The Frozen Rabbi (26 page)

“What about”—Bernie was conscious of sounding a tad sanctimonious—“‘Do not unto others what is also hateful to you?’”

“I don’t like to embarrass with too much Jewish stuff the goyim,” repined the rabbi, “though speaking of Hillel, what about ‘If not now, when?’” squeezing the broad behind of Messalina, who giggled gamely.

“This is not helpful,” Bernie admitted to himself.

“Bubbie, you’re all farmisht because how you suffer from the blue beytsim.” He touched his own scrotum sympathetically. “Relax and deposit in the appropriate female orifice your seed. This is nature. Myself, I never had on earth no wife and kids; like the Karaites that would make from themself a eunuch, I was pure. Till the afterlife I waited to be a man so that I’m makink up for it now the lost time. So stop kvetching and start yentzing; this is my advice that I give to you free of charge, plus a first edition of my book that it’s called
The Ice Sage
, adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God. Rosalie, ziskeit, fetch for me a copy the book, which it’s twenty-nine ninety-five retail.”

Bernie received the self-published volume with its glossy cover portrait of the rabbi in his shtreimel with the snap-on raccoon tail. “Thank you,” he said uncertainly. Here was at least something palpable he could bring back from his visit. Wasn’t that what Lou was always bugging him about, that he should bring her back something of value from his travels? It wasn’t enough just to tell her about the unity which is the redemption of all things, and so forth; redemption you could get for a pro-rated annual “tithe” at ben Zephyr’s New House of Enlightenment. For a reasonable fee the rabbi would restore your soul. What more could you ask? Which was precisely the question that the still frustrated Bernie put to the rabbi, who sighed impatiently.

“H’omer…”

“Bernie,” the boy corrected.

“I know by you your name. H’omer means matter; the material world, called also pardes, the Garden, which it is all that here concerns us.”

“But,” Bernie felt himself succumbing to exasperation, “isn’t it pretty hopeless, I mean, the world?”

“What kind message is that? You know they are the same in Hebrew, the words for messenger and angel? It’s for the teacher his responsibility to bring the good news.”

“Even if it’s a lie?”

The rabbi ignored him. “I’m a busy man; I got now to meet my Tantric Kabbalah group.” The ladies helped him up from his chair and back on with his ritual garment, dusting him with the powder puff and whisk broom again. “I’m very gratified we had this little talk, baruch haShem and all that.”

He was nearly out the door when Bernie collected himself enough to cry, “Rabbi, wait!”

Turning only halfway ‘round, “What is it you want?’

“Your blessing?” said the boy.

“Sure, sure. Gezunterheyt. Knock yourself out.” And he was gone.

T
hey slept together like brothers in the same bed, which Shmerl lowered each evening from the ceiling and raised again (sometimes with Max still in it) in the late mornings when he woke. For although Max had adjusted to Shmerl’s odd hours, he often continued to sleep in his borrowed longjohns through much of the day. In fact, during those first days after his rescue Max never set foot outside the automated shack, as if the ordeal of the previous months had finally caught up with him and laid him low. Even though his wound was minor and largely healed before the week was out, he remained convalescent, and Shmerl was happy to indulge him in his prostration. Having saved him, the dung carter now felt somehow responsible for securing his guest’s enduring safety and health. Though Max assured him the attack in the alley was merely a chance episode not likely to happen again, Shmerl remained anxious concerning his new friend’s welfare. He changed his head dressing daily, examined him for any symptoms of concussion, and continued to apply the vile medicinal compresses; he cooked him meals: mostly a gluey amalgam of kasha and eggs, though sometimes there was Jewish fish: “Is now my namesake, Karp.” And Max, who had eaten all manner of treyf these many months, was appreciative, not to say amused by the crucibles and alkaline cells Shmerl employed in his culinary endeavors, the results of which were more often than not inedible. Nor did it help that the aroma of every dish partook of the stables’ distinct bouquet. All the same, in a show of abiding gratitude (and in deference to Shmerl’s insistence that he keep up his strength), Max would dutifully sample the fare; though in time the guest, begging his host’s permission, revived Jocheved’s dormant skills and took over the cooking himself.

Of course the subject of the frozen rabbi had necessarily to be broached and dispensed with before the ice (so to speak) could be broken between them. It was Shmerl, protesting all the while that he had no wish to pry, who had nonetheless initiated the conversation on that very first night.

“So how by the old chasid did you come?”

Max demurred, not inclined to lie to the hunchback but also unready to state the plain truth. “He is in my family a cherished memento,” was his lame explanation.

