Now, they call it slow leather. But in Isai’s life, he has known no other way. He has known no faster way.
When the day is done, and the leather has become lame and cured from having soaked in its bath of lime, Isai straddles his fleshing beam as if he were a gymnast on a pommel horse. A rawhide laid in front of him.
Nightly, he works scudding away the hair of the hide from its grain. Kipskin is what they call a hide like this one – untanned leather from a young calf. It is supple, desirable, but stubborn to a burnish. Isai must push hard on the scudding knife with his right hand. He must stretch the hide taut with his left.
Nightly, when the hide has dried to a thing parched as paper, and the scudding is done, Isai must skive the hide in half. He cranks the skiver until his arm grows tired, splitting the bolt of the hide into two straps, thin and fine.
And nightly, as Isai works his leather, he expects to prod his fingers with the tips of his awling tools. Just as likely, he might cut at the heels of his hand with a knife blade, but never worse than a knick from a morning shave.
Dark falls on cobbled Kneeland Street. The lighted windows of the cobblers and tanners in the storefronts by his own become fewer and fewer until there are none kept awake by the lamps of men working. The window in his shop shutters black like a camera lens. It becomes harder to see this time of day. And whether it is the dullness of the blade, or the limpness of the kipskin that makes his knife wag, Isai cannot be sure. Still, he has cut himself all the same. The flat knife bites into his thumb. Deeper than it has before. Isai has cut himself to the bone.
When he looks down at his thumb, whether it is surprise or nostalgia that he feels, even Isai cannot say. But where the thousand bleeding capillaries splayed open in pricks of red mark his fingerprint, Isai sees the corn poppy fields of his childhood. He sees the Stavyshche that he loved. The kame hills, green and rambling. The hyalite lake, and a girl beside it with seed burs hooked to her stockinged feet. Isai rushes to the faucet beside his workbench to run the blood clean from his fingers, and wash it away. Wash all of Poland away with the boyhood that it kept.
He continues to work for a while, though his thumb aches. But as the night turns over into morning, and the sky purples like a bruise, increasingly, Isai believes it is not his throbbing thumb but something else animating the kipskin to a hum. To a pulse beneath his fingers. But at such a question, Isai feels his mind is running from him. He hangs his awling tools above the work table. Greases his skive for the day to come. Isai wraps his thumb in cheesecloth, and tapes it so it holds. He wrestles his mind to sleep.
The next morning, Isai cuts the leathered kipskin into the pieces instructed by his pattern – a fashionable men’s loafer with thick, crepe soles. He cuts around the stencil, diligently as to avoid his thumb. He arranges the pieces around the cork of the shoe mold, constructing the upper, or that more flexible part of the shoe above the sole, from the toe to the tongue.
His thumb is throbbing. No better than the night before, but still Isai works.
He perforates the leather with an awl where the needle is to be drawn through. Puts a bit of tension on the first knot, but not too much. He catches the stitch. He jumps a hole where the leather is too thin, too fragile. He does this a thousand times before the afternoon begins, poking at his thumb all the while. Where the bandage has been punctured, the tanning salts that sweat from the leather itch at his wound, and they anger its throbbing to a sting.
Still, Isai works.
Isai prepares the sole of his shoe. Lines it with a piece of burgundy leather, and a good, steel shank at the heel. He takes a leather welt strip, which must first be skived down further. He feeds it through the welting machine with his right hand, positions the upper with his left. What Isai expects to see, and what he has seen so many times before at his table, is the machine’s needle joining the strip of welt, the leather of the upper, and the sole with a triumphant hiss.
But, where the toe of the shoe is to be joined with the sole, it gapes open like a slack jaw.
Isai checks the cartridge of the machine. Replaces it for good measure. He feeds the welting strip through again, and waits to hear the hiss. Still, the gap remains.
Isai brings the shoe up to his face, closer to inspect. He can’t trust his eyes as he used to. This, he knows. But as he does so, the golden stitches along the sole meander back from which they came with a loping gait. The leather toe peels back, flexing itself into the shape of a palate, and from the shank of the heel, the burgundy insole unfurls like a human tongue.
The leather collar – once that beautiful kipskin, where the laces of the loafer are meant to weave through – scrunches itself on either side into two dark and imposing eyebrows.
Isai watches in amazement as the shoe shakes and sputters, coughing up resin from behind its leather tongue as though with an urgency to speak.
Are you alive? Isai asks. He is stunned by what sits on his work table, among his bevels and his bolts of fabric.
The shoe pauses to consider. Nie, it decides.
Who are you? Isai asks. But the upper leather bends itself into a suspicious shrug, and its eyebrows furrow as if to deny the question.
