Land of Promise

Not dragging his feet despite being so tired, he who had been born in Istanbul without dreams of grandeur and without history walked as if all fear but also all illusion had been devoured by the ocean, on a journey so long that he managed to play dominoes, try out the other language, and worry about succumbing to the temptation of getting drunk.

Tall, pale, alone; uncommonly white and framed by a smile that I could never match; contained within his own certainty that nothing would be lacking; hardly a few minutes of silence, a code, an unknown visage: that’s what he was like. Someone could translate, not forgetting his well-proportioned slimness, “elegant”; even “poor but elegant”; or even more “a poor but elegant Jew.” From Istanbul, though others say – other women, really, my aunts – that he came from a town near Smyrna (or Izmir or Stambul).

His feet softly sheathed, he dragged other soles over the smoothness of the board: steadfast and exhausted, he mended shoes day after day, lining up the work and the money in an invisible promenade. They slipped over the table. He counted them, had the shoes he’d repaired recorded (not by pairs but by unit). “That’s the difference between sellers and menders, they count them by two and we count them one by one.” And when Elías helped him, he smiled: “Son, you’ve heard it said that two men don’t fit in one shoe. That sounds like the exercises you do with your...