The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

“I just said so,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it doesn’t let you off the hook that we share the same taste in music. That’s coincidence, not character, and don’t redound to anyone’s credit. Jerry was right finally to pull the headphone off your head. I’m only sorry he didn’t catch your ear in his fist.”

  “Oh,” I said, “no. I only meant …”

  “You did your duty. It don’t make no difference what you meant.”

  “He’s right,” said Philip.

  “He is,” I agreed. I turned back to the man with the flowers in his beard. “What else?” I asked him. Because, though I still had no idea where we were—Philip, when he’d discovered our coordinates, had passed them on to us but they hadn’t meant anything—I didn’t care. It was all wisdom now—how he’d spoken to Philip, to me, what he’d been saying. I knew there was plenty more where that came from and never wanted the ride to be over. Why, I was like a kid, staring out the window of a Pullman car berth, lulled by the mysterious geography of the night, seduced by the steel percussion of tons.

  He spoke to us, instructed us, taught us, even Philip into it now, rapt, engaged as someone counting. Old Posypuss (because I didn’t know his name, because he never said it, because I never asked) wising us up, even in English his voice cadenced as an uncle’s aliyahs, like broches lilted as lullabies. One time he paused to ask if either of us had a cigarette we could spare and it seemed so out of character I questioned whether I’d heard him correctly.

  “You smoke, Khokhem?”

  “I butter my bread.”

  “Beg pardon, Tzadik?”

  “What, I’m going to be killed by an omelet? French toast? A Carlton, a Vantage, a Lucky, a Now? They want me that bad, let the pikers come get me.”

  “Beautiful,” I told him.

  “Ah,” said Philip.

  “Sure,” said the man with the flower-strewn beard, “a parable in every box. Philip, please,” he said. “Watch the road. Look where you’re going.”

  We landed at Prospect Creek camp by the Jim River, thirty or so miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was full daylight and Philip took me over to Personnel, where I was photographed and issued an identification tag while he filled out Emergency Landing and Distress forms required by the company if he was to claim Distress and Hazard reimbursement, and which I, as his passenger, had to witness and sign.

  “Hey,” the clerk explained, “it’s red tape but we have to have it. Otherwise these clowns would crash-land in just any old snowbank and loll around in the midnight sun building the old D-and-H to the tune of five bucks a day till their rations was gone and they had to lift off again.”

  “Five dollars a day? Why would anyone do something like that for just five dollars a day?”

  “Hey,” said the clerk, “you kidding me, Padre? Because it’s an angle. Because it’s another angle, and life up here is lived as if it was ge-fucking-ometry.”

  The clerk turned out to be right in a way, but missed the real point, I think. (This isn’t my rabbi mode now—I had, when I was in Alaska, little occasion, as you will see, to fall back upon my rabbi mode—so much as my apocalyptic one.—Ice. The world will not end in fire—you can see fire; darkness was the mode here—but in ice.) Which wasn’t angles, not entirely angles anyway, so much as a sense the men—we—shared of being stuck along some infinite loop, embraced in the stifling bear hug of a closed system. What that clerk called angles were only the sharpish edges with which they meant to nick the system, to let a little light bleed through. If they often seemed frantic as children, on liquor, on pot, if they engaged, on days off or at times when it was impossible to work, in endless tournaments of round-robin poker, gambling for table stakes higher than any ever seen in Vegas or my beloved New Jersey, it was because they—we—were so caught up in our terrible doomsday cynicism. The impressions I’d had in Anchorage, of wartime, of gridlock, of the sky’s-the-limit life, and which Philip had explained to me up in our little wooden nest egg while we waited for the weather to warm up so the lake could freeze over, as the general Alaskan scam, were not only reinforced from the moment we touched down on the Prospect Creek landing strip (and had to sit in the plane while the gas tank was refilled, at a dozen bucks a gallon), they were raised from impressions to rules, the forced, improbable etiquette of the North.

  When I finished at Personnel the clerk handed me a map of the Atco units, circled the useful addresses like the girl behind the rental car counter at the airport (my quarters, Personnel, the Assignment office, the dining hall, the chapel, the infirmary, the card room, the club, the camp theater), and instructed me to report to the Assignment trailer after I’d eaten. There were, I understood as I made my way along the corridors and modules—it was a little like strolling through a troop train—essentially two basic models the company had drawn upon here—the Army, and the Starship Enterprise. After I unpacked and had my meal—the food was marvelous, thick steak, wine, lobster, and everything served on table linen the texture of men’s old white-on-white shirts—I reported to the Assignment office.

