The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  “Why did no one tell me this?”

  “It just started. He’s only fourteen. We wanted to let him calm down before we told you. He’s a kind of wild man.”

  “And you want me to send him to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, a man of ninety-six?”

  “Rabbi Moritz will know if he’s a baal shem tov.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Shall I send for him?”

  “How is he at maneuvering through traffic?”

  “Nothing can touch him. He could be a snake fighter.”

  ROGER Reveshze had run through the halls and up the stairs, his robes and fringes trailing him like battle flags in a strong breeze, and when he presented himself to the Saromsker Rebbe so excellent was his blood oxygen that he did not breathe hard. Many people can do physical feats and afterward suppress the need to take deep breaths, but Roger, who did not need to suppress an urge he did not have, stood quietly before the rebbe, his eyes semiskeptical.

  Like many fourteen-year-old boys in Hasidic costume, he had the sweetness of a lamb and the mischievous air of an owl. At the same time, though possessed of a slight and awkward body that had not yet solidified as it would in time, he seemed to have extraordinary gravity, or perhaps, the Saromsker Rebbe thought, I am just imagining it.

  He was not imagining. In Roger’s wild eyes, big ears, and big teeth, was a face, framed by blond payess, that led with instant speed to the Pale of Settlement the Saromsker Rebbe had known in his childhood. He merely had to look in the eyes of this boy to see the heart of eastern Europe, and there, rising against a field of black and gray, came a fume of gold in which, like smoke, souls in transport spiraled upward.

  Roger had something about him forever sad but forever indomitable. The rebbe decided to ask a question or two. He allowed them to spring whence he knew not, like an egg coming from the mouth of a magician.

  “What is your Hebrew name?”

  “Elchanan ben Moshe ben Arieh.”

  “What do you see, Elchanan ben Moshe?”

  “You.”

  “When you close your eyes.”

  This was for Roger an emotional subject, but one with which he was familiar on a daily basis, so he closed his eyes, raised his arms in a gesture of surprise, for what he saw was different every time, and said, “I see a courtyard in falling snow, people wrapped in blankets and shawls, wood that is broken and steps that are worn, a man standing in a square. He is dressed in black silk robes, his shtreimel almost covered with snow, his beard white. My heart cannot convey his expression. And I see houses that are lit weakly but brightly, their windows glowing yellow.”

  “Do you imagine this?”

  “I don’t imagine it, it exists.”

  “Still?”

  “Still.”

  “Do you pray?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who generates the prayers? Do you?”

  The boy smiled.

  “And what happens when you pray, physically?”

  “I twirl.”

  “You don’t daven?”

  “I begin to daven, and then I twirl.”

  “Like a dancer, spinning?”

  Roger shook his head in the negative. “No, head over heels.”

  “Head over heels,” the rebbe repeated, “no gravity.”

  “I’m blinded,” Roger reported matter-of-factly.

  “By darkness?”

  “By light: white phosphorus, pinwheels, stars on a field of fire. It’s an illusion. An ophthalmologist could tell you why. Nerve endings.”

  The rebbe was not convinced. Vision and skepticism are man and wife, bride and groom. “How do you know it’s an illusion?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because I prayed for the life of a bird that had flown against the window and was dying on the sill, and though I was swept up beyond the world, so was he. It’s an illusion.”

  “Maybe it was supposed to die.”

  “I didn’t want it to die.”

  “Since when is what you want central to the scheme of things?”

  The boy nodded in acceptance. These matters would have to be deferred, and the rebbe decided to return to the business at hand. “Roger, please take this letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, on Ocean Parkway. Do you know how to get there?”

  “Yes, we went there two times.”

  The Saromsker Rebbe put the forty pages in a Manila envelope. Then he opened the top right-hand drawer in his desk and took out a box of matches and a thick candle. He lit the candle. In his left hand he held his seal and in the right the end of a little stick of saffron-colored wax. But, as the wax melted, he burned his fingers, and he withdrew the flame. “I lost my tongs,” he said.

