by Pete Hamill
He took a different route across the meadow, stopping every fifty yards to shift the bag from one shoulder to the other, and went out through the Pritchard Street entrance. There were more people on the street now. A man with a squeegee and bucket cleaned the show windows of the Sanders theater. More kids entered the park with fishing poles. Nobody looked at him.
Michael walked down Kelly Street. His shoulders were sore now from the weight of the dirt. At the armory, he waited until he was certain nobody was watching. From his pocket he removed a key, taken from the rabbi’s clothes at the hospital, and hurried to the side door of the synagogue. He quickly opened the door, entered, and closed it behind him.
He waited in the dark vestibule for a long moment and decided not to switch on the lights. The police knew that Rabbi Hirsch was in the hospital; if they saw lights burning, they might come in and find him. I don’t want to see the cops, he thought. It’s too late for them. It’s too late for all of them.
He went up the three vestibule steps and unlocked the second door and entered Rabbi Hirsch’s small apartment. He set the bag down and in the dim light moved books on the top shelf of the bookcase, behind the radio and the photograph of Leah. There he found the second key. It was about four inches long, made of iron, and heavy. It was attached to a painted wooden stick.
Michael used the key to open the tall oak door in the corner. The door that had never once been opened by Rabbi Hirsch in Michael’s presence. At first the unlocked door would not open. He had to pull it hard, using all of his weight, until it squeaked on rusted hinges. Before him, a dusty stairway rose into darkness. His heart beating quickly, Michael went up the stairs, feeling his way near the top, thinking for just a moment that he should turn back, until he grasped the handle of another door. He turned it and shoved hard. The door made a scraping sound on the stone floor.
There before him was a great, vast, high-ceilinged room, illuminated by colored shafts of light from stained-glass windows and slashing bright beams where sections of glass had been punched out. He was in the abandoned main sanctuary at last, and the sight filled him with awe. The downstairs prayer room was like the downstairs church at Sacred Heart: low-ceilinged, plain, dusty, the pews full of prayer books. But this was like entering a secret room in a lost city.
He walked carefully along the wall, stepping over broken plaster and shards of smashed stained glass and stones that must have been hurled at the windows. He counted twenty-one rows of benches. There were prayer books at odd angles on every bench, some of them gnawed by rats. Thick cobwebs draped from the benches to the floor. The words KHAL ADAS JESHURUN were carved into the marble above the shuttered double doors that had once been the main entrance. Above the entrance was a balcony, like a small version of the choir loft at Sacred Heart.
Michael stood there, facing the sanctuary, trying to imagine what it had been like during the Holy Days when every seat was filled and there was a rustle of anticipation and wonder. He could see faces. He could see clothes. They had come here, assembled, embraced, and then left, some of them never to return. There must be places like this, he thought, all over Europe. In the feeble light, he could see on the far wall the carved wooden Ark where the Torah once was stored. It was huge, four or five times larger than the Ark in the basement sanctuary. Past the glass chandeliers, he could pick out the ner tamid, the eternal light, hanging from the ceiling, its candle no longer lit. And in the center, just as Rabbi Hirsch had told him, was the bimah, the speaker’s platform.
Standing there in this desolate emptiness, from which even God seemed to have fled, Michael began to weep without control.
He wept for Rabbi Hirsch with his broken face and his losses and journeys and endless grief. He wept for Leah Yaretzky. He wept for Sonny and Jimmy. He wept for Mister G. He wept for all those bony people he’d seen in the newsreels, staring with dead eyes past the barbed wire. He wept for his mother, who had crossed an ocean to escape hatred and found that it followed her like a wolf. He wept for Father Heaney and Charlie Senator, who had gone to their own diasporas. He wept for those people who long ago had come here to this holy place to celebrate their survival and good fortune and then had moved on once again. And then he wept for his father. Who was taken from the balcony of a movie house to the snows of Belgium, carrying with him the memory of a waltz on the polished floors of the Webster Hall. Carrying a picture of his wife. Maybe even carrying a picture of me. Oh, Daddy. Oh, Dad. Please help me now.
He lost all power in his legs and slid down the side of one of the benches and sat weeping on the dirty floor.
