold because he doesn’t like to be alone with Germans.”  How could I refuse  such a sweet old lady?   Didn’t realize I look that old.. Hell,  I’m only at the shy end of my 40’s . . .
Two other Americans here, expats named Rick and Amity from Santa Cruz. Amity’s willowy and blonde and speaks in the interrogative,  like all young women from California.   Rick is kind of cute if you like freckles. They  make publicity videos of European resorts and sell them to American tourist agencies.  Of course they plan  to shoot the folkloric events and have recruited some of  the German spa guests to take part..  Each  will dress up like one of the famous people who visited here,  then proceed to endorse the salubrious waters of Marienbad by saying “I came to take the waters at Marienbad,” in  quick shots that will  resemble the post 9/11 infomercials where a collage of black, pink, yellow, old, young, and disabled faces appeared and said one after the other, “I am an American” with an emphasis on the word I.
I thought the project was crass, if not downright dishonest, with its pitch for the unity of America and Europe despite recent tensions.  But I said nothing. Why bother to criticize people I’d never see again.  Besides, there was something oddly comical about the whole thing.
Lutz, though, was enraged because R and A didn’t choose him:  “Who gets a part?  Not me, not you.  The Nazis, that’s who.”   Christ, he reminds me of my late Super  Jew Uncle Morris,  who thought any goy was either a Cossack or a member of the SS.  He’d die if  he knew I  was staying so close to the German border.
July 11
Lutz kept talking to me all through dinner.  How many  spa guests, let alone Americans,    could cite even one fact about Nietzsche or Goethe or Gogol or Franz Joseph.?  I confessed to not knowing the answer, tried to concentrate on my dumplings.  Did anyone at the Thermal Hotel
know that two of the luminaries, Freud and Mahler, were Jewish?  Though personally he preferred Romberg  to Mahler and Freud nowadays  was a subject for cartoonists.  And would I believe that so far I was the only guest to recognize the name of that “boring” French movie, Last Year at Marienbad?   I said I could believe it. Of course the French were the worst anti-Semites in  Europe.   Later, he promised, he would explain to me the movie’s secret Vichy messages and its link with the  old spa town where  we were staying.  I actually began to look forward to tomorrow’s folkloric dancers:  better than no distraction  from Lutz except dumplings and beer.
July 12
Precisely on time out stomped the dancers.  Blonde,  of course, and wearing identical embroidered aprons over their dirndl skirts and peasant blouses with billowing white sleeves and drawstring necklines.  Such blouses were once popular in  America. There’s a photo of me
wearing one and looking grumpy, I must have been  about 6 or 7.
Stomp, whirl , thump, plunk, circle,  stomp..  I think the name of the dance is the Schuhplattler though Lutz says  it’s the Schutz Staffel –which I just happen to know was the actual name of the  SS.   He finds his joke terribly funny..  Thank god the dancers’ wooden shoes thumped out  his laughter.
Next a garlanded chorus singing the “Lorelei” way off key, followed by the theme song from “The Sound of Music” and–in what Lutz said was an obvious effort to mollify the inhabitants of all anti-Semitic nations within missile-range–a rousing demonstration
of   Swiss yodeling by a troop of portly old men wearing lederhosen and carrying large steins.    The audience cheered and Lutz gave forth his own yodel.  Luckily at that moment a  gust of wind knocked a stein from one  of the yodelers’ hands, the stein crash-landing on the edge of the stage.   I found the whole business so funny I was relieved when the Germans laughed too.
So much for folklore, except for that old beerhall song where everyone puts arms around another and sings Ein, Zwei, Sofort. . .With Lutz’s arm on my right side and a yodeler’s  on  my left,  I  joined in. Yes, I admit I like the song, along with some other oom-pa-pah music from the . . .the.. .1940’s.   Weimar Republic?
