The Frozen Rabbi (41 page)
Slated for tonight’s catch was a crowd of refugees aboard a fishing trawler operated by a Greek ally of the Jews called the Goose. To retrieve them, once he was relieved from sentinel duty, Ruby descended the watchtower and pulled the knit cap with its elliptical eye slits over his head; he climbed into the tin-can Minerva alongside the others and was driven to the coast, where he boarded a launch and rowed out to net the survivors. They were the usual collection of phantoms and wraiths, none of whom would ever entirely occupy their own lives again, but there was among them a girl with a shorn head like a gosling’s who for some reason caught Ruby’s eye. She was wearing a long skirt of drapery-thick flannel beneath which her legs were carelessly parted; she carried slung peddler-wise over her shoulder a pillowslip containing what appeared to be books. There was nothing especially prepossessing about her, no distinguishing feature beyond the dreamy cast of her eyes—so why should his first sight of her prompt such a prickling in Ruby’s brain? Then a word from the Baal Shatikah (words from that quarter being in such short supply) and the girl was dispatched to Tel Elohim, where Ruby might continue to follow her progress.
He was hard-pressed to explain the feelings she awoke in him, feelings he neither welcomed nor rejected but only suffered like an infirmity. What was it about this particular chit of a girl that intrigued him? You certainly wouldn’t have called her beautiful. Her pale complexion was sprinkled with freckles that appeared to be in the process of peeling like dried mud, her hooked nose was as narrow as a rudder, and the remnant of her auburn hair resembled sagebrush. But for the patched lilac skirt she chose to wear despite the heat, and the slight swell of her breast, there was little about her to indicate that she wasn’t a stripling boy. Her emerald eyes, however, unlike the inwardly focused orbs of her fellow “illegals,” were wide open, their pupils (when not peering into a book) fixed intensely on a place whose center, Ruby decided, was everywhere. Among the vague emotions she provoked in him was a curiosity to see precisely what it was she was looking at.
Her name was Shprintze, which Ruby learned the way he learned everything else about her, by spying—and she remained Shprintze even as the other girls were trying on Tamara, Tirzeh, and Gabi, in the hope that a new name might erase the stain of the old. Like the other newcomers she performed the tasks the commune assigned her with a ready obedience, looking in her draggled skirt and head rag every inch the rustic peasant maid. The problem was she was playing the wrong part. Unlike the others she’d refrained from burning her old clothes and drawing new ones from the common pool, the khaki shorts, olive drab shirts, and lace-up boots that were the uniform among Zionist homesteaders. She was a milkmaid, a laundress, a bird nester; wielding her pruning shears like talons she chased sparrows from the grape arbor; she harvested olives from the grove behind the children’s house, pressed the pulp between millstones, and cranked the centrifuge that separated water from oil with the motion of a schoolgirl swinging a rope. But to Ruby’s practiced eye, as he watched her toting pails or cradling a peck of oranges in her apron, she seemed only to be making believe. While the others began in time to be assimilated into the life of the colony, Shprintze—not unlike the Baal Shatikah himself, who’d built a hut beyond the settlement’s barbed-wire perimeter—remained aloof. She did not contribute to the impromptu truth-telling sessions conducted after meals in the dining hall, when the survivors broke down in their confessions and submitted to the consolations of the commune. (The kibbutzniks had become seasoned hands at ministering to hysteria.) Nor did she ever, at least in Ruby’s hearing, attempt to use the sacred tongue.
He could only speculate as to why she chose to remain an outsider, though the answer may have been merely that she preferred the company of her books. Because when she wasn’t performing her impersonations of goose girl or serving wench, she was poring over one of the vermin-nibbled volumes that were the only baggage she’d salvaged from her past. That was the posture in which Ruby was most likely to observe her—sprawled among the flowers called blood of the Maccabees that stippled the meadow just beyond the compound—as he grazed the sheep he’d appointed himself to watch.
