The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  “God of Job!” The rabbi gagged.

  A disemboweled carcass of a pig, its side torn open, sprawled on the floor in front of the main display case. Swarms of flies blanketed it. Scores of cats, every stray in Chelsea, fought for position. The fittest clawed at the pig’s carcass and slurped its body fluids. Rats bigger than small cats gorged on the pig’s eyes and ears and tongue, scarring its face and head with gouges made by their sharp, pointed teeth. Swine blood stained the pale yellow poultry a deep red and pork fat desecrated the kosher beef. The floor shone like a sea wall covered with fresh guano.

  Maddie doubled over and vomited her seder meal, but the cats and rats continued feeding. Only the flies, buzzing their approval, assayed her puke. Eleazer the grocer gave her a bottle of soda water. “The old country has come to the new,” he said.

  “The synagogue.” The rabbi’s voice cracked.

  Its exterior was untouched. The cornerstone, granite, proclaiming “1890,” was as resolute as the day it was dedicated. The stained-glass windows, which portrayed scenes from the Holy Scriptures in triptychs of many hues, unbroken, caught the fire’s light and hurled it back like thunderbolts. It made no sense to Maddie that this fragile glass survived the maelstrom on the streets, unless it had been intentionally spared. By whom? The hand of God? Or, the hands of people with the sickest of the sick sense of humor?

  With Maddie’s hand in the small of his back, the rabbi seized a railing and pulled himself up the shallow front steps of the synagogue. Moskovitzky followed. The lock had been gouged out of the wooden door. The foyer was the same as when she had first visited the rabbi and Moskovitzky. Prayer books filled the shelves waiting for congregants to gather for the next service. A chest of black yarmulkes guarded the doors to the sanctuary. Prayer shawls were draped over a wooden rod. The rabbi kissed a yarmulke and placed it on his head, as did Moskovitzky, who handed one to Maddie together with a bobby pin for her to fasten it to her hair.

  Inside the sanctuary under the back pew, she saw a bracelet. It reminded her of the identification bracelet engraved with her name she received as a First Communion gift. It was silver and shiny, that gift, and had a secret compartment where she kept a four-leaf clover rather than a family photo because she believed a four-leaf clover would bring her the luck of the Irish. She wore the bracelet day and night, everywhere but the shower. As she grew and the links became tighter it made a permanent indentation in the soft skin of her wrist until a link popped open and the bracelet fell from her wrist. Where, she did not know. Like life, one moment it had been there, the next it was gone.

  Reaching under the pew, Maddie picked up the bracelet, examined it, then sealed it inside a stamped envelope she kept in her purse, a superstition she inherited from her ma who was always prepared in case she unexpectedly had to mail a letter.

  “The Torah!” Rabbi ben Reuben shrieked. It had been unrolled down the aisle and a red swastika stenciled on each page. His body stiffened as if a bolt of lightning entered his body through his eyes and coursed through his nerves, then slackened as if the electricity had exited his nervous system. His arms flailed like high tension wires detached from their grounds.

  “Epilepsy?” Maddie asked, but Moskovitzky shook his head.

  The rabbi collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath like a man who would not survive without a respirator. He stared straight up, his eyes unseeing, the eyes of a blind man who no longer had memories of ever being sighted. Maddie put her purse under his head and loosened his belt and tie. Moskovitzky replaced his yarmulke. The rabbi’s lips quivered. He mumbled, a stutterer who choked on his words. His eyes widened. His eyelids withdrew inside his head. His face had the expression of a man witnessing something so horrific he could not turn away, something he had seen before but had erased from his memory.

  “He needs a doctor,” Maddie said. “Is there a payphone?”

  The rabbi grabbed Maddie’s arm. His fingers dug into her flesh. The tighter he gripped, the calmer he became. His face relaxed. The rabbi closed his eyes, then opened them. They focused, his eyes. Not on her. Not on Moskovitzky. Not on the ceiling above them. Not on anything in the sanctuary of the synagogue. In those eyes, Maddie now saw a clarity she had not seen before. Something had excised the cataracts that had blinded the rabbi to his past with a precision beyond the capability of any human hand. The rabbi’s hand fell limply from her arm. With effort, he placed it flat against his chest, over his heart as if he were pledging loyalty to something known only to him. His change in demeanor transfixed Maddie.

