The Fog of Severin

That autumn, when all the teachers in the city went on strike, the boy found himself at loose ends. An only child, soon to turn seven, morbidly shy and undersized, he had a handful of occasional playmates but no close friends. His amblyopic left eye necessitated his wearing both a beige patch over his right and bulky, black-framed glasses that sat crookedly on his nose. The eyepatch made him a target of the neighborhood bullies, who called him “Cyclops” and cuffed him about. Often, he wished that he possessed the size and ferocity of that mythical creature. Lacking those qualities, he rarely ventured beyond his backyard, where, weather permitting, he would pass hours tossing a Spalding in the air and catching it about half the time when it came down, all the while imagining himself patrolling centerfield in Shea Stadium.

The boy’s father, a high school geometry teacher, was also homebound due to the strike. He spent his days fretting over bills, while listening to local news broadcasts on a transistor radio and hoping for word of an impending settlement.

He and the boy’s mother argued frequently, and with increasing bitterness, often forgetting that the boy was in the house and could hear them. Money was the main source of contention. For the sake of economy, dinner often consisted of soup and sandwiches, and long afterward, the boy would associate that troubled autumn of 1968 with the smell of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Still, the boy’s father would say to his wife, “You’re killing me with the spending.” On occasion, they fought over politics. Two bêtes noires haunted the imagination of the high school geometry teacher: Mayor Lindsay, the “limousine liberal,” and some “rabble rouser” named Rhody McCoy. Together, in his mind, they bore the blame for the strike and the precarious state of the family’s finances. A lifelong Democrat, at times he even hinted, to his wife’s horror, that he might just vote for Nixon in the upcoming presidential election. Never one to back down from a fight, she would sometimes goad her husband by gushing over the mayor’s patrician good looks.

Often, the boy sought out the company of his grandfather, who occupied the apartment on the upper level of the family’s gray-shingled Queens duplex. The old man, with his twig-like limbs, concave chest, gnarled fingers, comically large ears, and gray flannel pajamas that hung upon him like a sack, looked to the boy like a scarecrow. The living room where the two of them would sit was a place of perpetual twilight, illuminated only by a small table lamp and whatever light from outside could filter in through the windows. With the thermostat always cranked up to seventy-eight degrees, the room felt like a greenhouse. In a corner behind the old man’s chair, a humidifier pumped out a white mist in volumes sufficient to befog the windows and the boy’s glasses. The powder-blue wallpaper nearest the spout had begun to blister. A smell of disinfectant suffused the air.

Still, the boy could listen for hours, spellbound, while his grandfather told him tales about a childhood friend named Pipik. Pipik first appeared as a young boy who also had to wear an eyepatch and endure teasing from his peers. The taunts stopped, though, when Pipik invented a fog machine that saved his little town of Severin by hiding it from the marauding Cossacks who constantly plagued it. When Pipik grew a little older, he decided that he wanted to see the world beyond Severin, so he built a small but very sturdy boat and rowed it all the way across the Atlantic to America. In another version, he made the trip to America on foot, after inventing special shoes for the purpose. The shoes, which had wings and a motor, enabled him to glide over the water at 300 miles an hour. Arriving in America without a penny to his name, Pipik lived as a vagabond until he grew rich by inventing a suit that made its wearer invisible. With his newfound wealth, he found that many women wanted to marry him. Wary of gold diggers, he wooed the one woman he truly loved by disguising himself as a poor student, revealing his identity only after he knew for certain that she loved him, too.

The boy’s father insisted that the stories were nonsense, that neither Pipik nor Severin had ever existed. Pipik wasn’t even a real person’s name; it meant belly button in Yiddish. One day, pointing his thumb at the ceiling, he said to his wife, in front of the boy, “It’s not only his lungs that were damaged by the poison gas.”

“How dare you?” replied the boy’s mother, and a terrible row ensued.

Later, however, she admitted to the boy that she did not think that Pipik was a real person either. Grandpa had always been one for telling wild stories that he got from books, movies, operas, and his own imagination. As a child, she had loved his stories, too, but she had outgrown them. She even suggested, gently, that the boy might benefit by spending a little more time playing outside with other children.

“I think your dad is right about that. It would be healthier for you. Besides, Grandpa’s not well. He needs his rest.”

The next day, though, when a sudden squall chased the boy in from the yard, he went upstairs again.

“Grandpa,” he said, “Mom and Dad say Pipik isn’t a real person.”

The old man began to cough, and his brittle scarecrow frame shook.

“Grandpa, are you all right?”

As he often did when worried, the boy picked at the lower edge of his eyepatch.

“It’s nothing,” wheezed the old man.

He spit into a tissue, which he then balled up and dropped into the waste basket beside his chair. For a long time, he did not speak. The humidifier gurgled on and on, the tall maple in the front yard groaned as its denuded branches bent to the wind, the rain rapped against the roof and the windowpanes, and from downstairs, there came the first rumblings of a nascent marital storm.

