סיפור פילדלפיה

היי חברים

לאלו מכם שיש להם סבלנות לקרוא באנגלית, אני מצרפת סיפור שכתבתי השבוע ללימודים. אשמח מאד לשמוע תגובות וביקורות. ייתכן שבקרוב אתרגם אותו לעברית, אבל מי שמסכים לקרוא את המקור – זה כמובן עדיף. והרי הוא לפניכם.

מתגעגעת לכולכם, כאן בניו יורק.

Funeral Philly/ Yardenne Greenspan

"Shall I tell you the story that every writer wants to write?" Russell asked Dina, giving her a quick look through the rearview mirror. "Sure", she answered, sneaking a peek at her watch. She was about to be late for the service. She had already lost ten minutes going around in circles with the driver of the first taxi she'd taken. Even after repeating the address three times he could not for the life of him understand her. And she knew that he was, in fact, hanging on for dear life. The moist look in his eyes reflected how desperate he was for the money. She knew nothing of hanging on for dear life, only of hanging on, and she told him to let her off. Her eyes were now also moist. She knew she was going to be late.

Her watch was showing 12 minutes to three as Russell said: "I went to penitentiary for seven years when I was fourteen. I was framed".

"What for?" Dina asked.

"What do you think they would frame a guy like me for?" Russell asked, as if it were obvious. Actually, Dina had no clue what "a guy like him" might be. There was nothing unique or out of the ordinary about him, although the picture on his taxi license did resemble a mug shot. "What?" she finally asked.

"They said I beat a man to death", Russell replied, setting the blinker for the right turn. "Not only that", he added with serene wonderment, as if to show that this was the truly extraordinary part, "they said I broke every bone in his body".

It seemed that Dina always came to Philadelphia for funerals. The last one had been her grandmother's. It was quite the convenient death. Her father had been informed in advance. "They say it should happen any day now", he told her over the phone. "Can you come with me?" It felt like ages since she had last seen her grandmother, on that hot day in August, feeding her mashed potatoes in the hospital's dining room. Her grandma's eyes were considering the world around her through a vale of wonder and awe. Everything was fresh and crisp. Except for the mashed potatoes. It was hard to unite this woman in front of her with the image in Dina's head. With the loving, strict and loyal woman who could drive Dina's mother crazy with passive-aggressive criticism, and on whose chest she once fell asleep in a car, only to wake up in Niagara Falls.

"I've got to go to my grandma's funeral in Philadelphia", she explained to her boss later. "Oh, your grandma passed away?" her boss asked empathetically. "Not yet", Dina apologized, "but we're expecting her to."

It was a good thing that they left when they did, for she did, in fact, die while they were on their way. Philadelphia, the city of Dina's childhood memories, of riding the merry-go-round, visits to the zoo and drawers full of stuffed animals, was forever transformed. Instead of an ice cream cone, during the Shiva she was offered a nice glass of vodka and asked about her plans for the future. There was no escaping it. She was now an adult.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, unsure why Russell would choose to deliver this piece of information to a passenger. "Oh", she uttered, glancing at the road around her, trying to make sure they were still headed in the direction of the funeral home. It was useless though – she did not know the direction. They were far away from the red brick buildings of her youth, the ones that still haunted her dreams. At night Philadelphia would crumble around her. The fragile houses of the city, forever riding the thin line between majestic and meager, dignified and dilapidated, would crumple and tumble like paper into a wastebasket.

Two years had passed since her grandmother's funeral, and in these two years Philly had become more and more of a distant memory. It was a place she told her friends about with sparkling eyes, reminiscing, but she hadn't come to visit and neither had her father. Her past was now a thing of the past.

Russell concentrated on the slow traffic in front of his taxi, trying to force the cars forward with the power of his mind. He had done this all the time when he was a kid. At nighttime in his room while his brothers and sisters were asleep; in the mornings, riding the school bus. But whether it was flying out the window or driving the bus off a cliff, these attempts never worked. He hadn't tried it in over fifty years, but this was an emergency. This young lady had a funeral to attend. "Freakin' turtles, move!!" he shouted towards the crawling vehicles, and then, turning to Dina, "Whose funeral is it?"

"It's my dad's uncle", Dina answered.

"And you came all the way down from New York for it?" Russell seemed to think that this was the most unusual fact stated in the taxi in the last few minutes.

"My dad couldn't come", she answered then asked, "Why were you framed? I mean, why you?" She wasn't sure if she wanted to know the answer, but she had to ask.

"Oh", Russell said matter-of-factly, "'cause I was always getting into trouble. I was in reform school, you see". "What for?" Dina asked.

"Well, I had a master key to every newspaper box in town", he confided.

"How did you get that?" She asked. It was now two minutes to three. There was no chance of getting there on time. "Well", Russell explained, "it was the darndest thing. I broke into this one box, and the key was just lying there".

It was the middle of winter, 1956. The snow was stacking up high as Russell's numb fingers picked the lock. He had to remove his gloves for the task, but his bulky and misshapen winter-coat still hampered his precision. He'd practiced this maneuver for days, using the lock on the bathroom door as a stand-in, and finally got it down. But in all of his rehearsals he never factored in the constraining shape of his sister's hand-me-down coat. It was meant for her big frame, designed to contain her in her entirety, but when she proceeded from "big" to just plain "big-ass" his parents had to get her a new coat, and Russell was left with the remnants.