  “How could they have known?” The rabbi’s voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else, another time, another place. He repeated his question, each repetition bringing his voice closer and closer until, at last, it was here and now. “How could they have known?”

  Maddie held the rabbi’s hands.

  “So long ago. I was just ordained. Just married. A small apartment. Two rooms. A window overlooking Gutenstrasse.”

  The rabbi spoke softly and they had to bend over, their ears inches above his mouth.

  “She made curtains. Blue and white. With flowers. Not much furniture. A table from my uncle. Two chairs. Didn’t match. Sleeping. Hot. Windows open. Pounding at the door. Does the rabbi live here? More pounding, louder. Schnell. I was scared. Confused. Didn’t know what to do. Gestapo. One had a riding crop. Drunk. Whiskey breath. Black shiny boots. I’m Otto Kempka.

  “She came out of the bedroom. Soldiers went in. Tore apart the bedding. Pulled out drawers. Emptied closet. Smashed mirror. Kempka. Whiskey breath. Her wedding gown. She tried to save it. Kempka hit her with his riding crop. Cheek split open. Blood. Raised my hand. He hit me across the face and made her hold the gown. He forced a scissors into my hand. Cut into strips, he ordered. For my daughter, she begged. Kempka laughed. Never to be born, he said. It took forever. A pile of white at her feet. Like firewood at the feet of a person to be burned at the stake.

  “The synagogue, Kempka said. Four stayed with her. An hour. Two blocks. An hour. Whiskey breath. The Torah. If you want to see your wife again . . . I unrolled it down the aisle. A bucket. Red liquid. Warm. Too thin to be paint. No paint smell. A brush. Stencil. Swastika. On every page, Kempka ordered. With each stroke I begged Hashem’s forgiveness. An hour, two hours. How long? Don’t know. Kempka drank whiskey. When I was done, I thought I had cut myself. They left me there. I ran home. She was gone. No clothes. No books. No furniture. No pictures. Nothing but strips of wedding gown. I went to the landlord. Out or I’ll call the Gestapo. New tenants in the morning. I searched. Everywhere. Hospitals. Cemeteries. Jails. Morgues. The dump. The streets. The river. Never found. Never found. I was taken to the camps. I searched again. Survived. Came to America. Came to Chelsea. Never found.”

  The rabbi blinked. His eyes slowly focused as he returned from a distant place, a distant time.

  “Sie wäre wie alt?” he asked. “Sixty-six? Did her eyes really sing? I don’t have a picture. Is she dead? Ist sie tot? Kann ich sicher sein Ich habe nie Kaddisch gesagt. Ich habe nie wieder geheiratet. Wie könnte ich?

  “Faces. I looked at faces. In crowds. On the streets. I didn’t know why. Now, I do. Vielleicht das nächste Gesicht. Einmal in einer Cafeteria. Essen Toast. Langsam. Sehr, sehr langsam. Working girl’s hands. Clean from a lifetime spent in other people’s water. After every bite, wiped her lips with the napkin. München, sagte ich. Pardon? Sie sagte. Aus der Tür. Die Straße entlang. Weg. Weg.”

  The rabbi was quiet now. Moskovitzky was crumpled on the floor beside him, his head bowed. Maddie wept. She wept for the rabbi. For the words she did not know, but understood. For the wife whose name he never spoke. For the Torah unrolled on the synagogue floor. For what was happening in Boston. She wept tears of bitterness and in her tears she forged a bond between herself and these two ancient Jews, and she knew, the way one knows a truth to be true precisely because it can-not be proven, that somewhere, beyond all the tears, walked a young Jewish bride, the rabbi’s wif
e, in the company of young Master Devlin. She now appreciated the lesson of Elizabeth’s death, that each death sires its own unique sadness, and she realized she now wept for the exception which proved the rule, that the sadness caused by the death of Master Devlin and the rabbi’s wife was the same sadness, made bitter by being murdered out of hatred. The rabbi was quiet now, and still she wept.

  The rabbi rose from the floor. Page by page, with great care, he rolled up the Torah while Moskovitzky searched for the finials, mantle, and silver breastplate. He found the yad, the silver pointer used by the reader to mark his place. Under the front row of pews, she found the stencil. A swastika like in the rabbi’s story.

  “Read a portion,” Moskovitzky said.

