Son of a Smaller Hero (22 page)

Melech looked at him – his mouth opened and his hand pressed to his throat suppressing a scream.

“Zeyda
, I …”

That swarthy man with the dense eyes grabbed the box and yanked out one of the scrolls. A crowd gathered around him. The swarthy man plucked his nose and held up the scroll and yelled: “Wolf Adler died for the Torah.”

Melech seized the box.

Noah stared stupidly and began to sway.

“WOLF ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH.”

A woman fainted. She was seated on a kitchen chair and a man was fanning her with a newspaper.

A face swam out of the sun to Noah. Itzik’s finger shook under his eyes. “You’re a tramp,” he said. Then, for he must have caught a whiff of Noah’s breath, “and a drunkard too.” Noah tried to break away but Itzik held on to him. “Your father died for God but you’re a …”

“Itzik, please.…”

An incensed crowd pressed around them.

“You may come to the funeral but after that don’t you dare …”

Noah turned away but his path was blocked by the stretcher-bearers. His father’s body was covered with a blanket. Noah let them pass. Itzik grabbed him again. “God will …”

“I should hit you,” Noah said. “I’m angry and I should hit you. But that would be my short temper against your short mind.”

“ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH. WOLF ADLER …”

The swarthy man held the scroll aloft before a throng of admirers.

“Go ahead,” Itzik said. “Hit me. You’re rotten!”

“EVERYBODY LISTEN, WOLF …”

Noah stared at the swarthy man. “Please tell him to stop, Lou. I know he died for the scrolls but …”

“…  ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH. LISTEN!”

The doors banged shut and Noah saw the ambulance pull away just before Itzik – holding him very tight – began to shake him and shake him.

Somebody took a picture.

Lou separated them. He pressed Noah’s arm and shrugged his shoulders. His eyes were moist.

T
HAT WAS A BRIGHT MORNING – THE MORNING OF
Wolf Adler’s funeral. The shrill blue sky was without clouds or depth. Those birds that had anticipated the oncoming winter filled and fluttered in the blue blackly; lots of twittering, swooping arrows, bound south. Trees postured limply, their leaves yellowing, on both sides of the street. An angering, ubiquitous sun ricocheted off black sedans and sweltering faces and mushy asphalt. Many a frazzled flower yearned for the shade of red-brick walls or balconies in the occasional parched garden of City Hall Street. The crowd of mourners gathered there that morning was estimated at “more than a thousand” in the afternoon edition of the
Star
. The
Gazette
, however, claimed 1,500 mourners several hours later, and the
Herald
, appearing the following morning, began its story with “Nearly two thousand Jews …” Anyway, there was quite a crowd. Lots of the hoi-polloi but a few important people too. Take – for instance – Buddy Gross of 20th Century Promotions, who had been responsible for the splash of full-page memorial advertisements in all the newspapers. A black-boarded picture of Wolf and a poem. (Max had objected to the ads at first. But Buddy had told him: one, the reporters would get the story anyway; two, Max had a bastard of a
campaign coming up; and three, it was an honour to the community.) Now David Lerner, who was also there, was a horse of a different colour. Formerly a communist and still a poet, Lerner was famous for his lyrics throughout Outremont. Possessor of a real rhetorical gift, he wrote speeches that were read by philanthropic millionaires at Zionist banquets. He had gotten two hundred dollars for his ode celebrating Wolf Adler. That, and a total readership reckoned at 800,000 by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. (A considerable jump over the three dollars and less than two hundred readers his
Ode to Sacco and Vanzetti
had earned him some years back.) Take Rimstein the rag pedlar. He had ruptured himself long ago and in an even colder country to keep out of the Czar’s army, and had come not to mourn a friend but to size up the coffin and to keep in the sun and with the crowd. The swarthy man with dense eyes, Yosel Wiserman, hoped to see another family squabble. Also present: Louis Berger the Bookie and Hoppie Drazen. Twersky, landlord. Yidel Stein. Pinky’s Squealer. Many elderly women with wizened faces and yellow shawls wept copiously. Professionals, they seldom missed a wedding and never a funeral. Simcha Rabinovitch – now there’s a better Jewish joke than most. Born in a tailor shop on a dark tenement street, Simcha had walked across Latvia and through Russia and down into China – where another tailor had forged papers for him – and across to Japan and San Francisco and over the American continent to Montreal, Canada, where his Uncle Herschel had given him another stool in another tailor shop on another dark tenement street. There he stooped, the marathoner arrived, robbed of the dream that had sustained him through all his hiking. There was no parking space available for blocks around and all the windows of City Hall Street were stuffed with howling, disputatious spectators. Estelle Geiger, who had been up in Ste. Agathe with the children – wasn’t it better to spend money on enjoyment than on doctor’s bills? – and who had been elected Queen Esther by a landslide at the
YMHA
Purim Ball of 1949, was there with six other wives. Seven ripe peaches with black
hair. After the funeral they were going to see
The Robe
at the Palace and then Normie had promised to take them out to dinner at Ruby Foo’s. Black policemen in magnificent goggles patrolled the route between the house on City Hall Street and the synagogue on silver motor-cycles. One of them, Omer Desjardins, had used to be on the anti-Red squad and knew the constituency of Carrier intimately. When he had last raided Panofsky’s he had allowed him to keep
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
because he had known that it was a medical book. Art Gold turned up with the kids, Gloria Anne and Sheldon. President of the Committee for Better Relations Between Gentiles and Jews – “There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy’s. And the right side.” – he hoped to organize a Wolf Adler Memorial Fund. Youngsters shinned up lamp-posts whilst many of their elders, who had movie cameras, stood on the rooftops of cars. Benjy Tulch, whose father had been killed in a running gun-battle with the
RCMP
when his family had still been bootleggers, twisted in the seat of his
M.G.
Ah, it was a fine day. You can have your slap-dash of an autumn day with insanely bright leaves falling at your feet, you can have the dreams of your loose spring evenings that end up being just dreams, you can even have all the snows of winter, but give me a white day with a blue sky and a dazzling yellow sun. Rosy women and brown children and pink-faced men. Hey, remember that day Moishe the Idiot farted during the Kol Nidre service? Or that time they raided Chaim Shub’s shop for printing phony raffles? Hell. Hey, remember Bloom?
“MAKE BLOOM YOUR BROOM, CLEAN UP CARTIER.”
The crowd surged to and fro before the door to the house. Moishe Garber, who was a recent arrival from Lodz, wanted to know if the house was for rent. He had a family of five, he said. Press photographers leaned against cars. Aaron Panofsky watched from his wheelchair. The Hook, and a few nimble-fingered others, moved stealthily among the crowd. Inside, prayers were being read:

