The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  Closed neckline in back, side and front. (Collarbone should remain covered)

  Elbows covered in all positions

  Knees covered by dress/skirt in all positions

  Proper cover of the entire leg and foot

  No slits

  Girls and women who wear immodest garments, and thereby call attention to their physical appearance, disgrace themselves by proclaiming that they possess no intrinsic qualities for which they should garner attention …

  So that explained the dress code. But the word that leapt out at Will had nothing to do with necklines or slits. It was ‘Rebbe’. This sounded like the man Will had to meet.

  He looked up to get his bearings, noticing for the first time the street sign. Eastern Parkway. He had barely walked ten yards when he saw another sign: Internet Hot Spot. He had arrived.

  His stomach heaved as he walked in. This was surely the scene of the crime. Someone had sat at one of these cheap blondwood desks, surrounded by fake wood panelling and grey floor tiles, and typed the message announcing the theft of his wife.

  He stared hard at the room, hoping his would suddenly become a superhero’s gaze, magically able to absorb every detail, seeing with X-ray vision the clues that must be here.

  But he only had his own eyes.

  The room was a mess, not like the latte-serving internet cafes he knew from Manhattan or even his own patch of Brooklyn. There was no espresso or mocha here, no coffee of any kind in fact. Just bunches of exposed wires, peeling signs on the wall, including a picture of an elderly, white bearded rabbi — a face Will had now seen at least a dozen times. The desks were arranged haphazardly, with flimsy partitions attempting the separation into individual workspaces.

  At the back were a stack of empty computer cartons, still leaking their Styrofoam packaging, as if the owners had simply bought the equipment, unloaded it and opened for business the same day.

  Will got a few upward glances as he came in, but it was not nearly as bad as he had feared. (He had visions of his occasional student forays into out-of-the-way pubs in big English cities, places so hostile the locals seemed to fall into an instinctive, sullen silence the moment a stranger was among them.) Most of the customers in the Internet Hot Spot seemed too preoccupied to be interested in Will.

  He tried to assess each of them. He noticed the two women first, both wearing berets. One was sitting side-saddle on her stool, allowing her to keep one hand on her pram, rocking her baby to sleep as she typed with the other. Will ruled her out immediately: a pregnant woman could surely not have kidnapped his wife. He eliminated the other woman just as quickly: she had a toddler on her lap and wore perhaps the most exhausted expression he had ever seen.

  The rest of the terminals were either empty or used by men. To Will, they all looked the same. They wore the same rumpled, dark suits, the same open-necked white shirts, and the same wide-brimmed black trilby hats. Will looked hard at each one in turn — Did you kidnap my wife? — hoping that a guilty conscience might at least send one of them blushing or rushing out of the door. Instead they kept staring at the computer screens and stroking their beards.

  Will paid his dollar and sat at a screen himself. He was tempted to log onto his own email, so that anyone checking him out and reading over his shoulder would immediately know who he was. He half-wanted them to know that he was here, that he was onto them.

  Instead, he took time to absorb what was in front of him. Each terminal was programmed to show the same home page, the website of the Hassidic movement. There was a tracker on the left of the screen, scrolling birth announcements: Zvi Chaim born to the Friedmans, Tova Leah to the Susskinds, Chaya Ruchi to the Slonims. At the top of the screen was a banner, showing the same face that hung on the wall, though this time it appeared to be dissolving into a picture of the Jerusalem skyline. Underneath ran the slogan: Long Live the Rebbe Melech HaMoshiach forever and ever.

  Will read the line three times, as if trying to crack a cryptic crossword clue. He had no idea about melech but Moshiach was now very familiar, even if he had not seen it in this form.

  The word that mattered was Rebbe. The man in the picture that hung everywhere — an ancient rabbi with a biblical white beard and a black trilby pressed firmly on his head — was their leader, their Rebbe.

  To Will, it felt like a breakthrough. All he had to do was find this man and he would get some answers. A community like this, he was sure, would be hierarchical and disciplined: nothing would happen without the nod of the top man. He was like a tribal chief. If Beth had been taken by the men of Crown Heights, the Rebbe would have given the order. And he would know where she was now.

