For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  “This is a crucial time,” Charles said.

  They were by the umbrella stand. Zalman pulled out a cane. He scratched at his nose with a pinkie. “It’s an age-old problem. To all the great ones, tests are given. I wouldn’t be surprised if the King of the Khazars faced the same one.”

  “What happened to the king?” Charles asked. “How does it turn out for the great ones?”

  Zalman leaned the cane against the wall.

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is they all had God. They knew in their hearts God.”

  Charles put a hand on Zalman’s shoulder. “I’m only asking for you to tell me.”

  “You already know,” he said. The joy drained from his face. “You know but want me to lie.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  The rabbi’s face looked long and soft; the rapture did not return. “No hope, Mr. Luger. I tell you this from one Jew to another. There is no hope for the pious.”

  Charles made his way back to the table only to find Sue gone, the table clean, and the chairs in place. Could it have been more than a minute? He saw the garbage can from the pantry in the middle of the kitchen, the paper tablecloth sticking out the top. A disposable dinner, the dining room as if untouched.

  He started toward the bedroom and stopped at the study door. Sue was standing by the windowsill beside the tarnished candlesticks which were fused in place where the wax had run off the bases. She picked at the hardened formations, forcing her nail underneath and lifting them away from the painted wood of the sill.

  “It’s not sacrilegious, I hope?” She continued picking at the wax that ran over the silver necks in braids.

  “No,” Charles said. “I don’t believe it is.”

  He crossed the room to stand beside Sue. He reached over for the hand that scratched at the fine layers of wax on the sill. “So it’ll stay there,” he said. “So what.”

  “It will ruin the paint,” she said.

  “It will make the window frame look real. Like someone lives in the apartment and uses this room.”

  Charles looked around the study, at the lamp and the bookcase, then out the window at the buildings and the sky. He had not read that far into the Bible and still thought God might orchestrate his rescue.

  He took hold of Sue’s other hand and held them both in place. He wanted her to understand that there had indeed been a change of magnitude, but that the mark it left was not great. The real difference was contained in his soul, after all.

  Sue’s gaze fell past him before meeting his eyes.

  He tried to appear open before her, to allow Sue to observe him with the profound clarity he had only so recently come to know. Charles was desperate with willingness. He struggled to stand without judgment, to be only for Sue, to be wholly seen, wanting her to love him changed.

  Reb Kringle

  Buna Michla stuck her head into the men’s section of the sanctuary, hesitant, even though her husband was the only man there.

  “Itzi,” she said.

  He was over by the ark, changing the bulb in the eternal light, pretending that he hadn’t heard.

  “Itzi, the children. Think of all the children.”

  “Bah!” He screwed in the bulb with his handkerchief and the eternal light flickered once before resuming its usual glow. Reb Yitzhak folded his hankie carefully and, slipping a hand under his caftan, stuffed it into his back pocket.

  “Itzi!”

  He turned to face her. “I should worry over the children? These are my children, all of them, that I should worry over them and their greed?”

  She walked to the heart of the sanctuary and sat in the front row of the easterly-facing benches. “You should worry maybe over your shul. You should worry over the mortgage that is due.” Buna took a deep breath. It was satisfying to yell at this stubborn man.

  “How many people pray here, Yitzeleh? How many prayers go up to heaven from under this roof?”

  “There are thirty-one people who pray here three times a day, and I don’t know how many prayers reach heaven. If I knew such things I would also know a better way to pay the rent.”

  “And what of the roof under which we sleep?”

  “Yes, Buna. And I would know also how to pay for the roof.”

  “How to pay you already know,” she said. “Four weeks’ work is food in our mouths, so what’s the question? For eleven months you won’t be forced to smile.”

  Reb Yitzhak considered his wife’s statement. Every year it was the same argument and every year he lost. If only he had been born a wiser man—or married a simpler woman. He put his fingers into his long white beard and slowly worked them down toward its jagged end.

  “It’s a sin, this job,” was all he came up with.

  “It is absolutely not a sin. Where does it say that playing with goyishe children is a sin? There is no rule against playing games with them.”