This was taking too long, he thought, shaking now as his hands acquired the wintery sensation of growing larger, bizarre, like claws. He would have to give up the whole operation soon. Russell wasn't even looking at the box, but rather at the far end of the street, where he thought he saw the shadow of an approaching man under the street lamp, when, with a soft click, the lock suddenly came loose in his hands. Without a thought to his frozen digits, he reached into the half-open box, ready to collect the change he would find in it into his coat pockets. Instead, he saw the key resting atop the stack of newspapers. It was small and fragile, and seemed more fitting for a little girl's journal than for such a goldmine. A tag attached to it read "master". "Now this is a different kind of change", Russell whispered to himself, laughing an inner sort of laugh, as he did whenever he said something he found to be clever or ironic. In his mind, a new chapter in the plot of his life had just begun – something fresh and thrilling."I'm afraid we're not going to make it on time, darling", he now told Dina, grimacing at the other drivers. "I'm terribly sorry about this friggin' thing".

"It's not your fault", Dina assured him. She had become resigned to the inescapable delay. They would have to accept it, she thought, momentarily regretting the whole ordeal.

"You know, I missed a funeral once", Russell interrupted her bitter thoughts. "No one told me where it was, I didn't know if I needed to get to Alaska or Arizona. I was uninformed. So anyway, I grew up right here in Philly. I was one of eleven kids".

He was a sad little dirty boy in ragged boots and a woman's coat, its pockets heavy with coins. An urban peasant cross-dresser with no place to go. The three weeks when he was master of the master key were like a dream, but not necessarily a good one. He spent his money on silly things – candy, comic books. He was too afraid to attract attention to himself by buying a new winter-coat. The one true luxury he allowed himself was a pair of thick and smooth black socks. He had seen them in the window of a department store, and had actually walked in the store several times just to run his hands over them. They were soft like silk and tight like a hug. They felt like he imagined a cloud would. He never took them off for the rest of those three weeks, until he was caught and sent to reform school. He sobbed quietly as the officer ripped off the smelly socks and replaced them with the tough, white institutional ones.

They would be starting now, Dina thought gravely at five past three. The rabbi would make a short introduction and all the room would join him in the first prayer. If she had made it on time, she would be wondering which relatives she was supposed to recognize and which were virtually strangers. Had her father been there with her, they would have discussed it afterwards, on the way to the reception, him reminding her, telling the same stories again, their black attire gleaming in the sun. "Man, this is a beautiful day for a funeral," he would joke. "Thank you Uncle Mort!"

Russell still remembered the day he was working in the carpentry workshop when he suddenly heard a strange rumor fill the school. The rumor ran through the hallways, bouncing off the walls, gaining speed and volume and finally reaching him with all its might. He was wanted for murder. Apparently, he was suspected of killing a man during a fight outside an Eagles' game last night. No one at school seemed to mind the impossibility of this, seeing as he was in his dorm the night before, playing solitaire under his blanket like he did every night. He hardly had time to ponder this puzzle himself before, almost uncontrollably, he was running outside, to the school's yard, past the guards who were reading their magazines and up across the fence, unintentionally kicking the sign that read "Philadelphia Central Reform School for Boys" on his way out. He did not know why, nor did he think this would do him any good. All Russell knew was that he had spent enough time cooped up, be it inside a fat girl's coat or within the walls of this pseudo-prison, and he wanted to be master once again. It was less than twelve hours before he was arrested and taken to penitentiary to the beginning of the proceedings of his trial, which began on the date of his fourteenth birthday.

"So what happened then?" Dina asked, drifting in and out of her own thoughts.

"Well, the most important thing about prison is, how you call it, networking, and I was always in and out of court, so I didn’t know anybody really, and I only kept getting into more and more trouble. I got into a fight with the sergeant and was transferred to a prison in California. That's where I met Charles Manson".

"You're kidding", Dina said incredulously.

"No, I met him. And I can tell you he's just a little idiot, nothing more".

Ironically enough, during his time in Corcoran State, California, his job was to make keys. He would get molds and fill them with metal, then delicately shape the edges so that the key was one-of-a-kind. One time he stole one of his creations and took it with him to his cell, wanting to discover what it opened. It didn't work on any of the cell doors, or on the gate of the yard. Later on, a warden informed him that the keys were actually used for different facilities around California, such as soda machines and mail boxes. Russell often wondered whether the key he stole could open any of the newspaper boxes.

In the taxi, stuck in traffic, things were out of his hands once again. He could control the ignition, the route and the calls he accepted, but not the other cars, nor the pain he felt as he was once more delayed by a hesitant driver. In a final act of release he had decided to sell his taxi and stay on as a driver only, owner of nothing. "Something good did come out of all this", he said suddenly. "I wrote a new law".

"What law?" Dina asked.

"The law that says that the judge can't influence the decision of the jury", Russell said proudly.

"You wrote that law?" Dina asked again, glancing again at his license to catch his full name.

"Well, it was an understanding before that, but my appeal made it into a proper law," Russell explained, gripping the wheel with all his might and steering them, finally, into the parking lot of Goldstein's Funeral Home.

She tipped him five dollars, though there was nothing moist and pleading in his eyes. "You see", he explained before she left, "it was the only thing I ever wrote. I would have become a writer like you, but I can't spell to save my life". She knew she should be going, but something was holding her back. "You know", she said, not sure why, "tomorrow is the Jewish New Year".

"Oh", Russell said excitedly, "happy new year!"

"Happy new year," Dina answered and hurried inside "Thank-you."

She opened the doors to the large room quietly and sat in the back, not even noticeable, as her dad's cousins were eulogizing their deceased father. She was trying to make the most of what was left of the service, but could not concentrate. Finally, she took out her phone and did a Google search on the taxi driver's name. She listened to the rabbi sing El Male Rachamim as she waited for the results to appear, but a moment before they did she turned her phone off. "Amen", she said with the rest of the people in the Temple, as the coffin was carried away.

The End