Then  Rick and Amity announced the start of the publicity video, what an honor it  was to make a film in  Marienbad, etc.   A man wearing a sign that said Chopin and dressed in a tuxedo so tight it made his cock bulge crossed the stage, pretended to jump into a makeshift pool, said “I took the waters at Marienbad,” then quickly left, forcing a few delicate coughs.while somewhere in the background a cassette played the first two measures of the Prelude in  A minor.   Light applause.  Next up was” Liszt,”  looking absolutely rakish in a red wig.  He said the requisite line in Hungarian as well as German and English, tossed a rose to a young lady in in the audience whose deeply cleaved breasts leapt  from her halter top, did his pool thing and  vanished to a lusty version of his Valse Obliee.  More light applause.  And so on,  luminaries climbing onto the  stage like  baseball players coming to the plate in  a prearranged batting order intelligible only to the directors, since Albert Schweitzer  preceded both Gogol and Heine.  I was nearly asleep from boredom when  suddenly it happened:
“Dvorak” having  done his thing,   Lutz climbed onto the stage and shouted “I  am Josef  Goebbels.  I, too, took the waters at . . .” . He repeated his speech in German and then, lifting my hand, dded:  “This lovely young woman  is my wife Magda….”
At first the audience was too stunned to respond. But soon they began  to chant MAGDA, MAGDA ! ordering me on stage.  I pretended not to understand though I feared they would lift me  forcefully.   Boos and catcalls, the Teutonic/Bohemian  versions of  Bronx cheers.  When I failed to respond someone  shouted “We know who you are, you little Jewess! You’re Anne Frank! “   Thank god for  Nietzsche, who gently told me to “chill out. “  The Emperor Franz Joseph  unsuccessfully struggled to wrest the microphone from Lutz, who kept ranting:  COME ON,  GOERING, WHERE ARE YOU?  WHERE’S HIMMLER?   YOU  CAME HERE TOO!  YOU FORGET ALREADY?
Ja, Ja from the audience: WHERE’S  EVA BRAUN?   WE WANT EVA!  WE WANT EVA!  Cheers, stamping of feet, rhythmic clapping.   Lutz said I should pretend I was Eva but despite the generous quantity of beer  I had drunk at dinner, all I could manage was a whisper that I was Barbara Lefcowitz from Brooklyn.  “I guess improvisational theater is not your schtick, Bubele,” Wagner said.
I wanted to hide behind this statue of  the spa’s founding father. But that would only attract more attention.  Besides, I  admit I was getting more curious about the Teutonic sense of frivolity.  Lutz himself was now laughing.  Yes, laughing along with Wagner and Goethe as they gave him high-fives, followed by the  rest of the  caste.   “Enough of the Holocaust,”  someone shouted from the audience. “Don’t you Jews have anything else on your minds?”
“Yes, money,” Lutz answered. “Money and power.  Today Israel, Tomorrow the World.”  And he laughed some more,  joined by the  no longer startled audience.
Soon everyone, including spa guests and  a few people from  town, was roaring and  clapping and stamping their feet.  Since  I was sitting in  front I could hear clearly  the words of my new pal,  Nietzsche :“Thus spake the boorish American Jew. . .But Never Forget, my friends. Never Forget that Christians are no different.  Because of religion,  man has been a manifold, mendacious, artificial and opaque animal throughout the course of history. . .”
“Faustian,” said Goethe. “I should have gone to Italy.”
“ I ‘m going home,” said Dvorak, humming the refrain from his New World Symphony, composed when he visited America. Going home, going home/ I’m a-going home…  Even Freud added something about  America being a gigantic mistake.   What a kick. . .I couldn’t imagine such intellectually subtle antics back home.  When a battalion of pashas and shahs surrounded Lutz and were about to carry him off  I actually felt  sad.  But King Edward VII , known as Bertie to his many intimates, spoke up and, as if on cue,  Lutz  left the stage on his own.
“Peace, peace.”  The King raised his fingers in a 60’s style peace sign, but turned one of them the wrong way, so according to international body language he was saying fuck you.  “Peace. We  must respect our American cousins, men and women  who lack our centuries of cultural breeding. . .”
He quickly lost his audience when a woman representing the late Czech opera star  Ema Destinova  strutted  on  stage and announced she was Brunhilde.  Cheers.  Wagner, of course, followed, declaring himself  Siegfried.  And the Schuhplattler girls  decided they were Valkyries.  Soon everyone was rushing on stage, shouting, singing, drinking beer from a barrel that was supposed to be another  folkloric prop; yodeling; fencing with walking sticks; even raising hands in what I assumed was a parody of the Nazi salute.    But I wasn’t positive.  And certainly Lutz, back next to me,  was sure it was the real thing though Hitler could nowhere be found–that is, until a slim man with slicked black hair and a cardboard mustache marched towards the stage.