  “Playing! You haven’t seen, Buna. Anyone who has seen would never call such mayhem playing. Not since the time of Noah has the world seen such boundless greed.”

  “So it’s not playing. Fine. But you’re going. And you will be jolly and laugh like the bride’s father at a wedding—miserable or not.”

  Reb Yitzhak took off his caftan and made his way down to the basement, leaning against the banister with every step. He was a heavy man, big in the belly, and his sciatica was acting up. The rickety wood stairs groaned as he headed down into the darkness, where he grabbed at the air in search of the frayed string and the lone sixty-watt bulb.

  The oil burner sat under a web of rusted pipes that spread across the low ceiling. Behind the burner, there was a turn in the basement leading to a narrow dead end of storage space. It was the farthest place from anything, the best place to keep the Passover dishes so that they shouldn’t be contaminated during the rest of the year.

  He pulled the sheets off the boxes, all of which were marked PESACH, in Hebrew, with a big black marker. He couldn’t make out the word since the light from the bulb barely reached that part of the room. But Reb Yitzhak didn’t need to see so well. What he was looking for was recognizable by feel. The box he needed was fancy, not like the kind one brings home from the alley behind the supermarket, the sides advertising cereals and toilet paper, boxes living already a second life. This one had a top to it, the kind that could be lifted off, like a hatbox but square. This box felt smooth to the touch, overlaid with satin. When his fingers brushed against it he knew.

  As he picked up the box, Reb Itzik employed the Back-Saver Erect Spine Lift, counting out the positions, “One, feet apart; two, bend knees,” exactly as Dr. Mittleman had shown him.

  Trudging up the stairs and directly to the front door, Itzik stopped and put the cumbersome package down.

  “Ach,” he said, “subway tokens.”

  “They’re on the shelf in the foyer where they sit every day for the last forty years.” Buna came in from the kitchen, wringing her hands on a towel and ready to show this mule of a man where was a token and the shelf and also, if need be, the front door.

  “To get to the subway you remember?” she asked, daring him to show even the slightest bit of resistance. “You want I should get dressed and ride all the way into the city with you?”

  Reb Yitzhak didn’t want that at all.

  Putting on caftan and coat and lifting the satin box, he gave Buna Michla his best look of despair—a look she saw only twice a year. First when it came time to carry up all the Passover dishes from the basement and, second, from the doorway, when he went off to the department store at the start of the holiday rush. So sad was the look that she lost her resolve not to chide him—she could not stand when he indulged himself to such a degree.

  “Do they make you work on Shabbos?” she said. “Do they force you to go around with your head uncovered or deny you proper respect?” She undid the lock for him. “Like a king on a throne they treat you.”

  Itzik lifted up his box and fumbled with the door. “I pity such a king.”
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br />   Leaning against a public telephone on the sidewalk and taking a moment to catch his breath, Itzik was surprised to see a new man yank open the gate of the service elevator at the department store. Ramirez, who had been there every year from the start, from the day Reb Itzik had surfaced with the employment agency slip in his hand, was now gone. He had been Reb Itzik’s one friend at the job and had always kept an eye out on “the rabbi’s” behalf. Without Ramirez there chewing on a cigar and offering immediate consolation, Itzik gave in to a moment of virtual despair. He felt abandoned. But at least one of them was free of the place.

  Itzik approached the freight elevator, scowling at the Salvation Army worker who shook out Christmas tunes with wooden-handled bells—his last chance to be grumpy that day. The elevator man, not much older than a boy, gave Itzik a slow looking over, working his way up from the orthopedic shoes and taking his time with the long white beard. Itzik didn’t flinch. He was used to it, prepared for the thousands of looks and inane questions, tugs and sticky fingers, that he was in for during the coming days.

  “Floor?” the man asked, motioning with his thumb.

  “Eight,” Reb Itzik said.

  “I heard about you,” the elevator man told him, shoving the empty garbage dollies to the back wall. “You that Rabbi Santa.” “Yes,” Itzik answered. “I’m the infamous Reb Santa.”

