The Lion Seeker Read Online Free PDF

Isaac watches her untie the leash from the wall but when she pulls it the dog and its tail droop and it looks at him and yaps and Isaac runs across and falls over it, squeezes its huddled warmth tight against him. I didn’t even give a name yet.
    Listen Isaac, don’t stir me now. Don’t make me boil. Be good.
    I’m not, Mame, I’m not.
    He looks up and she’s moving to the sewing room. She’s moving fast and all of a sudden it hits him that it’s just like it was with the couchers: it’s going to be the couchers all over again! He starts to shout as loud as he can, he leaves the dog and he chases after her with his arms spread. No Mame, no! Don’t do it, no, Mame!
    Mame puts on the light in the cramped hut, turns to face him with a screwed-up face. What are you hammering in my head for? Calm down.
    You mustn’t, Mame!
    Mustn’t what? What are you crying about?
    As she talks she reaches into a hiding place behind a half-splintery folded table and brings out a bottle of brandy, then another. Isaac stops shouting, leans against the wall.
    What is it? says Mame. What’s the matter?
    He doesn’t answer but watches her wrapping the bottles briskly in newspaper so they won’t clink inside her handbag. She puts the handbag strap in the crook of her plump arm, her chin points. Your friend, she says.
    He turns and the little dog is standing there watching his face. Mame comes out and picks up the dog’s string, hands it to him. She walks off and he doesn’t move. She stops and looks back. Isaac.
    He follows her and the dog follows him. Drooping both. Okay, oright, ja: the dog will not stay. He’s resigned. Seeing her go for the sewing room like that—it lit up the fearful memory of that other day, harsh and real enough to burn away all the protest in him. More than.
    Â 
    Old carpets draped on a sagging frame that reeked of smoke and sweat, that’s all it was, pressed against one wall of the workshop opposite Tutte’s bench. And the warm feeling from the slumped men there on it, their grizzled faces and hairy hands. He loved to watch them, how they tipped bottles of Chateau brandy and used their penknives on plates of pickled fish or to cut up fatty chunks of Goldenberg’s kosher polony or salty crackling logs of biltong. The way they argued over the scattered news pages. How they taught him to play klaberjass with a dog-eared pack showing ladies in bathing costumes (slapping the cards down hard, shouting
Shtoch! Yus! Menel!
), and how they smoked their oval Turkish Blend cigarettes pinched in a circlet of thumb and forefinger.
    His father would look up and sometimes add a murmur to their lurching debates from the workbench where he was bent over the watches; never more.
    Simple Fivel had the gap in his teeth and the tongue curling through to the tip of his nose. Kaplan used to bend over the side hacking up black jelly into a saucer always positioned by his left foot. Mandelbaum had no teeth at all, his gums alone crunching peanuts and even Mame’s taygluch—syruped doughnuts baked candy hard—while he winked at Isaac, making him giggle. They were the men of old and their hoarse voices breathed to him the wisdom of narrow streets and distant times and fading places, they wore their hats on the backs of their heads and went at life with a sideways elbow, a knowing whistle from the corner of the mouth. Scrapers, survivors. Full of jolly battering. They told no stories that were not jokes. There is a way to laugh at anything and they had it, a glaze of double meaning he could never quite penetrate but always sense. And when they laughed, their heads rocked back and the couch squeaked and shifted. Farting Ellenbogen the crook. Yishi Strudz doing tricks with hanky and spoon. Swarthy Leitener the strongman buckling horseshoes, a drop of shvitz quivering on the tip of his arced nose.
    While they laughed he saw that their sad drooping eyes did