  The rabbi recited the blessing offered by those called to the Torah: “Borchu es adonoi amvoroh . . .,”

  Maddie stared at the black letters glowing through the swastika’s pale red. At the seder table that night, the rabbi had told her Torah was the tree of life to those who clung fast to it and now she saw how it revived him. He picked up the yad. She followed its tip across the page as he touched each word. The rabbi’s voice strengthened word by word and filled the sanctuary. At the end of the passage, the rabbi recited the blessing after the reading of the Torah: “Boruch ato adonoi . . .,”

  “It’s from Exodus,” the rabbi said, “the crossing of the Red Sea when Moses parted the waters and the Children of Israel passed safely but the Egyptians drowned.

  “There is another version. When Moses led the Children of Israel to the Red Sea, it is said, he cried out to Hashem for help. Hear my prayers, Moses said. Hashem replied: This is not a time for prayer. This is a time for faith. Go forth into the Red Sea or suffer your fate at the hands of the Egyptians. Moses led the Children of Israel into the waters. The water rose to their ankles, their knees, their waists, their chests, their necks. Moses walked onward and the Children of Israel followed. When the water reached their noses, the sea churned and parted and Moses led them to safety.”

  Maddie thought of Yeats’s poem, Parnell’s Funeral. Her da cried whenever he read it. Yeats asked, “What is this sacrifice?” and lamented that Parnell’s death was a useless sacrifice because his heart was eaten by his own people. Now, Yeats’s question, What is this sacrifice? confronted her. She could not run from being Mary Ann Devlin any more than Jacob Moskovitzky could run from being Jacob Moskovitzky. For her, for the rabbi, for Moskovitzky, the answer to Yeats’s question, sooner or later, had to be, I am this sacrifice.

  Another thought formed in Maddie’s mind, slowly coalescing the way a memory does when the mind unexpectedly encounters a reminder of the past. Levy did not resist a plea-bargain because he was a fatalist bound by God’s will; nor did he resist a plea-bargain because he was a fanatic on a mission. His resistance was a proclamation to her, to the rabbi, to Moskovitzky, of his innocence, a proclamation of his willingness to go to trial than plead guilty to something he did not do. It was an act of courage, his answer to Yeats’s question. He, too, was that sacrifice.

  She took Moskovitzky’s hand in one of hers, the rabbi’s in the other, resting her fingertips against his gnarled knuckles. In her mind’s eye, she also held Levy’s hands, convinced now beyond all reasonable doubt that he was innocent in fact.

  As they, Maddie, Rabbi ben Reuben, Moskovitzky, exited the synagogue into the oven of a hot April night and passed through the handiwork of hate spread out on both sides of a dying, dead Chelsea street, she vowed to God to follow the bracelet from beneath the pew in the synagogue in Chelsea and to follow the stencil to wherever they may lead. And she vowed to God to become, if necessary, whatever sacrifice was demanded of her to prove Avram Levy innocent. On Elizabeth’s soul, she did vow. And the souls of her namesakes and the souls of her ma and da and grand da and she wished they were all alive to share the moment.

  And, they were.

  -5-

  Maddie escorted Rabbi ben Reuben and Jacob Moskovitzky through the gauntlet of destruction which once was a Chelsea street of Jewish shops, stepping over fire hoses snaking away from hydrants, stepping around fire engines and police cruisers and ambulances with their back doors open. A cop hustled them behind a police barrier that cordoned off a side street. A scrum of reporters demanding access, television and newspapers, swarmed around them, their way blocked by a wall of police. A reporter with a The New York Times press credential hanging around his neck tried to interview them, but Maddie brushed him aside, brushed all the reporters and cameramen aside. Breaking free of the scrum, she guided the rabbi and Moskovitzky away from the police barrier, down the side street, back to the rabbi’s home.

  That night, sleep did not come to Maddie Devlin. Television, radio, records, books, magazines, warm milk, a snifter of brandy, a bottle of Guinness, nothing quieted her mind nor quelled her anxieties. Her future, her escape from the sinkhole of legal aid, her liberation, now lay engulfed in the disemboweled innards of a pig greedily devoured by rats and feral cats on the floor of a kosher butcher; in the flakes of carbonized pages of sacred texts wafting in the fiery wind; in pale red swastikas desecrating the parchment of the Hebrew Bible; in an identification bracelet sealed in an envelope in her purse.

