The Frozen Rabbi (42 page)

“My papa was Reb Eliakum Feygenboim, a mokher seforim, a bookseller; my mama who I don’t remember died young. We lived on the Tsvarda Gass in Vilna, in three crowded rooms over the shop that was everywhere books, downstairs and up. As a business, the shop was nit gornisht, a failure, since my papa—if he sold shrouds nobody would die—gave away to his favored customers the prizes and discouraged who he deemed unworthy from buying the rest. It was only when he would leave the city on peddling trips to the villages that he would make from the Litvaks a few groschen. They wouldn’t let girls go in cheder so I never learned to read Toyreh, but I could read from the
Tseyna Reyna
and the
Maaseh Bukh
and I gobbled up like shnecken everything in the shop from Shaikevitch to Aksenfeld.…” She was speaking, Ruby understood, as the heroine of a story, “Shprintze the Bookpeddler’s Daughter,” who lived in her papa’s library and was every girl in every story she read.

“Then came in an evil hour the shretelekh, the devils in their helmets and boots that they piss green worms, and dragged me out of my books into Sitra Achra, the Underworld, where even God don’t go. There they put on me their mark so that always I would belong to them.…”

Before she’d been abducted, however, Shprintze had hidden a bag of treasured titles in a space under the floorboards in the shop. Her father, who lacked his daughter’s presence of mind, was still selecting books for the journey when the Germans burst in, and as he lingered too long in choosing, they stove in his satin-capped skull with their rifle butts. Broken heart notwithstanding, Shprintze was shrewd enough to swallow the shop key before being marched to the depot, and in the boxcar that transported them to perdition she voided her bowels and dug the key from her own filth. After the liberation, she made her way back to Vilna, whose desolation proclaimed the news that the Underworld now held dominion everywhere. She returned to the shop late at night, used the key that still miraculously opened the lock, and crept inside. Bereft of books, the place was an apothecary’s, its shelves boasting potions that for all she knew gave to the devils the saberlike erections upon which they spitted young girls. In haste she pried up the floorboards fearing a vacancy, fearing the discovery of her father’s bones, and reclaimed her bag of books from their cache. She hurried back into the street, where she stopped beneath the first lamppost and opened a volume at random, hoping to plunge without prelude into that element from which she’d been cast out. But the words lay on the page like flyspecks, refusing to give up their meaning, so that it seemed her exile was to be everlasting.

Transferred from one DP camp to another, she wound up on Cyprus, whence she was swept along on the current that ultimately washed ashore in the Promised Land. But the Bible was never her book, and by the same token the Jews from that epic—the kings, seers, and harlots that haunted the born-again landscape—were not her people. Then she surprised Ruby by appending to the end of her confession, “Now you.” And when he hesitated, “A mol iz geven…”

“Once upon a time,” he offered at length, feeling obliged to tender his own demonic credentials, “Ruben ben None burned down his papa’s parnosseh, his livelihood, with his papa inside.” But saying it didn’t make it a story; it would never be a story. “Since then” he added, “murder is all he knows.”

But the truth was that he wasn’t murdering anybody these days, and the anger he’d once been able to conjure for the task was no longer available to him. Now he was wholly occupied by his concern for Shprintze, who inspired sensations he couldn’t even name; though one of them was accompanied by physical symptoms—chronic bellyache, full-throttle heart—that might be ascribed to fear. Never before afraid on his own account, Ruby feared for the girl’s fragility, for the welfare of her blistered fingers, the pulse that stirred the numbers on her wrist, the russet hair which, grown out of its featheriness, was whipped into a brushfire by the desert simoom.

In the meantime Shprintze and her association with the counterfeit shepherd were the subject of much gossip among the population of Tel Elohim. Leery of the Baal Shatikah, they speculated on his pernicious influence over the girl, who was becoming if possible ever more remote herself. They observed with disapproval the way the ill-matched pair conspired over books in the company of a defective dog and a dingy flock, their hind legs matted from the runs. But nobody dared to interfere with them, as they sprawled amid spear grass or sat beneath the canvas cover of a mired truck regarding a sunset, which looked to Ruby like a hemorrhage behind a gauze dressing, to Shprintze a bedsheet after a wedding night. Then the girl would go back to her walking part among the settlers and the shepherd would return his sheep to their wattle. He would retire to his tin-roofed hut on the chalk ridge overlooking the settlement, a habitation so overgrown with ranunculus that it might have been a natural outcrop, and prepare his meager supper.