  It was McBride himself who invited me to enter.

  I’d seen him only once, at the motel in Anchorage the week before, and we couldn’t have exchanged two dozen words, but it was like, I swear it, coming upon one of my oldest and dearest friends. Maybe it was the suit and tie, except for Petch’s the last I’d seen since going down in Philip’s airplane, or the voice, not only uninfected but smooth, without twang or accent, a reassuring sound of the civil. It could even, God help me, have been his briefcase, a signal of routine, of a world where men went to business each day and returned each night, late for supper if they’d been held up by traffic. The only discordant note in the ensemble was the yellow hard hat he wore, but even this could have been ceremonial as his suit or symbolic as his briefcase, a reminder to the men that, please, let’s never forget it’s still Alaska up here, we’ll be blasting, working with heavy equipment, there could be avalanches, I love you guys, let’s be careful out there. And he’d signed my motel chit (and reminded the men that it was like when the family had taken their trip cross the country). I’m no, God forbid, Eddy Tober but, no offense to Flowerface, a fella needs a father figure he can rely on once in a while.

  So, as you can imagine, I was more than a little excited to see him.

  “Mr. McBride,” I greeted him, “how are you! I guess you heard about the trouble we had. It was touch and go there for a while, but Philip kept his head on him—he’s a good man, Philip is—and we had a couple of very lucky breaks there, which I’ll tell you the truth I figure we had coming in view of the near-tragic stuff we went through. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and here I am, a week late but rarin’ to go. Oh,” I said, “which reminds me. Did Rodendhendrey ever show up? Did Cralus? Did Fiske?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m your rabbi, Mr. McBride. I’m Rabbi Goldkorn, sir. We met at the Travelodge? In Anchorage? I have to laugh. You didn’t know me then either. You thought I might be Fiske. Or Rodenhendrey. Or maybe Cralus. It’s just that I’d never been taken for a Rodenhendrey or Fiske before. I suppose a Cralus. Cralus is one of those names that could be anything really, but Rodenhendrey? Fiske? No way. That’s why I have to laugh. Though I want you to know I’m reassured you don’t have these preconceptions. It makes me more comfortable, it puts me at ease.”

  “You’re at ease?”

  “Well,” I said, “we’ve been through some rough circumstances, the pilot and me. There were times we both had to wonder whether we’d make it. I guess I’m just relieved, maybe a little nervous.”

  “You’re my rabbi? Sure,” he said, “now I remember. You arrived a day early.” You were flying up the next day with the Hebrew supplies.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I remember. I recognize you from your ID tag.”

  “I wasn’t wearing an ID tag. I didn’t have one then.”

  “No,” he said, “of course not.” He was looking at my shir
t, and I suddenly realized he was the sort of man who never forgot an ID. What people looked like on their driver’s licenses and passport photos. It was his business, I guess. When he saw me in Anchorage, he didn’t so much see me as my picture, reduced and laminated, what I’d look like behind plastic. “Hey,” McBride said, as if he were reading my thoughts, “it’s a good likeness.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And the supplies? You have what you need?”

  “The supplies? Oh, you mean the Hebrew supplies. Yes,” I said, “they’re fine. I locked them in my room in the duffel. They’ll be all right there, won’t they, till I find a safer place to store them?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, “why not? You’ll find that people don’t so much steal up here as get into the more violent crimes. There’s lots of cheating at cards, so naturally there’s a certain amount of killings and beatings and stabbings. Crimes of passion, too, of course, because even though there’s ladies on our crews, there’s not nearly enough to go round. That’s why we try to keep it a lot like downtown Saigon.”

  Of course. Downtown Saigon. Not war so much as the behind-the-lines life, the R&R one. Which would explain my Anchorage impressions, my instincts here since we landed. Which would explain the thickness of the steaks, the wine and lobster, the drawn butter, rich and yellow as the yolk of an egg, and understood at once that anything goes, that probably everything did, and knew—and feared—that my work was cut out for me, that there’d be, good Lord-of-All-Worlds, Jews to save! (Resisting, kicking and screaming in my head: Hold it, hold on there, I’m Rabbi of Lud, only some offshore ordained justice of the peace, really. What did I know of sin, what did I know of evil?) Of half a mind to protest to McBride right then, right there, that I didn’t bargain for this, that, like everyone else, I was there for the history of the thing, the visionary once-in-a-lifetime opportunities of boom. That, oh, yes, if some welder’s, or blaster’s, or heavy-equipment operator’s kid suddenly wanted bar mitzvah’ing, I was prepared to handle it, or even a shotgun wedding, say, and certainly I could pronounce a nice eulogy at a moment’s notice over the body of some poor unfortunate come to a bad end in an avalanche, but that, well, what I didn’t know about heroin and dirty needles, cocaine and prostitution, high crimes and misdemeanors, could fill a book, and that perhaps he really ought to get somebody else—a priest, say, and that I would understand. Of course I held my tongue.