  She tried to visualize what lay beyond, but a fog, thick and viperous, occluded her view. She was about to take her first step on a long journey; but she had no guide. Alone at the midpoint of her life, she would have to find her own way. She felt spikes being driven through her hands and feet, a crown of thorns being forced down on her head, wounds being gouged in her side.

  The suffocating heat kindled memories Maddie now wished she did not have, memories of clients who had murdered but were acquitted because she had out-thought, out-prepared, out-lawyered the prosecution. How many had murdered again? Too many, but she had wrapped herself in the cliché of the Seventh Amendment; no sin committed, no sin confessed. Not according to Levy’s Talmud test. That test she had failed. She had researched Catholic doctrine. It was more forgiving, teaching it was morally licit for an attorney to defend a client the attorney knows to be guilty as long as the attorney does not misrepresent facts to the court, such as allowing the client to commit perjury or presenting an alibi defense the attorney knew to be false. Being morally licit did not assuage her guilt. Outside her window, heat currents swarmed around the street-light like thugs waiting their turn to rape a young girl.

  Maddie threw on some clothes and wandered the neighborhood. Bags of garbage awaiting the morning pickup lined the curbs. She smelled and tasted the heat-intensified stench. Lights from the twenty-four-hour convenience store at the corner beckoned. The bullet editions of the morning papers would be on the newspaper rack. A way to kill time until dawn. Maybe a better future was hidden in her horoscope.

  “I saw you on the tube,” the clerk said as she handed him a five-dollar bill to pay for two twenty-five-cent newspapers. He wore a leather sweat band on each wrist, laced with rawhide rather than buckled. The veins in his arms wiggled like blue earthworms burrowing beneath his skin. There were no needle marks. Maybe he injected between his toes. Many of her clients did. On his forehead above his right eye, a tattoo of a skull laughed when he raised his eyebrow. As he talked, its jaws opened and closed. None of the gang members she had defended over the years sported a tattoo like that. Maybe there was a new gang in town; or, maybe, it was a souvenir of too much hash, too much booze, too much cunt, while on R&R in Saigon. She had never seen this clerk before; but, then, with the rapid turnover on the graveyard shift, she rarely saw the same person twice. His hand lingered over the button that opened the cash drawer. She asked for her change.

  “I hear you fuck Jews. Niggers. Spics. Gooks. How ’bout me? War hero, I am.”

  She picked up three packages of hot dogs, $1.49 each, from the cooler. “I get off on these, pencil prick. Buy yourself a blow job with the change.” His obscenities chased her down the street. He stood on the sidewalk outside the store. Its fluorescent lights made him look like a child’s toy w
hich glowed in the dark. From down the block, she shouted, “Your better half dripped down your mother’s leg,”

  He faked a move toward her. “At least I had a mother.”

  In her apartment, Maddie nibbled on the hot dogs, raw and uncooked, kosher, which she hadn’t noticed when she grabbed them. The problem messages hidden in horoscopes was that, like beauty, their meaning was in the eye of the beholder. She might as well believe in the Oracle of Delphi.

  She telephoned George Harriman. “Meet me at Behan’s. It’s about the Chelsea business.”

  “Christ, Maddie, do you know what time it is?”

  “Time is of the essence, Uncle George.”

  Behan’s was Southie’s last all-night railroad diner and it didn’t serve decaf. A “Sanka is for sissies” needlepoint made by one of the waitresses hung above the coffee urns. Sanka, as everyone in Southie knew, was packaged in orange, a color as welcome in Behan’s as Maddie Devlin herself.

  Maddie was on her third cup of coffee and the caffeine was beginning to infuriate her system as she waited for Harriman. People who traded day for night crowded the diner: cops and firefighters unwinding from the four to midnight shift; truck drivers on their way from delivering the bullet edition of the newspapers; donut makers relaxing before firing up the grease vats to prepare for the morning rush; janitors and cleaning ladies who moved into Boston’s office towers after the secretaries, business executives, bankers, lawyers finished for the day; interns and residents recuperating from a seventy-two hour shift in the emergency rooms of the city hospitals. They all flocked to Behan’s because Behan’s specialized in truckburgers–shitburgers in impolite company–a hamburger grilled in butter with a slab of American cheese, topped by a fried egg, sunny side up, and thick slices of fresh onions pan fried in the butter and hamburger juices. Banished to the back booth by the door to the restrooms, Maddie sat alone with her coffee.