Then what are you? Isai tries, but he is met with the same response.
Will you tell me who you are? Asks Isai, and at this, the shoe confirms.
Tak, it says. Its voice is guttural, cauterizing itself at the end of the word with an agonizing dryness.
Isai looks down at his finger, and it is then, he knows. He shudders for knowing, and chastises himself for having forgotten his Talmud. He remembers the man called Bar Kokhba. Leader of the Israelites, protector from the Romans, who, in exchange for a finger from his infantrymen, would dispense honesty and truth to those who would listen.
When Isai was a boy, it had been a truth-telling game. It had been Bar Kokhba’s namesake. For all those hours they had spent, cramped and fearful and lonely in the dark, they would take turns as the Bar Kokhba, answering each other’s whispered questions. Tak, yes. Nie, no. In these scenes of boyhood, it is always her face that Isai sees. He sees her kneel in the mud at the water’s edge, tending to the burs caught up in her stockings. Already, they can hear the boots trodding heavy down the steps of the embankment. They catch glimpses of their uniforms, the color of gunsmoke, through the trees. What a punishment, Isai thinks, that he has forgotten the sound of Raizel’s voice, but can remember, so well, the sounds of canines. The damning sounds of German consonants, raised from the depths of human throats. How foolish, he had thought, then. The burs had already torn their silken runs, leaving streaks to match those made by tears, fallen, on Raizel’s soiled face.
Isai pauses. Are you the Bar Kokhba? he asks, so quiet as to be a whisper.
Tak, rasps the shoe. It lolls its tongue about, and stretches its mouth wider, snapping a dozen more of Isai’s careful, golden stitches.
Do you know me? asks Isai. Do you know all I have done?
Tak, says the shoe. Tak, he says again.
Have you come to hear me repent?
Nie.
He thinks of a question she had asked him once, before the day at the lake in Stavyshche. They had sat alone, whispering in the dark. It had been his turn to answer questions. His turn to play the part of the Bar Kokhba.
Are you scared? she had asked him, once.
They had chosen the Branicki Palace to hide. As a boy, they had called it the Versailles de la Pologne. The Versailles of Poland. The palace had been built for the Count Branicki, and so, had been built to befit the ambition of a man who dreamed of being king. It had been built with a warren of tunnels, befitting the ambition of a man who might have need to hide.
The tunnels ran underground—beneath those high moraine hills of Poland, covered in forest breathing green lungs for the city, and dotted with the tributaries and grander lakes of the Suprasl River. At night, when they asked their questions, and when they hoped for impossible answers, their voices would carry in those friable walls. Isai wonders, now, if it was their voices—carrying too far, carrying to hateful ears poised at some shotcrete mouth of those tunnels—that had given them away.
Too many years have passed. It is odd what Isai remembers. He can no longer hear Raizel’s voice. But he can remember the clove and herring on her breath. He can remember how hope felt like Raizel’s warm breath on his cheek.
Are you scared of what could happen? she had asked, a second time.
Nie, Isai had lied to her. He thinks often of that lie—heaps it onto his lot of sins like a pile of leaves.
Isai holds his face in his hands. Runs his good thumb over the leather back of the Bar Kokhba, and feels where the stitches, there, have snapped and perished. At this, the Bar Kokhba utters a foreboding hiss.
What was I meant to do? Isai asks, though he knows it is a question Bar Kokhba will not answer in a word. He says it for himself. He listens to his own heartbeat in his ears. He feels it pounding in his thumb.
Isai remembers looking at their boots. He remembers being dragged to Kościuszko Square—a square that had once been kept alive with Stavyshche’s artists who came to sit in the fashionable cafes along the high street, and drink plujka because it was romantic and cheap. He Remembers tasting the blood in his mouth, like metal, but warm like something else. Remembers seeing the artists hanged from the hornbeam trees planted along the square. Or else, their bodies piled on the front steps of the Podlasie Cinema, where Raizel and he had spent the groszy of their childhood. Black holes in those foreheads, that pile of foreheads, staring out at Isai like third eyes. Isai remembers seeing their fingers pointed in her direction, toward the poppy fields behind the lake, asking if it was where she’d run.
Tak, he had told them. Tak.
You cannot know how I had tried, Isai says. But of course, that is not a question. Bar Kokhba offers no response.
Bar Kokhba, having grown tired of Isai’s questions, feigns exhaustion and threatens sleep. The burgundy tongue retreats back into the cavernous upper of the half-done shoe. It curls upon the insole, and warbles in an exaggerated snore.
Tell me Bar Kokhba, have I been a good man? Have I been a good man in all else that came after?
And though Bar Kokhba hears, he doesn’t answer. It is a question good men don’t have to ask.