“What he makes you to remember?”

Again Max was stymied, while Shmerl, to his relief, seemed to dismiss his waffling silence as an occasion to offer a theory of his own. “I think he is yet alive, di alter mensch,” he stated, a faraway look clouding his eye; “he is only asleep and dreaming. He dreams the dream of the world that we are all of us in it, and to wake him now might make already the end of the world.”

While questioning the dung carter’s sanity, Max acceded at the same time to Jocheved’s endorsement of a concept she regarded as rather sound.

At first Shmerl had worried that Reb Levine (who lived above the stables) might discover his guest and evict them both, but the contractor had little need to venture into the shack anymore, now that his employee had made himself so indispensable. In fact, thanks to Shmerl’s vigor and ingenuity, the old livery stable proprietor was enjoying a state of semi-retirement. As a consequence, his lad-of-all-work had never had to explain the jungle of gadgetry (the Otto cycle engine that ran on feces and moonbeams, the battery that alternated currents the way a prism divides a wave of light into a rainbow) that had overtaken the tarpapered outbuilding.

Rivaling his passion for invention, however, was the prospect of continuing his explorations of the Golden Land with a worthy partner; and solicitous as he was of his guest’s recuperation, after a reasonable time had elapsed, Shmerl invited Max to walk abroad with him. The invitation triggered in Max the first pang of alarm he’d experienced since taking advantage of Shmerl’s hospitality; then it passed, and he donned the shirt, trousers, and Kitchener vestee that the dung carter had bought him off a secondhand rack in Orchard Street. (His own clothes, beyond bloodied, were clownishly voluminous.) It was a late afternoon at the outset of spring, no doubt approaching Pesach, though who remembered holidays in this heathen land? Nevertheless, Shmerl was in a holiday mood. He had just returned from paying the livery stable’s weekly extortion fee to members of the Yid Black Hand in their fumy backroom behind Grand Street. There, he was brought up short upon recognizing a couple of characters seated at the bottle-laden table—the caddy cap in new knickerbockers and argyles, his sidekick stuffing burny up his beak—who thankfully showed no signs of recognizing him. Seeing them in their natural habitat left Shmerl with the conviction that they were merely a pair of garden variety gonifs of a type that were a common hazard in the Tenth Ward; they were finally no more a menace than bedbugs and rising damp. So when he arrived back at the wagonyard, Shmerl proposed to the yungerman, whom he decided had been idle too long, that they take a stroll; though just in case he carried along his galvanic cane.

Mild breezes nipped at the heels of a gusting wind in full retreat as the dung carter and the dissembler browsed the East Side streets, observing together the same sights they’d witnessed countless times on their own. But each, though he never said so, had the peculiar sense of seeing the neighborhood afresh, Shmerl as if peering through the eyes of his newfound friend, and vice versa. Outsiders for so long, together they felt what neither had before: that they were young men out on the town, a couple of rubbernecks ogling the ghetto’s attractions, gauging the potential of an East Broadway shmooserie or candy store for fellowship and intrigue. With only a spotty understanding of how his companion had survived the winter, Shmerl felt he was introducing a greenhorn to the omnifarious city, and Max reinforced his attitude by perceiving the streets for once as amusement rather than likely threat. Relinquishing a little his habit of eternal vigilance, he also let go of the impulse to cloak himself in yet another disguise, so protected did he feel in the company of his bed fellow, this patent meshugener with his strange avocations whom he was nonetheless growing to admire. There even came a point in their stroll when, watching some girls in their dove-gray shifts playing potsy, chanting “Chatzkele, Chatzkele, shpil mir a kazatzkele” and using a fisheye for a marker, Max’s spirits rose almost past containing. “What a jubilee!” he exclaimed, then was immediately embarrassed, feeling that such an indecorous outburst must be a joke of Jocheved’s at his expense (while Jocheved, from her concealment, wondered if Max had lost his mind).

Another awkward moment for Max came when they stopped for a bowl of borscht at a dairy café, and Shmerl—digging into his knippl, the little knot of cash he’d been hoarding since he’d become a hired hand—insisted on paying the tab. Having passed a dark season as the object of charity, the beggar now wished to be benefactor, despite having no material resources to speak of.

“It is for me my pleasure,” his host assured him, proud to be arm-inarm with such a silken youth, so delicate-featured and slight of frame, attributes almost unseemly for a man. With a sigh Max had accepted the refreshment, just as later he learned to graciously accept the ticket to a Yiddish theater production of
Hamlet, der yeshivah bocher
, translated and improved for the edification of the general public, or the price of admission to a cabaret. For his part, Shmerl felt heartily beholden to his companion for allowing him to show them both a good time. How long he had waited for someone with whom to share his enthusiasm for the knockabout streets and the institutions he’d been too shy to enter alone. It was as if he finally belonged to the teeming neighborhood and had at last arrived in America.

