The Frozen Rabbi (16 page)

The casket was rolled upright on a handcart into the building’s deepest sanctum, a pine-floored locker where wheels of cheese large as millstones, beer barrels with ivory spigots, and various imported delicacies were stored. There the proprietors, Gebirtig Junior and Senior, welcomed their guests to the Castle’s keep. Well-fed burghers both, wearing identically striped galluses and with fat cigars plugged into complacent grins, they seemed happy to defer to the brisk direction of the financier’s agent. At his command the mammoth green lozenge of ice with its dormant occupant was hoisted by workers from its box by means of a winch suspended from an overhead gantry. Max held his breath as the dripping block dangled in the frigid air from a hawser-thick noose, dipping left and right like the arms of precarious scales. Then the flannel-wrapped pillows of fish roe upon which the ice had rested, smelling surprisingly fresh, were removed from the casket and placed on a butcher’s slab, after which the block was thankfully lowered back into its crib. But what made Max even more ill at ease than had the thing’s visible exposure was the way the two Gebirtigs had scrutinized the ice-entombed rebbe almost as covetously as they had eyed the caviar.

The agent plucked from the lapel of his cutaway a tiny silver spoon with which he proceeded to sample the goods, chewing with methodical concentration before declaring the morsel satisfactory; then removing an envelope from his pocket, he tossed it to Max, who snatched it out of the air like falling manna. He supposed he was expected to count the money, which he had just enough presence of mind left to do, feeling the eyes of the proprietors upon him all the while. Stammering that all was in order, he stuffed the money back into the envelope, tucked the envelope into his inside coat pocket, and bowed to the agent with a slight spillage of raven curls. The fish eggs were then loaded into the wagon and buried in straw, on top of which were nestled, as a further decoy, sacks of groceries and bottles of vintage Sauterne. Then the agent departed without ceremony, leaving Max to the good offices of the Gebirtigs, who insisted he call them Asher and Tsoyl.

Obviously well compensated for their part in the relay of merchandise, they seemed also well informed concerning Max’s commission on behalf of the glaciated old man. “Be assured,” they told him in a homey Ashkenaz idiom, “will be looked after respectfully, your zayde, till you return from making his funeral arrangements.”

“I have first to visit the office of the Western Union,” Max announced, as per Pisgat’s instructions (and lest it be thought he had other plans for the cash). This too the Gebirtigs seemed to anticipate.

They gave him explicit directions as to how to reach the telegraph office on Delancey Street and described the procedure for wiring the money back to Poland. Feeling as if the cash in his pocket were a hot potato he must promptly dispose of, Max set off with a purpose into the jostling unknown. He had been told his destination was only a few blocks away, but the welter of the Lower East Side streets was immediately disorienting, and alone he remembered that, notwithstanding his pocketful of ill-gotten gains, he was without a sou to his name. Of course, once he was rid of the money, his empty pockets would at least preserve him from the risk of robbery, but despite his apprehensiveness he couldn’t help entertaining other possibilities. Given all Max had endured during his journey, would old Pisgat begrudge his skimming a scant few bills from such a thick bankroll, just enough to tide him over till he managed to secure a foothold in America? It was safe to say he would never be in possession of such a fortune again, and how, when it was gone, would he support himself, never mind see to the perpetual care of the ice-girt oddity? Thinking of which: Temporarily liberated from that weighty encumbrance, Max had the sense that his task was done. So what was to prevent him, other than Pisgat’s threats (and Pisgat was very far away), from taking the money and disappearing into the country’s interior, where he might perhaps purchase a kingdom and rule over a tribe of grateful savages? What, in any case, was the alternative? He supposed he would have to appeal to some benevolent society for a few dollars with which to rent a hole in the wall, then take a job in the rag trade—the industry in which he’d been told all greenhorns were employed—thus insuring his indenture to pisher wages for the rest of his days. On the other hand, already a smuggler, why not a thief? But still in the process of inventing himself, he decided somewhat grudgingly (nudged by Jocheved) that Max Feinshmeker was a man of his word, and anyway he just wanted to put this nerve-racking chapter behind him.

