In the early fifties the crowded tenement district in the old mill city where I grew up was gradually thinning out as families were beginning yet another migration into newer, more prosperous communities.

            My mother had died when I was three and my father and I lived with my grandmother in one such tenement.  She, like most of the older people there, spoke with a thick Italian accent, and most times it was easier for her to revert to her native Italian language. 

            I was thirteen the year I became a Freshman in the public high school which was located in a neighborhood unfamiliar to me.  I didn’t realize it at the time but on that first morning, dressed in a new outfit she had sewn for me, I took my first steps away from the only world I had ever known.

            After walking six blocks I turned down a side street which I thought might be a short cut to the school.  An old man was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store, totally engrossed in the small mound of dirt at his feet.  It happened so fast there was no time to react.  Two boys ran past me and one smacked something into the back of my head.  I fell over against the old man who just barely managed to keep his balance.  He raised his broom and swore at the boys who had already darted around the corner.  I reached to the back of my head already knowing what it was and desperately began tugging at the sharp, sticky wad of burrs. What a way to start school.  I was yanking and pulling succeeding only in trapping more hair around the burrs.  He stood there for a moment watching me before he spoke.

          “Wait,” he said.  “You’re making it worse.  Come inside.”

He took hold of my arm and guided me into a small delicatessen.

          Through my tears I made out the chipped, white lettering on the door which read Saul Kaplan, Prop.  The store was long and narrow.  On left was a sparkling, glass-fronted counter behind which were trays of strange looking food.  Suddenly the aroma in the place settled in around me and I almost forgot why I was in there. 

          Opposite the counter, against dingy, gray walls were two small tables with four chairs neatly arranged around each of them.  He motioned me to sit down.  His face was ragged and his mouth drooped at the corners.  Watery eyes squinted at me from behind rimless glasses then he planted bony fingers on top of my head and examined the problem.

          “Stop sniffling and give me your comb.”

For the next twenty minutes he separated strands of hair combing away bits and pieces of burrs all the while muttering foreign words under his breath. When he was through he shuffled into the back room.  I craned my neck and could see it was the kitchen and he was at the sink washing his hands.  He came back out carrying two pieces of cake and set one plate in front of me. 

          “Bubka,” he said, “I make the best.”

            I was already late for school but was not too anxious to get there anyway so I thanked him and we ate in silence.  His hands shook slightly as he broke each piece carefully and when he was done he pinched a few crumbs between his fingers and dropped them into his mouth.  A hint of a smile traced his thin lips. 

            “Better now little girl?”

            I nodded.  “Better.”

            Each morning after, at seven-thirty, the little bell over the door would signal my arrival and Mr. Kaplan would pop up from behind the counter.  I would slide a dime toward him and was introduced to such delicacies as kugel, blintzes, knishes and bagels.  Quite a change from my usual fare. 

            No matter what I bought it only cost a dime.  I would take my treat over to the corner table and Mr. Kaplan would drink coffee.  Like my grandmother he too had an accent and I noticed that sometimes when he spoke, his eyes, like hers, seemed to take on a faraway look.  Such mysteries in their eyes; eyes that unfolded a certain memory of a warm smile, a touch.  Where did they go when their eyes wandered past me?

            I found out Mr. Kaplan lived alone upstairs over his store in three rooms.

            “I am an old man,” he explained.  “I only need a little space.”

            It saddened me to think of him alone but when I pressed him about his family a shadow seemed to fall across his face and I knew I had said something wrong, but just as quickly the shadow lifted. 

            “My brother and his wife live around the corner.”

            So he was not completely alone. That made me feel better. He took to filling small containers with something different for me to take to home and sample.  Chopped liver, which I tasted and gave to my cat.  Gefilte fish which I also tasted and which I also gave to my cat.  How, I wondered, could something that smelled so good turn out to be just liver and fish?  Poor Mr. Kaplan.  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.  Because I never said anything he thought I was liking that.  My pretty cat was getting pretty fat.

            Sometimes I would find him in the back room sitting in a tattered arm chair, playing checkers with an imaginary partner, moving the red and black pieces indiscriminately all over the board. 