Pandemonium. Someone tried to stop the man but was blocked by several women dressed as witches.  Ah, so it was Walpurgisnacht.  How could I have forgotten?  One of the women, the heftiest, stripped off her  costume and mounted a  broom, presumably to capture the putative Hitler, but he had escaped into the hills and nobody cared about him anymore. With broom-mounted witches leaping high over my head, I realized the boundary between  folkloric and libidinal lunacy  had been crossed, so it was no surprise when  the evening turned into an old-fashioned pool party, naked bodies plunging into the thermal bath, cavorting and singing and, yes, indulging in varieties of sexual play, much of it below the surface but  still visible.
Ema Destinova, the Czech opera star, her stoutly dignified figure now totally nude down to her ringlets of auburn pubic hair,  began to remove my skirt and blouse.  But that far I couldn’t go. . .I insisted on removing my clothes myself  before entering the pool,  which amused Mahler and Freud in particular.  The two Jews, as Lutz would have said, except he was busy stripping.  The two Jews who refused to participate, who preferred to sit on a ledge and observe.
I guess it was the sight of Lutz in the raw except for his chest, which was covered by a towel,  that finally made me realize the whole thing was a carefully planned put-on.
I couldn’t refrain from swimming towards him, lifting the towel and peeking at his chest.  Yes, there was a large tattoo, but he so quickly covered it up again  I couldn’t make out any details. No wonder he had worn that thick  t-shirt with the orange birds!  But  I didn’t care any more.  A put-on, an entertainment, in other words a lie, a pretense– with the cooperation of  Rick and Amity and Lutz himself.   What a fool I am for not figuring it out earlier.  But then I would have returned to my room and spent the evening reading Kundera. . .
Even after the spa’s guards brought an end to the pool party well past midnight,  I couldn’t get rid of Lutz.  Over yet more beer he told me  I should follow in his footsteps.  The card he  handed me said:  DR. ALPHONSE ETIENNE  KOBASCHEVSKY  (PROFESSIONAL PROVOCATEUR), Baltimore, Maryland.
“ Jolly well,” said King Edward VII.  “.How about doing an anti-royalist  performance  at  Windsor?  I’m tight with  one of the butlers.”
“Of course, Your Majesty. Maybe my new friend the professor will come, too. Let me introduce Lady Diana.  She’d make a good queen, even though she’s Jewish,  ha, ha.” .. I  shook  Bertie’s hand and introduced myself as Princess Anne, adding that Lutz sometimes mixes up his princesses.  I also said  that I was originally from Brooklyn but when I wasn’t teaching overseas I now lived in  Ohio. “Fine place,” the King replied.  He and Lutz huddled to make plans for Windsor,  but not before Lutz again advised me to become a professional provocateur.  The pay’s not bad and  you get to meet a lot of interesting people–not only Nazis but commies and pinkos and racists and  gays of all kinds…whatever crazies have to be shaken up. And it always worked:  Not that I’m a crazy, but  didn’t I feel shaken up?
I felt confused.  No, the right word is intrigued.  Intrigued by all that Eurocynicism, the lies, theatrics, subterfuges, the sense that nothing mattered anymore,Nema Problema–as demonstrated most clearly by Rick and Amity.  Yet even Nietzsche, who happened to pass by, didn’t think nullity was the answer.  God was dead, long live Dionysius and his atheistic Ubermensch.  Who might even be a Jew for all that matters nowadays.  Seen any good movies lately?  What did I think of Ariel Sharon?  Did I think he was acting like a Nazi?
“Be careful.  Sharon’s my secret lover,”  I said.
“Ja.  I know many women are attracted to fascists.  Like your Sylvia Plath once  wrote about her Dad.  ‘The boot in the face.. .’  How does the rest of it go?”
“Never heard of her,” I lied.  How could Nietzsche possibly know that I had written my Master’s Thesis on Plath?
