“Long ago,” I say, as I sample the gathering. “Very long ago, when you weren’t born yet…”
“When we still lived in Morocco,” yells one.
“Turkey!” yells another.
“Pa. Ra. Ma. Ri. Bo!” roars yet another one.
“Somalia,” whispers number four.
I raise my hand. “A long time ago indeed, very long ago, there was a man who could fly.”
There is a skeptical quality in Nur’s brow that spills into her eyes. She lifts her glass and blows on her tea, quite aware of the effect it has on me.
One moment of speechlessness. Then I shiver and speak.
It all started with one little boy who came to the shop and, looking around and noticing the sand-colored Dakota, asked if it was for sale, finished that is. I looked him over, got the smallest box from the shelves, ripped the shrink-wrap with my nail, and got the little bag out. “Look,” I said. “That’s it. Twenty, thirty parts. It’ll take about an hour. Perhaps you can find someone to help you.” His face told me that there was no one.
The neighborhood has changed. The families of old, with their 2.3 children and the steaming pot of tea that waits after school, have disappeared. Twenty years ago you’d see blue-haired little old ladies in knitted suits doing their shopping. Now it’s Turks, Moroccans, Cape Verdeans, Hindustani, Chinese, and God knows where they all come from. And there are the single mothers, and fathers. The sort of families, anyway, that don’t have the time to indulge in good and wholesome handiwork. The shoe shops with their beige old ladies’ shoes have been replaced by twenty-four-hour Chinese restaurants, Islamic butchers, and Moroccan bakers. And where once the faint smell of office stationers lingered, with their dusty displays of pencils and faded notebooks, now one would smell fresh coriander, the heavy sweetness of Turkish pastry, and the red-hot kitchens of The Great Wall and Asian Glories.
That was what I was thinking of, the neighborhood and how it, and I, had grown and changed, and I looked at the boy and suddenly told him to return next Wednesday. I would try to round up a few more kids and we would build together. He shot me a look that was at the same time incredulous and surprised. Only after he’d left, while I was cutting a mold on the workbench, did I realize what I had done. I put the knife down and stared at the kites that hung from the ceiling, the sewing machine and the fluorescent yellow thread that ran through the needle, the spools, neatly lined up, the rolls of fabric along the wall, and I thought: the time has gone when a man could invite a couple of kids from the neighborhood for a glass of lemonade and some wholesome handiwork without getting his face in the papers. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I yelled into the empty space. “Baden-Powell?”
But my initial hesitation didn’t save me and now they’re here: eleven children, their mouths open, sitting around a workbench that’s cluttered with shears, Stanley knives, pieces of nylon fabric, and loose threads. They’re fingering glasses of Coke now, the silence for the first time since they came in so complete that it’s almost audible.
I’ve told that story before, the one about the man who could fly. The boy who picked up the sphere has reached out before to touch the thick glass. It doesn’t seem to matter. It’s not the story; it’s the way it’s told.
“A sculptor and his son were imprisoned on an island,” I say, “where the sculptor had to work for the king. The king had everything he desired. Gold overflowed his treasure chamber, a hundred beautiful girls with hair as black as the night and faces like the full moon served him at his table, dressed him in the morning, and entertained him as they danced in the evening in front of the fire in the great hall, and every night fifty strong men painted a new sky on the ceiling and fresh trees on the pillars, so that it seemed as if the clouds moved and the trees grew. One thing was missing: a wife. The king could have taken any of the beautiful girls for a wife, of course, and all of them would probably have been more than happy to be chosen, but the king wanted beauty to surpass anything he’d ever seen, and as he saw the hundred beautiful girls every day, dancing and singing and serving him, none of them would do. That is why he had called for a sculptor, to make a statue of the fairest woman in the world. At first the sculptor felt very honored, but after one of the girls had told him what the king had in mind, he’d started thinking of ways to escape. ‘Dear sculptor,’ the girl had said, ‘you must know that the king is a mighty sorcerer who wants to bring your statue to life to marry her. No one in the world must know, and so he will kill you after you’re finished.’ That frightened the sculptor. Not because he feared death—he was old and famous and life had been good to him—but he had brought his son with him to the island, to work as his assistant, and the boy was just thirteen. And then there was something else. After he’d been chiseling the huge block of marble for a few weeks, he had discovered that it was not just a statue he was sculpting. One night he had entered the studio and the light of the moon, which came from far away, over the sea, was soft and blue. It skimmed, no: it flowed like water, over the shoulder of the statue, smoothly caressing the curve of the neck, the coastal line of her jaw, her cheek, the planes of her temples. There, in the moonlit dark, was his mother.
“The king had