            “You cheat, Mr. Kaplan,” I would tell him in a mock serious tone.

            “You mind your business,” he’d mutter and drop the pieces into a small, brown paper bag.

            One morning as I was getting up to leave one of my books toppled over against his cup spilling hot coffee on his hand.  I grabbed a napkin and began wiping his hand.  “I’m so sorry.”

            “No problem,” he insisted, “no problem.”

I stopped and stared at some numbers which seemed to be tattooed on the inside of his arm near his wrist.  He gently pulled his arm away and adjusted his sleeve.  I had no idea what they were or what they meant.  His mouth became a thin line and he read the questions in my eyes. 

            “Dachau”, he whispered.

            I didn’t know what that meant either so I remained silent and the lines seemed to etch deeper into his face.  It must have been a place because he said his wife had died there.  And his son, his daughter-in-law and their little girl.

            “My granddaughter,” he said, barely above a whisper and laughed sadly.  “The old man lives.  The young ones die and the old man lives.”  He shook his head and in one quick motion slapped his knee and dragged himself behind the counter.

            “I give you something nice for lunch.  You eat that peanut butter all the time.  Look at you, so skinny.  He wrapped two cheese blintzes in wax paper and filled a small container with kashe and bows, which I never gave to my cat. 

            I walked behind the counter and rested my hand on his arm.  He placed his hand over mine.  “Don’t be sad for me,” he said.  “Little girls should laugh, be happy.”

            “I’m sorry they hurt you, Mr. Kaplan.”  But I didn’t even know who I meant when I said “they”. 

            “I’m sorry they hurt anybody.”  He pushed the bag at me.  “You will have the best lunch in school and when your friends ask where you got it, you tell them from Saul Kaplan’s store.  You bring me business from school, I get rich, I retire.”

            That day, after school, I spent the afternoon in the library.  I lugged volumes of books to the table and read everything I could on a place called Dachau and other places like it and one book led to another.  I had heard the old people in my neighborhood speak in Italian of Mussolini, Il Duce, they would say and spit on the ground.  The closest I had come to the war was in the balcony of the Central movie theater on Saturday afternoons.  I had never heard anything about what I was reading either at home or at school. 

            Before I knew it, it was 5:30.  I had a long walk home and all kinds of things were rolling around in my head.  There was so much I didn’t know.  How will ever know all there was to learn….about so much.  Some people lived and died within a few city blocks and the world beyond was a strange place.  But everything was changing, moving ahead and away from the familiar.  My grandmother was afraid.  Her friends were dwindling and her grandchild was growing up, skirting the edges of other worlds. For the first time in my life I had friends with names like O’Brien, Kristakos, Meister and one, a girl named Ernestine, had black skin.  A wrinkled old man fed me bubka and blintzes, bagels and lox.  He told me of a place called Israel and a Hell called Dachau.

They all had stories to tell.

            “My grandfather once told me…..”

            “My uncle was a sponge diver in Greece and one time during the war……”

            “They were sharecroppers in Mississippi and once…..”

            “They couldn’t get any work because no Irish need apply.”

            “They threw rocks through their windows.”  But why?  “Because they were Jews”

            “Why Ernestine?”

            “Because….”

            “Never mind.  I know why.”

            Against my grandmother’s bosom I had been sheltered, warmly and safely, and on those night so long ago when I crawled into her bed and curled up against her, I’d beg her to tell me a story.

            “Tell me a story, Nana.  A long story about the old country.  What was it like?  Did you have a Nana and did she tell you stories too?”

            “Figlia mia,” she would say and brush the hair from my eyes.

            The doctor said he was sorry.  “Congestive heart failure.”  But he was wrong.  There was no way her heart ever failed.

            I didn’t go to school for a week.  From the wall over her dresser I took down a yellowed photograph and stared at the somber face of a handsome young man, hair parted in the middle, a moustache and dark eyes.  Next to him his wife, hair piled neatly in a bun, with a smile not quite fully realized. 