Somewhere in the distance people  were again singing that beerhall song.   I wanted to link arms with them and sing Ein, Zwei, Sofort,  but it was late and  I had to pack  so I could make the first  train to Prague and catch my flight home.
Had I made a fool of myself, had I betrayed my people, found the hated Germans too amusing, should I have kept my clothes on,  should I have told the King my real name instead of playing along?  Probably yes.  But it’s time to let go.  Tomorrow I can leave  it all behind, half a continent plus an entire ocean behind.
September 23
Already I wish I were back in Europe.  Julia,  Head of the English Division,  announced today the grading standards for entry and exit writing assignments of all students,  which  must–no exceptions–match the newly revised  Outcome Assessment Standards decreed by the State:
ENTRY TOPIC: Role of Women and Minorities in Huckleberry Finn..  EXIT TOPIC: Same
LENGTH:  600 words     PENALTIES:  Minus 5 points for each shift of focus from
assignment, no matter how “creative”; minus 10 points for each violation of political  correctness; minus 2 points for each word that exceeds or falls short of word limit.

I and a few others protested vigorously, but Julia said there was no choice.  Anyone failing to conform would risk non-renewal of his or her contract.  Then, looking straight at me,  she added, “That would also mean no more teaching in the college’s programs abroad.”  Period.
Journal, October 4, 2003
I decided to sabotage the test.  Why not?  Anything so  rigid and heavy-handed deserves to be sabotaged.  Links, Rechts,  Achtung!  So I gave all my students extra points where the rules demanded penalties, even snuck in extra points for flashes of creativity.  Doubt if the grading committee will catch me, but admit I’m anxious. Maybe I could  say I did it as a joke?  Pull an Arnold Lutz prank? Shock them by saying even the Germans flout imposed structures nowadays, to say nothing of the French who never pay their taxes?  Got an e-mail from Stefan today.  He loves the ESOL program in Bratislava: no textbooks, no tests, just lots of conversation.  They meet at cafes and  go on all evening drinking Pilsner.
November 1, 2004
Julia summoned me to her office this morning.  I had seriously violated the rules of  both  the school and the state.  Did I realize what that  meant?  I  didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,
so I bit my lip hard.  Not only had the committee discovered my ruse, but she herself  and the Dean corroborated it.  She went on to say that such an act was a major ethical lapse, a serious crime in the “outside world.”   I denied  everything, told her the accusation was obviously an attempt to get rid of me.  Thank god  I kept myself from adding “because I’m  Jewish,” though Julia had frequently been caught making anti-Semitic remarks American-style, like referring to Jews as “New Yorkers” and putting down Jewish writers as too obsessed with the
“damn Holocaust.”
“Now who’s accusing whom?” she said.  “Get a lawyer if you think we’re violating Affirmative Action.”
“Not worth it.  I can always find a job abroad.”
Most graciously, she informed me that the college would give me until the  end of the semester  to arrange other  employment.    I thanked her for the charitable offer, but doubt she saw through the irony.  Walked off  humming  Ein, Zwei, Sofort  for some reason. .  sans linked arms.
March 20, 2004
Pressures of  job hunting  have kept me  fromwriting except scrawled notes for poems and stories.  But yesterday I found a spa magazine at the local gym, which, of course, made me think about Arnold Lutz and the events of last summer.
Actually, I never did get the skinny on  Lutz.  Was he really a Jew or just an opportunistic Jew in drag?  A former Nazi?  Most likely just another schmuck who wanders the world looking to exploit his schmuckiness.
Then why am I still curious about him? As I think back, I must have found his masks, his bad theatrics, appealing despite my distaste for him.  After all,  why not pretend to be everything?  A good way to avoid the possibility, make that pretense, that you are nothing. At the very least, a way to attract attention, a fleeting  admiration. Scripts, nothing but scripts. Scripts full of lies.  A cynical disregard for those shreds of  beauty, truth, and moral responsibility not yet engulfed by  the maws of modern history.  Hey, wait a minute.  Hadn’t my sabotaging of the state mandated test been the equivalent of a lie, a disregard for my alleged responsibilities, then lying about it to Julia on top of that?
