Just Like Dostoyevsky - Barry Rachin (early readers .txt) 📗

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 Dakota? 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.”
“You have to ask an Irishman if he’d like a cup of tea?” He smiled at his own joke and promptly sat down at the table. Becky padded quietly into the room and leaned up against the dishwasher.
“Where’re you from?” Sylvia asked.
“Glendalough. In the Wicklow Mountains of eastern Ireland. Beautiful country. Not much steady work, though, for someone like myself. Saint Kevin founded a monastery in Glendalough in the 6th century.”
“I’m not familiar with Saint Kevin,” she said with a faint smile.
“Ah!” He caught the subtle humor. “No, I should be surprised if you were.”
She brought him his tea which he sweetened with sugar. “Never married?” The question was gratuitous. She already knew the answer.
“Never had the misfortune.” He continued to drink his tea in silence, the face dusted with grayish film - cement or sand - the curly brown hair drifting out from under the shaggy cap. “Not being much of a talker,... it’s a bit of an affliction with me,” he said. “Don’t know what to say when I’m around people such as yourself.” He sipped at the tea, draining the last of it from the mug. “All I can do is mend walls.”
“If people could mend walls as easily as they make mindless chatter, there’d be no need for people such as you.”
“Never thought of it that way,” he said rising to his feet. His legs were thin and slightly bowed.
“One question before you go,” Sylvia said. “The section of wall you repaired looks fine, just as it did before the accident. But now the undamaged portion somehow looks different.”
“While I rebuilt the wall, your daughter tooled the joints,” he replied, “from one end to the other. That’s why it looks spanking new.” He was at the door now. “Like I said, I ain’t much good with people, but I do a passable job with mortar and stone.”
When he was gone, Becky added, “He showed me how to use the pointing tool.” Sylvia remembered the useless-looking, piece of scrap metal. “Scrape the broken mortar and stone dust from the old bricks. How to wet down the crumbling cement and reform the joints.” There was more than a hint of reproach in her voice. “He’s not some stupid, working-class clod, if that’s what you think.”
“I never, for one minute suggested - ”
“And he never snuck a peek at my boobs or bare legs. Not once!”


Sylvia opted to stay at her interpreter’s flat outside Moscow rather than a Western-style hotel. Tuesday the electricity was off and she was forced to carry her grocery bags up four flights of darkened stairs to the cramped apartment where they lit candles and waited for the lights to be restored. No one seemed to care. Since ‘perestroika’, municipal services and living conditions had deteriorated.
“Much divorce in Russia. I’ve been married three times, my present husband twice,” Marina said. “One can’t be happy when life is so hard.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and held the glowing weed in front of Sylvia’s face. “In Russia we understand what tar and nicotine does to your throat and lungs; we know vodka pickles your brain, rots the liver.” She sucked on the tobacco and blew a thick column of smoke out her nose. “We are not stupid, only weary of life.”
Later that night, neighbors in the upstairs apartment began to fight. The husband was drunk; the wife hysterical. The muffled sounds of young children crying filtered through the thin walls. The screaming and recriminations rose to a crescendo and just as abruptly subsided in an eerie stillness. “When these things happen,” Marina muttered, sitting in the darkness waiting for the electricity to be restored, “we have an expression. We say ‘Just like Dostoyevsky!’. Do you understand?”
“Yes I understand,” Sylvia said.
In the morning, she was lecturing at Moscow University. She would covered the first hundred pages of Crime and Punishment, focusing on the murder of the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna; Raskolinikov’s chance meeting in the tavern with the drunken buffoon, Marmeladov; the letter from his mother describing Mr. Svidrgailov’s botched attempt to seduce the younger sister, Dounia; and the dream sequence predating the murders. With Dostoyevsky as a starting point, subsequent, guest speakers would proceed to the other, pre-modern, Slavic writers.
Sylvia wanted to review her notes. But without adequate light or heat - the furnace had shut down when the electricity was lost - nothing could be accomplished. “Spakonay nochee (good night).” She went into the other room, put on her nightgown and lay down on the cold, sagging mattress.


In late August, Sylvia arrived home one day to find the kitchen floor under an inch of water, an ominous, hiss coming from the cabinet under the sink. Kneeling down, she opened the cabinet and was struck full force by a blast of cold water. The blow knocked her almost to the middle of the room where she lay dazed in the cool wetness. Water was pouring from the joint where the shut-off valve ran up into the sink. She edged closer and tried to turn the valve but the spray was too intense and drove her back. Her right eye was throbbing, the vision fractured into multiple images.
Sylvia struggled to her feet but promptly fell down again whacking her head on a chair. Retreating to the den, she dialed the plumber and reached an answering machine.
Mason and general handyman. No job too small..
“Do handymen fix leaky pipes?” she mused. Placing the heel of her hand over the right eye, Sylvia dialed the number on the torn scrap of paper. The phone rang a half dozen times before she heard the familiar Irish accent. “It’s Sylvia Mandelstam.” She was crying now, making no effort to hide her distress. “A pipe broke. The kitchen’s flooded. My eye hurts. Can you help me?”
“Where’s the leak?”
“Under the sink.”
“Go down in the basement. Shut the main water supply.”
“I