“Wh-what are you doing here?” the man demanded in English.
I was almost as shocked as the man must have been. It was the first time I had been interrupted during a burglary, and all I could think was that he’d seen my face and he was a Jew.
“Shut your mouth and get on your knees,” Frankie said, in a smooth, calm voice that promised violence as efficiently as any gun. How strange it must have been to catch a hint of that yeshivish cadence while staring down the end of a gaping barrel.
The man didn’t move. He didn’t speak. His eyes shifted back and forth like he meant to memorize us, his face white with rage or terror.
“Would you prefer a bullet in them?” Frankie asked.
Slowly, the man sank to his knees.
I felt sickened. Somehow, this was different than mugging a stranger in a pitch-black alley, than pickpocketing one from behind, or breaking into an empty house and pretending that I’d once lived there as I searched through cupboards and drawers. There was no darkness here to hide me. This man could see me. He was staring right at me.
It shouldn’t have made a difference, him being a Jew or not. But it did. My face burned with humiliation, and I imagined the old women in my hometown shul, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. Shanda, they’d say, like judges in their dark veils and headscarves. Shanda. Disgrace. Shame.
“Go get the stuff.” Frankie kept his eyes on the man. “Alex? Are you just standing there? Go get it, now.”
I couldn’t think straight. My thoughts were scattered like broken glass. This was wrong. Everything was wrong. Frankie shouldn’t have had his gun.
“You look like a good boy,” the man said softly, his Yiddish coming out off-kilter and scratchy, as though it had fallen into disuse. “I can see it in your eyes. You don’t want to be here. You don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t talk to him,” Frankie barked, kicking the man in the small of his back. It was a restrained blow, dealt with the side of his foot, but the man groaned like something had broken deep inside him.
As I gathered up the rest of the loot with shaky hands, the man’s gaze burned into me. My head pulsed with shame and regret, and I couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.
“You have it all?” Frankie asked without looking at me. The gun quivered in his hand ever so slightly. I caught a glimpse of his face. With a jolt, I realized he was afraid. “Well, do you?”
I swallowed hard. “Everything.”
“Good.” Then he spoke to the man, and I knew this, because his voice chilled over until it was as hard as ice. “Now, your watch and your ring.”
The man took off his ring and pocket watch, freeing the gold chain from his buttonhole. Rather than place the items in Frankie’s outstretched hand, he held them out to me instead. Like a peace offering. Like a plea.
“Alter, don’t,” Frankie said. By then I was already reaching for the ring.
The man’s fingers locked around my wrist. He dragged me off balance, twisted me around. I struggled as he linked his arm around my neck, certain he meant to break it.
“Don’t shoot!” the man yelled. “If you shoot, I’ll—”
A hot smatter of blood fanned across my face as Frankie drove the butt of the revolver into the man’s nose. I fell onto my stomach and was beginning to rise when I heard a yelp from behind me, a grunt, the scuffle of boot heels on the floorboards. I turned around to find Frankie on top of the man, punching him.
One fist, then the other, the blows steady and rhythmic. In some way, it was even more brutal than if Frankie had lashed out in an animalistic fury. The gun was by Frankie’s feet, and I picked it up before touching his shoulder.
When Frankie looked up at me, his gaze was a thousand kilometers away. There was blood darkening his brown curls. Blood flecked across his lips. And I realized that the boy I’d thought I knew down to the heart, I really hadn’t known at all.
That night, I had realized that he wasn’t the only stranger. I had become a stranger to myself as well. But it was more than the thievery. I had been frightened by how Frankie made me feel. How I could lose myself for hours watching the way the sunlight teased the contours of his high cheekbones and bronzed his rebellious curls. How just the thought of kissing him set me burning like a firework, the desire so strong I thought it’d tear me to pieces if I had to keep it pent up inside me much longer.
“You could have told me you didn’t want to steal anymore,” Frankie said as we headed deeper into the marsh. “We could have worked something out. You could have... I don’t know. You could have gone to the fence instead of me. You would have probably been good at that, negotiating, keeping it composed, cold. Distant.”