I began to laugh.  At Julia, at my obedient colleagues, at myself– though my script was not as amusing as “Walpurgisnacht”  when it came to black humor.  [OK, Barbara, admit you found Arnold amusing--even the audience’s scripted calls for Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun.  Even if tasteless, at least they were  not so damn self-righteously literal, like the State Outcome Assessment Standards for Student Writing. Even to a Jew ]
Ah yes, I see I’m still ambivalent about what happened.  Especially about the compromises with language, my own,  Lutz’s, the  audience’s.  How  along with the state of Ohio we were exploiting words’ wonderful but dangerous capacities for expansion, their convoluted historical shifts:    Hello> Old High German halon, summons to a ferryman; OF ha lou, for loup, wolf.  A codename for Hitler, whose favorite song was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
April 27
A letter from Lutz, postmarked Baltimore.  He told me the video, now entitled “This Year at Marienbad,”  had been adapted into one of those “artsy-fartsy” movies they show in artsy-fartsy theaters.  I must see it.  I myself was not in it but he and the King had a long scene.  At first I thought that I wouldn’t see it even if it crashed through my window.  Enough conflations of fantasy and reality.  Then I decided I certainly would see it if I could find such a theater anywhere near this fucking little Ohio town.  Which I’ll soon be leaving– but for where  I do not know.
Oh well, I’d probably find  the film too folkloric for my taste anyway.
***

THE  DINA  LETTERS  (Fiction/Essay)
1.  My Questions:
Dear Dina, long dead great-aunt I never met, in my  imagination you’re riding the Blue Train above the rooftops of  Belarus. I think they just called it Russia back then. You’re riding  over snowfields, which like everything else are tinged blue, even the miasmal fumes from the Pripet Marshes.
You’re wearing a blue shawl, a blue kerchief  knotted  around your thin face whose blue eyes  resemble those of my mother.   She was named for you.  That’s a fact.  Which means you died sometime prior to her birth, which took place in 1909, another fact.  But where and of what you died I’ll never know.
Dina,  you’re riding the Blue Train all the way to America, 16 years old, your hunched  back risen behind you, a loaf of bread so thick and high you must hang your head, lean far
forward in your seat, so your breasts, full of desire, brush against your knees.
Nobody sits next to you,  none of your many sisters or brothers, not even your dear mother or your father,  Jacob.   So after tucking the loose ends of your shawl, I seat myself
on the wooden plan next  to you and ask:
Dina, did you really die in Pinsk, left behind when the family emigrated to America or were you turned  back at Ellis Island?  Or did you  really die on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side?
Were you sometimes happy even though they called you  The Hunchback and wrung their hands, vey iss mir, she’ll never have any suitors, an old maid, a burden, a curse, gott in
himmel what have we done to deserve this?  Excuse my questions; I really want to know you, know the place you came from, the place you came to, the place where you died.
Why did the officers at  Ellis Island cross out your name on the passenger manifest,  yet stamp you admitted, followed by the scrawled words Deformity of the Spine?   As if you were a double of yourself.  Dina,  I can’t help thinking about Dinah, defiled daughter of  another Jacob.
100 years later almost to the day of  your ship’s arrival in New York, 2/20/1904, I discovered you on microfilm in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.  Of course I’ll never know the true, the real story, no matter how often   I ride along with you on the Blue Train to. . . much as I hate to say, the Blue Train to your  death and soon enough  to mine.
So meanwhile let’s gossip and laugh like any 16 year old girls.  I’ll tell you all the family dirt and you can tell me your secrets.  Perhaps you  had a lover from the next shtetl, a young rabbi, or better yet a firebrand who  stayed behind  to fight the hooligans, the drunken Cossacks.
But I’ll spare you word of the wars, the betrayals.
Dina, time’s running out, the train is moving faster, away from America, from Europe, the rest of the world.  So please hurry and break your silence.  Dina.  Jacob’s daughter with the hunchback and crossed-out name.  L’Chaim!     Sincerely, Your Grand-Niece, Barbara
2.  Her Answer:
Barbara, or should I call you Basha? Please excuse my simple words.  Mama knew Hebrew, Yiddish,  a little Russian and Polish, but only the boys were  allowed to read and write.
