A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “ — took in the case of Rabbi Akiva, yes, I know all about that,” the archangel Metatron said. “Although forefathers isn’t the correct word.”

  “As they informed me.”

  “And I found Dr. Sammelsohn’s hat,” the rebbe said, “and followed him in order to return it.”

  The archangel Metatron moved his gaze from the rebbe’s face to my fedora, which I still wore, apparently uncertain what made this hat so irreplaceable a trip through the Divine Palaces was necessary for its return. “But surely you’re here for other reasons as well,” he said.

  And the rebbe nodded. “Indeed, I was wondering … that is to say, I’d assumed, from all my years of toiling in the vineyards of the Holy One’s holy Torah” — here, the voices rang out: “May His great name be blessed forever and ever!” — “that we might find Him” — the voices sang: “Blessed be He!” — “on His holy throne, so to speak” — the voices: “Blessed be the glory of God from His place!” — “where we might successfully petition Him for His mercy or at least come to understand the divine withholding of it.” The rebbe looked about the room with a calculated nonchalance. “And where, by the way, is the Lord’s holy throne?” he said.

  In answer to this impertinent question, the archangel Metatron, King of Angels, et cetera, et cetera, drew himself up to his full height. His many sets of wings bristled — they sounded like an army on the march — and I assumed at that moment that we’d be chased out, flung from those lofty heights like mice swept out of a cupboard. But, no, he simply said, “Would that all humanity had made the ascent you two have done today.” He seemed in the grip of some terrible emotion. “May we sit?” He pointed with his forehead to three armchairs in a nearby chamber. “Over here. Away from all this paperwork.”

  We did as he asked, and I was amazed to feel the chair, although constructed out of humming script, sink comfortably beneath my weight.

  “The text you see forming the chair,” the archangel answered my un-uttered question, “is the mathematical formula for ‘chair.’ The chairs you know on Earth are the product of this equation. The same holds true with everything you see here: the books, the ladders, et alia.”

  The rebbe scanned the tall shelves of books behind Metatron’s head.

  “Yes, it’s there,” the archangel told him.

  “What’s where?” I said, looking between the two of them.

  The rebbe laughed modestly.

  “The book your rebbe is writing,” the archangel explained. “You’ll find it on the shelf and also listed in our card catalog.”

  “And the publication date?” the rebbe asked innocently enough, I thought.

  A sort of fire flickered in the archangel’s eyes. “Let’s not get greedy, shall we?”

  “Fair enough, fair enough,” the rebbe demurred.

  THE ARCHANGEL LEANED back in his chair and crossed his legs. He gripped the top of his thigh with both hands and interlaced his fingers around it. There were so many of them, it took a moment for his wings to settle in around his shoulders. At last, he said, “Ah, well, you’ve asked the right question there, haven’t you? Indeed, where is the Holy One’s throne? You’ve made it to the Seventh Heaven, you’ve braved the storehouses of ills in the Sixth. You’ve passed through the Door of Fire, and here you are, in the fabled Seventh, hoping to challenge and confront your Creator, to awaken His Exalted Conscience and to stir Him into action, to remind Him that He is not only the Maker of Peace but also, as it says in our holy books, a Man of War, so that you might say to him: ‘Look down, look down, see how Your people are suffering. Arouse Yourself and come to our aid.’ Or words to that effect, yes?”

  The archangel Metatron glanced between us. Light from a skylight fell diagonally across his bearded face. “Perhaps I can ring for a little coffee or tea. Would either of you care for a little something?”

  We nodded and shrugged in the polite way of guests who fear their presence might be inconveniencing their host. Nevertheless, the archangel Metatron lifted a bell from the coffee table and shook it. Its little ringing seemed to echo down many adjoining hallways and corridors. The archangel Metatron listened for a moment, hearing apparently nothing in response. “Oh, dear.” He sighed. “I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with nothing for the nonce.”

