Just like Dostoyevsky

Just Like Dostoyevsky

  by

  Barry Rachin

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  Published by:

  Just Like Dostoyevsky

  Copyright © 2010 by Barry Rachin

  This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Just Like Dostoyevsky

  The mason arrived late in the afternoon. He went to the jumbled pile of red bricks, snatched up a brick in his left hand and began tapping at the crusted mortar with an odd-looking hammer - too short to pound nail with, too narrowly-constructed and lightweight for any other, practical use. Tap. Tap. Tap. Broken cement and sand flew in every direction. Sylvia Mandelstam’s twelve year-old daughter, Becky, tanned legs askew, was sitting on an undamaged section of the wall talking non-stop. Lean and wiry with a tuft of curly, brown hair skittering out from under a shapeless brown cap, the mason never lifted his eyes. Finishing the first brick, he knelt down and retrieved another.

  Sylvia watched from the upstairs bedroom window for a while then went into the den to edit term papers. An hour later when she looked, he was standing in the same position chipping away only now a small pile of clean bricks lay neatly stacked to the right of where the truck had crashed through the wall the previous month. Becky was still straddling the wall carrying on an intense monologue. “Strange!” Sylvia muttered.

  An oil truck caused the damage. As the driver rounded the turn off Hope Street, the left front tire blew out; the errant truck with its full load of number ten heating oil as added ballast careened onto the property, raking the wall, right-to-left, for a distance of thirty feet. The insurance company settled within days. Sylvia got the mason’s telephone number from a small line ad in the Providence Journal:

  Mason and general handyman;

  no job too small;

  call Danny O’Rourke at ... .

  “Fixing the wall’s no problem,” the middle-aged man said in an amiable tone tinged with Irish brogue, “Late afternoons and weekends. Five hundred dollars. Everything.”

  The insurance company settled for fifteen hundred. “Yes, that seems fair enough.”

  Irish brogue. From an etymological standpoint, Sylvia understood the term to have several distinctly dissimilar meanings: a heavy shoe of untanned leather, formerly worn in Scotland and Ireland; a strong oxford shoe, usually with ornamental perforations and wing tips. She glanced at Danny O'Rourke's steel-toed construction boots. “When can you start?”

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Chip. Chip. Chip.

  By 7:30 the light was fading. In the yard, the monotonous, brittle sound of a snare drum solo gone slightly haywire drifted through the window. Sylvia pushed the heap of papers aside. Two hours he’d been at it without a break and after a full day’s work elsewhere. Becky was in the den doing homework. Sylvia went downstairs and out the front door into the muggy, July warmth. “If you’d rather purchase new brick,” she said approaching from the flagstone walkway, “I’ll be happy to kick in the extra money.”

  The hand holding the hammer drop to his side, and he looked up with clear, brown eyes. “New brick won’t match weathered.” The chin was broad, Gaelic - cheeks wide, sloping toward a generous mouth. “No need to waste good brick. Another day or two, I’ll have these cleaned up like new.” He dropped the brick in his hand onto the soft ground. “I usually deal with the husbands,” he said, collecting his tools.

  “How’s that?”

  “When it comes to estimates and repairs.”

  Sylvia smiled and teased a crimson ladybug off the sleeve of her blouse. “The husbands,” she repeated with a watery smile, as though the term held some exclusive, hidden meaning. “Even if he were still here,” she said sardonically, “my ex-husband wouldn’t understand what you’re doing anymore than I do.”

  The mason did not react. His expression remained neutral, noncommittal.

  Sylvia’s ex-husband, Jason, had always been an incessant talker, a shameless self-promoter. When he bailed out of the marriage, he took with him the entire Coltrane collection - 25 CD’s, including several hard-to-find, bootlegged European tapes - plus the white noise of his arrogance. After publishing several clever articles on post-modern, French literature, Jason ran off with a leggy, blonde coed. Now he held a full professorship at Rutgers where, academic rumor had it, he traded the blonde for a more supple-minded philosophy major a scant seven years older than his daughter.