But I hid under the table and pressed inside my head whatever I could hear them learn
until my back hurt so much I had to crawl away. Once Papa caught me and beat  me. He was drunk from too much slivovitz and praying.
Mama would try to flatten my back with rolling pins and irons.  When nothing worked she blamed me and cried. I hardly ever went outside except when everyone  was sleeping,
in the dark no one could laugh at me, curse  me  for not being perfect.
Are you perfect?  I hope not.
But  there  were some good things. I didn’t  have  to carry wood and pails through the snow and  I had the whole tub to myself,  it was only a big tin  pan from the milk farm but I could sit there, no one staring  at my body.  Oh, I had  my secret ways, I must–how you say?–confess.
My hands were good  so I sewed all the clothes lying on the floor which got cold and damp.  At night my hands found all kinds of places nobody knew about except me and the devil–the one who cursed  me when I came out wrong from Mama, that’s what they all said,
even the doctor.  Sometimes Papa said I was only good enough to be a  kurveh– a bad word I think means whore.
Promise you won’t  tell anyone, but I never believed in any devils except maybe Izzy Koretsky who had red teeth.   No more than I believed in the God that Papa  prayed to make me  stand up straight.  Be beautiful like my sisters, your grandma Annie, so quick and smart, little Zelda and Schaine Fagele, the pretty bird.  I hated her the most.  She and Zelda danced
on the deck of the ship. All the rich people clapped and gave them candy.
Me?  Down with the rats in the stinking dark steerage crying  to  go  home.  Mama said 16 year old girls don’t cry.  Most of them are already married with babies.  Maybe in America. . .I’d become a  kurveh, a whore,  just to spite them,  but it must  hurt bad when  men put  their things inside you and I could never lay flat to open my legs enough.  Milk and honey, everyone said.
America was made from  milk  and honey.  How could they believe such  nonsense about a place?  A place they had never seen. .  .
But the stories never fooled  me.  Even if that place did exist, for me it was hard enough to walk on earth. I would drown in all  that damn  milk and honey, trip over the gold on the streets which  was probably just dreck from the animals anyway.
When the ship docked in  New York on  20 February 1904  it was cold and gloomy.  From the little I could see the snow looked gray, like it needed to be scrubbed clean.  Not at all like the pure  white snow fields of Pinsk.  I kept wishing those  big blond  American soldiers who sent us into an enormous hall. . . ach the noise! the smell of  fumes from what they called disinfectant, as if we were full of disease.  Much worse than the fumes from the Pripet Marshes. I kept wishing those soldiers and the goyish doctors who also wore uniforms and never smiled  would order me to go back home.
Home to where I could listen to the music of  splitting  icicles and look up at the stars. They said the marshes made people sick, gave them Pinske  Blutte,  I think it means weak blood, but in the spring long  reeds and sometimes wild red poppies sprang up and I could shape the mud  to little figures, maybe a golem like in the story Papa once  told me.  If I dipped my hands deep enough, I’d feel lots of warm things, like when I put my hands inside me, once I  found  a stuck bird and made its  wings  free–
If only Mama had not convinced them to admit me,  I guess she felt guilty,  no, I really think she believed in her heart America would cure me.  ButI hated those goddamn stinking
stinking little rooms on Rivington  Street, all of us  packed like a barrel of herrings with other families, babies crying, such noise, no place to hide.
Sometimes I’d  sneak  out and walk across the  bridge to Brooklyn, have you  heard of it?  That  big silvery bridge, and I’d build myself a little house on someone’s fire-escape. Nobody ever noticed  me, except one night it got very cold and my coat bulged in  back so I couldn’t button  it.  Such a fever I got!  Mama wrapped me in  rags soaked with hot urine and mustard.
But I refused to get better.  I think they were relieved, what a burden I was, maybe
more than my back  was to me.   Thank you  for your concern and for taking the time to make me up based on so few facts. It’s almost like–how you say?–making up to me
something I lost. Almost.  –Yours, Dina

THE  BANS  OF MAINE :  A PROPHECY
At first it was just the upholstered chairs with names like Chippendale and Queen Anne.  A few days later, all chairs, no matter their style or fabric.