He wept until he had no more tears to weep.
And then he stood up and gathered himself. After all, he had work to do. Work that he now believed only he could do. And Shabbos began the next day at sundown. So did Frankie McCarthy’s party.
He went to the bimah. The raised platform was covered by a dark purple cloth that was speckled with plaster and water stains. He pulled the cloth aside and saw the wooden platform that Rabbi Hirsch had described to him from his hospital bed. Sunk into the wood was an iron handle. He pried it up with his fingers and then lifted. A door opened in the top of the platform. Below him in the darkness was a long, deep, tiled structure that resembled a sink, complete with a water tap and drain. On the floor of the sink was a gleaming wooden box, shaped like a coffin. About two feet long. Tied with rough twine. Michael felt his skin pebbling in awe and fear. “It’s true,” he said out loud. “True.” The box once handled by Rabbi Loew had survived the centuries and then had been taken by runners and couriers from Prague to Palestine and finally to this building in this parish in Brooklyn. And here it was before him. He held the railing of the bimah to steady himself and then he reached down for the box. For such a small object, it was heavy, as if many things had been compacted inside its burnished wood. He placed it on the edge of the bimah.
Then he realized that the cords that tied it shut were almost new. The box had lain in its dusty attic for centuries, but someone had opened it in recent years. There were holes spaced three inches apart around the lid, and indentations in the wood, as if a claw hammer had been used to remove nails. Below the lid, the smooth sides of the box were rough in five or six places, perhaps from prying by a screwdriver or flat chisel. And in his mind, Michael saw him: saw Rabbi Hirsch, while the Nazis were marching through Prague, watched him opening it, and, yes, witnessed him falling to his knees in despair as he failed to do what he wanted to do. He thought: I must pray, so I don’t fail. He untied the knots. He slipped the cord off the box and then gazed at it for a long moment. He lifted the lid. He was certain then that he could smell the mists of Prague.
Lying on top of a piece of crumbling purple brocade was the silver spoon. It was dull and tarnished in places, but Michael could see the Hebrew lettering on the handle, and felt the same eerie chill that Rabbi Loew must have felt when it was handed to him by Emperor Rudolf. Beside the spoon, in a small ceramic box, was the curled parchment. The shem. They’re here, Michael thought, just as Rabbi Hirsch whispered they would be. After their long journey, they came to rest here. In this abandoned room. Waiting until they were needed. Waiting for me.
Michael picked up the long-handled spoon, feeling weightless and formless, as if the bones had vanished from his body. The thick silver spoon must have weighed three pounds. His hand trembled in wonder. He rubbed his thumb over the Hebrew letters, and he felt suddenly connected to the distant past. I am as old as the world, he thought. I have seen many things. He wanted to pray, to speak in a thousand languages at once, to express some nameless feeling of connection to the nameless man who had cut those letters in some nameless place across the seas. He tried to conjure a face. He tried to invent a name. Neither would come to him, as the silver spoon shook in his hand. And he thought: No man carved these letters. These letters were carved by God.
He gripped the spoon in both hands to stop the trembling and then held it up, like an offering, to the empty Ark and its unlit eternal ligh
t.
35
Across the long, broiling day, Michael made nine more trips to the hill beside the Quaker cemetery. Around two o’clock, he went home to assure his mother that he was all right. He had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and washed it down with iced tea. After she left to look once more at the garden apartment in Sunset Park before going on to work, Michael rushed to the park. It was after dark when he carried his last load of dirt into the synagogue on Kelly Street.
He poured each load of dirt into the long, flat sink, packing it loosely with his hands. After the last bagful was transferred into the sink, he sat down hard on a dusty pew. He was so drowsy that he felt as if he were underwater. I need a nap, he thought. Just an hour, stretched out on this empty bench. Just to rest. Just ten minutes. Five. But then he imagined waking in the gray dawn, and his mother panicking and the police searching the parish for him. He couldn’t let that happen. No. He stood up straight and slapped his cheeks to come fully alert, and thought of the great, ballooning shape of Rabbi Hirsch’s battered face. No: I have to sleep at home tonight. In my own bed. I need to be strong.