Removing his glasses, the old man wiped the lenses with a tissue, all the while gazing sorrowfully at the four-by-six-inch black and white photograph of the boy’s mother, which stood on the small lamp table beside his armchair. In the picture, she was seventeen years old, her thick, lightly curled black hair flowing to her shoulders, her smile brilliant, her eyes possessed of a radiance that had dulled long ago.

“So, tell me. Do you think Pipik is real?”

Wiping his own clouded glasses on the bottom of his t-shirt, the boy hesitated.

“Nu? You don’t know? Well, it’s like this. Sometimes, your old grandpa tells a story, and maybe he adds a little bit here and a little bit there. He colors it in a little bit, like in a coloring book. But that doesn’t mean it’s not mostly true. Pipik is to you, isn’t he?”

The boy nodded, but in his eyes there remained uncertainty.

“Well, then, that answers your question.”

“But what about Severin? Is that a real place?”

“It used to be. But it’s gone now. You won’t find it on any map.”

“What happened to it?”

“Ah, well, it was so long ago. Let me try to remember.”

Closing his eyes, he drummed on the armrests of his chair with his bony fingers.

“Well, it was like this. When Pipik left for America, there was nobody else in the town who knew how to use the fog machine. The Cossacks started causing trouble again, and the mayor of the town turned the machine on. But neither he nor anyone else in the town knew how to turn it off. So, the machine kept pumping out fog, even after the Cossacks were gone. Eventually, the fog got so thick that the town just disappeared.”

“What about the people who lived there?”

“They disappeared, too. All the people Pipik knew there. The ones he had left behind.

His mother, two of his sisters. They all disappeared.”

“Where did they go?”

“Nobody really knows. The fog must have carried them off somewhere.”

The boy gave him a puzzled look.

“Why didn’t Pipik leave instructions for the machine?”

“He didn’t think of it, I suppose. Pipik was very clever, but he could also be very careless sometimes. He didn’t always think things through. If he had, he would have sent for his mother and sisters.”

There came another coughing fit. Two more balled up tissues joined the growing collection in the waste basket.

“Grandpa, why do you cough so much?”

“It’s because my lungs don’t work so well anymore.”

“Because of the poison gas in the war?”

The old man grimaced.

“Instead of talking about poison gas, why don’t you go fetch me my mandolin from the other room?”

Listening to his grandfather play had, of late, become an increasingly rare treat, and the boy was not about to let the opportunity pass. He ran to the bedroom.

In both sound and finish, the instrument had lost much of its former luster. The old man spent several minutes tuning up. Then he started to play, haltingly, stopping when he missed a note and starting over again.

“Ach, these fingers. They don’t do what I want them to anymore.”

Still, he persisted, and his playing slowly became more fluid. He even began to sing, his voice a phlegm-muffled croak:

Oh, my sweet Tessa,
She came from Odessa,
And she was a dancer divine.
Her moves were intricate,
And boy was she wicked…

He sang the last two lines a second time and then stopped.

“Ach, I forget the rest. It’s a song I used to play with my friends on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. I could really play then. We would play and sing, sometimes till morning. We had mandolins, accordions, clarinets, violins. What didn’t we have? The whole neighborhood would come out to hear us and sing and dance. And everyone was happy. And the women were so beautiful.

“You would have loved it there. There was a carousel, a roller coaster, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show—everything a boy could want.”

Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, as if he were breathing in the bracing air of the seaside rather than the vapors of a sickroom.

“Why don’t we go there?”

The boy began to pick at his eyepatch again, for the conversation had taken a worrisome turn. Twice before the old man had attempted to act on that oft-expressed desire. The first time, he had barely made the kitchen before a coughing spell sapped his energy and resolve. On his second try, he had managed to get out the front door of the apartment, but had stumbled on the landing and nearly fallen down the steps. The boy had not told his mother about the latter episode, for he feared upsetting her.

“But, Grandpa, how would we get there?”

“We’ll take the train. We’ll walk to the station. It’s not a million miles away.”

“But it’s cold, and it’s raining. And it’s getting dark out. And Mom will be coming up soon to give you your supper.”

The boy realized that he had pulled his eyepatch loose at the bottom.

“Too far. Too cold. Too this. Too that. That wouldn’t have stopped Pipik. He had a sense of adventure.”

Reaching for the thick hardwood cane that stood propped against the lamp table to his right, the old man pushed himself up onto his feet. His legs began to wobble, though, and he quickly sat back down. The cane fell to the floor.

“Why don’t you go get me my coat and shoes from the closet?”

Despite his misgivings, the boy did as told but as slowly as he could, hoping that he could stall until his mother came. Rummaging through the front closet, he plucked a badly frayed black woolen coat from a hanger and then returned to the living room.

“I couldn’t find your shoes, Grandpa,” he said, though he had spied a pair of dust-coated black wingtips in a corner on the floor of the closet. “Do you want me to go look some more?”

“Never mind the shoes right now. We’ll do the coat first.”

The old man slipped his right arm into the sleeve.

“Now pull the rest around behind me.”

