They still believed in angels: notes from a gothic American tale
There were always rumours about the people in the small towns in the Delaware Bay region. There was a lot of nineteenth century Europe in those people, if you get my drift – cosmopolitan, yes, is one word. America, to my mind, had settled down by the end of the Civil War. You had Americans, at last, free of the British, at last, finding their identity as Americans, at last, had, in the main, a sensible religion, at long last. And then, late nineteenth century, all the upheavals in the Russias, in the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, you had all these downtrodden people making new waves into America. They brought darkness, superstition, brought vengeance and vendettas, they brought old religions and mumbo-jumbo, they brought magic, most of it not good.
So the story didn’t start, as people seem to think, with the Russian Revolution, but went way back before that, with men who’d been part of the Polish aristocracy, whose lives had changed when their country disappeared. It started with men who served those crazy Hapsburgs – you know, all that God and King and Kaiser, all that saber-rattling that went to its logical conclusion in the First World War, their ornate pastel uniforms covered in mud and blood.
Among the masses of laborers and steelworkers, lathe-turners, agricultural workers and what have you who lived in these towns and drifted into them to work, there were all these people who shone out because they were different. They worked sorcery with numbers, worked it with the discipline they put on their bodies and minds. In one town, there was a psychic couple, felt the glow from within each other, raised two strangely determined kids, both with the shine of vocation in their eyes. One turned it to sport, became crazy about riding a bike in races, about climbing up mountains on it. He dreamed of racing the grand tours of Europe one day, and he did just that, though not for long. The other turned her mind to God, gave all her stuff away apart from a scruffy icon showing Saints Barbara and Katarzyna, served God as best she could, barefoot among the poor of the world.
There was a circus performer, three-feet-nine of muscle - a tumbler, in her own words, not an acrobat, whose bodies, she said, were too perfect for them to feel anything at all. She had belief in the gods and in herself, until it ran out in a moment of doubt and pain.
There was a religious sister the townsfolk wanted to make into a saint, despite the sum of her miracle being that she killed herself in the inept pursuit of good. They griped for years, those townies, done out of their saint. And yet all the while they had one among them, a magic midget, who worked only the purest good, and what did they do but despise her.
They had a vodka priest who once humped crates on the Baltimore waterfront, who then became a gambler, a man unafraid of his weaknesses, which just meant that he gave in to them all the time, and confessed them like anybody else with sin on their minds. A bishop they had, who audienced with the Pope in Rome one time and never had a better day again in his life, unable to rise to any occasion again except with the bitterest cynicism.
There was an artist who was determined to depict life the twisted way he saw it. And again, driven by vengeance and cruelty, he damaged people, killed them with the power of his suggestion and their own superstition.
There was mystery and anarchy, a guy who broke into stores and didn’t steal their goods – oh no. He destroyed them, systematically, used noxious substances and metal filings, rabbit and fish glue, and left them there. No pattern to it, no fixed times, nothing for the police to plot in terms of habit. Went on for years, made itself into a mystery that, in the end, nobody dared talk about. The Devil had come to that town, they believed, had vanished into its bricks and stones, but stayed.
Guys who got shot with a Nagant pistol. This was the favored weapon of the Tsarist police, and was so reliable the Bolsheviks kept it on as a weapon of choice. Lots of Russkies and Poles, Ukrainians, Litvaks, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Slovaks in the area, so it figured. The Nagant was a devil to reload, each shell having to be picked out one by one, each new slug having to be squeezed in, so it was no good for combat. But you could seal in all
its gases, so it was the one revolver that could be silenced, and that made it into the perfect assassin’s weapon. It was put to deadly use in all those towns in the region, the police pulling its giveaway 7.62 slugs out of shady men’s heads on a regular basis, all through Prohibition and beyond.
They loved their big events, held in their main square, loved their Fourth of July dinner, their Easter Day breakfast, their annual bike race and the balls held by their guilds, like they could only celebrate if they all had their eyes on one another. The kids had their own thing, their masked dance, where nobody knew who was who. And though the devil walked among them, causing death and misery, drunkenness and despair, the telling of sad sack tales and jeremiads, they still believed in angels, the people of that town. Those saps still believed in angels.
So the story didn’t start, as people seem to think, with the Russian Revolution, but went way back before that, with men who’d been part of the Polish aristocracy, whose lives had changed when their country disappeared. It started with men who served those crazy Hapsburgs – you know, all that God and King and Kaiser, all that saber-rattling that went to its logical conclusion in the First World War, their ornate pastel uniforms covered in mud and blood.