  “Tongs,” Roger repeated, fascinated by the word.

  The rebbe went to get a fresh stick of wax from lower down, but he opened the wrong drawer. As soon as he saw what was in this drawer, he slammed it shut. Flushed as red as if he had just climbed a sixty-foot rope, he found the saffron-colored wax elsewhere and nervously started to soften it in the flame.

  “What was that?” Roger asked.

  “What was what?”

  “What was that in the drawer?”

  “Wax for sealing envelopes.”

  “In the other drawer.”

  “What drawer?”

  “The one you opened before you opened the one with the wax.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” The rebbe’s eyes were now beady.

  “The box.”

  “What box?”

  “In the drawer.”

  “What drawer?”

  “What is Lindt?” Roger asked.

  “What is Lindt? What is Lindt?” the rebbe repeated.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” the rebbe said, now looking at Roger with panic.

  “Oh.”

  Roger successfully delivered the Saromsker Rebbe’s letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, whom he did not see, and who could, therefore, make no judgment as to whether Roger was a baal shem tov. Everything settled down and returned to normal, except for one thing.

  WHAT WAS LINDT? Roger’s teachers, all unter rabbis and nachmollers, didn’t know, and his classmates didn’t know, either. He went to Rabbi Eisvogel, who was second to the Saromsker Rebbe, and his designated successor.

  “Rabbi Eisvogel,” Roger said, captivated by birds perching on icicles hanging from the eaves of the rabbi’s study, “What is Lindt?”

  “Lint?” Rabbi Eisvogel asked back. “Lint is cloth shavings or other material, little fibers that collect and combine. Why?”

  “No, not that. It was written on the box—L-i-n-d-t.”

  “What box?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you saw a box?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rabbi Eisvogel asked, “Did you see a box in a dream?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you all right, Roger?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Good. Lindt, whatever it is, I’ll think about it,” the rabbi said.

  Roger thought that he would never find out what it was. The world was full of mysteries, and he had much else to think about, having been immersed in moral questions day after day, like metal annealed, since he was three years old. He returned to his studies and forgot about what he had seen in the Saromsker Rebbe’s drawer. But, then, when the next Sabbath was over, a lighthearted Rabbi Eisvogel, in the presence of students and disciples, asked the Saromsker Rebbe point-blank, “Hayim, tell me, what is Lindt?”

  The Saromsker Rebbe’s face turned as red as the flag of the Soviet Union. “I don’t know,” he said, with a Cheshire Cat smile, “but it may be a kind of Swiss chocolate.”

  Rabbi Eisvogel said, “Ah, I see. Is it kosher?”

  “How would I know?” asked the Cheshire Cat, disappearing into the semidarkness, where, amidst chanting and singing weakly illuminated by the light o
f only a candle or two among the coal-black sateen robes and dark sable hats, a passage had opened to the East, and such questions disappeared in a dim whirlpool that shattered time and revived the life of a hundred generations rising like a bonfire. The black coats, sable hats, and hallucinatory prayer were a stage setting in which light and darkness were intertwined for the coaxing, temptation, and entreaty of countless spirits that, somewhere in the closed and darkened rooms of time, existed still. And though these were as shy and delicate as fawns, they did come, in the mind’s eye. And, when they did, they floated before the speechless scholars, not in whitened afterimages but with the strength and color of figures in Renaissance paintings, for it was not death that had been summoned but life, and life came as if the sun had risen and shone through the blackness of night.

  • • •

  ROGER THOUGHT that only he knew the Saromsker Rebbe to be imperfect. Though the Saromsker Rebbe was constantly making protestations of imperfection, Roger now understood that these were only a cover to shield from the eyes of his followers the real imperfection. The Saromsker Rebbe had lied, directly and by omission, and with what the Sage of Minsk, the Koidanyev Gaon, called “dreadful unholy serpentines.” Lying was an unsolicited insult to the divine order.