We were ordered to bring them to the Redistribution Center by midnight or else the National Sanitation Squad  would remove them by force from our homes.  No exemptions except wheelchairs.  But anyone caught trying to create a fake wheelchair by attaching rollers to regular chairs would face imprisonment or worse.
Each chair would be given a number, which would be entered into a file, so future historians would be able to check the records.
Of course. Another sign of our leaders’ superb efficiency, my neighbor Marilyn laughed.  Another rumor calculated to terrify people into supporting their  whim of the moment.  Marilyn would be damned if she was going to give up the Rococo Revival balloon-back sidechair that had been in her family for generations.
Pavel, another neighbor, was distraught. Surely he’d be punished for not delivering a  chair. But he did not own any, preferring cushions and mats.  Would they take his word?  In America this is happening, I cannot believe it.. . To be safe, he asked me to lend him a chair so he could offer it as his contribution.
Francine, a 90 year old woman across the way, was more resigned.  “ Governments do this all the time. Just you wait and see. Beds will be next.  They’ll forbid us from sleeping.”
I myself figured I’d just hide my Renaissance Revival sofa with its well-worn
tufted velvet seat, one of the few items that, along with me, had emigrated to Maine from my New York apartment.  Of course, a sofa was not the same as a chair, but it was best to avert any semiotic issues.  My plastic kitchen chairs could go; I was planning to buy new ones anyway.
“Trust me,” Pavel said.  “I lived through time of the Martial Law in Poland . . Once they begin–”
I reminded him of the official government explanation: the decree had been issued in order to  protect people from the toxic effects of  chairs.  Their seats interfered with the proper alignment of the lower spine, as well as the coccyx.
“Yes, now I see,” he said.  “It’s a cover for the socialist revolution.  To redistribute
goods in order to create a more egalitarian society.  Just like in old country. All  chairs go to needy public institutions like clinics, halfway houses, prisons.  At least they say…”
“Crazy,” Marilyn laughed, “ If  chairs are bad for human health, why give them to the needy?  It’s like shipping all those Marlboro cigarettes to third world countries, along with our dented cans.”
“Ach, you Americans. So naive,” Pavel said. “Not like Europeans. . .”
Less than a week later the decree was expanded to a ban on anything made of pine–      tables, cabinets, shelves,  cabins, even pine coffins should any of the city’s observant Jews be saving such for their burial containers.
Why?  Discovery that the wood of pine trees contains a microorganism smaller and more dangerous by far than anthrax spores.
Pavel immediately complied, though he had to spread his canned goods and dishware on the floor,  as well as clothing previously hidden inside pine cabinets. Not only his sweaters and overalls but mateless socks as well.  Should he jettison the clothing, too, since it had been in contact with the killer pine?  Better wait for orders.   If indeed all were contaminated, he’d have nothing to wear except bathing trunks. And soon the weather would turn cold.
Marilyn, still skeptical but not laughing as much, begged me to hide her Salem rocker, hand carved by her grandfather from trees in his own pine grove. And the pine cradle she’d bargained so hard for at a garage sale. . Oh, and how could she forget the hand-painted Renaissance Revival pedestal , even though its pine had been ebonized and gilded.  Not that she was afraid of the Sanitation Squad, but if I could help her out this one time. . .
It turned out to be more than one time and Marilyn was not the only person for whom I provided hiding places for their pine artifacts.
It was not until the first Chair and Pine Burning that I began to take the decrees seriously.  I could, of course, turn over all my neighbors’ contraband to the government, but, as Pavel warned me, not only would everything be  burnt in the next such spectacle, but probably I myself.  “Trust me,” he said. “Before the Martial Law I lived through Germans and Russians.”  He advised me to burn the items myself, even if the result was destruction of my house.  Luckily, everything else survived, including my mahogany bed.
SRO everywhere, as you can imagine.  To watch a movie one had to stand the whole time, all seats having been removed from theaters.  To attend a sports event, a church service, a formal dinner (of the sort until recently called “sit-down”).
Either stand, no matter how wobbly and painful, or lie down.  At least, Francine repeated,  until beds joined the list of the  verboten.