“Frankie, I needed to leave. It would never have worked out in the end. It would have been the death of us.”
No sooner had the final word left my mouth than Frankie’s features darkened. Before I could react, he threw down his lantern and lunged at me as though he meant to kill me.
“Get off me!” I snarled as we grappled blind and grunting in the darkness.
“Get down!” He shoved me back, and like an utter schlemiel, I tripped over a branch and planted my butt in a shallow puddle.
He was just a shadow in a sea of shadows. I glared up at him. “What’s wrong with—”
A gunshot shattered the silence of the glade. Heart pounding, I lifted my hands to shield myself, as if that would stop a speeding bullet.
“It’s me, Frankie Portnoy!” Frankie shouted, stepping in front of me with his arms raised. “Don’t shoot us, old man.”
A figure emerged from the tree line. I could only make out his silhouette and the shape of the rifle he held.
“That was a warning shot. If I had wanted to shoot you, you would already be dead.” His accent was hauntingly familiar. I would have bet anything that he was from Romania or Bukovina and that he had found his origins in the eastern Carpathians.
“See, Alter, he’s almost as rude as you are,” Frankie muttered under his breath as he helped me to my feet. “You two will be perfect for each other.”
“You could’ve given me a warning that didn’t involve knocking me into a puddle,” I growled, swiping strings of mud from the seat of my pants.
Frankie ignored me. “Reb Meir, this is my friend, Alter Rosen. He’s—”
“I know what he is,” Meir said, keeping his distance. He had lowered the rifle, but only so that its barrel pointed at my legs instead of my head. “I may be old, but I’m not blind, Feivel.”
Frankie scowled. “How many times do I have to tell you? I hate that name. It’s Frankie now. Frankie.”
“Can you help me?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “Yakov’s getting stronger, and I don’t know what to do.”
“So, you know his name,” Meir said.
“He was my friend.”
Without another word, Meir turned and retreated into the forest. I thought he meant to abandon us here, but Frankie took my wrist and dragged me in pursuit of the man.
22
After about fifty meters, we reached a small stone cottage that looked as old as the land it grew on, as if it had been here since the beginning of time. Candlelight gleamed through the curtains. It might have been cozy, if not for the animal traps set up in a perimeter around the place, jagged-toothed things trailing chains. Not exactly what I’d call kosher.
Reb Meir waited for us in the glow of the threshold. My heart jolted as we neared. He was tall enough to scrape the door’s lintel, his slate-blue eyes set in a long, lean face. There were hints of silver in his beard and sidelocks, but he was hardly the wizened elder I had imagined.
“Come inside,” Meir growled impatiently.
“It’s okay,” Frankie whispered, resting his hand on my lower back. Nervousness made me weak in the knees, and his touch didn’t help. “I’ll be with you every step of the way.�
��
I swallowed down my unease, stomach twisting, and stepped into the cottage. Books and scrolls crowded every available surface. Sacks and barrels were heaped by the potbelly stove, near a cot with a threadbare blue blanket.
Setting his rifle in a rack on the wall, Meir nodded toward the table. “Sit down.”
There was barely enough room to sit, let alone rest my hands. Books crowded the table, their cracked spines gilded with Hebrew.
The recent rainfall filled the cottage with the scent of damp soil. A familiar aroma. A sad one. When my father’s business had failed, we had traded our comfortable house in the center of the Jewish quarter for a wattle-and-daub cottage on our neighborhood’s outskirts. After heavy rains, I would wake to this same odor, the walls damp with condensation.
I thought of my mother and sisters still there, and it made my chest tighten with longing. Now more than ever, I ached to see them again. Rivka and Gittel must be so big now, old enough to walk alone to market and chase the chickens. I wished I knew what they looked like.