  He picked at a thread on his gown and brushed away a bit of lint from the fabric. “I can tell you in confidence that I have long been in the Divine Service — it’s been aeons and aeons since I walked the earth as a humble shoemaker — and though times have been dark, I’ve never seen them quite as dark as these.” He shook his head at some private thought. “Oh, gentlemen, how I wish you could have seen this place in the old days!” He closed his eyes and hugged himself. “All the cooking and the preparing and the feasting! You wouldn’t believe it now, but the Heavenly Kitchens were once filled with clouds — What am I saying: clouds? — with whole stratospheres of delicious vapors. All for the never-ending banquets for the righteous! Oh, how I used to love walking these corridors, sticking my head into the kitchens. The smells would draw me from my writing table, and it was all I could do to finish my bookkeeping before dashing in to help. Of course, they never let me, but one of the sous-chefs was sweet on me, and she would always give me a little taste of whatever she was preparing before chasing me out again. The Seraphim, the Cherubim, the holy Chayyos running in and out, the clatter of silverware, of drawers opening, of rolling pins pounding, the Heavenly Choirs, the Earthly choirs as well, all singing the Holy One’s praises.” He smiled sadly. “It was a proper Heaven then, gentlemen, with music and dancing …” His enormous chest lifted and fell. “You could feel the presence of the Holy One in these halls then. But now?” He shrugged. Glancing over the top of his spectacles, he peered into the sky-embossed ceilings above us and, as though he’d caught a glimpse of cobwebs in a corner, he scowled. “Now you can’t even get a fucking cup of tea.”

  The rebbe brought his fist to his lips and coughed. He cleared his throat politely. “And where, so to speak, is the Holy One?” He seemed to be pressing the issue as gently as he could, and the archangel Metatron gave him a piercing look, as though taking in the measure of the man in order to determine exactly how much of the truth he might reveal to him.

  “Weeping,” he said simply.

  “Weeping?” the rebbe asked.

  “The Holy Blessed One is weeping. Oh, yes, he has a place for it. But you would know that, wouldn’t you?” the archangel said to the rebbe. “It’s called the Mistarim.”

  “Concealment,” the rebbe translated softly for me.

  “It’s an actual place?” I said.

  The archangel Metatron nodded. I leaned back in my chair and gazed at the clouds in the ceiling above me, and for a moment, I couldn’t help imagining the Holy One sneaking out of a window, as I had done after my marriage to Ita, and I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the Lord.

  “As God is infinite,” the archangel explained, “so is His pain infinite. There are some things, Dr. Sammelsohn, so great, so immeasurably large, that they cannot be seen at all. The Holy One’s pain is an example of just such a thing.”

  “If the world could hear the Holy One’s weeping,” the rebbe added, “it could never bear it.”

  “Of course not,” the archangel confirmed. “Everything would return to chaos and desolation. Instead, the Holy One chose to disappear, so to speak, to slip through the cracks of the Mistarim, and His absence, as you well know, has been as traumatic on Earth as it has been in Heaven. Now, the Holy One’s pain has grown so large and so great that even I cannot hear His weeping.”

  I DON’T KNOW how long we sat together in silence, but it felt like a very long time. The sorrow between us was palpable. I glanced at the rebbe. He seemed pale, unnerved, drained of vitality. “Well, you’ve cleared up everything,” he finally said, “thank you. And now perhaps I can finish my book.” After a long moment, he stood, and the archangel Metatron stood as well. He bowed at the rebbe’s feet, the
span of his enormous wings stretching out before him, and the next thing I knew, I was lying facedown in the mud in the Tłomackie Place Square in a not dissimilar position.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn! Cousin!” I heard the rebbe’s voice from very far away. “Wake up, wake up! Oh, dear, we’ve got to get you out of here!”

  I raised my head. The rebbe was standing over me, his beard flecked with mud, his hat askew. Mud darkened the knees of his trousers as well. He was holding on to my hat, which he placed on my head before lifting me from the ground. He threw my arm over his shoulders and carried me to his home.

  THERE, ONE OF the rebbe’s Hasidim met us at the door.

  “Bad news,” he said.

  “Bad news?” The rebbe held on to me more tightly.

  The Hasid ducked his head. “It’s the rebbe’s daughter, I’m afraid.”

  “Rekhl Yehudis?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Kidnappers. Or so we suspect.” The man smiled unhappily. “In any case, she hasn’t been home since Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday? How long have we been away?” the rebbe said to no one in particular.