  And he ate something that wasn’t kosher—not once, not twice, but over time. He concealed sin. He hid evidence. He misled his followers. Although because of the nature and scale of the offense all these things may have been morally forgivable, aesthetically they were not. The balances of the universe are precise and delicate. Depending upon the consequences, lying may be morally condemnable in varying degree, but aesthetically it is impossible in the absolute. One uncourageous lie destroys the core of the imagination. Roger hated lying, and knew that it was the outrider of malevolent forces, which come first with a lie so that they might not have to fight to subdue you. They declare what is true, how to order the elements of truth, and what is false. They ridicule, oppress, and—if you do not bend to them—they kill you. Roger would never yield to pressure, to false commandments, or to threats, for he had something for which he could gladly die, something that he would proclaim without embarrassment, that was the root, the rock, and the holy place of his life. This was the truth of the death of his mother and father and of so many other people’s mothers, fathers, children, wives, husbands, brothers, and sisters, in the holocaust into which he was born and to which he would, until the end of his days, bear witness—even as others might forget, ridicule, dismiss, or demean it.

  This was the hook with which the small, slight Roger Reveshze grasped at the robes of God in the hope of holding Him accountable. And though he was told not to, though it was illogical, a presumption—perhaps a blasphemy and a sin—Roger Reveshze knew his position and held fast. For him, this holocaust was a barrel in which the whole universe rolled. He cared little but to look forward to a life that might in a single place touch upon perfection as confirmation that blind persistence and love would lead to eventual reunion.

  THERE WAS no great consequence in defying the Saromsker Rebbe: Roger had his compass, and nothing could turn him. But now he could no longer trust the Saromsker Rebbe to sense an impending holocaust, which was part of the rebbe’s responsibility as the leader of a community immersed in the study of ancient texts and without the time to read newspapers and journals. Perhaps the rebbe’s regular reading of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Forward had led him to nonkosher chocolate, but, despite the risk, now Roger had to read them, and to study the politics of nations, as he could no longer trust the Saromsker Rebbe to do so honestly. This required as well occasional listening to the radio. What radio? And the newspapers, being so thick, were almost impossible to conceal. You could hardly slip them between the pages of a book. Why was so much space given to advertisements for malted milk balls and brassieres—the claims for which obviously were self-serving lies—when a psalm or the Ten Commandments could be written on a diaphanous piece of parchment the size of a postage stamp?

  For a boy who was used to four-hour exegeses of a paragraph, a sentence, a line, or even a single word, the prospect of reading every day a newspaper the size of a life jacket was terrifying. Perhaps, to ease his way into such things, and so he would not be faced with the problem of hiding such a big bundle of paper, he would start with the radio. He had heard radios when he passed by open apartment windows. Once, he had stopped short before an unattended parlor as a Brahms string quartet flowed like an invisible river past curtains lifting in the wind. He had not been allowed to listen to the radio, because nothing on the radio stayed still, and a lie could appear and disappear before anyone could know. A country that listened to the radio would have no way of knowing, therefore, what was true. Roger understood the reason for the prohibition, but now he had his own dispensation. And not only did he have a dispensation, he had a mission.

  “Luba,” he whispered to one of his classmates, another lamb-and-owl combination, “where is a radio?”

  Luba found this entrancing. “You want to listen to the radio?”

  “If I could ask a Jew a question, and not have it answered with a question …,” Roger began.

  “You would be the czar. There’s a radio in the butcher shop,” Luba said like a Roman conspirator. “Schnaiper can’t turn it off.”

  “He’s possessed?”

  “The switch is broken. It plays day and night.”

  “Why doesn’t he pull the plug?”

  “It’s plugged in behind the giant refrigerator where he keeps the liver. If he pulled the plug he would have to move the refrigerator, and if he moved the refrigerator he would have to take out all the liver.”

  Roger nodded. “It’s on all the time?”