He was as inept a shepherd as he was skilled at the trades of cutthroat and bloodletter. Wanting only the excuse of a task that lent itself to solitude, he had no interest in the science of animal husbandry. He could barely distinguish a lamb from a ewe, and regarded the randy old ram with its shit-stained crupper as merely a shofar-on-the-hoof. He was deaf to advice concerning the best spots to graze them, often leading the herd instead of to grass or stubble into unharvested fields of wheat and flax, which they devastated. He developed some aptitude in the use of the lasso but seldom had occasion to use it, since the kibbutz had voted that branding livestock was too charged a means of identification; and he failed to renew the salt licks that lay about the wadis like a sculpture garden. With the herd dog Abimelech, who belonged to everyone and no one, Ruby had never established any rapport. An odd hybrid of border collie and dachshund, the animal was more effective at terrorizing the flock than at corralling them into their fold. Nevertheless, despite his laxity Ruby had grown rather fond of the sheep. This is not to say he was moved to protect them from predators, diseases, or the poison grasses that caused them to inflate like fleece dirigibles. What he did protect them from, however, was being slaughtered or even sheared, which meant that the herd were in essence pets and a useless burden to the cooperative. Recently the secretariat had issued an ultimatum to Ruben ben None that he should render up the sheep for wool and mutton or relinquish his position to another.
“When the Third Temple is built,” he broke his usual silence to reply, “you can use them for a blood offering.” Which statement actually satisfied some of the more canonical among the delegates.
There came an afternoon like any afternoon when he was sheltering from the five o’clock sun beneath a red clay overhang while tending his flock. The agitation that was his companion since the arrival of the girl was accompanied at that hour by the jangling of the bellwether, the bleating of the ewes, and the yapping of the idiot dog Abimelech—all of which Ruby endured like noises plucked upon his tightly strung nerves. Suddenly he was aware of someone’s sandal-shod approach from down the tussocky slope to his left, and the girl Shprintze padded into view carrying a book. Having attained the privacy of a spot beyond the settlement’s boundaries and further obscured by a herd of sheep, she hoisted the flannel skirt to her haunches and squatted to pee. At that moment, no longer silenced by curiosity, Abimelech commenced yelping again.
The girl looked up but did not start and, catching sight of the dog’s presumed master crouched in his cleft, inquired in a tone of perfect ingenuousness even as she continued watering the earth, “Bistu a shed?” Are you a demon?
Confounded on several counts, Ruby felt cornered and slid farther into the hollow until his back bumped against the dirt wall. For one thing, he was surprised that he had understood the question, so slight was his knowledge of Yiddish, though the language had been in the air again due to the influx of illegals who spoke it. (They never spoke it for long, since mameloshen was regarded as the language of victims and for that reason practically outlawed in HaEretz.) Then there was the nature of the question itself, asked so earnestly that it gave Ruby pause to consider. He’d been a number of things during his years in the Land, few of which had much in common with the lives of regular citizens. In the end, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender, he could only answer, “Ich kayn vays.” I don’t know.
Dropping the skirt, underneath which she apparently wore nothing at all, the girl rose to her feet and stepped a few paces toward him.
“Ich bin a shed,” she confided in her flutey voice, and again he was taken aback by her candor. “Ich bin a shlecht yiddisher tochter.” A bad Jewish daughter.
Ruby had no idea what he should do with this information, but it fascinated him that she’d divulged it without an apology or trace of apprehension. Who wasn’t afraid of the Baal Shatikah? But Shprintze, so remote among the settlers, stood before him now as if she recognized him as belonging to the same species as herself. Flushed out, Ruby crawled from beneath the overhang and straightened himself to confront her, his heart galloping. Countless encounters with violent death had not caused his heart to gallop so precipitously. Nor did the girl make any movement toward withdrawing, and Ruby wondered exactly what it was she expected of him. Unable to suffer her gimlet gaze any longer, he dropped his eyes, which fixed on the book she held in her hand.
“Vos leyenstu?” he muttered experimentally, his voice still raw from old wounds.
She showed him the book, a volume of tales in a weather-warped binding by the Yiddish author I. L. Peretz, revealing in the process the garter blue numbers tattooed on her arm. When he took the book from her, she inhaled deeply as if she might not be able to breathe again until he returned it. He understood that the gesture had for her some grave ritual significance, and when he opened the book on a language he’d rejected as a child, a strange thing happened: The barbed Hebrew characters seemed to spill into his head as from a barrel of tacks, filling his brain with a thousand starbursts of pain. But with the pain also came a measure of enlightenment, because some of the printed words arranged themselves into units of sense. “Un Bontshe holt altz geshvign,” he read: “And still Bontshe remained silent.” It made his head ache terribly.
