The Frozen Rabbi (23 page)

As he strolled toward a produce stand beneath the shuddering uprights of the Second Avenue El, a fellow in a floppy golf cap turned about jockey style stepped up to greet him familiarly: “You’re so pretty,” he said, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker.”

IT
WAS
THE
young man from the ship. Despite his dowdy apparel, Shmerl was as sure of his identity as he had been of little else during that long cold season of carting dung. He was amazed at how relieved he was to see him, though they had yet to exchange a word, but while Shmerl thought he might now have much to say to him, his anticipation left him timid and reticent. So rather than cross immediately over the road to accost him, he followed the yungerman awhile from the other side. There was, after all, no particular hurry; hours remained before he was scheduled to make his rounds with the shit patrol, and it calmed him somewhat to observe the lad from a distance; saddened him as well to see how the intervening months had taken a toll on his former dignity. After a block or so along Delancey, Shmerl noticed that another, a lath-legged character in knee breeches and a turned-around caddy’s cap, also seemed to be dogging the young man’s heels. Then the caddy cap accelerated his pace, drawing alongside the yungerman to speak to him, upon which the youth, who had paused at a fruiterer’s bin, took off like a streak. Shmerl’s heart kicked at its cage as he watched the lad hotfooting it down the sidewalk, trying madly to dodge the passersby. In flight he looked over his shoulder, then turned around just in time to run smack into the arms of a big fellow in an ankle-length duster who had planted himself athwart his path. Thus embraced, the youth from the ship was manhandled by the duster—along with the caddy cap, who’d bolted forward to grab his collar from behind—into an alley off the crowded thoroughfare.

Shmerl was not the only one who had witnessed the abduction; others behind stalls and in horsecars saw the young man, a hand clapped over his mouth, struggling with his captors as they dragged him off. But while those who’d stopped to watch resumed their business as soon as the unpleasantness was out of sight, Shmerl recognized the event as the fateful moment he’d been waiting for. Confident in the strength that pressing irons and dung shovels had imparted to his stooped physique, he straightened his shoulders as best he could and drew forth from the walking stick he carried a slender metal wand. “Shemhemphorash!” he cried aloud, which was the name of the magic hat of Moses as mentioned in the
Sefer Sheqel ha-Kodesh
. It was as good a Hebrew battle cry as any he could think of. Zigzagging through heavy traffic, he crossed Delancey and charged the alley, where he began to thrust here and there in the gloom. The stock prod, which he’d devised on the principle of Aaron’s rod (it was a cane with a serpent’s sting) quivered like a fencing foil in his hand. He’d fashioned it with a trigger that sent a six-volt charge from a carbon battery to the platinum spikelet at its tip. The thing was designed for the purpose of encouraging horses in the livery stable to behave, but the nags were already so docile that he’d as yet had no occasion to try it out. This was his invention’s debut, and judging from the response of the young man’s attackers, it worked to good effect—especially now that Shmerl’s eyesight had adjusted to the halflight and he was aiming his thrusts with more accuracy. Both the duster and the caddy cap yowled as if they had fallen into a nest of electric eels; they dropped the blackjack and the naked shiv respectively to clutch at their parts, doubtless as shocked by the bent creature wielding his stinging weapon as they were by the weapon itself.

Having rendered the two assailants temporarily hors de combat, Shmerl sheathed his prod in order to raise their intended victim from the flags and hustle him out of the alley. The young man from the ship gripped his forehead, a thin trickle of blood leaking from between his fingers, but allowed himself to be led at a stumbling dogtrot behind his rescuer. Holding his stick in one hand, Shmerl pulled the youth along by the wrist onto Delancey, where after a short block he turned abruptly into another alleyway. Together they threaded a concatenation of puddled passages, emerging now and again to cross a noisy street only to duck straightaway back into the maze. Eventually they found themselves in a vacant lot strewn with refuse and bed frames dragged outside in the hope that the sun would lure the bedbugs from their slats. The lot was surrounded by a high wooden fence, one of whose boards Shmerl swung aside to usher his friend—Was it premature to think of him as a friend?—into Reb Levine’s wagonyard. Breathing the foul air with relief, he invited the stunned youth into his shanty, where he sat him down on a bed covered in horse blankets, which was lowered from the rafters by a system of pulleys and weights. Then kindling a lantern, Shmerl began without hesitation to attend to his guest’s wound, which amounted to little more than a shallow abrasion crowning a nasty bump on the kop.