Even the words chair and pine were banned.  No more chairwomen or chairmen, no more chairs of academic departments, no more pining for the good old days, pining away from grief over lost loves.
To further justify the purge, some official claimed he had learned via the internet that terrorists were particularly targeting those who sat, since sitting was a sign of bourgeois comfort.
So they announced that to increase homeland security, the bans were more than justified.  We must show them we stand up tall for America, stand on our own two feet.   And pine was doubly suspicious: not only did it carry deadly spores but sometimes contained knots that resembled eyes.  Evil eyes.  The eyes of Satan out to destroy all decent human values.
“Bullshit.  It’s just an ecological trick to help preserve our pine forests,”  Marilyn said.  “You can’t trust anyone these days.”
“You learn fast,” Pavel smiled. “For an American.”
The public burnings became more frequent, often accompanied by music and speeches.  At first thousands attended, standing, of course, through the five hour spectacles.   Then attendance began to drop.  Were people afraid to venture outside their homes?  More likely they stayed away because they needed time to dig their underground shelters in anticipation that beds would be next on the list of the banned.
I had begun to dig mine late at night;  more like a ditch,  which when completed would be 12 feet below the ground.  No room for my bed.  But I could sleep there on a pile of leaves and grasses just like our most primitive ancestors did to avoid attacks by animals or alien tribes.
For a while all was quiet.   Was the ban on sitting sufficient to attain the government’s goal of  postural purity?    And the pine ban enough to save the forests?  Some people had become adept enough at the lotus position to sit fairly comfortably on the ground or floor, proving one can adjust to anything.  A  brave few began to cut down birch trees and shape them into tables. . .
“I told you so,” Marilyn said.  “I knew the whole thing was just a crock. . .”   And she demanded I return her hidden pine,  which compelled me to confess my betrayal.  Would what you have done?
We figured the Bed Ban would come any day.  Instead,  we were ordered to get rid of all lobsters in the state of Maine.
Whether underwater or, worse,  already on shore, even if already in mid-boil. Out with the lobster traps!   Out with all lobster stew, bisque, and sauce. Every restaurant and roadstand had to jettison its lobsters at once. No lobster bibs, no paraphernalia like lobster forks.  Not even postcards depicting lobsters.   Because lobsters, like the snakehead fish recently discovered in Maryland, had evolved into predatory creatures that not only spread disease but could turn everything a lobstery red.
Something new was banned each day thereafter.  Flowery wallpaper.  All L.L. Bean merchandise.  Maine potatoes.  Hand-cobbled Dexter shoes. B&M Baked Beans.  Wild blueberries. Paper mills.  Finally, a sizeable portion of the state of Maine itself.
“Can you believe it?” Francine said. “They’re making this big hollow smack in the middle of the state. And you know what they’re going to fill it with?”
“Garbage,” Marilyn said.  “All the garbage from the rest of the country.”
“Nuclear waste,” Pavel said.
“Money,” I said, just for the sake of saying something.
“You’re all wrong.  They’re going to fill it with New York City.  Just take old Francine’s word for it.”
Indeed.  The next day our leaders announced that all five boroughs would be deposited into the Great Hollow as soon as the digging was complete.  What a boon for tourism!  Especially with our shaky economy!    People hesitant about visiting the Big Apple could now do so in the comfort of our own state of Maine.
Anyone who wanted to evacuate Maine was free to do so within 48 hours. But few actually did.
Marilyn moved from Portland to roughly where Millinocket had been and made a fortune selling Statue of Liberty souvenirs.  Pavel retrieved his clothes, figuring the pine ban was now moot, and quickly got himself a job as a waiter in a famous Hungarian restaurant transported from 2nd Avenue to Bangor.  He would teach Polish songs to the gypsy band relocated along with the restaurant.
Francine, I regret to say, disappeared, perhaps into one of the pine coffins still around.
I myself decided I would return to New York City, the real New York.   Which turned out to look just like Maine:  white-fenced cottages and lighthouses and lobsters thriving in the East River, where they had flourished as recently as a century ago.  Blueberries on Broadway,  Log Cabins on 34th Street.
When the winds cooperated,  the aroma of seawater was strong enough to overcome any lingering odors of fish and leather, pulp from the paper mills. . .
***

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