There, they concealed the moon beneath as much hay as they could gather and, for the first time in what felt like a month, they slept. Each night, however, the moon grew smaller and smaller. This so distressed the Hasids that they couldn’t stay hidden beneath their own haystacks, but crawled out obsessively to check upon its progress. They couldn’t lie to themselves: the moon was definitely waning. And finally it disappeared.
The three nights that followed were difficult ones, emotionally wrecking for the Hasids. How they fretted and fussed, tearing at their beards, wailing for mercy! Still, as terrible as these nights were, they were nothing compared to the fourth night when the moon failed to reappear. The Hasids raged madly through the barn, searching the cracks in the floor for even the smallest of crescents.
Nothing could be found. They held each other and wept.
The earth was dark and they had lost the moon.
70
Can it possibly be true, Kalman’s story? On the surface of things, I have every reason to doubt him. Perhaps they pocketed the silver for themselves and are hoping now to recover it. Why should I believe their story? Still, he’s a trustworthy sort, this Kalman, and a fellow Jew besides. It’s forbidden for him to deceive me. Not that it hasn’t been known to happen, one Jew lying to another, we’re only human, after all, but, still, what’s forbidden is forbidden. Plus, he’s a Hasid, he’s taken on more than the Law requires. He’d be cutting his own throat, lying to me.
Along with the two bags and the shovel and the broom I am forced to carry, these thoughts weigh me down until each footstep is more difficult than the last. I am about to insist upon stopping for the night, when our clanking trio emerges into a vast and open field. The light from the stars, no longer obscured by foliage, shines on the grass so clearly that every blade seems to stand out against its own shadow. Checking the field’s mathematical correspondences, Zalman allows himself one small syllable of satisfaction: “Ha!” He drops to his knee and, with a spade he has carried on his belt, overturns a swallow tuft of earth.
He sifts the black dirt through his fingers, raising his smudged hand towards Kalman’s eager face.
“Kalman, tell me, what do you see?”
A repressed cry of joy manages to free itself, if only momentarily, from Kalman’s throat.
“Exactly,” says Zalman, “exactly.” And again, he picks through the moistened loam. “Now, Reb Chaim, look.” He extends his palm to me. I step closer. He holds a small portion of the fallen night, or so it appears, so many silver motes are gleaming in the blackened dirt.
I raise my gaze from his flat palm to his hawk-like face. Behind the wild and now unruly beard, his black eyes burn even more wildly.
There will be no sleep this night, I sadly tell myself.
Zalman slaps his palms, one against another, cleaning them, returning the dirt to the ground. He gives me a bracing chuck on the shoulder, as though he has read my thoughts. With Ola’s compass in hand, he counts seventy-seven large paces, moving to the center of the field. Remembering the small telescope, I bring it from my traveler’s sack and watch him through its fractured lens.
“What’s he doing?” Kalman breathes impatiently on my neck, pulling with both hands on his reddish beard.
Consulting the compass, Zalman faces all four directions, one after the next, before settling on one. He spits into his palms and raises the pickaxe high above his head. Bracing his legs, he brings the axe down, cutting into the earth.
“What’s he doing now?” Kalman jumps from leg to leg, squinting into the distance.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“Let me see, let me see!” Unable to stop himself, Kalman pulls the lens from my good eye.
“Ah yes ah yes I see I see,” he says, all in one breath, before returning the spyglass to me.
I once again peer through the little tube. Zalman is on his knees, with a mallet, pounding pegs into the ground. He reorients himself with the compass, until he is sure he is facing our direction. He waves his long arm and motions us to join him.
What are we to do? Kalman and I collect the equipment and struggle with it to the center of the field.
“Kalman, Chaim!” Zalman shouts, returning a third of the way, un-burdening us of at least a good half of our load, taking the brooms and the shovels and the buckets upon himself. “My calculations have proven exactly correct, right down to the smallest detail, God be praised.” He is delirious. “I am certain it is no more than ten to fifteen meters beneath us. If we begin now and work without ceasing, I’m convinced, with God’s help, of course, that we can have it up and running for Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the new month.”