Among the masses of laborers and steelworkers, lathe-turners, agricultural workers and what have you who lived in these towns and drifted into them to work, there were all these people who shone out because they were different. They worked sorcery with numbers, worked it with the discipline they put on their bodies and minds. In one town, there was a psychic couple, felt the glow from within each other, raised two strangely determined kids, both with the shine of vocation in their eyes. One turned it to sport, became crazy about riding a bike in races, about climbing up mountains on it. He dreamed of racing the grand tours of Europe one day, and he did just that, though not for long. The other turned her mind to God, gave all her stuff away apart from a scruffy icon showing Saints Barbara and Katarzyna, served God as best she could, barefoot among the poor of the world.
There was a circus performer, three-feet-nine of muscle - a tumbler, in her own words, not an acrobat, whose bodies, she said, were too perfect for them to feel anything at all. She had belief in the gods and in herself, until it ran out in a moment of doubt and pain.
There was a religious sister the townsfolk wanted to make into a saint, despite the sum of her miracle being that she killed herself in the inept pursuit of good. They griped for years, those townies, done out of their saint. And yet all the while they had one among them, a magic midget, who worked only the purest good, and what did they do but despise her.
They had a vodka priest who once humped crates on the Baltimore waterfront, who then became a gambler, a man unafraid of his weaknesses, which just meant that he gave in to them all the time, and confessed them like anybody else with sin on their minds. A bishop they had, who audienced with the Pope in Rome one time and never had a better day again in his life, unable to rise to any occasion again except with the bitterest cynicism.
There was an artist who was determined to depict life the twisted way he saw it. And again, driven by vengeance and cruelty, he damaged people, killed them with the power of his suggestion and their own superstition.
There was mystery and anarchy, a guy who broke into stores and didn’t steal their goods – oh no. He destroyed them, systematically, used noxious substances and metal filings, rabbit and fish glue, and left them there. No pattern to it, no fixed times, nothing for the police to plot in terms of habit. Went on for years, made itself into a mystery that, in the end, nobody dared talk about. The Devil had come to that town, they believed, had vanished into its bricks and stones, but stayed.
Guys who got shot with a Nagant pistol. This was the favored weapon of the Tsarist police, and was so reliable the Bolsheviks kept it on as a weapon of choice. Lots of Russkies and Poles, Ukrainians, Litvaks, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Slovaks in the area, so it figured. The Nagant was a devil to reload, each shell having to be picked out one by one, each new slug having to be squeezed in, so it was no good for combat. But you could seal in all
its gases, so it was the one revolver that could be silenced, and that made it into the perfect assassin’s weapon. It was put to deadly use in all those towns in the region, the police pulling its giveaway 7.62 slugs out of shady men’s heads on a regular basis, all through Prohibition and beyond.
They loved their big events, held in their main square, loved their Fourth of July dinner, their Easter Day breakfast, their annual bike race and the balls held by their guilds, like they could only celebrate if they all had their eyes on one another. The kids had their own thing, their masked dance, where nobody knew who was who. And though the devil walked among them, causing death and misery, drunkenness and despair, the telling of sad sack tales and jeremiads, they still believed in angels, the people of that town. Those saps still believed in angels.
"I'm a tumbler," Lucy said. "Not an acrobat."
“I’m a tumbler,” Lucy Ephraim harked back through centuries of circus tradition to tell anybody who got it wrong. “Not an acrobat.” Acrobats had no sense of humor, she claimed, no love of life nor people. They were too hung up on their perfect bodies to be anything but vain and in turn bitter at the emptiness that lay at the end of vanity.
An Angel, Dancing on the Head of a Pin
Milo looked over Balz as if seeing it for the first time. The peat fires smelled stronger than ever. The washing had colors in it that never existed till then. The tiles over the doors of houses, glazed with crosses, were gleaming. Milo thought if he listened hard over the keening of the town’s creaky windows he would hear everything said in the streets. He saw men with dusty faces fingering greasy ties and tilting broken hats at lemon-faced women whose headscarves concealed hair crimped up in the hope of curls with twists of newspaper. He made out the air forming pockets around their bad teeth, saw them give pain a face as they muttered, “Goddam it if we’re not the most unlucky people in the world.” At the windows of second-last chance saloons and fat-chance cafés he saw the faces of dead flyers, ghost motorbikers, future presidents, bike-pushing Frenchmen, Jesus, drowned children, Lucifer and men who got taken into forests by soldiers and never seen again. He spied traders cursing the saboteurs who spoiled their wares, glued their locks tight shut and sugared their gas tanks. A piece of machinery shuddered to life in his head and Milo knew he was having what is called the sight of things already seen.