It had been a long while since he’d dined with the community, though for a time women enamored of his legend had left covered dishes at his door: savory beef and egg noodles, pita bread and sesame paste, stewed prunes. But since his withdrawal from the life of the commune and the plugatsim, the terror squads, the food had ceased to appear, and Ruby sustained himself on whatever came to hand. It might be a raw potato, a fistful of unripe carobs, oranges bruised with blue mold. It was penitent’s fare, which he ate more out of the habit of staying alive than from any real appetite. Despite his forager’s diet, though, Ruby supposed his health was sound enough, but while his muscles remained taut his body had grown alarmingly thin. He had no mirror (shaved by instinct like the blind) but could trace in his sunken cheeks the creases wrought by constant worry. He could feel the years and the toll his rearoused sensibilities had taken, and though he longed to articulate his feelings for Shprintze, he was afraid that if he expressed them they might ravage her the way they had him.

For the same reason, he had yet to touch her. He was fearful that her mostly imaginary world might not withstand the blunt impact. It was difficult to know, given all she’d been through, what did and did not constitute defilement; and while he might suffer the urge to stroke, say, the tendon at the downy nape of her neck, he knew better than to risk the intimacy. Better to ache with unrealized desires, inviting a pain that was no less than he deserved. What he didn’t deserve, however, was that the pain, though nearly unbearable, should also be unbearably sweet. Then on an evening in the month of Elul when they sat reading at the lip of a well, the chill air emanating from its stony darkness as from an ice cave, Ruby inadvertently placed a hand in Shprintze’s hair. It was not deliberate, but in some corner of his mind he registered the gesture, imagining she might incline her gamin’s head and allow herself the ghost of a grin—and that would be that. Instead, she turned toward him with a mouth that looked to have been gashed open, its stifled howl more shrill than any sound she might have uttered, and springing catlike to her feet, she ran away down the hill through the cyclone gates of Tel Elohim.

But later that night, as he lay twisting on the rack of his folding cot, castigating himself for his blunder, the door opened to starlight silhouetting her spare contours through a flimsy nainsook shift. “Murder me, my wicked one,” she importuned him in a perfect imitation of coyness—and a few months after, she began to show the swelling that indicated she was quick with child.

RUBY
HAD
A
FRIEND
of sorts, a young Arab shepherd he’d run across years before while grazing his flock in the dried-out washes west of the settlement. The boy, perhaps mistaking the assassin for a legitimate herder of sheep, had attempted to direct him through gibbering and gestures toward greener pastures, but Ruby preferred to remain in the wastes where he squatted meditating on his sins. A twiggy character in a filthy tunic, with a clump of hair like a bird’s nest, the boy shrugged his knobby shoulders and hied his flock toward the grassy heights. But he reappeared at odd intervals during the succeeding days so that Ruby suspected their meetings were not always accidental. With a broad grin proud of its broken teeth, a plaited ribbon dangling lewdly from his loincloth, he greeted his fellow shepherd with a merry “
Itbach al yahud
.” Death to the Jew. It was a salutation delivered with such hearty good humor that Ruby, who’d heard it often enough in other contexts, could only respond with a slightly puzzled, “Aleichem sholem.” This became their customary exchange whenever they crossed paths.

Ruby assumed at first that the boy hailed from the mud-domed village of Kafr Qusra, which could be seen from the slopes of Tel Elohim, but soon he began to realize that the shepherd swore allegiance to no place on earth. He had a name, Iqbal bin Fat Fat, which Ruby had gleaned over the course of several visits, but though he babbled incessantly—a multitude of consonants trampling a handful of vowels—his unlikely moniker was the only solid detail the amateur herdsman was ever to learn of the boy’s identity. He turned up unannounced and took for granted the Jew’s unoffered hospitality, but while he was clearly a bit deranged—a mejdoub, he called himself, a born fool—Ruby began to look forward to their encounters. Their initial meeting had occurred during the fugitive period following the Baal Shatikah’s prison escape, when he’d returned to the kibbutz after months of hiding out. He was still lying low, abstaining from the night patrols and tending to avoid the settlers as well—who were themselves not altogether happy to be hosting him, especially since his uncles of blessed memory were gone. So it surprised Ruby to discover that he welcomed the unscheduled visits of this quaint interloper; nor did it seem to matter that communication between them was so restricted, as the Arab apparently required no comprehension from his audience and the Jew had long since lost the habit of conversation.