  The elevator man began to cough into his fist.

  “Damn,” he said. “I thought they were shitting me. That you was a myth.”

  “I exist, yes, for real,” Reb Itzik said.

  “Seems so,” the man said. He began to pull the gate closed behind Reb Itzik and hesitated midway. “Don’t you want to go in through the chimney?”

  Reb Itzik turned to face the street.

  “Such jokes my friend Ramirez got tired of making when you were still too small to reach the buttons.”

  The elves were in place, stationed every few feet throughout the giant room and continuing along the line of children that reached out into the hallway and past the tiny café, then snaked around the back of the passenger elevators and onto the staircase to the seventh floor. The room itself was decked with flashing lights and fake trees, hollow gifts with colored bows and giant paper candy canes that all the curious children ventured to lick, one germy tongue after another. There were elves posted on each side of Itzik; one—a humorless, muscular midget—wore a pair of combat boots that gave him the look of elf-at-arms. His companion might have been a twin. He wore black high-tops but had the same vigilant paramilitary demeanor.

  Sitting in the chair, resting his hands on the golden armrests and leaning back against the plush cushions, Itzik was forced to admit that Buna was right. Poised in front of hundreds of worshiping faces and with a staff of thirty at his beck and call, it did indeed seem, looking down from his giant gilt chair, that he was a king on a throne.

  Itzik had arranged for his support elves to keep up a steady stream of Merry Christmases. He was not one of the provincial Jews who had never crossed the Royal Hills bridge into Manhattan, the naives who’d never dealt with the secular world; it was not the first time that he’d put on the suit, and he very well knew the holiday kept him afloat. But even after all those years, the words “Merry Christmas” remained obscene to him.

  The first child was an excited little girl. Small enough that she was there to see Santa, to get a pinch on the cheeks and a picture to put up on the refrigerator door—not yet a rapacious little beast with a list of demands who would have a seizure if he did not promise everything he was asked.

  Itzik fell into character and gave a nod to the elf manning the crimson cord. The little girl rushed toward him like a bull in a chute, her mother prodding her regardless, and the immense crowd taking a baby step toward him, beginning with the front and then spreading backward in a seemingly endless wave.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” Itzik said, offering a hand as the girl was lowered into his lap. The girl beamed appropriately, bathed in the light of popping flashes and the glory of receiving the first ho, ho, ho of the year.

  “What’s your name?”

  “It’s Emily, Santa. I wrote you a letter.”

  “Yes, of course. The letter from Emily.” He tapped his foot against the platform. “Well, remind Santa again: Have you been a good little girl?”

  By twenty minutes to lunch, Itzik was sure that his very spirit was being challenged, as if God had become sadistic in his tests of the human soul. Both his pant legs were wet with the accidents of children who showed their excitement like puppies. The sciatica was broken glass running up and down the nerve in the back of his thigh. And one boy—a little Nazi, that one—had pulled out a pair of safety scissors and gone after his beard.

  “Get on up there,” said the elf on winter break from Tulane. She lowered a curly-headed tyke onto Itzik’s left knee, his bottom lip flapping as he primed his crying machine.

  “Don’t cry, boychik. Tell me where’s your mother.”

  “She’s waiting for me at the Lancôme counter.” And then, after a pause, “She’s getting her face done.”

  “Her face done?” Itzik said.

  “Yes,” the boy said.

  “So, nu?” Itzik said. “Have you been good this year?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Did you pay federal and state taxes, both?”

  The boy shook his head, no.

  “I can find it in my heart to forgive you,” Itzik said. “But Santa isn’t the IRS.”

  The boy didn’t laugh. The elves didn’t laugh. Tulane actually sneered.

  Reb Itzik ran his hand along the length of his beard and extended his free leg.

  “What can I do you for?” he asked.

  “Mountain bike,” said the boy.

  “And?”

  “Force Five Action Figures.”

  “And?”

