The Café of the Question Mark
Published in Issue #32(Excerpt from a Novel)
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Europe becomes a room. The same room. Cramped and cold and dark as a cave. Flowered wallpaper blistered or blotched with fantastic continents, dream portals to places-other-than-this. Peeled in stripes as if someone had clawed at it desperate to enter those countries. A stained mattress on the floor, scrawled with the graffiti of other fugitives. Desperate messages or casual musings or rants written in Latin letters or Cyrillic letters, or the barbed Hebrew letters of Yiddish. At night the same flickering candle throws their conjoined, moving shadows on the wall, multiplying them and connecting them into the forms of all those other scrawlers. When Elazar blows out the candle, cockroaches scamper across them and the noise of the street seeps into the room. Carriages rumbling over paving stones, carters yelling, their shouted words teetering on the edge of meaning.
Like two characters in a folk tale, Elazar and Ruhu had jumped on a white horse and galloped away from his intended bride and a wedding that sat like a black toad on their future. They had gone first ridden to Biaylstok, where he found a buyer willing to pay well for Malka, the white mare. His old boxing manager Benya had arranged, or more exactly insisted on, a quick wedding for the fugitives, coming up with a rabbi, or what Elazar hoped was a rabbi: a cadaverous stick of a man, his strangely yellow-colored hair and beard sticking out in clumps like little explosions around his face. Elazar...
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