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“In whose playful hands are we?” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

It was early dawn -- a little after three -- when the young prostitute began to walk homeward in the relentless drizzle. Bitter and mortified, she shivered and pulled the

collar of her raincoat tighter. Pain over her humiliating lot was no longer a coherent

thought. It just filled up her interior with the weight of aimless brooding.

Wanting to reach her one-room apartment as soon as possible, she sped up her steps,

carefully balancing herself on the wet, uneven cobble stones of this sadly neglectedTransylvanian town.

She fumbled in the dark for the keyhole and then stepped into the stench of the moist

kitchen. The voices of men heard from inside lost none of their raw brutality across theclosed door. No peace even at home! Gritting her teeth, she stepped into the thick 

cigarette smoke and smell of brandy.

At the table two men played cards, her ex-convict lover Vladimir and a pock-marked manwith heavy muscles bulging under his jacket. Her arrival was barely noticed.

Agnes threw her coat on a chair and sat on the edge of the bed. First she put her elbows

on her knees and then just allowed her arms to dangle between them. She leaned forward,

head bowed -- a strand of wet hair across her painted, debauched face -- the deep

décolletage of her dress allowing a clear glimpse of shapely, youthful breasts.

Without lifting his head from the cards, Vladimir addressed her:

“Join the game, Agnes.”

“I don’t want to,” she answered glancing malevolently at the two men.

After taking a swig from his bottle and a long drag from his cigarette, Vladimir said

casually:

“Yet it would interest you. This man, Sergei, from the traveling circus, already took all

my money, now you are the bank.”

Agnes lifted her head and looked at the man in wonder.

“Rotten pigs!” she mumbled.

The petroleum lamp cast a deadly yellow glow around the filthy room. The rain

continued to knock on the window. As the two men slammed one card after another,Agnes nervously tightened her blouse and furrowed her eyebrows. Nothing made any

sense anymore. She wanted to die.

Vladimir threw down his remaining card and hit the table with his fist:

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“Undress Agnes, I have lost you!”

She straightened herself, eyes burning with the bitter fire of hurt dignity.

The man from the traveling circus observed her with undisguised sarcasm.

“This is not a joke,” bellowed Vladimir, “that was the agreement.”

Agnes did not move.

“Don’t be tasteless, Vladimir!” she whispered in a begging tone.

Vladimir stepped up to her and slapped her face with hateful force. Her nose began to

 bleed. She looked with helpless despair at the man from the traveling circus who said

vary calmly in Russian:

“Ne nado! (Not necessary!)

He then told Vladimir that Agnes would go with him. Vladimir seemed to protest but the

menacingly quiet demeanor of the bulky man had convinced him that acquiescence was

in his best interest.

As the two stepped into the grey, wet autumn morning, the man said:

“I’m Sergei.”

“Agnes,” was the answer and the two shook hands.

Two months later they were married.

Sergei was 27 at that time.

When the Russian revolution engulfed his native Moldavia earlier in the decade, making

it into a Soviet republic, he escaped to Romania where he joined a famous circus as an

“Untermann” -- the name given to the strongest acrobats who held up the agile ones. Butdrinking cut his performance career short. In the end, he was glad that the circus kept him

as a member of the “tent crew.” In that capacity, he became a skilled carpenter and

locksmith, trades that he could legitimately claim in his applications to emigrate to theUnited States. The application, filed in 1924 in Bucharest, was approved in 1928.

At the feet of Lady Liberty on Ellis Island, the immigration official took a glance atSergei’s hopelessly long family name, written in some unpronounceable East European

language, and he had made an offer that was not meant to be refused. “From now on you

are John Smith,” he said. The name was written into the documents, stamped, and the

official turned his attention to the next arrival.

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The “Smiths” settled in the lower East Side. While Agnes worked diligently in a textile

factory, “John” chose a very different path; he joined a gang that ran a bootlegging

operation in Hell’s Kitchen.

By the summer of 1932, it became obvious that no matter which party won the

 presidential election in November, the speak-easy business, the mainstay of gangster  profit at the time, would end.

All hell broke loose also in Hell’s Kitchen as different crime organizations encroachedinto each others’ territories for the last minute grab. “John Smith” was lured to the bank 

of the Hudson River and was shot in the head by rival gang members.

Agnes raised their only child, a daughter called Natasha, alone. No longer wanting to beknown as “Mrs. Smith,” she assumed her German maiden name Roegen, which, at the

urging of everybody around her was simplified into a better sounding, easier-to-spell

“Reagan.” No one really knows how she survived the high-unemployment years as a

single mother with a small child, but the fact remains that she never had a police record.She remarried during the war and worked until her death in 1970.

In 1950, Natasha married John MacCulloch, a man 20 years her senior. When he

announced his intention to turn a penniless beauty without college education or social

standing into a MacCulloch, his family was understandably perturbed. They belonged to

the highest stratum of New York society, where the ticket of admission had no dollar  price.

Shortly after their son, Nigel William was born, John divorced Natasha. Just like her mother she also had to raise her child alone, although under very different circumstances.

 Not only did Agnes help but the MacCulloch clan never abandoned her. She received

monthly payments from an elderly aunt of John’s.

 Natasha remarried but Nigel could never warm up to his stepfather, a Mexican

 businessman from New Jersey. And eventually, he got closer to the MacCullochs who put him through college and Yale Law School. At age 61, with a family of his own, he is

the executive director of New York’s most prestigious art foundation.

 Natasha inherited Agnes’ diary and when his mother died early this year, Nigel came intoits possession. He had it translated from a mixture of German and Romanian.

He kept the contents to himself.

What purpose would it serve to have an exchange like this in an exclusive social club?

“So your grandmother was a descendent of German settlers in Transylvania and your 

grandfather was a Russian, living in Moldavia. How fascinating! How did they meet?”

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“Well, my grandma was a prostitute and grandpa won her in a card game, called

Schnapsen.”

When he heard --

“So what’s your heritage Nigel, Scotch and Irish?”

He would answer – 

“Yes, and perhaps also a little German.”

Agnes dotted on Nigel. She took him to the circus at Madison Square Garden, ice skating

at the Rockefeller Center; to mesmerizing Christmas shows at Radio City Music Hall --and all those toys from FAO Schwarz. Memories of her lived in weird juxtaposition to

knowledge about criminal depravation.

From the thick mud in the penumbra of his conscience a strong sense of reality hademerged. Having a comfortable life is an accident of birth. Rivers of blood and tears ferry

most genes in tiny paper boats to the vast ocean of oblivion. His grandmother, a magic pearl, came so close to being lost. If, way back, Sergei had not held on to the Jack of 

Hearts for some confused reason in the wee hours of a rainy November morning in that

shabby town of Transylvania, would there be an honorable Nigel W. Reagan-MacCulloch

today?

In the diary he found what Agnes considered the song of her life – (in translation):

“Forward bears! Time has come to move; the high mountains are waiting;

The brave never look back -- forward, forward;

The high mountains are waiting; the high mountains are waiting . . .”

Sometimes he whishes he knew the melody.

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