Mrs Galitzka said people’s bad luck started when some clan left its village in some corner of Europe without paying dues to some saint in its midst. For this they carried a saint’s curse in the form of a jeremiad, a long sad story to be told till time ran out.
“Is that true?” Milo asked his dad.
Mr Galitzki said softly, “What do you think?”
Milo wavered.
Mr Galitzki said, “Beware of people who talk about saints.”
Milo’s mom did and his sister did and his friends and their parents, so did his teachers and the priests and nuns – the whole town, the voices on the radio, everybody talked about saints.
Mr Galitzki said, “Beware of people who tell you about saints, and angels, cherubim, seraphim, divine messengers, devils and demons and all that kind of whatever.” The laugh left his voice. “They are fools and liars of the deepest shade.”
“They are not.” A small voice, ignored. Mila’s.
“Beware them all, Milo. They’re crooks, cheats and corrupters of the mind.”
“They are not.” Mila stamped a foot.
“People should forget the bad things.” Milo sounded as if he mistrusted his own good sense. “And then they won’t have to tell the long sad story.”
“It’s the things that happen that are the curse.” Mr Galitzki pitied his little boy’s lack of intellect. “The story’s going to get told whether people like it or not.”
They were on the ramparts of the fort on a winter afternoon after school. Below on Glass Beach, soldiers marked time to the barking of a drill sergeant with a head like a dog. They watched the men fade in the fog. Milo spied a child figure pirouetting on one leg on top of a twenty foot flagpole on the beach. It was a sight so fantastic that the sense of the already seen deserted him. He grabbed at his dad’s sleeve and pointed and said, “Lucy.” Mila repeated the name as a question, and clapped her hands urgently.
“The little saint herself.” Mr Galitzki was compelled to watch the alarming dance. He was reminded that he owed the little acrobat, and always would. He put a hand onto his son’s head and remembered that Milo might not have been there were it not for Lucy Ephraim. He tried to blot out the vision of Lucy but then all godless Witold Galitzki could see was an angel, dancing on the head of a pin.
Mrs Galitzka said people’s bad luck started when some clan left its village in some corner of Europe without paying dues to some saint in its midst. For this they carried a saint’s curse in the form of a jeremiad, a long sad story to be told till time ran out.
“Is that true?” Milo asked his dad.
Mr Galitzki said softly, “What do you think?”
Milo wavered.
Mr Galitzki said, “Beware of people who talk about saints.”
Milo’s mom did and his sister did and his friends and their parents, so did his teachers and the priests and nuns – the whole town, the voices on the radio, everybody talked about saints.
Mr Galitzki said, “Beware of people who tell you about saints, and angels, cherubim, seraphim, divine messengers, devils and demons and all that kind of whatever.” The laugh left his voice. “They are fools and liars of the deepest shade.”
“They are not.” A small voice, ignored. Mila’s.
“Beware them all, Milo. They’re crooks, cheats and corrupters of the mind.”
“They are not.” Mila stamped a foot.
“People should forget the bad things.” Milo sounded as if he mistrusted his own good sense. “And then they won’t have to tell the long sad story.”
“It’s the things that happen that are the curse.” Mr Galitzki pitied his little boy’s lack of intellect. “The story’s going to get told whether people like it or not.”
They were on the ramparts of the fort on a winter afternoon after school. Below on Glass Beach, soldiers marked time to the barking of a drill sergeant with a head like a dog. They watched the men fade in the fog. Milo spied a child figure pirouetting on one leg on top of a twenty foot flagpole on the beach. It was a sight so fantastic that the sense of the already seen deserted him. He grabbed at his dad’s sleeve and pointed and said, “Lucy.” Mila repeated the name as a question, and clapped her hands urgently.
“The little saint herself.” Mr Galitzki was compelled to watch the alarming dance. He was reminded that he owed the little acrobat, and always would. He put a hand onto his son’s head and remembered that Milo might not have been there were it not for Lucy Ephraim. He tried to blot out the vision of Lucy but then all godless Witold Galitzki could see was an angel, dancing on the head of a pin.