The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  It doesn’t require much telling, this shouldn’t take long.

  McBride was there again. I recognized Spike and recognized Ambest. I spotted Anderson, I spotted Jim Krezlow. And picked out others whom I’d first seen in Anchorage. Peachblow and Schindblist. Jeers, who had failed to qualify in the jackham-mer and been flown back to Alabama, had evidently come up to snuff and was being given a second chance. (Or perhaps not, maybe he was just there to see me.) There were Indians who looked familiar, and others from earlier fiascos. There were almost no Jews at all.

  Rabbi Petch, with whom I had thought to trade jobs, was there. At the Jewish New Year’s solemn beginning—it was early October; we were at Crystal Creek camp; at this latitude the fierce fall had already begun to drain the light, suck at its sparkle and leach its golds and yellows, tamping it flat, white, thin and dull as skimmed milk—he sat dressed in the hot woolen suit he’d been wearing when I’d last seen him, at the dead center of the congregation, not its southwest corner, but in its actual bull’s-eyed nub and nucleus. I was certain he huddled there for protection, as though maybe there were two neutral corners in the natural world, one for indoors and another for out.

  Well.

  This was the little reconditioned one, the short-handled, twenty-four-inch, ninety-thousand-dollar Sephardic. Or which would have been Sephardic if it hadn’t been blank. Which could be—who knew?—Sephardic yet, if all we needed was to get some specialist, someone checked out in the Sephardic hand the way old Jeers was checked out in jackhammer to go to work on it and copy down Pentateuch (which, considering the losses so far sustained, and providing the new guy was willing to work for nothing, would still come to something just over a hundred thousand bucks a teuch). Or could be if we didn’t have to fly in some extra-holy type first (the flower-bearded fellow, say) to re-deconsecrate the hoaxed-up sheepskin, reconsecrate it again and just set the scribe loose.

  But that was something that would have to wait.

  First I had to get through Rosh Hashanah.

  I began by asking the Four Questions.

  “Wherefore,” I chanted on this brisk Alaskan autumn morning six or so months after the Passover in the only Hebrew, with the exception of my haphtarah passage, a handful of broches and poems, and a few prayers for the dead, I had ever memorized, “is this night different from all other nights?

  “On all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread; on this night why only unleavened bread?

  “On all other nights we eat any species of herbs; on this night why only bitter herbs?

  “On all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once; on this night why do we dip them twice?

  “On all other nights we eat our meals in any manner; on this night why do we sit around the table together in a reclining position?”

  When I finished I looked up from the empty parchment, looked down again quickly, and hurriedly started to recite my haphtarah passage before the remaining Jews, McBride, the other gentiles, the redskins, and the Anchorage Seven.

  I might have gotten through it, too, the first Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline ever publicly to re-bar mitzvah himself, when I felt someone beside me. It was Petch.

  He took over for me, going through the service without a single mistake. Though why anyone should take my word for this I can’t say. He even had a shofar with him and sounded it, the dark, mottled, polished ram’s horn, glazed as tortoiseshell, summoning the New Year through its harsh, amplified winds like a sort of spittled Jewish weather, brusque, gruff as phlegm. He finished the morning part of the Rosh Hashanah services and started up again in the afternoon. Then again at sundown. From the Torah that never was. I stood beside him on the platform and, properly cued, even participated by chanting the broches, reading them off the blank parchment by following the silver yad that Rabbi Petch moved along the missing Hebrew.

  Through the long, prayer-filled day we carried on one of those mysterious conversations inaudible to the congregation.

  “I heard about you,” he said.

  “I guess everyone has.”

  “Is that what you want? To be famous?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “ ‘Thou, O Lord, art mighty for ever. Thou quickenest the dead. Thou art mighty to save.’ ”

  “I’m sorry about all this,” I said.

  “You should be. This is the first time I’ve ever been so far from Anchorage.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Barbarous. Worse than I thought. Will you look at that raging river? I think it’s going to bust its banks and take the bridge out.”

  “That’s Crystal Creek,” I said.

  “I’m taking my life in my hands. How are the Eskimos around here?”

  “Very tame. Gentlemen, in fact.”

  “A lot you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “there you have me. I’m a bumpkin.” I wanted to make him understand. “Because I never took it seriously. The proposition that roughnecks could ever get into any of this. Or that God would take their disengagement seriously either. On my side in this, though why I should assume so I don’t know.”

  “God’s opinions?”

  “That’s right.”

  “ ‘Now, therefore, O Lord our God, impose Thine awe upon all Thy works, and Thy dread upon all that Thou hast created, that all works may fear Thee and all creatures prostrate themselves before Thee.’ ”

  “Since,” I said, “there was going to be an Alaskan pipeline anyway, and all the red tape and Title Nines and Tens and whatever were already in place, I thought it was a good time to get out of Jersey, put a stake together, and, if things worked out, maybe trade congregations with you.”

  “Out of the question,” Petch said. “No deal. Deal’s off. You aren’t serious. You were never terrified enough. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for your stake,” he said suddenly. Then, softly, “Someone must stand between us and the Eskimos.”