  “Day and night. The cats listen to it when he leaves the store. And he can’t change the station, or he doesn’t want to. Roger, he listens to … boogie voogie.”

  “The tubes will burn out,” Roger said authoritatively.

  “No, they won’t,” Luba answered. “It doesn’t have tubes. It has new things called trahnzeestores, which never burn out. It will go forever.”

  “He’ll sell the liver.”

  “Not as fast as he puts new liver in.”

  “How can that be? Eventually the refrigerator would expand until it was as big as the universe.”

  “No, sometimes he puts in an onion,” Luba said. Luba had been born in a town, recently wiped from the surface of the earth, where logic was not held in the highest esteem when it was held at all.

  “How do you know all this?” Roger asked.

  “On erev Shabbos I get the gribenes and other chicken stuff from Schnaiper. In the morning the truck gets the meat, but the gribenes is never ready then, so in the afternoon Rabbi Eisvogel sends me for it. I carry twenty-five pounds of it in a wicker basket strapped to my back.”

  “That’s what that is,” Roger said, “and that’s why it smells that way.”

  “Yeh,” Luba said.

  “Can I take your place?”

  “For how long?”

  Roger thought. “Five years.”

  Luba’s eyes crossed, and he rocked his head from left to right.

  “I’ll give you all my hamentashen.”

  Luba raised his eyebrows and looked to the side.

  “And half my jelly doughnuts,” Roger added.

  “All of them.”

  “Three-quarters.”

  “Okay,” said Luba, “but you’ll have to wait until May. I have a subdeal with gizzards. I bring them to Rabbi Glipsin of Foin, but in May he’s going to Neshville.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  SCHNAIPER THE BUTCHER looked up. “Why suddenly a new boy? Where’s Luba?”

  “He’s in training.”

  “For what?”

  “To become a polar rabbi.”

  Schnaiper narrowed his eyes.

  “Canada,” Roger said, pointing straight up. “Completely full of ice.”
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br />   “So?” asked Schnaiper. “We have winter, too. What would a polar rabbi have to know?”

  Roger slowly and intolerantly moved his head, as if to say, “What an idiot,” but, then, instead of jumping forward with an explanation, he said nothing, and let the butcher beg for it.

  “What? What would a polar rabbi have to know?”

  Roger laughed.

  “Tell me,” Schnaiper commanded.

  “You’re a butcher, right?” Roger asked. This was a carefully plotted question to ask a man, in a white apron, with a huge knife in his hand, standing at a giant butcher block next to a case filled with ten tons of chicken liver.

  “What do you think?”

  “So, tell me, Mr. Butcher,” said Roger, “walrus.”

  “What walrus?”

  “Walrus. Kosher for Passover, or not?”

  Schnaiper’s eyes darted. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I’ll tell you.” Roger beckoned for him to lean forward, and the butcher did. “Ask a polar rabbi. He would know. At this very moment, Luba is deep in studies of precisely this kind of question. Penguins.”

  “Who’s his teacher?”

  “Rabbi Eisvogel.”

  “Eisvogel. Good man. Still wants twenty-five pounds of gribenes?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be fifteen minutes. I apologize for the radio. I can’t turn it off. It’s goyisheh, but if you daven you can drive it out of your mind. I myself like it. It has pretty music called boogie voogie.” He went to package the gribenes, taking the wicker basket with him like an alpine guide.

  Left by himself in the ice-white interior of the butcher shop, Roger lifted his eyes and listened. The radio had been on of course, as it was an eternal radio, when first he had walked in, but it had been just noise. Now he cocked his ears to listen and decipher. He expected to hear, perhaps, an interview with a famous rabbi. No. He thought the next most likely thing would have been an interview with the Pope. No. News about wars, Germany, ships at sea, the president’s health. No. Whatever it was, however, it was as slow and deliberative as a Talmudic exegesis. In fact, he was pleasantly surprised by the unhurried pace, for he had expected thoughtless gushing, and this was careful, tranquil, with long calming spaces between the words.