  Though I hadn’t forgotten I was in the Assignment office, and looked at McBride waiting for him to tell me what to do. He didn’t speak, and looked at me as if I had him stymied, this fellow who never forgot a face on an ID.

  “Well,” I said finally, “if you could give me some idea of my duties …”

  “Your duties?”

  “It’s a long pipeline,” I offered by way of a joke.

  “Oh,” McBride said, pulling open a drawer in his desk and referring to a sheet of paper he took from it. “It’s not Rosh Hashanah, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Yom Kippur?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Succoth? Shemini Atzereth? Simchas Torah?”

  “No.”

  “Is it coming on Chanuka?”

  “Not till Christmas.”

  “Chamish’ Osor b’Shvat? Purim? Pesach? Lag b’Omer?”

  “Chamish’ Osor b’Shvat? Lag b’Omer?”

  “Shavuoth then, Tisha b’Av.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Hey,” he said, “smoke if you got ’em.”

  So, on the principle that we’d once been in the same motel lobby for a few minutes back in Anchorage, and were all in this together, I asked about Spike. I asked after Ambest and Anderson, and about old Jimmy Krezlow. I wanted to know what had happened to Peachblow and tried to find out how Schindblist was getting on.

  “Did Jeers ever qualify?”

  “Jeers?”

  “Guy said he was checked out in jackhammer but didn’t have the certification to prove it.”

  “Yeah,” McBride said, stroking his jaw, remembering, “yeah, Jeers. No,” he said, “we gave him a test. He flunked. We let him wash dishes and work the grease trap till he earned the fare back to Alabama.”

  I’m next, I thought, thinking of the half-million-bucks’ worth of Pentateuch back in my room under canvas and hasp. I’m next, I thought, thinking of that small biblical fortune in sterling silver yads and eighty-seven-thousand-karat beaten-gold menorahs and the shittim-wood arks.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes. Well, no. I mean, well, what am I supposed to, you know, do?”

  “You’re the rabbi. You’re on call. You sit in the rabbi trailer and chat up the Jews.”

  Sure enough. There it was. Right on the map. With my other useful addresses. However could I have missed it? If it’d been a snake it would’ve bit me. The rabbi trailer. To which, once I’d settled in, I repaired.

  I posted regular office hours and, at least for the better part of the first two or three weeks, scrupulously observed them, almost as if they—the hours—were themselves a claim of conscience and comprised a set of canonical hours I solitarily kept, a squeezed matins and lauds, a concentrated prime and terce and sext and nones, the vespers and compline of contractual duty. (More often than not reminded of the flower-faced man, whom Philip had flown off with the next day, depositing him, so I was told, in Fairbanks, from which town he meant to make his way to Anchorage, perhaps by glacier, moving at the glacier’s pace, a few fast inches a day with the wind in his face.) No one came.

  I had the use of Alyeska’s secretarial services and duplicating machines, and had notices posted on the bulletin boards announcing my presence at Prospect Creek camp. No one came.

  And, after first reserving them with the authorities to be sure the Atco units that served as the club for Prospect Creek camp would be available when I needed them, I put other notices up—for dances, for get-togethers, inventing affairs, making the coffee-and-Danish arrangements, inviting our singles to come together in Jewish sock hop—high times for one and all. Again, of course, nobody came.

  If, I figured, the mountain won’t come to Mohammed … And visited the sick in the infirmary. All I accomplished was to make those who were well enough nervous, and those who weren’t, terrified.

  And it wasn’t as if there were no Jews at Prospect Creek. There weren’t a lot, but there were some, Jews of a different color, as the Catholics and Prots and even the Eskimos and Indians there were of a different color, order. Pipeline, they were pipeline Jews, there to make a wonder of the world. No back seat to God, they seemed to say. Oil or nothing! Valdez or bust! And proceeded to live some specially dispensated, tall-story life of the body and mind, their attention focused somewhere around the speed of sound, the speed of light, richocheted, caromed off the forces and their unleashed, hopped-up pagan energies.

