Shadow Play

On summer evenings, Uncle Nathan used to put on shadow plays. With nothing but ten fingers and a beam of light against a plain white wall, he astounded us with lions and monkeys, alligators and train engines. All eyes watched, riveted, when the silhouette magic began. He didn’t ask for much — a wall, a light. In the back rows of wedding halls, or when holiday dinners were winding down, his fans would gather to marvel: a butterfly, an antelope, Theodor Herzl, a turtle.

In between shows, Uncle Nathan was a dutiful clerk at the VAT office. He was not bitter that life had led him to this — a narrow room, a desk, forms piled high. ‘You see, it was here on this wall that it all began,’ he would say, pointing to the plaster wall opposite his desk and drifting away into sweet remembrance. The wall was bare, with no pictures or windows. Only the roving silhouette of Uncle Nathan’s finger, no longer merely pointing now, but capering — a seahorse, a ballerina, a fighter plane.
As Uncle Nathan chuckled, his eyes aglow, his interlocutor would abandon any notion of pitying this man hunched over a broken desk squeezed between a door and a file cabinet. It was a miserable alcove, sliced out of a larger office. The partition had been ordered years before — six clerks on one side to help customers, and Uncle Nathan on the other with a broken ventilator wedged into the wall above his head.
‘But it’s all right. Without this wall, where would I be?’ And a jubilation of fingers would dance recklessly on the wall as Uncle Nathan astonished his guest: a shark, a tractor, a magician, a paratrooper.

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First published in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and  Culture. Translated by Jessica Cohen