  Even in her prime, Sylvia could never keep track of her husband’s dalliances. Short and plump hers was a muted, understated attractiveness. The legs were still shapely, but hadn’t always been. She had to work at it.

  “Your daughter, Becky, said you teach.”

  “Russian literature, at Brown.”

  He tossed his hammer - a double flip, end over end - and caught the handle effortlessly. An involuntary gesture, she had seen him do it a dozen times or more while he was working at the bricks. “Ever been to Russia?”

  “Last year. An academic seminar in Moscow.”

  “Like it?”

  “Yes, very much so,” she lied effortlessly. “A thoroughly enjoyable experience.”

  Moscow airport. Bleak and dismal with atrocious lighting and Spartan furnishings. At the far end of the arrivals gate, a trio of frumpy babushkas dressed in white smocks were washing the floor. One woman with a nose like an onion leaned on a long-handled pole, a 12-inch T tacked to the end. A second woman fished a rag from a pail of filthy water, wrung the excess back into the bucket and hurled the limp cloth onto the floor.

  Splat! With no great sense of urgency, the woman with the pole began pushing the mess back and forth redistributing the muck in a broad arc. Smoking an unfiltered cigarette, the third woman, presumably the crew chief, showed no interest in either the arriving foreigners or her workmates. They took a brief rest, chatted, gazed dully at the empty Aeroflot planes resting on the rutted tarmac and scratched their shapeless rumps before proceeding to the next patch of grimy floor.

  Welcome to Moscow!

  “Danny’s nice,” Becky shuffled into her mother’s bedroom later that night as she was preparing for bed. A lithe version of Sylvia, Becky was often mistaken for an Israeli sabra; the olive skin and chiseled nose were patently Mediterranean. “Nice and available.”

  “You want me to marry a brick layer?”

  “Date a few months then decide. Where’s the harm in it?”

  Sylvia brushed the fine, dark hair out of the girl’s eyes. The faint outline of a training bra was visible beneath the summer-weight, cotton blouse. Not much flesh to support. If Becky was anything like her mother, another year or two, the meager mounds - more like hillocks - would need more than a flimsy training bra to hold them in check. Her daughter’s lack of curves offered little solace; it was the potential for curves that kicked Sylvia’s maternal anguish into high gear. “What did you and Mr. O’Rourke talk about?”

  “The man’s no talker. Hardly said two words. Reminds me of that character in the Carson McCullers story.”

  “Which one?”

  Becky took an emery board from her mother’s night table and began shaping a nail. “The deaf mute.”

  Sylvia frowned. “I think you’re blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.”

  Becky smirked, a conspiratorial gesture. “Danny’s never been married. I told him you were divorced.”

  Sylvia felt her face flush hot. “Must I remind you, Mr. O’Rourke is here to repair the wall. And from what little you’ve learned, it’s clear we have absolutely nothing in common.”

  “Daddy’s Jewish
; he teaches at the university. Lot of good that did!”

  “Touché,” Sylvia replied and kissed her daughter lightly on the cheek. “I can assure you I will, not now or ever, go out with Mr. Danny O’Rourke.”

  The next afternoon the mason did not return. She had paid him half the money in advance as an act of good faith. Hadn’t bothered to sign a formal contract or work out the fine details - cost of labor, materials, etc. An act of good faith? More like a colossal act of stupidity! When would she stop behaving like some ditsy divorcée and more like what she really was: a single mother, head-of-household?

  Another day and no sign of Mr. O’Rourke. On Friday the battered pickup with the blown muffler pulled up in front of the house. The mason went directly to the busted wall and began cleaning and stacking bricks, lingering even later into the dusky light until all the bricks - even the damaged ones - were tidied and properly stacked.

  The next day he arrived before 9 a.m. and began mixing mortar in a crusted wheelbarrow.

  “Gonna be a scorcher.” Sylvia came out to greet him. “Temperature’s in the nineties.”

