and then going into deep genuflections, heads to the floor, eyes shut, hands guarding the face from bomb- flash.
It was a long time before they were positioned and settled and still.
Matty had his head at the base of the cloakroom door nearest his desk. He liked to duck and cover. There was a sense of acting in unison that he found satisfying. It was not so different really from opening and shutting the cloakroom doors with two of his classmates or reciting mass answers to Sister's questions from the catechism. He felt the comfort of numbers. He felt snug and safe here on the floor, positioned more or less identically with the others. After the first moments of surprise and confusion, they were all calm now. This was the first rule of atomic attack. Keep calm. Do not get excited or excite others. Another rule, Do not touch things.
He felt an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover. It was a community of look-alikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air. The overbrained boy of the thirty-two pieces and the million trillion combinations liked to nestle in his designated slot, listening to Sister's voice repeat all the cautions and commands like a siren lifting and dipping in the dopplered haze of another nondescript day.
Keep calm.
Do not touch things.
Do not answer a ringing phone.
Unplug your toaster.
Do not drive a motor vehicle.
Carry a handkerchief to place over your mouth.
In their prayer posture they could have been anyone from anywhere. The faithful of old Samarkand bending to their hojatollah. The only thing that mattered was the abject entreaty, the adoration of the cloud of all-power-forty softly throbbing bodies arrayed along the walls.
She ordered them back to their normal places. They got up, retrieved their fallen books and slid a little hangdog into their seats, watching Sister Edgar so they might ascertain how totally foolish they ought to feel.
Never end a sentence with a preposition and never begin a sentence with an And.
Sister was not pleased with their performance. She leaned over her desk, hands so tensed on the wood surface they could see the blood drain from her knuckles.
They waited for her to tell them to do it again.
'Hey Bobby.'
'I'm busy over here.'
'Hey Bobby.'
'I'm busy over here.'
'Hey Bobby. There's something we want to tell you.
'I told you, okay, I'm busy.'
'Juju wants to tell you. Hey Bobby. Listen.'
'Go way, all right?'
'Hey Bobby.'
'Fuck out of here.'
'Hey Bobby.'
'Irbu see I'm working over here?'
'Hey Bobby. Juju wants to tell you this one thing.'
'What.'
'Hey Bobby.'
'All right. What.'
'This one thing.'
'All right. What.'
'Shit in your fist and squeeze it,' Nick said.
She didn't know what to call it, a lightness, a waft, something with change in it, treebloom or fragrant rain, and she stood on the stoop and watched a man across the street chip rust from his fire escape, up on the fourth floor.
A truck pulled up in front of the grocery two doors down. The grocer's son came out and unlocked the metal hatch in the sidewalk and lifted the two swing-back sections. The men unloaded crates of soda and took them on a handcart into the store, the older man, or carried them by the hand grips, the younger, down the hatchway into the storage cellar.
Klara lit a cigarette and thought about going across the street to get the child, who was being minded by the tailor's wife today, this was a Wednesday, because it was nearly time.
The younger man wandered over to the stoop on the way to his third or fourth trip into the cellar.
'
She looked at him, taking in the question.
'Hate to ask,' he said.
She looked at him, taking in the damp shirt and scuffed dungarees, the way he held the crate at belly level, forearms veined beneath the rolled sleeves.
'One drag could mean the difference,' he said, 'between life and death.'
She said, 'In which direction?'
He smiled and looked away. Then he looked at her and said, 'When you need a smoke, does it matter?'
She reached out and offered the cigarette but he didn't put down the soda crate and take it. Instead he climbed two steps in her direction and looked right at her and this meant she had to place the cigarette between his lips or withdraw the offer.
At first she didn't do either. She took a drag herself and said, 'Aren't you afraid it'll stunt your growth?'
Six days later, or seven, she came out of the flat and locked the door. There was someone on the stoop looking in through the vestibule. She knew exactly who it was and what he was here for and she made a gesture that was either a shrug or a come-on. Then she put the key back in the door she'd just locked, unlocking it.
He followed her into the spare room and when she turned he was right there. He was pretty big and lifted her into the wall. She kicked out of her shoes and grabbed his hair, a fistful, and jerked his face away from hers so she could look at him.
When they were nearly naked they stood watching each other. There was no bed or sofa and they barely touched, his hand on her upper arm, which she pushed away. She kept waiting to feel crazy but didn't. He put his hand on her upper arm and she knocked it off. He shrugged and laughed, like what's going on. She put her hand to his chest. She could make him stop laughing by touching him.
She said, 'Are you a boy I ought to know? Who are you? Not that I give a damn.'
He was darkish and well-built and he moved her into the wall again. She pushed her hair out of her face. She thought as long as she kept him in this one room, no one could say there was something crazy going on. This was the spare room, the paint room. She wasn't supposed to be naked here but aside from that, her feet cold on the bare floor, there was nothing awfully strange happening here.
He had his hands all over her. He smelled of cigarettes and something else, some odd body must mixed with sweat. They kissed for a time that seemed to be hours. It seemed to be taking hours, long sluicy kisses that she disappeared into, distant, empty, feeling his hand brusque on her tit, but also practical all of a sudden, yes, pushing him off and going into the closet down the hall and getting the spare mattress for the child's bed, a Jewish heirloom of the generations.
She went back to the room and gave him the mattress, rolled up and tied in a length of twine. He stood it on end and pretended to hump it, his tongue hanging out.
She noticed the room. He unknotted the twine and flopped the small mattress down and lowered himself to his knees, waiting. The room was beautiful in this light, shadow-banded, all lines and gaps, claire-obscure, and she walked over to him, untrusting of course, and motioned for him to sit back on his haunches.
She didn't know what would come next, second to second, and kept resisting even as she moved into him, biting and stroking, the word stroke, the word cock, half resisting everything he did, smelling work and basement on his body, sour rooms webbed in dust.
