Cloth Menu

That night started out in a secret gambling den reserved for diplomatic personnel. This was Romania in the mid-80s, Ceauşescu and all that. Coldest winter in centuries and that week the embassy food shipment goes missing. Miserable. The stores were bare, as well, natch, so we're about starved to death on a steady diet of dust and file folders. In fact, this place was located in a sub-basement of an old supermarket where several Baltic appliances had taken up residence. Crazy. They made a hell of a racket, too. And what with the Revolutions roaring in the next room, you had to shout to get your cards. Anyway, there was me, a rabbi, a stevedore, a cop, an atomic scientist, a knife thrower, a baby, and the dealer, a Cherokee called Squirrel. Some assignment. "Policy," we said, and shrugged. So I'm holding a flush to make you weep when the lights go down. That stills the Baltics, too. But when the lights come back up, there's a Carpathian at the table. Hallucinating, I think. We all think. Mass hysteria on account of starvation! We're playing for seeds at this point, caraway left over from some old goulash palace up the block. Pathetic. And then the rabbi starts reminiscing about his stint in the Faroe Islands to the phantom Carpathian! Madness. We're about to hold the fellow down, jab a needle in him, when the Carpathian—he's sweating like a stoat now—pulls this cloth menu out of his jacket pocket and starts patting his brow. Well, that's about the time the Trotskyite Temperance League raided us and I've always had a hard time piecing together what happened. What I'm sure of is this hatchet in my skull and the Carpathian's menu, which somehow ended up behind my left molar. Dinner.