  Though it was humiliating to me, I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little relieved. Here was Petch with his phantom Eskimos and chimerical natural disasters ready to throw himself into the breach, to intercede on man’s behalf for God, or God’s for man’s, whichever came first, like a limited warranty.

  “Maybe,” I told him, “I wasn’t terrified enough. Though by any normally terrified guy’s standards I’m pretty terrified.”

  “ ‘Let all the inhabitants of the world perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue must swear. Before Thee, O Lord our God, let them bow and fall.’ That’s why … What’s his name, McBride?”

  “McBride, yes.”

  “That’s why McBride don’t fire you. You ain’t scared enough yet to blow in a whistle, you’re not quite afraid to make a wave. That’s why he’ll probably let you play out your contract.

  “Oh,” he said, “by the way, is it true? Were the others like this?” He touched the yad to the godforsaken parchment.

  “One contained highlights. One was written out in English.”

  “No swastikas but? I heard swastikas.”

  The scrolls were covered and placed back in the ark.

  “No,” I said, “of course not. You think I would have sat still for swastikas?”

  “A bold, stand-up guy like you? Why not?”

  We finished the services. Then we shook hands and each heartily wished the other might be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. Everyone did. McBride and the Indians. Jeers and the gentiles.

  I walked Petch to the airstrip where his bush pilot was topping off the fuel in the gas tank and listening to music coming in over the plane’s radio on an Anchorage AM frequency.

  Next week was Yom Kippur. Petch offered to come up, but I told him there was no need, I’d use the transliterated version.

  “Ballsy,” he said.

  “Why do you have to go? You don’t have to go. Stay over, go back in the morning.”

  He looked up at the calm, perfectly cloudless sky. “Better get out,” he sa
id darkly, “while the getting’s good.”

  “Don’t you think you’re imposing a skosh too much awe upon His works? Is it necessary to dread all He created?”

  “Sure,” he said, “everything.”

  “Safe trip,” I told him.

  “Wise guy,” he said and turned to the pilot. “Excuse me, you’re not afraid you’ll wear out the batteries?” He pointed to the plane’s radio, turned high, pushing its tinny music through the headset on the pilot’s seat. Philip also liked to use his radio for purposes for which it was never intended. I recalled how upset I’d been when we were airborne again and he’d tuned in to listen to a Fairbanks station, perhaps the very one that was playing now. Only now I understood what was happening. It was the same instinct that drove them to six-pack the house, that same sporty waste and recklessness lifted to a kind of code. You started with the realization that you only lived once. Then you modified your behavior to spite the bad news. (I had a sudden hunch about the stake all of us were supposed to be putting together up there, that it was a myth, more chimerical and dreamy than any of Petch’s disasters.) Maybe that was what was so unamiable and cynical about the idea of the potlatch. Maybe it was what Petch objected to in me. Life was so difficult, being good, respecting God. Dread and awe, I was thinking, were hard in such an awesome, dreadful world, and I began to pray that Rabbi Petch and his pilot be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, then that Shelley and my daughter Constance were, Spike and Ambest and Krezlow and Anderson and Peachblow and Schindblist and Jeers, and all the names of all the people I could remember meeting up there—the Jacobsons, Dave Piepenbrink, Arn Sternberg, McBride, Deb Grunwald, Howard Ziegler and Milt Abish and Karen Ackerman and Philip, the bush pilot who’d almost gotten both of us killed. Which is just exactly when the song ended and they broke for the news and the announcer came on to say that there’d been a plane crash on a small island in Cook Inlet. His two passengers had survived, but the pilot, Philip Kutchik, a Fairbanks resident and Tinneh Indian who flew for the Alyeska Corporation, had been killed instantly.

  I went to Phil’s funeral. A busman’s holiday, you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I hadn’t been to the funeral of anyone close in years. Not since my mother’s, not since my father’s. Living in New Jersey, in that queer, Jewless, almost unpeopled town, there’d been no occasion. Shelley and I had only a few friends, and none of them, knock wood, had died. So I went to Philip’s funeral. Though we were hardly friends and I thought him a bit of a jerk, we’d certainly been through a lot together. We’d hacked out a nest together. We’d broken hardtack, shared the last of our jerky, displaced each other’s weight—I’d bite a fingernail, he’d spit out a window. I shouldn’t go to his funeral? My God, we were besieged by bears, found out by the wind-wafted tang of our mutual excrement. We weren’t close. That was only proximity in the plane, but I shouldn’t go to his funeral?

  And a good thing, I thought at the laying out. Because except for one or two pilot chums (there, it turned out, as official Alyeskan delegates), and the crash’s two survivors (who stood by the casket—which, to my surprise, was open, Philip’s face having escaped injury, its only wound being in the suddenly paid attention of his expression—and told everyone who came near, myself, representatives of the funeral parlor, who they were and that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them there in that coffin instead of the poor dumb, jargon-spouting son of a bitch with his attitudes and minimums, civil evening twilights, eminences, DF steers, pan pans and A-OKs who lay there now), no one showed up.