  The mason worked the gray sludge in a figure eight pattern with a garden hoe. “Threw in some lime,” he said, indicating a bag of white powder in the rear of the truck, “so the mortar wouldn’t set up too fast.” He dumped a shovelful of fine sand into the soggy mix. “I’ll rebuild the far column first, run a line and fill everything in between.”

  Other tools lay on the ground, odd-looking tools she hadn’t noticed before: a long mahogany-colored level with a curved, yellow bubble, trowels, small wooden blocks, string and a strange-looking tool that resembled a twisted piece of scrap metal. “That,” he saw her gawking at the bent rod, “is used for tooling joints. Keep moisture off.” He threw the hoe aside and began working the thickening mass with a short-handled, pointed shovel. “In winter, frozen water can crack mortar. So much for your newly-repaired wall.”

  Nine thirty and it was already insufferably hot. “Yes, I see,” Sylvia said and retreated to the inconspicuous safety of her front porch.

  Pushkin. Gogol. Turgenev. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Solzhenitsyn. On the second day in Moscow, the insanity began. They were driving down the main thoroughfare, the Kremlin with its spiraling domes visible out the right hand window. A policeman waving a wooden nightstick pulled them over. The Russian driver got out of the car. After a short conversation, he returned and they continued on their way. “What was that all about?” Sylvia asked the interpreter, Marina.

  “Today is Friday,” Marina said gruffly and withdrew into a wall of silence. She was a tall, stylish woman in her late twenties with thick lips and close-cropped hair.

  They sped through Pushkin Square, past the Bolshoi Ballet, Lubyenka Prison. After a moment, Sylvia said, “I know what day of the week it is. Why did the policeman stop the car?”

  As though locked in mutually exclusive conversations, Marina repeated, “Today’s Friday, last day before weekend.” They passed several government ministries and a public housing unit built with forced labor, prison conscripts, during the Stalin era. “The Russian government pays poorly. This is how the police get their vodka money. By shaking down drivers on their way home from work. A few rubles here; a few rubles there.”

  “And if you refuse to pay?”

  Marina only gave her a dirty look and stared out the window at the crater-like pot holes and grimy snow. “Today is Friday,” she repeated grimly.

  On Monday afternoon, Danny O’Rourke began filling in the smashed-out portion. With the column trued-up, the work went much quicker now. “My father’s a big cheat,” Becky Mandelstam said. “A whoremongering asshole.”

  The mason wrapped one end of the discolored masonry twine around a maple corner block then stretched the line sixty feet to the far end of the brick wall where he fastened it tautly to a second, hardwood block. With the guide line in place, he came back to where the young girl was standing. “I don’t know that your mother would much appreciate your sharing that information.”

  She stared impudently at his jutting jaw. “I’m not gossiping,” she protested. “My father’s infidelity is common knowledge; it all came out in court during the divorce settlement.”

  In lieu of a response, Danny slathered mortar on the underside of a brick and tamped it into place on the broken wall. Reaching down with the sharp edge of the trowel, he trimmed the excess cement bulging from the wet joint; the pasty mortar fell noiselessly to the ground. Edging closer, Becky fingered the white, linen twine. At first she thought his features coarse, common. But now, she noticed something terribly appealing, strong and forthright, about his brown eyes and Irish chin. “I study body language. Yours is very calm, earthy.”

  The mason removed his cap momentarily to wipe his forehead. A film of sweat was developing on his freckled cheeks. One of the bricks was touching the string. With the butt of his trowel, he tapped it back a fraction of an inch. “Earthy,” he repeated, reaching for the 48-inch level.

  “I think you and my mother could be very - ” She waved an hand theatrically in the air.

  “Incompatible,” Danny offered. “A Jewish, college professor and an uneducated, Irish brick layer.” He patted her playfully on the head with a gritty hand. “There’re a half dozen words for what you’re trying to say and I wouldn’t repeat any of them in mixed company.”

  When Sylvia returned home from work on Wednesday afternoon, the wall was finished. Becky wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk. She was wearing a halter top and cut-off jeans. “If you won’t go out with Danny O’Rourke, at least invite him over for a home-cooked meal.”