  Will left hurriedly, anxious to find this Rebbe as quickly as he could. As he got back onto the street, he noticed that others were moving at similar speed; everyone seemed to be in a rush. Maybe something was going on? Maybe they had heard about the kidnapping?

  Within a block or two he found what he was looking for: a place where people gathered to eat or drink. For reporters, cafes, bars and restaurants were essential locations. If you needed to talk to strangers, where else could you start? You could hardly knock on people’s front doors; stopping people in the street was always a last resort. But in a cafe, you could start a conversation with almost anybody — and find out plenty.

  There were no cafes here, no bars either, but Marmerstein’s Glatt Kosher would do. It was more of a dining room than a restaurant. It looked like a canteen, with hot food at a counter served by large, grandmotherly women. Their customers seemed to be gaunt, pale men, wolfing down chicken schnitzel, gravy-soaked potatoes and iced tea as if they had not eaten for twenty-four hours. It reminded Will of the refectory at his public school: big women feeding thin boys.

  Except this scene was much more bizarre. The men might have stepped out of a picture book of seventeenth-century eastern Europe and yet several of them were yammering away into cell phones. One was simultaneously tapping into a BlackBerry and reading the New York Post. The collision of ancient and modern was jarring.

  Will queued up to get his own plate, not that he felt like eating; he just needed an excuse to be there. He hesitated over his choice of vegetable, overcooked broccoli or overcooked carrots, and was soon upbraided by one of the babushkas behind the counter.

  ‘Hurry, I want to get home for shabbos,’ she said without a smile. So that explained the rush: it was Friday afternoon and the Sabbath was coming. Tom had mentioned something about that as Will left, but he had not taken it in: he literally did not know what day it was. This was bound to be bad news. Crown Heights would surely close down in the next hour or two; no one would be around and he would find out nothing. He had no choice; he would have to move fast, starting right now.

  He found what he needed: a man sitting alone. There was no time for English circumlocution. He would have to deploy the instant, American approach: Hi, how you doing, where do you come from?

  His name was Sandy and he was from the West Coast. Both of which facts caught Will by surprise. He had, half-consciously, assumed that these men with their beards and black hats would bear alien names and speak with thick Russian or Polish accents.

  That had been part of the culture shock of the last hour, the realization that a corner of what could have been medieval Europe lived and breathed in the here and now, in twenty first century New York. He felt like a novice swimmer who discovers he can no longer touch the bottom.

  ‘You Jewish?’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m a journalist.’ Ridiculous thing to say. ‘I mean, the reason why I’m here is that I’m a journalist. For New York magazine.’

  ‘Cool. You here to write about the Rebbe?’ He pronounced it Rebb-ah.

  ‘Yes. Well, among other things. You know, just writing about the community.’

  Sandy turned out to be relatively new to Crown Heights.

  He said he had been ‘a surfer dude’ on Venice Beach, ‘hanging out, taking a lot of drugs’. His life had been a mess until six years ag
o, when he had met an emissary of the Rebbe who had established an outreach centre right on the oceanfront.

  This Rabbi Gershon gave him a hot meal one Friday night and that was how it started. Sandy popped in there for the next Sabbath and the next; he stayed overnight with Gershon’s family. ‘You know what was best, better even than the food and the shelter?’ said Sandy, with an intensity Will found awkward in a man he had just met. ‘They didn’t judge me.

  They just said that HaShem loves every Jewish soul, and that HaShem understands why we sometimes take a roundabout path. How sometimes we get lost.’

  ‘HaShem?’

  ‘Sorry, that’s God. HaShem literally means “the Name”. In Judaism, we know the name of God, we can see it written down, but we never say it out loud.’

  Will gestured for Sandy to carry on. He explained that he had put his life in the hands of the Rebbe and his followers.

  He started dressing like them, eating kosher food, praying in the morning and evening, honouring the Sabbath by abstaining from all work or commerce — no shopping, no using electricity, no riding the subway — from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.