The upstairs sanctuary was now very dark, its spaces illuminated only by light from the moon. He looked at the shem, waiting in its ceramic box. The spoon lay hidden under a pew. Everything is ready, he thought, even me. But it was time to go home. After all, this was still only Thursday. He had one more day to do what must be done. One more day until the party for Frankie McCarthy. On Shabbos.
At home, he soaked in the bathtub and scrubbed away the traces of dirt under his fingernails. He went to bed before his mother came home, and in spite of the relentless, clammy heat, he fell swiftly into a dreamless sleep.
When he woke on Friday morning, the bed was marshy with sweat. He could hear the radio from the kitchen and his mother’s voice, singing happily along with the Ink Spots on a song called “The Gypsy.” He pulled on his white baseball pants, as instructed by Rabbi Hirsch, and his white socks and sneakers and a white T-shirt. But he felt strange and dreamy. His mother’s familiar voice made him think that maybe none of this had ever happened. She sounded as she always did in the mornings before Frankie McCarthy walked out of the snowstorm into Mister G’s. Everything else was the same: his chair, his bureau, the cabinet full of comics, the window that opened to the fire escape. Was he really dressing in white, for purity, to spend a day summoning a living creature from dirt? Was he to be like Dr. Frankenstein? He lived in the real world, not in a movie. Then he saw the piece of his plaster cast adorned with Rabbi Hirsch’s precise Hebrew letters. He picked it up and kissed it reverently. Everything had happened, all right; all of it.
“Good morning, young man,” Kate Devlin said cheerfully, poking a spatula into a frying pan on the stove. He mumbled a good morning and stepped into the bathroom to throw cold water on his face and comb his hair. He left the door open while he washed. Everything was familiar.
“You had yourself a sleep, didn’t you?” she said. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Slept like a rock.”
He closed the door and urinated and washed his hands, examining the bathtub for signs of dirt from the park. There were none. When he came out, Kate had laid three slices of French toast on a plate on the table. He sat down, slapped butter on the fried bread, and sprinkled sugar over the top. He ate greedily.
“Well, it’s done,” she said, explaining her cheerfulness. “I rented us a place. The one with the garden.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, we’ll be in by the middle of August, so we’ll have to start packing tomorrow.”
“But you’re still working at the Grandview?”
“For now,” she said. “Tonight for sure. But there’s an opening out at the RKO in Bay Ridge. Just great luck.” She gazed out the window at the summer haze. “We’ll be out of here soon. It won’t be soon enough.”
Her voice mixed with the radio, a tune called “The Anniversary Song.” Al Jolson. He heard a phrase about how the night was in bloom though a word wasn’t said. Kate was talking about getting boxes from Roulston’s grocery, and how he could begin packing his own things on Saturday. But he didn’t even try to imagine the move, the new apartment, a garden. He was thinking only about the night ahead.
“Sometimes bad times are really for the better,” she said. “We can throw out a lot of junk, and—” She noticed his clothes and smiled. “You’re dressed to play ball!”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Up the park.”
His plate was already clear, and he got up to wash it in the sink and place it in the drainer.
“You’ve made it up with those two so-called friends?”
“Well… I don’t know. I’ll just try to find a game.”
“Be careful with that leg, now,” she said.
Off he went, wearing his I’M FOR JACKIE button as a badge of defiance. He took the long way to the synagogue. Walking fast on what felt like a brand-new leg. Off to Kelly Street. Through the door. Into the upstairs sanctuary.
Then he started to work at the long, deep sink, murmuring the instructions from Rabbi Hirsch as if they were part of the mass. He ran some water and stirred the dirt and water with the long silver spoon to make mud. He stripped off his shirt and trousers to keep them clean, because later he had to be dressed in pure white. Then he started shaping the mud. A torso. Arms. Legs and feet. A head. Stepping back to be sure the proportions were right. Shaping the details of the face with the handle of the heavy spoon. Making an opening for the mouth. Dividing fingers and toes.
He was on the banks of the Vltava. He was waiting for fog. He imagined a red moon. His sweat splashed into the mud. Hours passed as he refined and refined his work. The light in the sanctuary shifted with the sun.
