Coney by Amram Ducovny Page B

God.”
    At a fish store specializing in
just-caught fish
, Zadeh bought the last laugh.
    Appropriately bloody catch in bucket, they had insisted that Bama immediately clean and fry the hard-won prize. None of them particularly liked fish, but they were no less vengefully ravenous than cannibals at the flesh of captured enemies.
    The last bite cued a bowel movement lecture, followed by the lecturer’s long absence that taught by example. When Zadeh, glowing with health, returned from the bathroom, he would head for his desk and open his Old Testament. Harry would pull up a chair beside him.
    Zadeh maintained an unblinking stare while reading the black Hebrew letters of the Torah, moving his head, rather than his eyes, from right to left. Harry considered those fixed eyes as unfathomably powerful as Buck Rogers’s ray gun.
    Soon Zadeh would sound a salivaless expectoration and reach for his shiny, black Waterman pen, whose circumference nearly matched the fat Upmann cigars he sometimes smoked. Unscrewing the cover and jabbing the point downward to loosen the flow of ink, he would launch a closed-mouthed vibrato growl of disgust for the offending passage. The fourteen-carat gold-plaited nib then glided along the margins of the Torah, leaving hairline strokes of blue ink which at first seemed a meticulously copied musical score but, whencompleted, formed a perfectly even block of a midget Hebrew army commanded to attention. The error set right, he would again spit it out and swivel his head in search of the next abomination.
    When turning a page, Zadeh would bid it good-bye with an exasperated “Enough already.” This habit had alerted Harry, at age ten, to his family’s general failure to draw distinctions between the animate and inanimate. His father, reading Freud, would mumble, “Thank you.” His mother praised or cursed her mascara brush. Bama’s intimacy with the evil eye empowered her to chase it from the room by brandishing a straw broom and cursing.
    His father explained that Zadeh and Bama and perhaps to a lesser extent, his mother, were victims of Polish romanticism, an aberration which drew no distinction between fantasy and reality. The results could be as relatively benign as electing of the concert pianist Paderewski Poland’s first president, or as life-threatening as centuries of insistence that Poland could subdue Russia.
    The explanation had shed sense on some of Zadeh’s eccentricities: when he came across a picture of Stalin in a newspaper, he would obliterate him with a punch that put a hole in the paper, then brush his right palm over his left to bid good riddance to the Russian tyrant. Or the time in a local candy store when Harry, age twelve, had been drawn to a large group surrounding the pinball machine and egging on the player with: “Go get ’em, Pop.” On tiptoes, Harry had watched Zadeh barking commands in English and Yiddish to the silver balls as they collided with the bumpers.
    Playing pinball was a sop to Zadeh’s passion for gambling. Lacking funds, he usually was relegated to kibitzing. More than one black eye had confirmed the stupidity of some who resented his advice.
    Eventually he had been picked up in a raid on a gambling casino. Bailed out and brought home by Bama and Harry’s parents, he ignored their questions, fuming over the duplicity of the number 16, which had lied to him.
    â€œSixteen,” his mother repeated, adding with a derisive laugh. “Wasn’t that the age you said I was too young to go out with boys? Some lucky number.”
    â€œLeah,” Bama shouted, “you must not speak to Mr. Fishman that way.”
    â€œMr. Fishman, Mr. Fishman, can’t you call him anything else? He’s your husband, my father, for Christ’s sake.”
    â€œIn Warsaw …” Bama began, but deferred to her husband, who abandoned the number 16 and pointed a stiff finger at Harry’s mother, arcing