The Pinch Read Online Free PDF

withdrew what looked at first glance like a hunk of driftwood but proved on closer inspection to be a violin, a rough and rustic relation of the original instrument. Feeling for the edge of the counter, he laid the instrument tenderly atop the hill of fabric, like an infant he was preparing to diaper. Then the blind man deftly replaced the missing string, turning the pegs at the scroll end to tighten it, plucking it until he was satisfied with the sound.
    “Let’s see can I play y’all gentlemens a tune,” he said, stooping to remove a bow from his sack. Bracing the violin under his bristly chin, he began to saw the strings, while loose hairs from the bow tossed like the mane of the horse they were shorn from.
    Muni’s experience of fiddlers was limited to the vagabond musicians he’d heard at shtetl weddings as a boy, and so he expected something lively. Perhaps a jig with a foot-stomping rhythm that expressed the vitality of a people who, common wisdom had it, were a fundamentally happy lot. But this tune, if you could call it a tune, was achingly sorrowful. There were brief melodic moments, but no sooner did you begin to relax with a lyrical phrase than the music turned plaintive again. Muni wondered if the musician had simply failed to master his instrument, a judgment his uncle—clapping his hands over his ears—seemed also to have made. In rejecting the serenade, Pinchas appeared to disregard as well the presence in his store of the blacksmith’s shifty son Hershel, a well-known ganef, a petty thief. Muni had been told to be on the lookout for the kid—a needle-nosed gowk in knee pants and jockey’s cap—but he was too diverted by the music to pay him any heed. Though the fiddling transported him to a place he didn’t especially want to go, he was helpless to resist being carried away.
    Then the Negro ceased playing as abruptly as he’d begun and asked the storekeeper what he owed him. Pinchas made a dismissive sign—the recital was compensation enough—but as the blind man was insensible to signs, the storekeeper came forward to escort him (“Name’s Asbestos”) from the premises. Behind them, his shirt bulging with pilfered loot, slipped young Hershel Tarnopol.
    Thereafter the blind man with the unlikely name became a fixture in the neighborhood. Novak the pawnbroker, who ran a shop on Beale Street, remembered having seen him playing on various corners down there. So why relocate from the district where he belonged to one where he was plainly, so to speak, out of tune? Did he mean to provide, with his unearthly oratorios, a kind of somber complement to the otherwise vibrant commercial racket of North Main? Because the blind man’s music served as a frequent counterpoint to the three-toned horn on Sam Alabaster’s touring car; it challenged the clangor of the trolley bells and the palaver of Leon Shapiro enticing passersby into his emporium to be measured for a suit of clothes. It was an antidote to the ecstatic ululation of the disciples of Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya, gathered of an evening in Market Square Park to say the blessing over the new moon. And though he couldn’t have said why, Muni Pinsker never passed him without dropping a little spare change if he had any into the fiddler’s felt hat, which was generally brimming with coins.
    “It says here,” cited Pinchas from behind his upraised journal, spectacles sliding down the slope of his nose, “they got in the new State Duma in Saint Petersburg deputies that they represent four Jewish parties.” Pinchas tried conscientiously to stay abreast of events in his mother country, subscribing to a paper he had sent all the way from New York. In this way he had followed, if some weeks after the fact, the failed Russian revolution of 1905 and the ensuing pogroms, the trial for blood libel of the brick maker Mendel Beilis. When he wasn’t griping about the intrusion of the uncanny into the quotidian life of the neighborhood, he was hopeful about