When he was finished, he walked as instructed to the four corners of the sanctuary and gathered dust and dirt in his hands and sprinkled it over the mud. As the mud dried, he smoothed the rough spots on hands and face until he could refine them no more. Then he went to the loft above the front door and found a worn, paint-spattered wooden stepladder. Right where Rabbi Hirsch said it would be. He carried it down to the sanctuary floor, bumping into walls in the tight stairway, knocking a wooden collection box to the floor. He carried the ladder to the front of the sanctuary, opened it, and adjusted the brace. He climbed up the rungs, as the ladder swayed and creaked, and lit the fat, squat candle of the eternal light with a wooden match. A soft, golden light immediately suffused the room.
Now he was very hungry. He went downstairs to Rabbi Hirsch’s room and washed his hands in the sink and took apple juice from the small refrigerator and drank straight from the bottle. The juice was cold and sweet, but the bottle shook in his hand and the perspiration would not stop dripping from his body. He dried himself again with a towel, but the sweat returned. He sat down at Rabbi Hirsch’s table, trying to be very still, struggling to control his fear. He was afraid of what he was about to do. Afraid he would succeed. Afraid he would fail. No: he would not fail. He believed. He would make it all come true. God would recognize him, his belief, his need. It would happen. Yes. It would happen, it would happen.
“Believe,” he whispered to the silence. “I believe.”
His gaze drifted to Leah’s photograph and he wished he could talk to her. He wished he could talk to Rabbi Hirsch too. But he was alone here in this place, and there was nobody to talk to except God.
Whispering an Our Father, he climbed the dark stairs to the sanctuary. There could be no more delay. Shabbos was almost here. He pulled on his clean white baseball pants and his white T-shirt. He stared down at the shaped mud. He opened the ceramic box and saw the shem: a rolled yellow parchment an inch wide, so old that the paper was leathery to the touch. He walked to the edge of the bimah and eased the shem into the hole he’d made for the mouth. Then he took the spoon in hand again and used the point of the handle to letter a single word on the brow of the head.
’EMET.
It meant Truth.
Then, standing behind the head, he took a deep breath, raised the spoon over the shaped head, and began to chant. The prescribed sounds were all letters. A, and B, and C, and D, right through the alphabet. First in English; then, to be sure, in Yiddish. The aleph-bayz. Seven times for each letter, followed by the letters that Rabbi Hirsch had told him stood for the secret name of God.
YHVH.
YHVH.
YHVH.
YHVH.
YHVH.
YHVH.
YHVH.
The secret name echoing mightily through the empty sanctuary.
Then he added vowels, A-E-I-O-U, seven times, again followed by the name of God. All the time moving, forming a wheel, doing a kind of dance around the sunken bimah, making a circle that traveled from right to left. Following the commands of Rabbi Hirsch. Feeling his own body charged with power and mystery. Believe, he thought. Believe. Here is the Kabbalah. Believe.
For the mystery was all about letters, Rabbi Hirsch had told him. Numbers too, in Kabbalah, but above all, letters; for from letters we make words, and words are the names of life. They name arms and legs and faces. They name men and women, insects and animals, and the creatures of the sea. They name oceans and rivers and cities. They name the grass. They name the trees. God gave letters to man and man made words from the letters and used them to name God’s nameless world. And Michael remembered from catechism class, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God.…
So Michael danced and chanted, repeating the letters in pairs and in triplets, then singing them as if they were sacred music, the room growing darker now as the sun faded, while Michael tried to will himself into the inert mud. He rose into a frenzy of words and letters, hearing sounds from his mouth that he did not think, moving to music that nobody played, rising into clouds, moving palaces across distant skies, speaking to birds, joining hands in a dance with Mary Cunningham and the Count of Monte Cristo, soaring and swooping and breaking for third, up, rising up, full of rain and fire and salt and oceans, all the way up, chanting the letters that named galleons and cowboys, pirates and Indians, borne by the letters, swept through golden skies, above the crazy world, above Brooklyn, above Ireland, above Prague, above the fields of Belgium.