  “Doom—the Return of the Deathbot; Man Eater; Stop That Plague; and Gary Barry’s All Star Eye on the Prize—all on CD-ROM.”

  “Anything else?” This appeared to be, aside from the sappy children in search of world peace, the shortest appointment of the day.

  “Come on,” Itzik said, “out with it.” The lip was starting to move again and Itzik knew if he didn’t get that last wish soon, he was in for a tantrum. “How about it?”

  “A menorah,” said the boy, and the tears started anyway and then stopped in a fine show of strength. It was Santa, at first stunned, then desperately trying to recall a toy by that name, who found himself bordering on a fit.

  “A what?” he said, way too loudly. Then, sweet, nice, playing the part of Mr. Kringle, “A what-did-you-say?”

  “A menorah.”

  “And what would a nice Christian boy want with a menorah?”

  “I’m Jewish, not Christian. My new father says we’re having a real Christmas and a tree, and not any candles at all—which isn’t fair because my last father let me have a menorah and he wasn’t Jewish.” And the tears started running along with his nose.

  “Why won’t this new daddy let you light candles?”

  “Because he says there’s not going to be Chanukah this year.”

  Itzik gasped, and the boy, responding, began to bawl.

  “Calm down there, little one. Santa’s right here.” Reaching back and squirming in his chair, Itzik produced a clean hankie. “Blow,” he said, holding it to the child’s nose. The child blew with some force. “Now don’t you worry about a thing. You ask Santa for Chanukah, you get it.” He tried his best to sound cheery, but he could feel the fury rattling in the back of his voice. “You just tell me your address and I’ll bring you the candles myself.”

  The boy had quieted down some, but did not answer.

  “Upper West or East?” Santa asked.

  The boy emitted a high-pitched “Neither.”

  “Not in the Village, I hope,” Santa said.

  “We’ll be in Vermont for Christmas. We have to drive all the way there so we can go to his stupid parents’ church.
” Right then, Itzik knew, in an already fading flash of total clarity, that the farce had finally come to an end.

  “Church,” he said, his voice booming. “Church and no Chanukah!” Itzik yelled, scooping the boy off his knee and getting to his feet. Itzik, glaring, held the child under his arm. The elf with the high-tops took the boy and stood him up on the platform as Itzik again yelled, “No Chanukah!”

  This Buna would understand; hearing this she would understand why the whole thing, the job and the costume and the laughter, was a sin. It was blasphemy! And then he screamed, loud and long, because of the cramps in his legs and the sciatic nerve that felt as if it had been stretched and released like the hemp cord of an archer’s bow.

  “Where is this mother?” he called out over the crowd. Grabbing the boy and risking a pinch to the already inflamed nerve, Itzik lifted him by the arm off the ground. “Where is this father?” Itzik demanded, the boy dangling like a purse in his hand. He wanted this grinch of a man brought forth, presented to him in judgment.

  The boy wriggled his way free. He took a cellular phone from his pocket and called his mother on the first floor.

  Itzik, conscious of the phone, began to feel guilty for scaring the child. He was still furious but also ashamed. He lowered his eyes and found the throng of holiday shoppers and the startled tots, eyes wide, staring back. Itzik, seeking a friendly face, a calm face, found none. He knew he had crossed the boundaries of propriety, and he was far past the point where he could sit back down and nod toward the elf in the combat boots to set loose the next child in line. He grabbed the pompom hanging down from his head and yanked off his hat, revealing a large black yarmulke.

  “This,” he yelled from deep down in his ample belly, “is not a fit job for a Jew.”

  A woman toward the middle of the room fainted dead away without letting go of the hand of her wailing daughter. She fell atop a padded rope that pulled down the brass-plated poles, spreading panic through the already jittery crowd, which began to knock over the aluminum trees and towering candy canes. The elves scurried, cursing and shrieking, unprepared by their half-day course for such an emergency. And one elf, the undercover security elf, clasped the earplug in his pointy ear and began to whisper furiously into his green velvet collar, an action that brought on the entrance of two more elves, one big and black, the other smaller, stockier, and white as the fake snow.