  ‘And did you do anything like that before?’

  ‘Me? You gotta be kidding. Man, I didn’t know what shabbos was! I ate everything that moved: lobster, crabs, cheeseburgers. My mom didn’t even know what was kosher and what was treif.’

  ‘And what does she think about, you know, this?’ Will gestured at Sandy’s clothes and beard.

  ‘You know, it’s kind of a process?’ Upspeak, even here.

  ‘She found the kosher thing hard; me not being able to eat with her when I visit with her in her home. And now that I have kids, that gets kind of tricky. But the toughest thing for her, without a doubt? When I became Shimon Shmuel, rather than Sandy. She couldn’t get her head round that.’

  ‘You changed your name?’

  I wouldn’t really call it changing my name. Every Jew has a Hebrew name already, even if he doesn’t know what it is.

  It’s the name of our soul. So I like to say that I discovered my real name. But I use both. When I visit my mom, or when I meet, you know, someone like you, I’m Sandy. In Crown Heights, I’m Shimon Shmuel.’

  ‘So what can you tell me about this Rebbe, then?’

  ‘Well, he is our leader and he is a great teacher and we all love him and he loves us.’

  ‘Do people do whatever he tells them to do?’

  ‘It’s not really like that, Tom.’ (Will had had to think quickly.

  In all his preparation he had forgotten to make up a pseudonym.

  So he had borrowed Tom’s first name and his mother’s maiden name: Sandy thought he was talking to a freelance reporter called Tom Mitchell.) ‘The Rebbe just knows what’s right for all of us. He’s like the shepherd and we’re his flock.

  He knows what we need, where we should live, who we should marry. So, yes, we listen to his advice.’ Will’s hunch was being confirmed. This guy pulled every lever.

  ‘And where does he live?’

  ‘He is right here in this community, every day.’

  ‘And can I meet him?’

  ‘You should come to shul tonight.’

  ‘Shul?’

  ‘Synagogue. But it’s more than that. It’s our headquarters, our meeting house, our library. You’ll find out all you need to know about the Rebbe there.’

  Will decided to stick with Sandy. He needed a guide and Sandy would be ideal. Not much older than Will, he was not a rabbi or scholar, not some authority figure who would require ingratiation, but a burned-out hippy who, Will guessed, had simply cried out to be rescued. If the Moonies had got there first, Sandy would have gone with them; he was a man who needed someone to catch him when he fell.

  They talked as they walked the few blocks to Sandy’s first stop.

  ‘Tell me something, Sandy. What’s the deal with this clothing? How come you all dress alike?’

  ‘I admit, I was pretty freaked by that at first. But you know what the Rebbe says? We are more individual because we dress this way.’

  ‘How does he work that out?’

  ‘Well, what makes us different from each other is not the designer shirt we wear or an expensive suit, something on the outside. What makes us different from each other is what’s inside: our true selves, our neshama, our souls. That’s what shines out. If the outside becomes irrelevant, if we all look the same, then people can truly start to see the inside.’

  By now, they had arrived at a building Sandy referred to as the mikve and which he translated to Will as ‘ritual bath’.

  They joined the line paying a dollar to the attendant at the door, Will handing over an extra fifty cents to get a towel, and headed downstairs into what seemed to be a large changing room.

  As soon as Sandy opened the door, they were hit by a cloud of steam. The air itself seemed to be dripping; Will had to blink three or four times to adjust his eyes. When he finally regained his vision, he stepped back as if he had been punched.

  The room was packed with men and boys who were either naked or about to be. There were bony teenagers, large bellied men in their fifties, their beards frizzing in the humidity, and wrinkled geriatrics — all of them removing every last piece of clothing. Will had been to the gym enough times, but there the age range was narrower, there were fewer people and nothing like this volume of noise. Everyone in here was talking; if they were kids, they were screaming.

  ‘We have to be entirely unadorned when we enter the mikve,’ Sandy was saying, ‘if we are to become pure for shabbos. Our skin must make total contact with the rainwater that’s collected in the mikve. If we wear a wedding ring, we have to take it off. We must be as we were the day we were born.’