“But friends,” he says, handing each of us a shovel and an axe, “this night can’t last forever and we have no time to waste!”
And so, we take our stations around Zalman’s central marker. I raise my eyes to the great sky, shining high above. I lift the axe they have given me. Physically numb and ravaged by my grief, I begin to dig.
71
We break into the earth with our sharpened hooks, shoveling in deeper with our flat pans. The Hasids sing wordless tunes to keep their spirits up. My back is aching, blisters swell inside my palms. That three old and tired Jews, and one of them dead, can work so hard is an astonishment to me. Before long, we are knee-deep into the ground, with small hills of overturned dirt all about us. Our shovelfuls are no longer entirely black. They glitter and glisten with silver specks. Pans of dirt fly over our shoulders, bursting apart like shooting stars. Our clothes become covered in silver dust. Indeed, we practically shine.
“Good, good,” Zalman mutters happily, confirming everything against his map.
When the ground is to my chest, Zalman strikes something with a hollow clink. The sound chills me to the bone. We relinquish our shovels and congregate, heads together, at the spot.
Zalman whisks away the extraneous dirt with a barber’s lathering brush. Digging in with his fingers, he uncovers a long white flute and holds it up to us.
“Bone,” he says simply. “Part of an arm, I suspect.”
Our work proceeds more slowly after this and with greater care. We must tie handkerchiefs around our faces. With each new shovelful, the pit releases a dram of biting stench. There is no longer any place for us to stand or to walk with safety. We sift through the remains gingerly and in our stocking feet. Despite precautions, our every step breaks something. More than once, one of us puts his foot down and the ground shifts, sending him backwards into the clattering heap.
Had we really convinced ourselves that the moon could be found lying beneath an empty field, ripe for the picking? No, whoever buried it has buried it deep, beneath layers and layers of corpses, so long ago now that the skin and the muscles have stretched and torn away, and there is nothing left but bones.
Near daybreak, Kalman shouts to us from a distance. Zalman and I make our way through the quicksand of tibias and fibulas, to where the blabbering Kalman is kneeling.
Even after we have reached him, he continues to call our names.
“Kalman, calm down!” Zalman orders.
Kalman points before him, his hand trembling.
Poking out from beneath a cluster of bluish elbows is the tip of the crescent’s curved horn, about as big and round as a large man’s fedora. It shines with a dull yellow light.
Zalman wraps a tailor’s tape around the curving hook and takes its dimensions.
“It must be enormously huge!” I say.
“Judging by the size of the hook,” he reads the tape through glasses, “I’d say it’s buried fairly deep.”
The sun sneaks over the horizon and the moon begins to whiten.
“Quickly,” orders Zalman, peering at the sky. “Grab the horn before it disappears!”
Kalman protests. “But, Zalman, I’m exhausted!”
“If it wanes further,” says Zalman, “we’ll never find it again. Our work will have been for nothing!”
Bleary-eyed, Kalman
does as he is told, wrapping his legs and arms around the moon’s conical tip.
“Oy, oy, oy, but it’s freezing!” he complains.
“You’ll get used to it,” says Zalman, handing me the end of a long coil of rope. Together, we lash Kalman to his lunar mast.
“But how can I sleep this way?” he calls after us, as we wade to the crater’s edge. “I’ll be good for nothing this evening! You’ll be short a man!”
His words trail us, growing fainter and fainter, as we cross the vast distance, and although I feel sorry for him, I am far too fatigued to be anything but grateful that it is he and not I who must sleep with the sharp hook of the moon rising, like a blade, between his legs.
Zalman and I help each other from the pit. We stand, finally on solid ground, dusting the soil from our trousers. Zalman pours a small bucket of seawater from the spigot in the vat and we wash our hands. My spine aches, my blistered palms are stiff and sore. I have never worked so hard.