Meir sank into the chair opposite us. If he was a Hasid, he had exchanged his fur shtreimel for a deerstalker cap and traded in his somber frock coat for a green Norfolk jacket.
Even as he took off his hat and rolled a cigarette, he had the cagey demeanor of a domesticated dog gone feral. He refused to take his eyes off me. As for me, I couldn’t take my eyes off his cigarette.
“Do you want one?” he asked, after he had lit his.
I cared for tobacco even less than I did for bourbon. Still, I nodded and allowed him to roll me one.
I lit the cigarette with a match and took a drag. The action came naturally, even though I had smoked just once or twice over the last several years. Only when I shook out the match did I realize that I had used my left hand.
“Alter is an omen name.” Meir drummed his fingers on the leather cover of a book. “Were you sick as an infant?”
“I was born with a fever. The midwives were certain I would die.” Something about smoking calmed me. It was soothing and familiar. I supposed I had Yakov to thank for that.
“I have known quite a few Alters and Altes, and many of them have gone on to lead long and exceptional lives. Unusual lives.” His slate-blue eyes pierced through the veil of smoke wreathing his features. “But you can’t look toward the future when you’re carrying ghosts upon your back.”
From a steamer trunk in the corner, Meir extracted a long white robe. It was a kittel, probably the same one he would use on the Day of Atonement. But it was also the kind of garment a groom would wear at his wedding as well as his funeral.
“Will I have to wear tachrichim, too?” I asked, praying he didn’t have burial shrouds hidden at the bottom of that trunk.
“Ah, we have a funny one,” Meir said with dry sarcasm, although I hadn’t been joking. He balled up the kittel and threw it at me. “No. This will suffice. When was the last time you visited a mikveh?”
Normally, I would go to the mikveh every Friday afternoon before Shabbos and also directly after taking part in the tahara ritual. This time, I had forgotten about it entirely.
“Last week before Shabbos,” I confessed. “I was so distracted by what happened to Yakov...”
“Nothing that can be done about that.” Meir crossed the room. “You’ll go into one soon enough. There’s a pond behind the house. It will happen there.”
While I changed into the kittel, Meir knotted lengths of blue and white cord into the tassels found both on tzitzis and on the corners of a prayer shawl. Like the fringed garment I wore under my shirt, the tassels themselves were also called tzitzis. He counted under his breath, keeping track of the number of knots. Eighteen. Eighteen for chai, for life.
“How long has it been since he died?” Meir asked between knots.
“Only a few days,” I said, watching Frankie in the corner of my eye as he leafed through a book on the table. It made me feel safe knowing he was here. He had always been one to protect others.
“Have you been seeing things?”
“Yes.” I looked back ahead. “They almost feel like memories, but darker. More dreamlike.”
Meir nodded gravely. “Once a dybbuk enters a living body, it grafts itself onto the host’s soul. In doing so, it merges with the host’s own memories and personality, first distorting them, then slowly replacing them with its own. The visions can be frightening, but they are merely a side effect of that assimilation. You’re fortunate to have come here before they worsened. You need to understand, this is not a person. Not anymore.”
It disturbed me to hear Meir speak of Yakov that way. The boy who had reached out to me in the mikveh had been afraid. He had clung to me. In that moment, Yakov’s fear had been real. Even now I still felt a deep and primal terror coil in my veins, and I knew in my heart that it belonged to him.
“But...”
Meir narrowed his eyes. “But what?”
I hesitated. “He feels afraid.”
“Nonsense. You cannot ascribe emotions to a dybbuk.”
“I know what fear is.”
“When a body is left alone after death, in a state of desecration, the soul becomes corrupted,” he said, as though I hadn’t even spoken. “It is no longer your friend. It is only a shadow of him, driven by the desires he had in life. The greatest kindness you can give the dybbuk is by helping it pass on, so that it may complete its time in Gehinnom.”
Face stinging from Meir’s cold rebuttal, I looked down. Against the dark fabric of my slacks, my hands seemed thin and fragile. Easily breakable. Dirt was engrained under the nails from the fall. I thought of how Yakov’s hands had looked when I had cleaned them.