HOLDING
HIS
ACHING
HEAD
, Max counted it as an aspect of the stupefaction brought on by his injury that the furniture in his host’s modest quarters appeared to be floating in midair. A table and chair, stove, workbench, and thunderbox all hovered above them amid dangling horse tackle, as if waiting for the shack’s occupant himself to levitate. As his rescuer dabbed at his forehead with the putrid-smelling poultice he’d prepared in a porcelain basin, Max also wondered at the swiftness with which he’d been spirited from the ghetto streets to this peculiar cell; though, accustomed as he was by now to uncommon places, he understood that the ghetto must still be close at hand. He supposed that under the circumstances he ought to introduce himself to this curious figure who had after all saved his life, but the problem was, he seemed for the moment to have misplaced his own name. Itche Fut? Chaim Grin? He felt his face for any artificial asymmetries (the irony of an authentic wound notwithstanding) and recognized its velvet contours.

“Feinshmeker,” he tendered rather formally, offering his hand. “Max.”

“Shmerl,” replied his host, with a hint of familiarity that made Max wonder if they’d met before. “Shmerl Karp,” which may have been the first time Shmerl had pronounced his abbreviated surname aloud. Eagerly he cranked Max’s extended palm with his right hand while continuing to dab with his left at the swelling goose egg on Max’s bare head. “I saw you already on the same ship we come over from the Old Country on.”

Max tried to square this information with the immigrant’s odd environment, such a far cry from the sweatshops and pushcarts and shuls. His gaze strayed again from his host’s smiling face and his shock of upstanding auburn hair toward the items suspended above their heads, and following his glance Shmerl folded the poultice into Max’s own hand. He stepped over to a console containing what looked like a rudimentary keyboard, a bellringer’s assemblage of wooden handles from which ropes of varying widths fanned upward like a web of ratlines on a sailing ship. Then he began with closed fists and a sudden startling show of energy to hammer the individual handles, which caused the airborne objects to begin descending in concert: the lit stove shaped like a cast-iron pig with a percolating coffee pot on top, the laboratory bench laden with frothing beakers full of incandescent purple gas. There was a large construction like a miniature refinery at whose center was an inverted milk can caged in perforated metal strips, surrounded by brackets, gears, belted bicycle wheels, and nodes of fairy lights—the whole contraption coated in a fur of polar rime.

“The machine,” explained Shmerl, giving one of the rimless wheels a spin, which caused coils to glow, an engine to hum, and steam to rise, “that it duplicates the prophet Ezekiel his vision of wheels within wheels. ‘Wherever the spirit wished to go, there the wheels went, for the spirit of living creatures was in the wheels.’ It makes, the machine, a perpetual motion that makes also, when is liquefied under pressure ammonia gas, eppes an everlasting winter.”

On cue the machine belched into a chute, with a tin pan attached to receive it, what was either an enormous multifaceted diamond or a large chunk of ice.

Max gaped in fascination for a full minute before his eyes were again drawn irresistibly toward the ceiling, where a narrow cedar box remained aloft. Once more noting the object of his guest’s curiosity, Shmerl depressed another couple of beveled handles, this time with an outright bravado. Chains ratcheted over iron sprockets as the casket began to descend until it rested on the earthen floor, its lid springing automatically open. “This I think belongs to you,” submitted the crookback.

Max got to his feet of his own accord but allowed Shmerl to assist him as he shuffled over to the box, where, pressing the poultice to his forehead as if to cushion the clapper in his skull, he looked inside. There was Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, resting comfortably in a clear block of ice that looked remarkably none the worse for wear. In fact, unlike the eroded green boulder that Max remembered, this one was pristine, showing the old recumbent tzaddik with his beard and gabardine to fine advantage. Turning back to Shmerl, Max asked him pointedly, “Who
are
you?” though he could as well have put the question to himself. In his fuddled brain he tried assembling what might pass for current articles of faith: that he was in a shack in a stableyard at the end of March, entertained by an outlandish person quite possibly escaped from an institution or storybook; though this did little to relieve his profound disorientation or to explain how the girl Jocheved could feel so perfectly at home.