  Will looked at his own finger, at the band that Beth had given him. At their wedding ceremony, she had placed it on his finger whispering a vow that was for his ears only. ‘More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.’ It referred to the depth of their love for each other.

  Now he was standing surrounded by naked men, some taking off tasselled vests — which Sandy explained were worn by order of a religious commandment: a reminder of God, even under your shirt — others putting them on, where they instantly became stained with the moisture of skin not yet dried, several muttering prayers in a language Will did not understand. How strange the world is, Will thought surveying this scene, that my love for Beth could bring me to this place and this moment.

  ‘Coming?’ Sandy was gesturing towards the pool.

  Something told Will that if he was going to win this man’s trust, he would have to show respect and go along with whatever ritual the hour called for.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, taking off his own clothes; even the wedding ring. Gingerly he followed Sandy, reminded of his school days and the walk to the communal shower after a winter afternoon of rugby practice. Then, as now, he felt self-concious, taking care to cover his private parts with his hands. The setup here looked a lot like those old school baths, down to the puddles of blackening water and the random pubic hairs on the white-tiled floor. There was a sign: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR, TAKE A SHOWER BEFORE THE MIKVE. Will took his lead from Sandy, who stood under the jet of water for just a few seconds.

  Then to the mikve itself. It was like a small plunge pool and plunging was what you did. Down the stairs, wade a step or two and then down — a complete dunk, so that not a hair on your head remained dry — then twice more and out. The temperature was comfortable but no one lingered. They were not having a dip or a Jacuzzi, they were there to be purified.

  As Will sank below the surface, holding his breath, he was filled with an unexpected anger. Not at the men around him, not even at Beth’s captors, but at himself. His wife was missing, in who knew what kind of danger, and here he was, butt naked. He was not where he should be, in a New York Police Department command centre, surrounded by flickering computer terminals manned by kidnap specialists, each of them working round the clock to trace phone calls an
d decode emails using state-of-the-art encryption technology, until finally one officer turns around and announces to the room — ‘We’ve got him!’ — prompting everyone to pile into squad cars and a couple of helicopters, surrounding the criminals’ den with a SWAT team of marksmen who then emerge with a trembling Beth, wrapped in a blanket, and her evil abductor in handcuffs or, better still, a body bag. All this raced through Will’s mind as he held his breath in the rainwater that was meant to sanctify his body. I’ve seen too many movies, he thought as he came up, breathed deep and shook the water from his hair. But the core feeling persisted. He should be hunting for Beth and here he was instead, bathing with the enemy.

  As he dried off and put his clothes back on, he could not help but see the men around him differently. What dark secrets did they carry? Were they blamelessly ignorant of this plot or were they all in on the snatching of his wife? Was it some kind of conspiracy, starting with the Rebbe but involving all of them? He looked at Sandy, fidgeting with hairclips as he returned the black yarmulke to his head. He certainly came across as a wide-eyed innocent, but maybe that was just a skilful pose.

  Will thought back to their first conversation at the diner.

  Will imagined he had sought out Sandy, but maybe it was the other way around. What if this ‘Sandy’ had been following Will since he had arrived at Crown Heights, contriving to be sitting alone in Marmerstein’s at just the right moment? It would not be such a hard trick to pull off. After all, weren’t these people famous for their cunning …

  Will stopped himself right there. He could see what was happening; he was panicking, allowing a red mist to descend when he needed clarity. Hoary old stereotypes were not going to rescue Beth, he told himself sternly. He needed to use his head. Be patient, stay polite and you will get to the truth.

  They popped in briefly to Sandy’s house which, Will guessed, had simply been allocated to him. It was decorated in a style that belonged to their grandparents’ generation: white Formica cupboards which would have looked modern in 1970, a linoleum floor which seemed to hail from the Kennedy era. The kitchen had two sinks and there was a large, industrial-looking urn of boiling water, complete with its own dispensing tap, in the corner. On every wall, in varying expressions, were photographs of the man Will now knew to be the Rebbe.