He paused on the corner of an avenue congested with market stalls, carts sporting garlands of tinware, trussed and flapping geese, bins piled with alps of eyeglasses, felt slippers, and celluloid buttons, wing collars like a nest of albino butterflies. Garbage choked the gutters, creating swamps into which women in brogans chased shoplifting urchins who ducked under the bellies of draft horses dead on their feet. From every fire escape hung the doubled-over carcass of an airing mattress, from every storefront an illustrated placard boasting a giant scissors or molar, its legend inscribed in holy and unholy tongues. Max paused to look left and right, realizing that in weighing his options he had forgotten the Gebirtigs’ directions, if indeed their directions were accurate; he’d lost all track of his whereabouts. Everyone around him was in motion as if desperately searching for something they’d lost, or leastwise bent on their next purchase or sale—everyone, that is, but the lanky golf-capped character in his patched plus-fours lounging in the doorway of a nearby bakery. Hadn’t Max seen the very same character lounging in another doorway a few blocks back? Or was it half a world away? Because, while any comparison to the Balut was invidious, the faces among this coarse congregation might have been the same ones he remembered from Jocheved’s native slum. It was as if, minus the mired motorcar or the manhole cover rattling above a subway like a gyrating coin, he’d traveled this far only to wind up where he’d begun.

In any case, despite Jocheved’s better judgment, he approached the loiterer, inhaling the aromas of baking strudel that reminded Max of how hungry he was, and inquired, “Zayt moykhl, reydstu Yiddish?”

“What other mother tongue would have me?” the loiterer responded in the vernacular, breaking into a grin that threatened to burst the pustules stippling his downy cheeks.

Subduing a shudder, Max asked him please the way to the Western Union. The young man instantly hopped down into the street paved in herring bones and broken glass, taking hold of Max’s arm to point him in a southerly direction. But no sooner had he done so than another youth, a bulkier one with a buzzard’s beak poking from under the bill of his cap, slammed into Max from behind, spinning him like a compass needle one hundred and eighty degrees.

“Klutz!” Max’s companion shouted at the youth, who forged ahead through the press of pedestrians without stopping. He let go of Max in order to make an exaggerated show of straightening his new friend’s disarranged coat. Then issuing somewhat mystifying directions (“You’ll want to turn left at Purim then pass on through the valley of dry bones”), he saluted with a click of the heels, about-faced, and took off like the other into the market melee. Over his shoulder he flung a proverb: “Eyner hot dem baytl,” letting loose a fusillade of laughter as he broke into a run, “der tsveyte hot dos gelt.” One has the wallet, the other the cash.

Max knew before he checked his pocket that the envelope containing the money was gone.

He realized also that he was lost, famished, exhausted, and now a marked man on a foreign shore where he hadn’t a notion of where to turn. Tears welled in his eyes—Jocheved’s tears, of course, but trailing through that dingy quarter it was he that was too reluctant to appeal to another stranger for advice. Regarding exactly what? There seemed nothing left to do but carry on trudging aimlessly until he dropped, which was surely imminent. So this was the Golden Land—this wagon rut where the setting sun was reflected in the beer spilled from a growler by the child sent to fetch it? Across the way a fishmonger spread the gills of a carp until it resembled a striking cobra; an evicted family surrounded by a drift of bedding lit a yahrzeit candle on their front stoop. And again Max had the feeling that he’d been here before, an impression corroborated by the reappearance over the road of the Gebirtigs’ place of business, to which he’d come full circle. It comforted him somewhat to remember that he was expected. Entering through the Ice Castle’s gas-sconced arcade, he located the joint proprietors at adjacent bill-laden desks in their mezzanine office, where he asked if they would mind extending his zayde’s storage a little longer. “A few days yet I need to find a funeral plot.…”

Father and son exchanged a look, then turned to Max as if he were certifiable. “What are you talking a frozen person?” wondered Asher Gebirtig, and Tsoyl, who’d clearly not fallen far from his father’s tree: “Eyz-kugel he thinks we sell here made from human beings.” They had never heard of such a thing. And truly, as he stood there before them in desolation, Max himself was almost willing to believe that the rabbi was a fantasy hatched by the demented Jocheved under the influence of her meshugeneh father; her family, the Frostbissens, they were always a peculiar brood. But stuck in a charade whose motions he felt helplessly condemned to go through, he demanded to revisit their treasury, and finding it bare of the reinforced wooden casket with its frozen occupant, threatened the proprietors with the police. Asher laughed heartily and reminded him he was in no position to make threats, while Tsoyl said that if he wanted to play that game, they would see his threats and raise him a couple more. Although Max had little idea what Gebirtig Junior was talking about, in the end he understood there was no recourse left him but to depart the premises and seek solace elsewhere.