            I folded her faded housedresses and wept for the beautiful young woman who had arrived on Ellis Island so many years before.  Sicilian peasants carrying two battered cloth suitcases and a dream for themselves and their three children, the youngest, my father clutching his mama’s skirt. 

            The first place they looked was up.  They turned around and they looked up at the buildings which stretched to the sky and she said aloud the only English word she knew then, “America.”  I wondered if I would have had the courage.

            I wept for Saul Kaplan and al the others who made the journey with scars burned into their bodies and minds.  They groped their way through the country until they heard a familiar sound and then clustered together in newer, smaller worlds.

            But one day their children’s children would all speak the same language.  Their eyes would open a little wider, they would hear other voices.  We were one step ahead of the changing times.  The graffiti scrawled on tenement buildings was being written with a new piece of chalk.

            Dennis Malone and Anna Lopez

            Bernie Levine loves Jennie O’Dowd

            Stan Sirawski and Angie Marcello

            The walls were tumbling down and old people closed their eyes remembering a simpler time.

            It was a warm February day.  Water seeped out from beneath every snowbank and I tracked it into his store.  He was sitting at the corner table, bundled in a heavy brown sweater, his hands cradling his coffee mug and I might have imagined it, I don’t know, but I swear his face brightened when I walked in. 

            “Where you been?  Sick?’

            I told him about my grandmother.  I sat there, my chin resting in the palm of my hand, the bubka which he set before me, untouched.  I told him how much I would miss her.  He said he knew.  That he understood.  Then he took a paper napkin and wiped at my tears. 

            “Come on,” he said.  “We go in the kitchen and say a little prayer for her, ya?”

            “Now?  Here?”

            He lowered his chin.  “And why not now?  And here?  That’s the beauty of talking to God.  You don’t need an appointment.”  He turned around at the kitchen doorway.  “And you don’t even have to go to his office.”

            That made me smile and I followed him. 

            He removed a pile of newspapers from a small wooden bench and we sat side by side.  He placed a black yarmulke on the back of his head and began.

            “Wait.  Teach me the prayer and I’ll say it with you.”

            He nodded and began one word at a time slowly and I repeated it. Then we said it together.  When we were done I blessed myself and in spite of the solemn moment Mr. Kaplan shook his head and smiled.

            Before I left he removed a small glass jar from the cabinet over the sink.  It was filled with dimes, all the dimes I had paid him for so many mornings. 

            “I want you to buy something.  Something to last a long time.  That when you look at it, you will remember Saul Kaplan.”

            All I could do was blink up at him.

            He pointed a gnarled finger at the door.  “Go now, so you won’t be late for school.”

            At the door, I turned and smiled at the thin, tired body, stooped from the weight of some invisible burden, making his way back to the kitchen.  Maybe in his eyes I reminded him of the granddaughter who was lost to him.  But it was I who would always be grateful if I was able to fill a sad void. 

            Mr. Kaplan died in May.  It was I, always his first customer, who found him in the kitchen.  I think I realized it as soon as I entered the store.  Only half the trays had been set inside the counter and the air seemed still and heavy.  I called his name twice as I walked toward the back room.  He was in his chair, his head back, looking like any old man just taking a nap.  In truth it was as if he had said, “Enough already, I’m tired.”

            His left arm was dangling over the side of the chair and I felt for a pulse.  There was none.  I telephoned his brother and in the few minutes it took for him to arrive, I sat on the bench behind the chair.  Waiting, remembering, fingering the gold cross that had been purchased with a handful of dimes, holding back tears long enough to recite his prayer, the one he had taught me when my grandmother died. 

            “Yskgadal, v’yiskadash shmay rabo, b’ol’mo deevro hir’usay, v’yamleeh mal’husay……”

            There had been beauty in their eyes.  I had seen it.  As if I ever needed anything to remember either of them.

            Sometimes my little daughter will ask me what I am thinking about.  “You look so far away mommy.”

            “I’m just remembering a smile, honey”

            A touch, a photograph, a place and time, and love.

– Lenora Salvucci

Author’s Note: This short story was published in a magazine called SIGN in October 1979.