  • • •

  I MUST HAVE blacked out again because soon I was in the middle of the street, the traffic roaring on either side of me. A cloud of thoughts buzzed around my head like angry flies. Rekhl Yehudis had been kidnapped! The Zamenhofs were gone! My world was disappearing! Everyone I knew had gone missing! Like God, they’d disappeared into the Mistarim! The conviction suddenly overwhelmed me: I no longer wished to live. I’d been walking along Nowolipie Street, but I made an abrupt turn and veered down Karmelicka, towards the Umschlagplatz. I’d turn myself in, I’d surrender, I’d accept my loaf of bread and my jar of beet marmalade, and I’d let myself be transported east, where, as so many of us had been murdered, I’d be murdered as well.

  It wasn’t a far walk. The entrance to the Umschlagplatz was at the point in the road where what had once been Zamenhof Street met Dzika Street. People were being herded in through the station’s many doors. Trucks roared up in fleets, and the Jewish policemen turned their captives over to the Ukrainian and the Lithuanian guards. I won’t say they herded us in like sheep. Rather, let me say that we were herded in like men and women who had no weapons of their own. The rain had turned to snow again, and the sky was frozen an iron grey. I was jostled in through the entrance along with everyone else. Inside, hundreds of people were milling about. I shivered and hugged myself. I had no idea when the last train had departed, nor how long anyone had been waiting, but it seemed a long time. People were clearly running out of food.

  “The next train?” I asked a man sitting on his suitcase, but he only stared into space. As I looked about for someone else to approach, I began to regret my decision to turn myself in. In one area, a man and a woman and two small children were lying in a puddle of blood. The children’s skulls had been smashed in and their shoes stolen. Had they tried to escape? I wondered. Or were they shot merely as a warning to the crowd, which, I realized, had begun to outnumber its guards.

  I rubbed my arms, hoping to get warm. I had no idea where I’d left my gloves. My clothes were covered in mud, and I’d apparently forgotten my coat at the rebbe’s. At uneven intervals, trucks drove up to the gates, and new crowds were deposited. There was no concealing anyone’s despair now. As the hours lengthened, women began wailing, children began shrieking, and the guards began shooting anyone who wasn’t moving quickly enough. Because they’d turned off the water that supplied the trains, we were all mad with thirst. Outside in the streets, I could hear gunshots and shrieking. Inside, people were begging for water and moaning. The elderly sat on boxes or lay next to one another on the ground. Children were losing their strength, their heads nodding on their necks, their eyes glassy, their lips dry and cracking.

  As the crowd swelled, people were getting lost in the crush, calling out for one another. I couldn’t stop sighing. A young man was selling yesterday’s newspapers at exorbitant rates. A cordon of soldiers marched through, taking the strongest-looking among us, firing their guns overhead or sometimes even into the throng. Eventually, a train huffed into the station, and we all surged towards it. There was more shooting and screaming and wailing. The guards pushed at us with their rifle butts. The doors of the cattle cars opened and the tangy scent of chlorine made it difficult to breathe. No one, I realized, had given me the three loaves of bread and the kilogram of beet marmalade that had been promised to anyone who turned himself in. One more lie, I supposed. Was I ready to die? I didn’t know. I only knew that I was hungry and tired and thirsty and too weary to resist. I attempted to make my way to one of the cars but couldn’t make it through the crowds. In fact, I was knocked back and pushed to the ground. “Please! Someone!” I cried, shielding my head with my hands. A shoe clipped my cheek, I was kicked in the ribs, someone stepped upon my hand. Through the legs of the people walking over me, I saw a figure dashing towards me, a doctor in a white medical smock. Bending over me, she took hold of my arms. “Hurry! This way,” she said.

  I STRUGGLED TO my feet, grasping her smock. “This way,” she said, and her voice forbade contradiction; nevertheless, I said, “But, Doktershe, I was hoping to board that train.”

  “Follow me.” I hadn’t the will to resist, and so I followed her away from the tracks and the crowds. It was only after I’d begun to calm down that I realized — mostly because of her limp — that this was Ita, or not Ita, but the young doctor and had so unrelentingly tried to convince me was Ita.