  I had rented an automobile and drove in the three-car cortege (the hearse, my rental car, a bright yellow Alyeskan truck) out to the cemetery. The two survivors had decided not to come, but the man with the flowers in his beard was outside the funeral parlor when I came out, and he rode with me in the rental car.

  “They seem a little faded, Khokem,” I said. I think it was the first time I ever referred to his beard to his face.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, stroking it lightly, “you know. October. The last leaf, same old story.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “Next time it should be a better occasion.”

  “Well, of course,” I said, shamed and chastened as I always am whenever anyone pulls this line on me. “It’s awful about Philip. Just awful.”

  “Terrible.”

  “I felt I had to come,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Though we were hardly friends and, to be perfectly frank, sometimes I thought he was a bit of a jerk, we went through a lot together.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “I understand.”

  “That plane crash. All the time we spent living in that airplane. Remember that nest that we hacked out of pine trees?”

  “I do.”

  “We lived out of survival tins and broke hardtack together. We shared dried jerky.”

  “I had some myself.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “you did.”

  “Sure.”

  “We learned each other’s weights and measures. I bit my nails, he spit out the window. He tutored me in the intricate Alaskan economy. My God,” I said, “we were besieged by bears!”

  “I remember that.”

  “I shouldn’t come to his funeral? I shouldn’t come? He was like a brother to me.”

  “To me too,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, “I know, Tzadik,” and wiped my nose with my handkerchief. “ ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, I am involved in mankind.’ ”

  “No, no,” said Flowerface, “you miss my meaning. He was my brother.”

  “Phil was your brother?”

  “We were identical twins. Here,” he said, “look,” and removing an old black-and-white photograph from his wallet, he pushed the snapshot toward me. In the photo a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, who bore a substantial but, considering the face I’d seen in the open casket, fallen-away resemblance to the Phil he had become, stood next to someone who might have been his mirror image. Both boys were beardless and, near their left temples, where, back in the plane in March, their heads had been covered by parka hoods, each had a tiny birthmark like a corporal’s chevrons. I saw the tzadik’s where he tapped at his temple. “Hmn,” he said, “hah? Hmn?”

  “He was your brother? Phil?”

  The falling away had occurred on both their parts, as if Phil had come to resemble a distant, younger cousin who would always look youthful, while old Posypuss, tricked out in his now fading flowers, was an actor, well cast but unrelated, carefully prepared by Hollywood makeup artists, to look like a relative, an uncle, say, even a grandfather, of the kids in the photograph.

  “We were Tinnehs,” he said. “It’s the way with Tinnehs.”

  “Beg pardon, Khokem?”

  “Tinnehs. Tinneh Indians? I told you. In the plane? How the Tinnehs are tribeless, clanless. How they—we—break away from each other. Generation after generation. Highest divorce rate in Alaska. Alaska? The world. How the children are placed in orphan asylums when the parents run off? That picture was taken in the orphanage. Don’t you remember? Why don’t you listen? You think I talk for my health? Identical twins, I told you how even identical twins drift apart.”

  He had mentioned identical twins. Phrases came back to me. They would, he’d said, “dissipate affinity, annihilate connection.” They moved, “down some chain of relation from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.” And remembered his saying how once the Tinnehs outnumbered all the other tribes put together but were now “rare in the Alaskan population as Frenchmen.”

  Now I recalled how interested I’d been, and the moment when the sun came up and he couldn’t finish his story because we had to take off.

  We were back in Fairbanks, parked in front of the hotel where he was staying. I had to drop off my rental car at the airport before my flight, I to
ld him.

  “Well,” he said, “it was good seeing you.”

  “Next time,” I said carefully, “on a better occasion.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and put his hand out to open the door. For the first time I noticed the mourner’s band on the right sleeve of his coat.

  “Listen,” I said, and touched him on the shoulder, “I’m sorry about Phil. I can’t tell you.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “But you know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, sloughing off my condolence, “we like drifted apart.”

  Then he opened the door and got out. I started to turn the key in the ignition, but the man with the flowers in his beard was rapping on the window for my attention. I leaned across to roll the window down on his side and he pushed his big head into the car.

  Up close, straight on, the beard seemed lopsided, lifeless. I caught the pinched, stale scent of mold. “Ain’t no murracles,” old Posypuss said, “I dud wished dey would was, but dey ain’t.”

  As Petch had predicted, McBride let me play out my contract. As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t let me resign and made me play it out. I guess he thought I was pretty well seasoned by the time of those Rosh Hashanah services and didn’t figure even Alyeska could afford another greenhorn rabbi until the fiscal year ran out on the one they already had.

  He never mentioned the Torahs. McBride, like the Eskimos, was a gentleman too.

  Which isn’t to say I could ever stop thinking of Flowerface out there in the dark. Out on that iceberg, in that proper, heroic blackness he rubbed against like braille, yogi-ing his bloodstream and rearranging his metabolics and contemplating not the ways of God or even Man, but figuring red tape, the long odds of Corporate Life, how the Feds would probably require affirmative action, Prots and Mackerel—snappers and even Jews demanding rabbis, Torahs, the works, and what all this could mean to him at Alaskan prices, till he saw what it felt like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few fast feet a day with the wind in his face.