The Entertainer and the Dybbuk

by Sid Fleischman

  “I do declare, everyone knows it. You won’t work on the Sabbath. And that Jewish dybbuk you use in your act. Of course it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed. I’m not Jewish.”

  “You don’t have to hide it from me,” she assured him.

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “On the level?”

  “I promise you.”

  “How disappointing!” Polly exclaimed. “Can you imagine me dragging a Jewish husband home to Alabama? Wow!” She crossed her eyes. “Some of our redneck neighbors would haul out the tar and feathers.”

  “I’m one-eighth Cheyenne. Won’t that do?”

  On the following afternoon, the dybbuk asked Freddie to accompany him to the cheder, a Hebrew school he’d located near the Eiffel Tower.

  “I’ll wait out here,” Freddie said firmly.

  “That won’t work,” said the dybbuk. “Just let me do the talking.”

  “I’ll be a fish out of water,” Freddie protested.

  “Pretend you’re a pickled herring.”

  The Hebrew teacher, the melamed, was an Algerian Jew with eyes as dark as fire pits. The Great Freddie was quickly registered as Avrom Amos Poliakov. A small school chair at a small desk became his. “Sit, and pay attention,” said the melamed.

  “I have lost my yarmulke,” Freddie heard himself say. What was that? My what? The teacher dug out a small black skullcap. Freddie slapped it on his head and cursed the dybbuk under his breath. The lesson began with a prayer.

  “Baruch atah Adonai…”

  Inwardly, Freddie crossed his arms and tried to tune out.

  “Reb Poliakov,” said the teacher as they finished the hour. “I notice you don’t move your mouth when you repeat after me.”

  “I never move my lips. I’m a ventriloquist.”

  After three weeks of listening to the dybbuk’s struggle with the Torah, Freddie discovered that a phrase or two was stuck inside his head.

  “Baruch atah Adonai…Shema Yisrael…”

  Finally, just before they were to go on for the 9:30 show, Freddie muttered to the dybbuk, “What’s playing inside my head like a phonograph record? What am I saying?”

  “Don’t lose any sleep. It’s not your bar mitzvah.”

  “I could be cursing my best friend.”

  “I’m your best friend.”

  They approached the wings of the stage and waited for the curtains to part. “So what do the words mean?”

  “You’re asking God to listen to you,” the dybbuk said. “It starts every prayer. So, as the Torah says, ‘Shema Yisrael, let us break a leg.’”

  Freddie laughed. He’d never heard the show-business prayer delivered with ancient Hebrew thrown in. That should guarantee a nifty performance.

  CHAPTER 12

  Summer was settling in. An early dusk, pumpkin tinted, lit the Paris streets like the flare of a match. The sidewalk tables were filling up. Freddie, in a rush along a narrow side street, passed a neighborhood café. A ragged boy in a coat with bulging pockets stood at the window looking in. Freddie barely spared him a glance.

  “Stop,” said the dybbuk.

  “What now? We’ll be late for our show.”

  “The world will end? Don’t you rich Americans have eyes?”

  “What are you talking about?” Freddie asked.

  “That kid at the window. He’s hungry.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “What’s he looking at inside? Suits, the latest styles? His stomach is growling.”

  “You heard it?”

  “I can hear an empty stomach at ten kilometers. And see how his pockets are bulging? He has everything he owns in those pockets. Give him a few francs so he can eat.”

  “Avrom, what do you want me to do, feed every street kid and beggar in Paris?”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re going to miss our curtain.”

  “Let them hold the curtain,” said the dybbuk. “If you can’t spare a few francs, take it out of my account.”

  “What account?” Freddie replied scornfully. He supposed Avrom Amos was seeing himself hungry at a café window, with everything he possessed in the world stuffed inside his pockets.

  Freddie dug wrinkled paper francs out of his pocket and shoved them into the hand of the street kid.

  “Here. Get something to eat.”

  When Freddie reached the Crazy Horse, and after hastily pinning a fresh flower in the buttonhole of his tailcoat, he strode center stage. The curtains parted. He rested a polished black shoe on a chair and sat the dummy on his knee.

  The puppet looked at him. “Do I know you?”

  Here we go, thought the ventriloquist. “I’m The Great Freddie.”

  “What makes you so great?”

  “I can throw my voice upstage into that barrel.”

  “You get paid for throwing up?”

  “I didn’t say that,” protested The Great Freddie. “I can toss my voice anywhere.”