Outside, the strange and the familiar tended to cancel one another out, so that Max looked upon the multitudes escaping the brick kilns of their tenements with an undiscriminating eye. He had strayed into a dark street under the El train stanchions, where red lanterns hung from the lintels of narrow frame houses on whose doorsteps women in dusky dressing sacques displayed their ankles. Despite his diminished condition, they nevertheless called out to the pretty boy to follow them upstairs, while other boys, men, and even a nervous, bearded patriarch clutching his phylactery bag heeded their enticements. It was then it occurred to Max that Jocheved might be similarly turned to good use. Perhaps, given his predicament, it was time to end the masquerade and admit defeat: the attempt to become Max Feinshmeker had failed. Max was at any rate a man who, due to his carelessness, would be fingered now by his former employer for retribution. So what better disguise could he assume for his own protection than that of the girl he had disguised himself to protect in the first place? But Jocheved was more stiff-necked than that; for all her indifference to her own extinction, she still reserved in her breast a flicker of something like pride. Max was sui generis; he had no forebears and could not be expected to share her sentiments. But while her sympathy for him made her waver, she owed it to her father to recover the by now melting contents of the family’s eroded hope chest.

F
loating somewhere outside of time and space, Bernie heard his name called from a corner of a distant planet.

“Mr. Karp,” asked Ms. Drinkwater, his biology teacher; “Bernie Karp,” she asked in the throaty voice that irreverent kids would impersonate to her face, “can you shed some light, so to speak, on the process of photosynthesis?”

From his disembodied vantage, Bernie knew many things. He knew the Shi’ur Komah, the measurement of the body of the Creator, whose height was 236,000 leagues; he knew that the measure of a league was three miles, the mile 10,000 cubits, the cubit three spans, and that a single span filled the entire world. He knew that heaven was full of windows through one of which he had glimpsed the hindquarters of the deity Himself and that the vision was as real as it was imaginary. This was a paradox that could not be translated into any earthly tongue and would evaporate upon his reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. But of photosynthesis he sadly knew nothing at all, having neglected his Biology homework, just as he had his Remedial Hygiene and Small Engine Repair, to say nothing of his failure to con the square-dancing diagrams for his Phys Ed class. Viewing himself from such an awful distance—an empty husk with kinky hair in a navy sweatshirt, his textbook on the desk before him tented over a compact edition of Ginzberg’s
Legends of the Jews—
Bernie felt suffused with pity. He no longer saw the classroom with its laboratory paraphernalia through the lens of Paradise; instead he saw the room in all its dreariness, the air riven by desires trapped within its phlegm-colored walls. It was an ill-starred environment that touched off the compassion that signaled the moment when his free-floating essence, lonely for the clueless youth he’d abandoned, reinhabited the stoop-shouldered body of Bernie Karp.

He was welcomed back to Olam haZeh, to the ordinary world, by the uncontrollable sniggering of his peers over his inattention to Ms. Drink-water’s query—though his abrupt animation prompted a universal intake of air. No sooner had he returned to himself, however, than he experienced a painful sense of contraction, the cosmos once again confined to the narrow dimensions of his protuberant skull. He could still recall the concept that sparked his transports: how the stories of Torah, as retold in
The Legends
, functioned as templates for locating the coordinates of a vast hidden world, but all that was reduced to foggy abstraction now. And as to the definition of the process of photosynthesis—A nechtiker tog, as the rabbi would say: Forget about it.

“What was the question?” asked Bernie, in an attempt to buy time.

The teacher, in her sensible serge, her face bleached from the chalk dust that earned her the nickname The Abominable Snow Woman, rolled her eyes, which was the cue for the class to resume its sniggering. Bernie understood the strategy; other teachers had employed it as well: They ingratiated themselves with recalcitrant classes by making themselves complicit in the mockery of Bernie Karp. The butt of much humor herself, the elephantine Ms. Drinkwater was taking the opportunity to deflect some of it in Bernie’s direction. “Photosynthesis,” she repeated, “the subject of the experiments we’ve been conducting all week. What is it?”