Objects and I, we can’t go on like this. We must work out a compromise, a freeze, before one of us does something rash. I’ve got to meet with their people and hammer out a deal.
“Stop it, Sam,” said Michiko.
“Get a real car,” I told her.
“Please, just stop. Stop it! I’ll call a towtruck or something.”
“Get a real car,” I said and thought—yeah, or a real boyfriend. Anyway, I was throwing the tools into their pouch, dusting my palms and wiping away my tears when I saw Bujak pacing across the road toward us. Warily I monitored his approach. I had seen this hulking Bohunk or throwback Polack from my study window, busying himself down on the street, always ready to flex his primitive can-do and know-how. I wasn’t pleased to see him. I have enough of the standard-issue paranoia, or I did then. Now I’ve grown up a little and realize that I have absolutely nothing to fear, except the end of the world. Along with everybody else. At least in the next war there won’t be any special wimps, punchbags, or unpopularity contests. Genocide has had its day and we’re on to something bigger now. Suicide.
“You a Jew?” asked Bujak in his deeply speckled voice.
“Yup,” I said.
“Name?”
And number? “Sam,” I told him.
“Short for?”
I hesitated and felt Michi’s eyes on my back.
“Is it Samuel?”
“No,” I said. “Actually it’s Samson.”
The smile he gave told me many things, most obviously that here—here was a happy man. All eyes and teeth, the smile was ridiculous in its gaiety, its candor. But then happiness is a pretty clownish condition, when you stop to think about it. I mean, round-the-clock happiness, it’s hardly an appropriate response. To me, this gave him an element of instability, of counterstrength, of violence. But Bujak here was clearly happy, in his universe. Bujak, with his happiness accessory.
“Jews usually good up here,” he said, and knocked a fingertip on his shaved head. “No good with their hands.”
Bujak was good with his hands: to prove it, he bent forward and picked up the car with them.
“You’re kidding,” I said. But he wasn’t. As I got to work he was already shooting the breeze with Michiko, nonchalantly asking her if she’d lost any family at Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Michi had, as it happened—a cousin of her father’s. This was news to me but I felt no surprise. It seems that everyone loses someone in the big deaths. Bujak changed stance freely, and, at one point, lifted a forgetful hand to scratch his skull. The car never wavered. I watched Bujak as I worked, and saw that the strength he called on owed nothing to the shoulders or the great curved back— just the arms, the arms. It was as if he were raising the lid of a cellar door, or holding up a towel while a little girl dressed on the beach. Then he roughly took the tire iron from my hands and knelt on one knee to rivet the bolts. As the grained slab of his head loomed upward again Bujak’s eyes were tight and unamused, and they moved roughly too across my face. He nodded at Michi and said to me, “And who did you lose?”
“Uh?” I said. If I understood his question, then the answer was none of his business.
“I give money to Israel every year,” he said. “Not much. Some. Why? Because the Polish record on the Jews is disgraceful. After the war even,” he said, and grinned. “Quite disgraceful. Look. There is a tire mender in Basing Street. Tell them Bujak and they will make it for you fairly.”
Thanks, we both said. Off he went, measuring the road with his strides. Later, from my study window, I saw him pruning roses in the small front garden. A little girl, his granddaughter, was crawling all over his back. I saw him often, from my study window. In those days, in 1980, I was trying to be a writer. No longer. I can’t take the study life, the life of the study. This is the only story I’ll ever tell, and this story is true. . . . Michiko was sold on Bujak right away and dropped a thank-you note through his door that same afternoon. But it took a while before I had really made terms with Bujak.