  “How about my pocket?”

  “What do you want your pocket to say?”

  “Keep out!”

  “Why are you all dressed up?” Freddie hoped to get the dialogue back on track. “Aren’t you Count Dracula?”

  “That shlemiel of a vampire? I’m a dybbuk.”

  “A what?”

  “A nice Jewish demon. I haunt people.”

  “That doesn’t sound nice to me.”

  “Is fighting wars nice?” replied the dybbuk.

  “The war’s history. Yesterday’s newspapers.”

  “Not for me. I placed a want ad. Let me look at the audience.”

  “Are you searching for a friend?”

  “A rat.”

  “There are no rodents in this cabaret,” Freddie said. Where was this dialogue going?

  The dybbuk said, “Keep your eyes peeled for a rat with two legs.”

  “An unfortunate pet? Did you name him?”

  “No. He already had a name.”

  “What was it?”

  “SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp. You’ve heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Aha!”

  “What do you mean, aha?”

  “He was the worst of the Jewish child killers, and you’ve never heard of him.”

  “I have a feeling this is something personal.”

  “He caught me. He shot me, personally.”

  “I hope you find him,” said Freddie, eager to change the subject. “What do you know about vampires?”

  “Vampires are a pain in the neck.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll buy a pair of platypuses,” the dybbuk continued.

  “Why on earth would you want a pair of platypuses?”

  “Because they’re so hard for a ventriloquist to say without moving his lips. Hey, you did good, Professor!”

  Applause, at last. Freddie survived the act somehow, took a brisk bow, and fled the stage. He put the dummy away for the night, forgetting to cover its eyes with the black cloth.

  What was it with the dybbuk? This was show business. No place to get even with the Nazis. It was now clear why Avrom Amos Poliakov had chosen a ventriloquist to possess. To play the mouthpiece. To bear witness.

  CHAPTER 13

  The dybbuk’s Saturday-morning bar mitzvah struck Freddie as an untranslated page of the Bible. He hardly understood a word being said in the synagogue. So this was the ancient language Moses had spoken. It sounded heavy with Old Testament cobwebs. Mercifully, the ceremony took less than an hour.

  A minyan of bearded Jews hung around him while he stood at the open scroll of the Torah. The dybbuk began to read his appointed text. Freddie moved his lips so that he might appear to be talking. For the first time, he felt like one of his own wooden dummies.

  Freddie had bought a dark suit for the occasion. Now he’d put the yarmulke on his head, and a prayer shawl over his shoulders. He looked neither left nor right. He was an imposter. He looked down
.

  He felt profoundly disappointed for the dybbuk. Where were his parents? His sisters? His little brother? His aunts and uncles and cousins to make it a celebration? Freddie was his only family and friend.

  Finally the dybbuk gave a sort of curtain speech. It was brief.

  “Now that I am a man, I will conduct myself as a mensch,” he said to the congregation of strangers. “While a child I saw enough blood to overflow the Red Sea. I saw Germans set Jewish beards like yours on fire, and laugh. I hid in sewers. Now I will wish peaceful lives for you all. But not for the Nazis. Not for SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp. It will be his turn to hide in the sewers.”

  Him again, Freddie thought. The child killer. Avrom Amos’s own murderer.

  The dybbuk fell silent. The ceremony was finished. Freddie didn’t have to be told. He could head for the heavy synagogue doors.

  “Mazel tov!” came a happy fireworks of voices.

  “What does that shout mean?” Freddie asked, once they were out on the sidewalk.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Then, mazel tov, now that you are officially a man. With that unfinished business wrapped up, I suppose you’ll pack and head for the clouds, or wherever you came from.”

  “I’m not finished. Now I can deal with the SS child butcher.”

  Freddie whistled for a taxi. “You can’t be serious. That German officer was probably killed in the war.”

  “Not him.”

  “Why did you wait so long to start searching?”

  “Do you think I’ve been twiddling my thumbs since the war? There’s no school for dybbuks, you know, to teach us shlemiels all the tricks. It took me a year to track him to Warsaw and another year plus to find his footprints in Berlin. That’s when SS Officer Junker-Strupp disappeared.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Slipped out of Germany, like other war criminals.”

  “To South America?”

  “I think he’s still in Europe. How cunning he was to get himself tattooed! On his forearm.”

  Said Freddie, “Not numbers!”

  “Yes, numbers. Like a concentration-camp survivor. Who would look for him among Jews?”