Drained, and with one last look at Kalman in the distance, roped now, or so it appears, to a mere column of air, I lie beneath a fir tree. I bend my arm beneath my head and roll onto my side. I hear him shouting and fall instantly asleep.
72
Bing! Ping! Ping! Bing!
I awaken to the pounding of hammers. The sky is black and distant, stained with a milky swirl of stars.
Have I slept the whole day through? It can’t be possible!
I sit up, feeling rested and refreshed, if a little sluggish. The moon, low in the field, is half-buried and glowing like a yellow shoe.
So it has neither waned nor freed itself and orbited away.
I rise and move cautiously towards it. Its light is splendid, dazzling. It is immense and I feel like an insignificant dwarf approaching a recumbent queen.
“Look who’s risen from the dead, so to speak,” Kalman cries out. He is perched atop a complicated scaffolding, near its apex.
Zalman calls down from the opposite side, “Greetings, Reb Chaim.” They have braced themselves to these beams with heavy belts. A series of long pipes stretch above the landlocked moon, connecting the scaffolding on either side. The construction must rise nearly sixty feet above the ground. I have to crane my neck to take it in. A thick cable is thrown over the center pipe and a large circular weight dangles from it like a watch on a chain, as though a mesmerist were preparing to hypnotize a giant.
Beneath it, embedded at my feet, the moon glows like a golden beetle stranded on its back, an embroidery of dark veins woven across its belly.
Zalman and Kalman cease their hammering and shimmy down their poles, smiling the serene smiles of accomplishment.
“We tried to awaken you,” Zalman says, “but the task proved beyond our meager capabilities.”
I sit upon an overturned bucket at the crater’s edge. My right leg trembles from disuse. There’s nothing I can do to make it stop. I was worn out, it’s true.
“You built all this in a single day?” I say, when they are near enough to hear me. It’s impossible!
“With God’s help,” they say.
“And the piping?” Unsteadily, I approach the base of the structure for a closer look. “Where did it come from?” With a curled fist, I knock upon a section of the bluish pipe, sounding out a hollow ring.
Have they built this monstrous contraption out of bones?
Kalman catches up with me.
“As soon as evening came, Zalman released me from guarding the moon. I, too, had slept the entire day. Like yourself. Only I can’t tell you the sorts of dreams I had. Try resting sometime with the moon for a pillow. In these dreams, Reb Chaim, I was nothing like myself. There were circular hoops, like bracelets, with beads on them, one black and one white. And they winked at me! And then each hoop jumped into a pair of shoes!”
“But what holds them together?” I say, pushing with my hand against the structure.
Kalman leans in towards me and grins. He removes a work glove with his teeth. “That, only Zalman knows.” He raises his head and scratches his beard, looking up at their construction. “But I suspect it’s a higher physics of some kind.”
73
According to Kalman, Zalman worked tirelessly through the day, carrying heavy tools and machinery, sleeping less than ten minutes every six hours. Although his hair is quite grey, he appears younger than when I first met him, and muscular beneath loose-fitting clothes. Even with the thick belt of tools hanging from his trim middle, he shimmies easily up and down the scaffolding, pulling himself along its narrow beams with a giant fish hook in the crook of his arm.
We stand beneath him on a pier of wooden planks, which the two Hasids constructed while I slept. I can’t believe I have missed so much! The pier extends over the pit, so that we may now reach the moon without stepping on anybody’s bones. Only the upper surfaces of the planet and its two horns have been disinterred, the bulk remains hidden as deeply as before. Its buried light shines through the bony sticks surrounding it, illuminating them, seemingly, from within.
From Zalman’s height, the whole thing must look like a melon rind tossed upon a garbage heap.
Kalman hands me a section of chain, and, at Zalman’s signal, we carry the stiff coils, unwinding them from a giant spindle, beneath the arches of the scaffolding and to the end of the wooden pier.
“Careful, Reb Chaim,” he says. “It can be a little slippery at first.”
He plants one foot on the moon’s glassy belly and offers me his hand.