Brothers and sisters, father, mother, wife and son of Wolf Adler, who had died a hero, stood around the pinewood coffin like hesitant swimmers standing back from a deepening pool. Leah wept dryly and Melech glowered and Jenny squeezed a handkerchief to her swollen eyes. Noah had a tendency to stare blankly.

Gusts made up of hundreds of hot, festering voices banged like rain against the shut windows.

Goldie gulped and reached out and crumpled up on the mute coffin. Knocking fiercely on the pinewood, she yelled: “Wolf. Wolf. Forgive me! Have mercy on us, Wolf!” Max pulled her away gently. “Easy,” he whispered. She broke away and turned wildly on Noah. “He shouldn’t be here. He’s a …” Her voice trailed off. Leah began to moan softly and her brother, Harry, patted her shoulder. “There,” he said. “There, there.”

Max and Itzik and Nat, Karl Panofsky, Harry Goldenberg, and Noah were the pall-bearers. Leah whimpered incoherently, the other women watched with horror, as the men grappled with the coffin and finally heaved it onto their shoulders rockily. A dreadful moment followed when the pall-bearers got twisted in a swirl of relatives in
the hall. The coffin, slipping treacherously, almost toppled to the floor. Ida dug her nails into Stanley’s arm. “I don’t want to look,” she said. “They open it at the cemetery and you’re supposed to. I can’t.…”

Outside, the crowd quietened. Identities were consumed one after the other until it became one taut, expectant face. Truly, this was the crowd that had waited at the foot of Sinai on the third day.

A swarthy man with dense eyes yelled: “Wolf Adler died for the Torah.
WOLF ADLER IS A HERO.”

The coffin was borne like a ship among them. Six men toiling under a shifting weight, thinking separate thoughts and leaving individual curses left unsaid. The elderly and the superstitious rushed towards them hoping to touch the coffin before it was swung into the waiting hearse. A red, blotchy face rubbed against Noah’s cheek. The sun beat down without pity. Cameras turned.

