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The day I was born.
It was a cold snowy winter New York. Cold was master. Heat was servant. Cold landlorded it in every tenement block, pushing the heat into smaller and smaller corners, throwing the heat out onto the streets where it disappeared in freezes of steam. No one could warm. Furnaces and boilers committed suicide under the strain and were dragged lifeless from the zero basements by frozen men in frozen overalls. The traffic cops, trying to keep order in the chaos-cold, felt their semaphoring arm stiffen away from their bodies. It was a common sight, at shift change, to see them lifted like statues off their podiums, and laid horizontal in a wheezing truck.
The cars and wagons and trolley buses moved slower and slower, valves faltering, carburettors icing, until with a protesting phut! they slept in the falling snow, their black painted out to white.
One man got himself a big pre-war fire truck with eighteen gears, engine so high off the ground that a child could stand underneath. He fixed up an asbestos platform with a tiny woodsman's stove on top and bolted the lot under the engine. By fuelling the stove he could keep his truck warm enough to be driven and he started a brisk business in grocery delivery. When anyone heard the clang of the fire bell or saw the great chrome radiator grille pushing towards their block, they ran out, limbs and overcoats, stopping him for milk and potatoes. From a distance, because the engine was so high off the ground, you could see the stove eye burning, glowing down the blanked-out streets and past the forgotten cars.
There was another man had six huskies that he harnessed to a home-made sledge. He was Polish and had come to New York to escape the war. No one was exactly sure how he had sneaked six huskies past Immigration but the story goes that the dogs were puppies and the officer, a born and bred city man, didn't believe they would grow any bigger. Besides, didn't his own wife love her chihuahua?
Around the markets of Orchard Street and Essex Street, everyone knew Raphael and his dogs. He made a living selling fruit-flavoured cheeses, his own secret recipe handed down from an uncle who had worked in the kitchens of the Tsar. If Raphael seemed eccentric, he was no more so than all the others who had been blown off their natural course and were learning new orbits around new suns.
When the snow started to fall, Raphael, under his vegetable sacks stuffed with dog hair and feathers, remembered a time before he was born, before his father was born, when someone who was still in his blood had travelled over the ice plains and the stilled rivers to fill a sledge with furs. The dogs growled at the snow falling in whispers, snow in flakes, snow in footballs, snow in avalanches, gaining mastery over the most modern city in the world. They too began to remember, and under their paws were the white rocks of the Eskimo, and stunted wind-mad plants, and volcanic sulphurous geysers, and outside, the short-fringed ponies, and other creatures, unseen, howling in the night. They were ready.
All night Raphael worked, hammering, sawing, bending, shaping, oiling, planing, fining, and there was wood, rope, metal and leather, and the dogs fetching in their mouths the things he needed.
By morning they were ready. In the raw dawn of a dead day, along deserted Fifth Avenue, the sound of bells, the sound of dogs barking, a whip in the cracking air, and a cry as old as winter itself. Raphael in his chariot, his hair black as coal, his eyes bright as living coal, spinning the snow under the rails of the sled.
People crowded out to him to get black tea or pea and ham soup from the two gleaming samovars. He sold bagels with his own fruit cheeses. He sold bars of dark chocolate and a patent chest ointment made of peppermint oil. The dogs, shaking the snow from their ruffs, were popular with the children, and bared their gleaming teeth and steaming tongues in greeting.
People called his sled and team 'The Angel Car'. He ran errands for the oldest and the youngest hitched lifts, piled in childish heaps behind the hissing copper cylinders.
New York, city of motion, could not go forward, and so, because it hated to stand still, it went backwards. Went backwards into its past, individual and collective, the past of the place; the Hudson river and the trappers, the Indians and their piebald horses, the Dutch Stuyvesants, trading, building, navigating, dealing. The past of its people, now from so many parts of the globe, but all knowing what it was to struggle, to pioneer. To make the difficulty into the dream.
The snow recast the buildings into mountains. Tiny figures huddled in all of their clothes and all of their bedclothes, padded without sound in the shadow of these mountains. They were hunting food, hunting company, they were bartering what they had for what they wanted.
To defy the silence of the snow people began to sing. The layers-deep of snow baffled the acoustics, so that someone a few streets away from a song, could not hear the notes, but could feel the vibration. The sound of the city singing shook its foundations so seismically that after the snow melted, a number of buildings were found to have lost their tops.
Anyone going about in those days would come upon fires lit on the sidewalks where groups of men and women congregated for warmth away from their swooned apartments. Then somebody else would arrive with a stone jar of Schnapps, and somebody else with a hod of chestnuts and somebody else with a mouth organ, and there was Raphael running up and down with red-hot pitchers, filling the mugs we all carried with us in those days.
I say 'we all' for I was about to be born.
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