O
n his way to see the rebbe, Bernie Karp observed the elongated shadow (his own) that preceded him along the dappled sidewalk. He’d transferred to a crosstown bus in order to reach a neighborhood on the city’s southern periphery, which was not unlike the one he lived in, a recent subdivision of overblown houses in a medley of architectural styles, none distinctive enough to allow the eyes any real purchase on the past. The streets were bordered by mulberrys and forsythias, oaks and elms in their scrawny infancy, peppered by fusillades from sprinkler jets. Approaching Rabbi ben Zephyr’s New House of Enlightenment, Bernie noted that his shadow was becoming shorter, and his feet, as he proceeded, seemed to have advanced from the shadow’s base to its knees. Then he stepped over the waist, chest, and shoulders, trod upon the head, and walked away from the shadow—which, when the boy turned around, was no longer there. Grown accustomed to the uncanny over the past few months, Bernie said to himself, “Easy come, easy go.”

These days the physical world was forever inviting incursions from zones that did not always conform to the laws of cause and effect. Such phenomena, he suspected, owed something to the influence of Lou Ella Tuohy, whose ministrations helped to integrate Olam haBa, the beyond, into Olam haZeh, the here and now. Her presence in his life was an assurance that, when he returned from his mystic adventures, some of the sights still clung like thistledown to his brain. As a consequence, Bernie found that his affection for Lou was often indistinguishable from his affection for Creation itself. There was sorrow in this loss of a particular focus, of the tension between his desire to ascend to celestial heights and his longing to be near the girl.

“You make it too easy for me to leave you,” he complained, if only because Lou Ella herself was so uncomplaining. Not only did she lend a literal hand in facilitating his spiritual leave-takings, but she patiently guarded his physical well-being when his spirit was not in residence, and welcomed him home again as a hero.

The girl, who had recently dyed her hair the green of pure Mercuro-chrome, thought this over. “It’s the truth,” she agreed without acrimony. “I’m an enabler of the most selfishest smuck in the world.”

“It’s shmuck,” corrected Bernie, apologizing once again for having returned empty-handed from his sorties into hidden dimensions.

Meanwhile, although the old man was virtually
AWOL
from Bernie’s life, the boy still regarded Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr as the progenitor of his expanded consciousness, a figure of unimpeachable authority. This despite the monkeyshines allegedly taking place within the confines of his New House of Enlightenment. For Rabbi ben Zephyr and his popular spiritual center had become something of a lightning rod for media attention in the Bluff City. Having hosted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the martyrdom of a black messiah, the city of Memphis was no stranger to controversy, but the antics of the unfrozen holy man had drawn the interest of a populace divided on the subject of his authenticity. Those who weren’t among the growing numbers that attended his instruction and meditation sessions were inclined to denounce him as a charlatan and imposter. It was an accusation that might have been viewed as a species of old-school anti-Semitism had not so many Jewish institutions lent their voices to the chorus of disapproval. In fact, the synagogues were more vocal than most in their righteous hostility. But if anything, controversy added spice to the rabbi’s ministry and heightened the profile of his media campaign. Commercials advertising the House of Enlightenment’s promise of the cosmos on demand were frequently broadcast on local radio and TV. Billboards featured the hoary head of Rabbi ben Zephyr in a coonskin shtreimel, declaring, “Feel good in yourself is the whole of the law,” and an Internet website posted a menu of New House programs.

It was sobering to consider how meteorically the old man had risen from his inauspicious beginnings in the Karp family rec room; but while Bernie attributed to the rabbi’s influence his own transformation from slug to apprentice adept, he also reserved the right to believe that the indebtedness was mutual: The rabbi owed him something for having attended at his reawakening. After all, it was he who had introduced the rabbi to the New World, easing his acclimation via TV shows such as
Few Are Chosen
(in which wealthy teens anguished over maxed-out credit cards) and
America’s Funniest Videos
(in which kids were caught on camera interfering with their pets). With this debt in mind, Bernie had set off once again to seek an audience with the rebbe, for the sake of asking him questions he’d yet to formulate.