  I’m telling you, pally, like goyim they were.

  So here’s what happened.

  Piecemeal, I stopped being so scrupulous about office hours and came later and later to open up and sit inside my rabbi trailer. And closed shop earlier and earlier, too. Some days neglecting to drop by even to check the mail (letters from Shelley were delivered to my quarters), Alyeska’s endless series of internal memos, bulletins, clippings, pledge cards (for blood drives, for the Prospect Creek branch of the United Way), newsletters, notices, press releases, announcements (“Commencing the first of the month the laundry’s new hours will be from …”)—all that purple correspondence, as I came to think of the company’s impersonal, one-size-fits-all mimeography. And stayed indoors (as I came to think of the Atco unit where I lived), watching, in those old, pre-dish days, two- and three-day delayed editions of the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett.

  In all fairness, what else could be expected of me?

  In all fairness, nothing at all, but I knew that what I’d undertaken, to serve a sort of sabbatical year (to pick up extra bucks, to shop around for a congregation, to
see how, or if, Alaska would suit, and send for Shelley and the tyke if I discovered it did), was become, for me, a time of trial. Prospect Creek, rather than the week or so I’d lived with Philip and Poseypuss in the crashed airplane, was quickly becoming my time in the wilderness. In Lud the dead were my congregation. I cheered for them and rooted them on the way St. Francis was said to do for the birds and the animals. Here, on the pipeline, I had no one at all.

  You want to know something? You want to know what the Rabbi of Lud started to do with his hands now that he had so much time on them? That’s right. A grown man. A rabbi. Playing with himself like a bar mitzvah boy. True to Shelley at first, but getting out on the town more, at least in my head, gawking the cleavages and pupiks, underthighs, calves and asses on Carson’s, Griffin’s and Cavett’s guests on three-day delay, old Goldkorn placing shlong to palm for a little shvontz tug and putz pull.

  It was an effort even to go to meals.

  So I pulled myself together.

  I went to meals. I went to meals and spoke when I was spoken to. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, and passed the salt. I went to meals, spoke when I was spoken to, passed the salt and offered the bread basket. Piecemeal, I’m saying, in fits and starts, I fell in with them.

  You have no idea what money was like in those days, what it meant, I mean. How easy it was to come by, how difficult it was to save. Generosity became a way of life. A way of life? A competition, an Olympic event. (Don’t think I wasn’t put in mind of the man with the flowers in his beard, of the tale he told us of John Lookout’s spectacular potlatch, of the competition among his guests to outshine, outspend and just generally outright outdo Lookout’s incredible example.)

  One of the reasons, I think, the pipeline took so long to complete as it did, is that we fell victim to each other’s parties. We were beneficiaries and legatees, and went surety for one another’s benders and hangovers and lost weekends. We strung each other out, I mean, and put each other on the nod on the arm. Wasting and blazing our brothers and sisters. (We? Absolutely we.) There was a custom in those high-kicking, freewheeling, last-of-the-go-to-hell-goddammit days, for someone to come into a saloon and “six-pack the house,” by which was meant that one withdrew three hundred dollars or so from his billfold, laid it down on the bar (not slapped, laid, set down, though it must have started with slapped, started, that is, with noise and showbiz and only gradually, or maybe not so gradually, slipped into a quieter though even more ostentatious—reminded this time that there’s nothing new under the sun, reminded, I mean, of the flashy discretion and noisy circumspection of my bar mitzvah days, when people slipped money into my hand and into open places in my clothing—mode), and purchased half a dozen beers for everyone in the tavern. (It may have been a sign of the season’s excessiveness when the three hundred dollars became four and five hundred dollars, or even more, because the sports were offering not just six beers this time, but six actual mixed drinks. And it was certainly a sign when the four or five hundred dollars was no longer even laid on the bar, when the six-packer was entirely unknown to his devisees and annuitants, and all you needed to know that a treat was in store, was the sound of a phone ringing behind the bar, the sight of the saloon man answering it, the look on his face as he agreed and nodded into the telephone. And surely the final sign was that not one dollar, not one, was ever lost by a barkeep for his willingness not only to extend credit over the phone, but to extend it to someone who because there wouldn’t be any credit in it for him—in the generosity sweepstakes, in those great give-and-let-give games—if his name ever got out, not only refused to give it but often wasn’t even asked!) It was like when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and found the Jews trying it on with the Golden Calf!