The Sea Beach Line Read Online Free

up the rest of his tea, then finally spoke.
    â€œ Ladno . There is another bookseller, Mendy, who maybe knows something more about where he was living, or his business. He could be the one I first heard the rumor from. Maybe there are still some assets you can sell off, to settle the estate. Go harass him.”
    â€œThank you. Is there a telephone number where I could reach him, this Mendy? Or an address maybe?”
    â€œNo.” Goldov shook his head. “No telephone. And I’m not knowing his address. But he sells on West Fourth Street in Manhattan, by the southeast corner of the park there. He’s out on the street most days, providing it doesn’t rain.
    â€œThank you.” He waved me off.
    â€œCome back to me if you learn anything about Alojzy’s finances.”

2
    MY NEXT DESTINATION AFTER Coney Island was Sheepshead Bay, Alojzy’s old neighborhood. For the past few years, I had done my best to avoid thinking about Alojzy too much. He was out there somewhere, and he was my father. I was safer because he was in the world. But he wasn’t around, and it was easier to push him to the back of my mind. Now, since receiving his postcard, he had been pulled back to the surface. Images of him filled my mind as I left the museum, but I couldn’t be sure how much of those were my own memories, and how much were me assimilating Goldov’s memories. I didn’t want to mix up my own image of Alojzy with one painted by the failed artist. My own memories were so fragile, I didn’t know how much cross-contamination they could withstand. Visiting the neighborhood where so many of my happy memories of Alojzy were situated would help me ground them.
    As I walked back up the boardwalk, two freighters passed by. I pulled out Alojzy’s postcard, which I kept in the same envelope as Goldov’s note, and held the picture up against the ocean. The view didn’t line up. Alojzy hadn’t drawn the picture in Coney Island. Istayed on the boardwalk until it ended. Passing up through Brighton, I bought two pirozhki stuffed with kapusta off a folding table outside a grocery store. The smell of cabbage and grease reminded me of days spent with Alojzy. I followed below the train tracks at first, but as I got closer to the bay, my memory of the local geography began to return. Walking up West End Avenue, I noticed strange bits of steel and brick sticking out of the trees down past the flat end of the bay. I couldn’t figure out what they could be. Brooklyn was full of things that did not make sense and were not explained; this was part of the reason it had been such a source of wonder to me as a kid.
    When I got close to the trees, I realized I was looking at the Holocaust Memorial Park. The monument had not been completed when my father lived down here. The local Jews were still arguing then about the details of its construction. My father had agreed with a popular sentiment in the neighborhood: it was wrong for the city to try to include the Roma in the monument’s lengthy text. Why should the Jews be disgraced by having to share their history with some damn Gypsies? All in all, though, Alojzy was not impressed with the whole idea of the monument. He found the American Jewish obsession with the Holocaust sentimental and indulgent.
    I walked through a row of trees and entered the park. Dozens of rough-hewn gravestones were scattered through the park’s center, each one bearing the story of some atrocity or death camp or partisan leader, in whichever language—English, Hebrew, Russian, or Yiddish—the donor had felt most comfortable. Little round stones rested on some of the gravestones. Around the top of the column, the word “remember” was written in all four languages. In the center, oversized strands of fake razor wire threaded around a spiraled column. The column was made to look like the bombed-out ruins of something old and brick, but was clearly one