Feathers

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight 1. After Leder’s stinging reversal in the Viennese Circle, the Nutrition Army’s forward command post was moved from the Café Vienna to Greenberg’s Bookbindery, which stood opposite the Alliance School at the top of Jaffa Road. There it stayed for the next two years, until the day of the great demonstration against the German reparations agreement, when the army was forced to disband. “Our movement is over the last of its childhood illnesses,” Leder promised me as soon as the dust from his outburst at the Ringels’ imperial banquet had settled. Instead of spreading ourselves thinly in a vain attempt to reach all sectors of the public, among them the cavalier subjects of Franz Josef, we must act like a mailed fist centered around a serious, ideologically motivated cadre that would prepare the platform of the future Lynkean state and act as its cabinet when the time came. Leder surveyed me sternly while dodging a pothole in the street and declared that such a cadre already existed, waiting for us to make use of it. Unless my memory was as weak as a cat’s, I surely remembered his mentioning, during his brief nighttime visit to my home, the organic food club gathered around Mr. Greenberg. He hesitated for a moment, then nonchalantly inquired whether my mother had started buying yet at Greenberg’s store. Thereafter I often went with him to the vegetarian discussion club that met daily at the Greenbergs’ during the early hours of the afternoon. At that time of my life my father was busy raising the dead with Riklin, my mother was totally involved with the abandoned Mrs. Barzel and her son, and I was free to do as I pleased. Leder and I would cross the empty lot on which the Hen movie theater was later built, enter a yard fenced round with rough stone, tiptoe down a path of smooth flagstone on either side of which lay Mrs. Greenberg’s carefully tended vegetable garden, and furtively bypass the sleepy bindery in which a young worker in a Bukharian skullcap phlegmatically passed a brush dipped in glue over bindings while Mrs. Greenberg sat behind him sewing pamphlets with a large, curved needle. Behind them, in the murky depths of the shop, loomed the silhouette of the paper-cutting machine, its round, heavy weight hanging threateningly in midair like a guillotine. The discussion club met in a room at the rear of the bindery, near the Greenbergs’ living quarters, which served during the morning hours as a health food store. A sourish smell of wheat germ mixed with the sweetness of brown sugar filled the tidy room, whose windows were screened against flies. On wooden footrests along the walls lay opened sacks of unpolished rice, bulghur, buckwheat, and barley grits, above which on blue shelves stood jars of dried apricots, figs, and apple rings. Mr. Greenberg, the two volumes of The Organic Food Book on his right and a cup of shelled sunflower seeds on his left, would already be presiding when we arrived, dispensing wisdom to the several disciples seated around him. He welcomed my début with a handful of crumbling molasses scooped with his fingers from the sack of brown sugar, topped it with two cracked walnuts, and declared that in my honor the club would adjourn its theoretical discussion of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau in order to listen once more to a familiar but still powerful passage by the immortal Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy. Colorful bookmarks lay, as though in a hymnal, among the pages of The Organic Food Book, so that it did not take Greenberg long to have us all gagging on the harsh smell of hot blood, the bleating of oxen, the slippery, shiny brown floors of the abbatoir, the raised blades of the axes, the jets of blood caught in basins by the butcher boys. While the club members plunged eagerly into the saintly novelist’s description of his visit to a slaughterhouse, I kept my eyes fastened on the cover of the book, on which were amateurishly drawn—like the pictures of famous rabbis hung by pious Jews in their sukkahs on the Feast of Booths—the portraits of ten great vegetarians from Pythagoras and Buddha to Leonardo and Lord Byron. On the back cover was printed the publisher’s colophon, the firm’s name cloven in two by an apple. As soon as Mr. Greenberg finished reading I...