“May the Almighty comfort you together with all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,” a man yelled. “Amen,” yelled many others. Silver motor-cycles mounted by goggled policemen began to cough and splutter. Melech Adler glowered back at the sun and shed no tears and clenched his yellowed fists in his pockets. Buddy Gross cornered the reporters. “Here’s a copy of the rabbi’s speech,” he said. “He was Max Adler’s brother. Remember that.” He pressed envelopes into their pockets. “The rabbi’s name is Fishman.
F-I-S-H-M-A-N
. From here we go to the synagogue. We …”

“How do you spell Max?” one of the reporters asked.

Gross stared and then grinned widely. “That’s funny,” he said. “That’s pretty good.”

Samuel Panofsky wheeled Aaron towards a waiting car. “Don’t start anything,” he pleaded. Aaron smiled bitterly. “I don’t go to the circus to tease the lions. I go to watch.”

“WOLF ADLER DIED A HERO.”

Noah felt the coffin cutting into his shoulder and remembered that the last time he had met his father had been in Panofsky’s. Wolf
had wiggled his ears and raised his eyebrows – a gesture that had defined their relationship pretty neatly. Goldie was right. Wolf Adler hadn’t had much of a son. Much of anything, you might say. Noah stared at Itzik’s tense narrow back. Had Wolf rushed into the flames to save the scrolls? Noah doubted that. Who was the girl in the faded snapshot? Tomorrow, after I’ve slept. Thank God Miriam’s back in Ste. Adele, he thought.

Max poked Lou. “Where’s Shloime?” he asked.

“Turrono. We sen’ a wire.”

“He didn’t get it?”

“How in the hell would I know?”

The wide-open doors of the black hearse beckoned.

Estelle Geiger stood on her toes. “Is that the one who lives with a
shiksa
in Ste. Adele?”

Leah was helped into the dark Cadillac and immediately sank back into heaps of cool pillows. Oh, the crowd. All of Montreal. A mass of flushed faces flattened against the car window.

The silver motor-cycles swung around in front of the hearse and spun in circles like bewildered, injured birds. A lost boy wailed. The coffin was eased into the hearse and a platoon of mourners fell into step behind the shut doors. Members of the crowd began to reclaim their lost identities again. Groups broke up, shifted, and formed in other combinations. Many people rushed for their cars and started for the synagogue, others fell into rows on either side of the pavement and followed after the slow, black hearse.

When the funeral procession finally reached the synagogue the doors to the hearse were flung open and Rabbi Milton Fishman, a pink-faced eagle, his prayer shawl flapping in the breeze, his beak dipped into his black prayer book, read a special prayer on the synagogue steps. Wolf Adler had not been a Zaddik, but he had died a hero.

After that the hearse, followed by nearly one hundred cars, drove more quickly to the Jewish cemetery in Cartierville. Noah stared
absently out of the window of the first car. His mother moaned. He watched as the city slipped away and vacant lots and buildings under construction became more frequent. He noticed the Ajax Trading sign on many of the construction shacks. Max had sold them the land. They finally turned up the gravel road that led to the cemetery. There was lots of grass that had been yellowed by the sun between the endless rows of tombstones. In Everlasting Memory of My Beloved Wife. Lest We Forget Harold, Peace to His Dust. Smaller stones for the children, bigger ones for the rich. Lean ones, fat ones. Tall, small. White ones, grey ones, brown and decrepit ones. Noah remembered overhearing that several wealthy Jews had recently been buried in coffins that were waterproof and air-tight. Not so Wolf Adler, who was being buried in cheap pinewood according to the orthodox laws. Noah gazed at the affluent trees and was struck by the incongruity of their maturing on so obvious a fertilizer. A green iron fence separated the synagogue lot from the lots of other congregations and societies. The Workman’s Circle lot was located on lower land. Marshland. Distinctions did not end at the grave after all.

Three husky labourers with muddy shovels waited beside a pile of rich brown earth. Beggars shook tin cans like threats under the faces of the mourners. A tattered man with a bronzed face sold Haggadahs. Birds chirped in the trees. A woman with damp eyes sold black books of mourners’ prayers. Away, far away, the city was a grey pulpy mass looming incoherently out of the hot brown earth.