  “Wait here,” she said, and she left me in a part of the Umschlagplatz inhabited only by the dead. They were transported to the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in carts used for that purpose exclusively. Perhaps, I thought, I’d been crushed by the mob and was now dead myself. But if I were dead, I reasoned, the dead themselves probably wouldn’t appear dead to me. Or would they? I didn’t really know.

  An hour passed, and the train I’d tried to board roared out of the station. I peered into the crowd left behind, wondering what to do next, when I saw her again, this Dr. Ita — to this day, I don’t know her true name — moving briskly towards me with (I had to squint to make sure I was seeing this correctly) and in her train. I laughed a bitter little laugh. Ah, so here it is then, at last, the long-promised, long-deferred reunion between and me. One more of Heaven’s cruel jokes. We were once again alive at the same moment and in the same place, and this slaughterhouse is the venue Heaven has chosen for our reunion? One kiss — is that what was to be granted us? — before the angel of death bludgeons us both with his truncheon?

  However, the doktershe didn’t offer to kiss me. Instead, she gave me an order: “Climb onto the cart and pretend you’re dead, and do it quickly, before somebody sees.”

  “Do as she says, Dr. Sammelsohn,” told me, gazing at the soldiers behind us, one hand on his revolver, the other upon his truncheon, poised and ready, if need be, it seemed, for battle.

  “It’s all been ordained,” assured me. “There’s no getting out of this, my friend.”

  “Hurry, hurry!” barked.

  I didn’t hesitate. Choking back my sense of revulsion, I clambered onto the cart. The figures there were cold and hardened. They didn’t move against my weight as one might have expected. Horrified, trembling, I found a small depression among them and lay down within it and pretended to be dead.

  “Keep perfectly still,” the doktershe whispered into my ear. She even stroked my hair a little bit. “Keep your eyes closed, and don’t move a muscle until you’ve made it to the cemetery.”

  “If she knew who you really were,” whispered to me as well,

  “she’d tell you how much she loved you. But, of course, Dr. Sammelsohn, she doesn’t remember any of that.”

  “As far as she knows,” said, “she’s merely acting on a strange impulse, an impulse she’ll never be able to explain to herself. Which is not an uncommon experience, I’m told, among you human beings.”
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br />   Ita took a limping step backwards, and the driver mounted the wagon. Picking up the reins, he alerted the horses of his intention, and the wagon began to move, its wheels slipping in the muddy ground. I kept my eyes open a slit, so I could see her. In her white medical smock, its edges smeared with dirt and blood, she kept watch over the cart as it juddered off, with and standing on either side. The distance between us grew. lifted his truncheon in a salute of farewell. After the cart rounded a corner, I could see nothing more of them.

  I shivered, aware of the inert bodies beneath mine, swaying with the movement of the cart. My head was on the breast of some poor woman’s coat. I tried not to look at my companions’ faces or at their grey hands. We passed beneath the arch of one of the Umschlagplatz’s doorways and were soon out on the street, the horses’ hooves clopping against the cobblestones, the sky wheeling above my head. Snow fell on my face, and I let it. The wind blew a freezing blast and, for a moment, I feared I might sneeze. I didn’t. The cemetery was outside the ghetto wall, and it was there that the driver abandoned us, with no guard of any kind. The fear of typhus was too great, I supposed; and certainly, I imagined him telling himself, these dead were dead enough, and could do no one any further harm.

  When I was certain I was alone, I scrambled off my bier. My legs collapsed, and I retched violently, the force buckling me in two. I fell onto my hands and knees, and vomited again. Wiping the damp grass and the snow from my hands, I stood. I was struck primarily by the ridiculousness of my situation. Though free, I had no place to go and also no means of getting there. My choices seemed to be starving here in the cemetery or taking my chances in the world, where no doubt I would be quickly recaptured and returned to the Umschlagplatz. Twice I headed towards the cemetery gates, and twice I doubled back.

  • • •

  IT WAS AN hour or so before nightfall when I heard my name being called softly. The rebbe had entered the cemetery from Karolkowa Street, the two angels behind him.