As for Max, he still couldn’t quite believe that he’d fallen into such agreeable circumstances. For one thing, despite the forced physical intimacy of their digs, it was relatively effortless to hide Jocheved’s gender from his host. This was thanks in part to Shmerl’s consideration of his guest’s privacy, that and his discretion regarding his own modest habits. As a consequence, even the concealment of Jocheved’s menstrual rags was not an issue, though the smell sometimes lingered; but Shmerl seemed to regard it as Max’s distinctive scent. Given Shmerl’s cavalier inattention to his own sanitary needs, and conditioned as he was by the fetor of the wagonyard, a fundamentally human essence was in no way offensive to him. In this environment Jocheved sometimes felt she might even relax a bit her tenacious secrecy; she might steal a peek on occasion from behind the mask of Max Feinshmeker, as if the world were not such a daunting place after all. This isn’t to say the girl didn’t sometimes have second thoughts about sharing such close quarters with a bunchbacked companion, involving as it did a moral compromise that Shmerl was not even aware of; there were nights when she lay awake on the flock-stuffed mattress acutely conscious of the fact that the creature lying next to her was male. Men, she must never forget, were the enemy, though this one, this luftmensch Shmerl, seemed of an entirely different breed; and in the end all her reservations with respect to their proximity were overruled by her host’s assurances that Max’s presence was a great relief from loneliness.

Still, they preserved between them a chummy formality, addressing one another as Feinshmeker and Karp, though each had been known on occasion to let slip the other’s given name. Naturally their honeymoon period couldn’t last indefinitely, nor did Max, now that his mental acumen was reawakening, wish to maintain much longer the purposeless status quo. Eager to repay his host’s generosity, he had begun to get ideas. One evening, a few hours before the start of the nightwalking circuit, at the time when they were accustomed to making their rambles, Max—or was it Jocheved? because it was getting harder to determine whence derived his lapses of voice into a reedy soprano—asked Shmerl to explain again how he had renewed Rabbi ben Zephyr’s compartment of ice.

“Zol zayn azoy!” replied Shmerl; “was a trifle.” He became abruptly animated as he began to describe how he had magnified sunlight through a filched headlamp in order to melt the original ice in the casket’s interior. Then the rabbi might have thawed out like a mackerel on a slab had he not refilled the casket, even as he drained it, with ground water pumped through a rubber hose. After that he’d caused the fresh water to freeze again. “Which is the part that to me it ain’t clear yet,” interrupted Max. But when Shmerl began his exegesis, using phrases for which there was no Yiddish equivalent—“volatile gas,” “pressurized ether refrigerant,” “homunculus” (since he regarded the rabbi himself as a stage in an alchemical process)—Max interrupted again to ask him, please, to demonstrate the operation once more. Then again his guest was transfixed by Shmerl’s performance, which he re-created in a tinned strainer pail. Such a presentation, he thought, could captivate the crowds on the Bowery; it could command a respectable billing at the Barnum Museum farther uptown. But then Max’s mind took a more expedient turn, which was possibly due to the influence of Jocheved, with whom he seemed to have entered into a period of detente.

Snapping out of his role of passive observer, he stood up from his seat on the floating bed. “Karp,” he said, “do you ever think you will like to make a gesheft?”

“A beezness?” Shmerl enjoyed showing off his expanding vocabulary, though the word tasted sour on his tongue. Of course, he seldom thought beyond his dreams, which, though they were lately more earthbound, had never God forbid included any commercial ventures. But so taken was he with his new companion that he felt himself inclined to go along with any scheme he might suggest, if only to maintain their close association. Still, he wondered exactly what it was about Max that so beguiled him and inspired his loyalty. True, he was physically quite prepossessing and unquestionably intelligent, and his connection with the deep-frozen tzaddik elevated him all the more in Shmerl’s eyes. There was also the possibility that his coattails might carry the inventor toward a prosperity he’d never sought, though for his friend’s sake he supposed he wouldn’t refuse it. But beyond all that, Max remained for the dung carter the embodiment of a nameless mystery, and Shmerl felt that he couldn’t part from him until he’d discovered its origin. So while there was much to be said in favor of solitude and bare subsistence, there was more reason to hang on to the yungerman’s company at any cost.