They would sit together for hours, Ruby nodding at the weird modulations of Iqbal’s chin music and sometimes sharing his water pipe. Their flocks never mingled; Iqbal’s dog, Dalilah, saw to that. A nobler, curlier breed than Abimelech, she would weave among the lambs and ewes, encircling them in an invisible fold, though the snowy Arab flock would have shunned the Jewish bunch for their uncouthness in any case. It never occurred to Ruby to draw a moral from the situation any more than he was moved to speculate about the boy’s origins: Iqbal was a denizen of the wilderness who had befriended the Jewish incendiary the way a jackal might approach a campfire to partake of the warmth. For the boy was very like a wild animal, or several animals, a mimic who spontaneously impersonated the behavior of whatever creature happened into their field of vision. If, say, a long-legged bustard flew overhead, the boy would rise on one leg flapping his arms and screeching hysterically; he would bay at the brindled wildcats and hyenas, who answered him with a forlorn plangency. Throwing back his burnoose, he might reveal the cowpie of his hair twisted into love locks plastered with butter, or lift his djellaba to withdraw from his sagging diaper a warehouse inventory of utensils and tools, which he offered for sale. In the heat of the day he would erect on the single pole of his shepherd’s staff a haircloth tent whose shade he offered to share with the Jew.

His sack also contained, along with a waterskin and various spices, ingredients exceeding the uses of ordinary condiments, such as crows’ wings, powdered porcupine quills, and pressed scorpion, which Ruby figured were employed in casting spells. At some point in the afternoon or evening the boy would gather his possessions and take up his crudely carved staff; Ruby would lift his rifle and the two of them would depart without ceremony in their separate directions. Often days, weeks, even months would elapse before they set eyes on each other again, upon which they would resume their chance acquaintance as if no time at all had intervened. But time did pass, and though the shepherd remained as unreconstructed as ever, Ruby noted that sparse hairs had begun to sprout over his tawny cheeks, and a knavish cast had entered his eye. Moreover, certain of his sheep had conceived the suspicious habit of nuzzling their backsides against him with a brazen immodesty.

The mongrel Abimelech, who barked at shadows and chased echoes, never bothered to signal the shepherd’s approach. (He adored Dalilah and attempted to court her with acrobatics resembling rabid convulsions, though she spurned his overtures and left him to hump the sultry air.) Iqbal, however, always announced his own advent with the usual insults, most of which remained unintelligible to Ruby. But mostly Ruby was indifferent to the shepherd’s language and satisfied to hunker beside him as he dredged a brazier from his bottomless sack for roasting gobbets of shashlik. Then the two of them would gnaw the leathery meat, their faces slathered with the grease, and afterward Iqbal, still unweaned, would suck the teat of his single goat until it staggered.

Once, as they sat among the saline bushes in a sandy stream bed, their sheep resting in the shade of the shallow chasm, the sun clouded over and a sudden storm came up. Even Iqbal, attuned though he was to every mood of the weather, was caught off guard. So torrential was the downpour that before the sheep could stir or the shepherds, languid from the afternoon’s hashish, rouse themselves, a flash flood had filled the empty channel like the bursting of a dam. Struggling against the surging current, Ruby and Iqbal attempted to harry their animals to higher ground. Most found footholds among the rocks of the defile and were able to scramble to safety in advance of the rising trough, but a few were deluged by the instantaneous wall of water and carried away. At one point Ruby himself was swept off his feet by the turbulence, and though he didn’t suppose himself in any danger, the shepherd plunged into the rushing conduit to rescue him. An aggravated Ruby found himself clutched by the beard, tugged from beneath the armpits, and dragged up the steep bank of what had become a roaring watercourse. But even then the boy did not let go his embrace (which was leavened now by an element of tenderness) until Ruby shoved him abruptly away, sitting up in time to see the incontinent old ram he’d been trying to save being swept downstream.