Meir finished knotting one tzitzis and moved on to the other. Nausea welled in my stomach at the sight of the braided tassels. I groaned as the heavy ache in my limbs crawled into my spine, seizing my lungs in an icy grip.
“Holding up all right?” Frankie asked.
“Trying,” I whispered through clenched teeth, struggling to draw in air. My entire body suddenly felt frigid and immobile, as though my blood had turned to clay. I tried to straighten my fingers, but I could hardly move them now. “My hands. I can’t...”
“Hey, Reb, something’s the matter,” Frankie said, his voice strained as tightly as the cords Meir knotted.
It dawned on me that this was what it was like to be dead. This was what Yakov had been feeling when we had washed him, when he had been buried. Frozen. Trapped. Breathless.
He must have been terrified. He must have felt so alone.
Meir set the finished tzitzis on the table and rose to his feet. He came to me and put his hands on my shoulders. I couldn’t see him, couldn’t even turn my neck anymore, but just the weight of his palms was reassuring. It reminded me of the way my father used to run his hand through my hair. It meant that I could still feel.
“Take a deep breath, Alter.” Meir spoke in a calm baritone. “Breathe in, breathe out. Listen to the beat of your heart. Count it. Remember, you are still alive.”
As I focused on my breathing, he grasped me by the palm and elbow, and firmly drew my hand back so that it was perpendicular to my wrist. To unfurl my fingers, he first straightened my thumb. It was the same technique we used at the chevra kadisha, when working on a corpse afflicted by rigor mortis.
“There we go,” Meir said, once he had freed my second hand. “Good. You’re doing excellent, Alter. Just keep breathing. Feivel? Hold his hands for me.”
This time, Frankie didn’t bother correcting Meir. He cradled my hands against his chest while Meir bound my wrists together with the braided cords.
Even as the ice melted in my veins and grateful gulps of air filled my lungs, my unease deepened into dread. I strained against the cords, overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom. The ceiling was going to collapse, or a flood was rolling in, or burning hail would rain
down.
“Wait, I can’t do this,” I stammered as Meir tied off the final knot. “If we go through with this, it’ll kill me. I know it will.”
“Don’t believe a word he says,” Meir told Frankie. “This is the dybbuk talking.”
I wanted to scream in frustration. Why was he talking over me? Couldn’t he tell that this was me?
“No, damn you. This is Alter talking.” I backed away from them, striking the table in the process. Books tumbled down, and loose papers rained on the floor at my feet.
Meir blocked the door. There was no escape.
“Frankie, remember that story you told me,” I said quickly, swinging my head in his direction. “Do you want me to end up like that boy? Because that’s what will happen. This exorcism will kill me. Not Yakov’s dybbuk. This.”
Frankie hesitated. “Maybe Alter is right.”
“You mustn’t listen to him,” Meir stressed as he took a step toward me. “The dybbuk will say anything to survive. It is a parasite that will suck every last drop of strength from its host and leave nothing left.”
“Damn you, stop calling him that!” I snarled, feinting to the left. “He’s more than just a dybbuk. His name is Yakov.”
Meir moved to block me, and I darted past him to head straight for the door.
Frankie made a grab for me, catching my sleeve. I shocked myself by twisting around in his grip and driving my knee into his groin. All his boxing skills weren’t enough to keep him from crashing to the ground, his hands curled over his wounded parts.
As he cursed at me breathlessly, I shouldered open the unlatched door and tumbled into the night.
“Stop!” Meir shouted. “Alter, don’t go!”
My thoughts were so muddled that I didn’t know whether it was my life I felt in danger of losing, or if it was Yakov’s terror that propelled me forward. It was as though we were two halves of the same animal, sutured together by a bond deeper than flesh.
I blundered through the darkness, crashing through the underbrush. Branches snared my kittel, tearing it down the back.
The City Beautiful Page 15