  “Did he see you in that outfit?” Sylvia asked.

  “It’s the middle of summer! You expect me to wear wool skirts?”

  Sylvia shook her finger in her daughter’s face. “You’re not a child anymore. As a woman’s body matures, even respectable men - ”

  “Oh, mother! Get a life!”

  At three a.m., Becky came to her mother’s bedroom and shook her awake. “You cried out in your sleep.”

  “Just a bad dream. A nightmare.”

  Jason, with an entourage of fawning, half-baked coeds, had returned to the misogynous scene of the crime, parading past Sylvia as though she were the nebulous figure, the one dreamed. No justice, no belated comeuppance.

  Sylvia pulled her daughter down on the mattress next to her. “I’m okay now,” she said and nuzzled the girl’s bare arm with her cheek. Becky would stay with her mother for the rest of the night and, for that small blessing, Sylvia was thankful. There would be no more hurtful, humiliating dreams with her child close at hand.

  “Got A-minus on a social studies test,” Becky said, fluffing the spare pillow. “Missed the capitol of South Dakota.”

  Sylvia could smell the avocado shampoo Becky favored. Reaching out, she fingered a strand of silky, black hair. “Not a name that readily springs to mind.”

  A light breeze stirred the wandering Jew in a macramé hanger by the open window. She had all three varieties - tradescantia albiflora, tradescantia fluminensis and zebrina pendula - scattered throughout the upper level. In recent years, she filled the house with a profusion of house plants - feathery ferns, philodendrons, coleus and African violets so delicate and turgid with vitality that the brittle leaves snapped and fell away at the slightest hint of pressure.

  Arranging her home as though it were a Zen garden, Sylvia favored a bare minimum of furniture. In the living room was a settee strategically placed near the bay window, a small bookcase and upright piano, separated by huge gobs of empty space. On each end table, exactly five - no less no more - National Geographic magazines, fanned discreetly in a semicircle. The magazines were not intended for reading. “A consultant from Perkins Institute for the Blind,” Jason observed a week before he deserted the marriage,” couldn’t have done a better job.”

  The capitol of South Dakota. Had she forgotten; had she ever bothered to learn the capitol of South Dako
ta? Or was this the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease? Multi-infarct dementia?

  “What’s it feel like to make love?” Becky asked.

  Sylvia was drifting back to sleep. The loose tether of her daughter’s precious voice drew her back. “First time it hurts; afterwards it’s nice.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  At twelve, she didn’t see anything. And what was the capitol of South Dakota? Sioux Falls? Pierre? Boise? Helena? Cheyenne? Rapid City?

  “Danny O’Rourke never damaged a single brick,” Becky said.

  Again, Sylvia felt the tug on the gossamer string of her fading consciousness and opened her drooping eyelids. “What are we talking about now?”

  “The mason. He cleaned and stacked two hundred and thirty-five bricks and never chipped a single one! I know because, after he left, I counted them.”

  “How do you figure it?” Sylvia’s brain was on automatic pilot. She wasn’t quite sure what she was saying anymore. Nor did she care. It was enough to have Becky in the warm bed next to her.

  “It’s all in the wrist, the angle the blade strikes stone.”

  Boise. Helena. Bismark. Cheyenne. Fargo. Broken hymens. Labia majora. Vulva. Bartholin glands. Chip, chip, chip. Tap, tap, tap. Tradescantia albiflora, tradescantia fluminensis, zebrina pendula. Unctuous, annoying ex-husbands.

  And the capitol of South Dakota is ...

  Sylvia called Danny O’Rourke at home the following evening. “You did a nice job.”

  “Been at it for the better part of twenty years,” he said in his dull, lumpy voice. “Ought to be good at something by now.”

  “About your money ...”

  “Catch you one night after work.” There was no great urgency in his voice. With a queer sense of well-being, Sylvia hung up the phone.

  On Thursday around six, Danny O’Rourke showed up. Sylvia brought him into the kitchen and gave him the remainder of the money. He folded the bills without bothering to count and stuffed them into his pocket. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. O’Rourke.”