The coat became so bunched up between the old man’s back and the chair that the boy could not pull the left sleeve free.

There came another barrage of coughing. More tissues found their way into the waste basket.

The boy sat down again. Outside, night was descending. The wind had diminished, and the beating of the rain against the roof tiles had ceased. The boy’s parents had, for the moment, exhausted their extensive catalogues of grievances against each other, and for a long time, the only sounds to be heard in the apartment were the wheezing of the old man and the gurgling of the humidifier. The mist inside and out had rendered the windowpanes completely opaque.

The boy wiped his clouded glasses again. He felt uneasy, for he noticed that the old man’s lips had taken on a faint bluish tinge, as his own sometimes did when he stayed too long in a cold swimming pool. Putting his glasses back on, he tugged some more at his eyepatch.

“Are you all right, Grandpa?”

“Yes.”

“Should I go get Mom?”

“No. Let’s just sit for a little bit. I’ll tell you another Pipik story.”

The boy waited eagerly but in vain.

“Grandpa?”

The old man, looking past the boy, did not answer.

The boy continued to pull at his eyepatch, until, suddenly, it came off altogether. He heard a creaking noise coming from the wooden stairway leading up the apartment. Recognizing the heavy, weary tread as his mother’s, he tried to stick the eyepatch back on, pressing it against his skin with all his might, but to no avail.

A key turned in the lock, and the boy’s mother entered the apartment. Her face was wan, her eyes puffy, her auburn hair oily and disarranged. She looked like someone who had just awakened from an uneasy sleep.

Crossing into the living room, she stopped short.

“What is this? Why aren’t you wearing your eyepatch?”

 “It came off.”

“Did you pull it off again?”

“No, Mom. I swear.”

“And why does he have his coat half on?”

“Grandpa wanted…”

“Grandpa wanted what?”

“To go to Brighton Beach.”

Her jaw dropped. She turned to the old man.

“Brighton Beach? On a day like this? Are you mad?”

He waved his hand dismissively.

“Such a fuss over nothing. I wanted to get a little air for a change. I get tired of looking at these four walls.”

“You can’t even walk, and you’re going to Brighton Beach?”

“I can’t walk?”

He groped for the fallen cane but his hand came up empty. Pushing against the armrests, he tried to lift himself from the chair, but his wasted arms soon gave way, and he fell back. His torso listed to the left, and his elbow struck the armrest.

“Gott in himmel! I’m the one who’s mad? No, I’m living above a madhouse. You think I don’t hear what goes on downstairs? I hear every word. And it chokes me. Like the poison gas, it chokes me.”

Hesitantly, his daughter reached for his left arm. He recoiled from her touch.

“Go away! Leave me alone!”

He then appealed to his grandson: “Do you think I’m insane? Your mother does.”

The boy, so often caught between the warring parties downstairs, squirmed in his chair.

The boy’s mother began a slow retreat toward the kitchen.

“I’ll go make you your supper. You’ll feel better after you eat.”

“I don’t want any supper. I want nothing. Nothing! Better the gas had done away with me back in France than killing me slowly for fifty years. I’ve lived too long. That I should come to this. Gott in himmel!”

The boy’s mother winced as though someone had cut her. Never had she looked so worn, so defeated.

“And you go downstairs, wash up, and get ready for your supper. I’ll be down soon.”

“Yes, Mom.”

As much as he wished to comfort her, he could find no other words. He hugged her, and she nearly squeezed his breath away.

“You’re such a good boy,” she murmured.

When she released him, he scurried out the door.

Downstairs, the house was dark, save for the kitchen. The sickly odor of cream of mushroom soup hung in the air, and as he stood in the narrow foyer at the front of the house, the boy felt a faint nausea. From the kitchen, there came the sound of rustling papers and the stentorian voice, peppered with static, of a radio news announcer. The boy wished that, like Pipik, he could shroud himself in fog and slip past the kitchen to his room. That way, he could avoid his father’s sour look and the inevitable, “So, you were upstairs again?”—which sounded to the boy more like an accusation than a question intended to elicit an answer. Turning around, he tiptoed back to the door. He opened it slowly, for it had a squeaky hinge, and stepped out onto the porch. There he would remain, he decided, until his mother came downstairs. His disobedience might upset her further, and that he regretted. Still, her anger—at least when directed at him—was more tempered than his father’s and tended to dissipate more quickly.

The rain had ceased, but a cold white fog, the likes of which the boy felt certain that nobody outside of Severin had ever seen, had settled upon the street. The night appeared unusually dark, for not only did the fog obliterate the natural light of the moon and stars; it muffled and distorted that which emanated from the streetlamps, scattering it into a million lusterless particles. The most solid of objects—telephone poles, the maple tree in the front yard, a neighbor’s plank fence, the wood-paneled station wagon parked in the driveway of the house opposite—seemed to dissolve before the boy’s eyes and reconstitute themselves in unfamiliar shapes. Shivering, the boy thought of the lost people of Severin, and he felt as if he, too, had been transported, somehow, to a place that he did not recognize, one very far from home.

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