Perhaps he sees my hesitation.
“Someone must stay on the pier,” he says, “while the other binds the moon in chains. I have not only already walked upon it, but have slept roped to its horn as well.”
“All right, all right,” I say glumly, wondering why I ever agreed to help in this lunatic adventure? Of what concern is their moon to me? Even were we to return it to the skies, still my nights would be as black as a printer’s apron! Nothing will take from me my grief. And yet, I have to admit, the prospect of walking across its lustrous surfaces is alluring. As a boy, I used to dream of it. An excellent hiding place, I childishly thought, if only I could reach it.
And so I put my hand into Kalman’s rough glove and bind a coil of chain around my shoulder. We count together and he yanks me forward, gripping my arm as I pass. Bracing my back, he pushes me along, my feet slipping and sliding, my arms flailing in great wheels.
“Well?” he cries, dropping his hands to his knees.
I am unprepared for how giddy the experience makes me. I can’t help laughing. The moon’s buttery slopes are icy, slick. “It’s like walking on a frozen pond!” I call to him over my shoulder. My legs shake and tremble, my shoes can find nothing solid to cling to.
Zalman calls encouragements from his high perch on the narrow beam, but to raise my head to search for him, I’m sure, would throw my balance off entirely and send me sliding over the edge into a tumult of exploding shards. So with both arms out on either side for balance, little by little, I adjust my movements, until I’m walking with mincing steps and a straightened spine. The secret, I’m delighted to learn, is skating. Soon I am zooming beneath the scaffolding and across the lunar terrain. How extraordinarily light I’ve become! My body isn’t as bulky here as it is on the earth. Even the heavy chain, once it enters the moon’s atmosphere, loses much of its weight. For the sheer sweet joy of it, I drop its heavy coils and gambol and caper like a frisky skater, leaping and spinning around the craters in clumsy figure eights.
“You see, you see!” Kalman calls from the pier. “Now imagine dreaming through that feeling!”
Zalman says, “Because I have absolutely no idea how long you can stay on the moon before freezing into ice yourself, I suggest you stop cavorting, Reb Chaim, and immediately get to work!”
Chastened, I skid back to where I left the chain. Already, it has begun to stick and freeze to the crescent’s icy skin.
Kalman skates over with a pair of gloves so that I may pull at the metal witho
ut causing pain to my hands. He brings as well my long woolen scarf, which I drape about my neck. He is panting from the exertion and his breath clouds up in steamy puffs.
Zalman lowers a bucket on the end of the dangling cable. Heads raised, Kalman and I watch it inch its way down like a mischievous spider. Inside we find an assortment of little clips and bars and a harness as well.
“With these,” says Zalman, “you will be able to support yourself against the underside.”
“You must secure the chain,” Kalman adds, “wrapping it across the two horns, so that we may hoist it up.”
I look from one to the other. Surely they are jesting.
“This, you want me to do?” What do they take me for, a muscle man? “I’m old,” I say, “and even as a youngster, I never went in for gymnastics of any kind.”
Zalman sits upon the narrow beam as though upon a mighty horse, his legs dangling on either side. “Reb Chaim,” he barks, “everyone must do his part!”
He is not standing on the lunar surface with its loony disequilibrium, and so the situation does not strike him as hilariously improbable as it does me. “Because you are dead,” he says, “you will be able to last longer in the dark underparts. Kalman and I would freeze there in an instant.”
Kalman nods sympathetically. “Have you never climbed a mountain perhaps?”
“Never,” I say.
“It’s not unlike mountain climbing.”
“Which I have never done,” I reiterate, shouting disagreeably so that Zalman may hear.
74
From Zalman’s dangling bucket, Kalman removes the harness, which he straps through my legs and around my waist. With a metal clip, he buckles me to the long chain.
“This will free your hands, for the climbing.”
He tucks two additional clips, one into each of my coat pockets, and gives them both a little pat.
I feel as though I’m being diapered by a disapproving nanny.
A Blessing on the Moon Page 18
