Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook Page A

itinerary.
    Below Thirty-fourth Street, the avenue darkened as they entered a landscape of closed shops, small and unlighted, the purveyors of cheap clothes and costume jewelry already home with their families in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx and whose absence drained some unmistakably vital energy from the city.
    The bus moved steadily southward, these same modest shops now giving way to a line of brick walkups and finally to the huddled streets of the Lower East Side.
    Night had fallen by then, but if there was safety in numbers, these streets were the safest in New York. For here, the people resided in close quarters, the spaciousness of the outer boroughs still unavailable to them. And so they lived stacked above tailor shops and bakeries and small groceries. Here, in the evening, they crowded the concrete stoops and spoke to one another in old-country tongues and dressed in clothes that seemed to be handed down not from older sibling to younger but from one generation to the next.
    Anna appeared as comfortable in the human current of these streets as a dolphin in the sea. Here all the world knew her and greeted her, and on the way to her apartment, she stopped many times to inquire if this child was still sick or that brother still in some far town.
    On each of these stops, she introduced Danforth as her employer, then went on to speak awhile before motioning him down the street. During these intervals, Danforth stood, alien and aloof, waiting, sometimes impatiently, to move on and even slightly offended that Anna appeared either oblivious or indifferent to the odd position in which she had placed him.
    The entrance to her building was over a shop whose metal staircase was covered in signs with Hebrew lettering. The shopwindow was filled with a curious array of objects, none of which Danforth recognized, save for the peculiar candelabrum the Jews called a
menorah
and that he knew they lit only for some holiday. Fringed prayer shawls were displayed on shelves, along with what appeared to be matching cases, and these too had Hebrew lettering. There was also a small table covered with silver-plated and ceramic chalices of various sizes. The entire display struck Danforth as typical of the Ostjuden, whose superstitions his father had often derided and whose tradesmen he’d scornfully dismissed as peddlers.
    â€œI live on the fourth floor,” Anna said as they entered the lobby of the building.
    From his first step up the stairs, Danforth was aware of the odors that engulfed and swirled around him. They were flat and heavy, and they gave an oily feel to the air. He’d smelled similar food in the street stalls of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw but had never eaten anything sold there. “And they call what we eat
treif,
” his father had said contemptuously, and with a quickening step, he’d hustled him back toward the far more stylish eateries of the city.
    â€œIt’s really not such a difficult climb,” Anna said when they reached the fourth-floor landing.
    â€œNot at all,” Danforth told her, though he found it necessary to disguise his slightly labored breathing.
    Anna swung open the door of her apartment, stepped inside, and turned on the light.
    The light revealed a room that surprised Danforth considerably more than anything Anna had said or done since he’d met her. For although located in what had seemed to him a sea of Eastern European Jewishness, her apartment revealed none of the ritual objects sold in the shop below, nothing to suggest anything but a secular life.
    â€œHow long have you lived here?” he asked.
    â€œA long time,” she answered.
    He walked over to the window that looked out on the noisy street below, a teeming world that reminded him more of Calcutta than New York.
    â€œPlease, sit down,” she said.
    He lowered himself into one of the plain wooden chairs and glanced at the small table to his right, where a lamp rested on a rectangle of cloth