He gave her back the book in a rueful transaction that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite place; then it came to him, the memory of a partisan attempting to replace a fallen comrade’s spilled intestines. He clenched his eyes shut till the image passed, and when he opened them again, there she was in her florid expectancy; her tapered nose twitched from a brush with a butterfly as she asked him, “Shtel mit mir a chupeh?” Will you marry me?
He stared at her, searching for some taint of sarcasm, and found none. Then the laughter started deep in his bowels, erupting in spasms in his chest and escaping his mouth in a volley of loud guffaws. Doubled over, he delivered himself of a hilarity that contained as much heartache as mirth and shook him till he could barely stand. The tears that scalded his cheeks mingled with the sweat bathing his skin, as if his flesh itself were weeping after so many arid years. When the seizure began to abate and he was able to pull himself together again, she remained as before, having stoically weathered the storm. Her crested head was cocked to one side as she studied him with interest. Was she crazy, he wondered, or merely stupid? The categories did not seem to pertain.
Mustering an uncharacteristic frankness along with his makeshift proficiency, he told her, “Nem mir in acht farknasn.” Consider us betrothed.
At first she visited him only at erratic intervals, usually appearing in the early evening after she’d completed her chores and before the dinner bell rang. She would sit beside him on a lava promontory or in a papyrus stand from which he watched his puny flock cropping mud and read one of her storybooks. In anticipation of her coming Ruby had begun to groom himself; he trimmed his arboreal beard and scrubbed his body in the shower bath of his own construction, a process involving half an hour’s pumping of water from a receptacle tank to the barrel above. Still he deemed the operation worthwhile since his cleanliness (plus the broadcloth shirt and duck trousers) helped, he believed, to conceal the turmoil within. Shprintze, however, showed no appreciation for his efforts, and seemed at first not even to recognize him, until he reassured her he was the same hermit troll to whom she was engaged. Neither was she as fastidious in preparing to meet him, though Ruby was a little intoxicated by the civet scent she exuded.
It wasn’t long before he learned her disturbing secret: that she only pretended to read the books whose open pages she never turned. He asked if she were illiterate, then immediately regretted the question, though she took no offense; she merely shook her head, and later, when he ventured to read aloud to her—still amazed at how the language reprised itself with near lucidity—she might anticipate sentences whenever he faltered, sometimes reciting them from memory with eyes closed. But mostly she was content to remain his passive audience.
It seemed to Ruby that Shprintze borrowed identities from the characters in those stories like costumes from a wardrobe rack in order to sustain her throughout any given day. But those temporary identities would wear thin by dusk and need replenishing from her bag of stories. When her assumed personae had run their course she came to him, and she appeared at those times practically a feral creature. It wasn’t that she was spooked or panicked but merely uncivilized and at sea until the reading domesticated her all over again. Then she could face the collective once more with the forbearance of a Sheyndele from Dovid Pinski’s “The Woodcutter’s Wife” or the vivacity of one of Tevye’s daughters, which would see her through another working day. Watching her Ruby remembered the multiple identities he’d adopted during his term as a fugitive; but since his post office photos had yellowed and been papered over by a new generation of Jewish desperados, he’d done with disguises. Now, but for his bare feet and checkered kefiyeh, he could have been mistaken for just another sunburnt halutz.
The girl’s bag of books contained a volume of Peretz Hirschbein’s stories and another collection of S. Ansky’s; there was
Midrash Itzik
by Itzik Manger, which included his Hershel Ostropolier tales, the moral fantasies of Glückel of Hameln, and I. L. Peretz’s fables and plays. It was a sweet and sour literature, full of worriers rather than warriors, that superseded in Ruby’s mind the news of Secretary Bevin’s Machiavellian policies and the assassination of Lord Coyne, the decimation by liquid nitro of the King David Hotel. But what of Shprintze’s own history? Was it, like the words in her books, worn so smooth by memory that her brain could find no traction there? This was Ruby’s theory, but every so often, though long out of practice in cajolery, he tried to tease her into disclosing some detail of her past. “A mol iz geven,” he might begin, chunking a shard from an ancient cenotaph at Abimelech harrassing a ewe munching nettles. “Once upon a time, Shprintzele was born…,” making a gesture indicating that she should continue the tale. And when she refused to take the bait, he would wait a day or two and try again. It was a little like trying to kick-start the commune’s old Flying Merkel motorbike, or so he told her, eliciting a flutter he took for the precursor of a smile; he had coaxed a smile. Still he was unprepared when the girl finally took up the narrative on her own.