  “Nazi cunning,” Freddie muttered.

  “But I’m cunning, too.”

  “I have noticed.”

  “I tracked down the German corporal who tattooed him. I got the number. I will track down the counterfeit Jew with J117722 on his right wrist.”

  “And then what?”

  “I will kill him,” said the dybbuk.

  The taxi blew its horn at a child racing across the street. The dybbuk didn’t mutter another word. But once they swung around the Arc de Triomphe, Freddie said, “That’s crazy.”

  “Did I say it wasn’t?”

  “How do you think you can kill him? You haven’t enough substance to lift a knife or pull a trigger.”

  “True. But there is a way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can pull the trigger for me.”

  Freddie leaned forward and told the taxi driver to stop, surprising a flutter of pigeons. “This is where I get out,” Freddie said, and threw open the door.

  “Wait. I’ll come with you,” said the dybbuk.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Crazy Horse was befogged with cigarette smoke. The showgirls, high kicking, arms locked like a chain of paper dolls, vanished one by one into the wings. There stood The Great Freddie, glum faced, waiting to go on.

  The dybbuk had fallen silent since breakfast. He wasn’t apt to show up. Freddie could already feel the flop sweat; he’d be standing unmasked in the spotlight. He couldn’t throw his voice without moving his lips—like a carp, the dybbuk had once remarked. The shtick was out. He’d have to cut the bottle of Perrier. Forget taping his lips. Once again, he was a so-so ventriloquist.

  What choice do you have, Freddie? he asked himself sullenly. Can’t let the dybbuk blackmail you into committing a murder. Not a chance. Nope. “But in the army, they taught you to kill,” the dybbuk had said at breakfast. “When you dropped bombs, do you think people didn’t die?”

  “That was war. You can’t kill the German officer without a trial.”

  “Did he give me judge and jury?”

  With a decisive chop of his hand, Freddie had said, “I’m not going to be a bloody barbarian because he was a bloody barbarian. It’s no deal.”

  The dybbuk had fallen silent.

  The walk-on music penetrated Freddie’s thoughts. He left the safety of the wings and found himself blinded by the spotlight. The audience sat unseen in the dark. What shambles of the act did he have left? Who was the puppet to be now? A schoolboy?

  “What do you like best about school?” the ventriloquist asked.

  “When it’s closed,” the dummy answered.

  The laughs were polite. That was the kiss of death, Freddie knew. He racked his brain for better material—any old stuff.

  “Did you say you hate dogs?” he asked the wooden puppet.

  “I didn’t, but I do.”

  “Why do you hate dogs?”

  There came a pause. “You’re forgetting. I was once a tree, Professor.” That wasn’t Freddie himself throwing the punch line.

  It was the dybbuk!

  A big laugh broke from the audience, and a smile rose like a sunrise across Freddie’s face. His partner, his friend, was back!

  He picked up the pace, eager to steer the material to familiar terrain. “Why are you wearing short pants?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Make it brief.”

  “I’m a dybbuk.”

  The Great Freddie was back in business.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Thanks, pal. Thanks, Avrom.” Freddie said once they were back in the dressing room.

  “So now we’re on a first name, huh?”

  “I was dying out there.”

  “I saw,” replied the dybbuk.

  “But I haven’t changed my mind about knocking off that German for you.”

  Said the dybbuk, “And me? When I was a kid, my mind was on an eye for an eye. Now I am bar mitzvahed. I am now a man. How would a mensch behave? So I changed my mind.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Drive him crazy. Leave it to me,” said the dybbuk.

  Freddie offered up a smile. “I won’t bet against you, Avrom.”

  “Now, may I suggest—buy her flowers.”

  “What?”

  “So upset you were with me, you forgot to keep your date for lunch. Polly.”

  Freddie picked out an armful of firecracker-red snapdragons and had them sent to Polly’s hotel. The next day, he waited at an outside table at Maxim’s. She came clicking along on heels as tall as telephone poles.

  He pulled back a chair. “Sit down,” he said.

  She gave him an onionskin smile, thin and dry. “I won’t ask you to tell me why you stood me up.”

  “Good. Then I won’t have to lie, because you’d never believe me.”

  She sat down and crossed her legs. Now he could see the flames of a bonfire building up in her eyes. Before each word left her lips, she dipped it in a southern accent, thick as gravy. “I declare if you don’t take me for a belle with boll weevils in her hair. Think I don’t know B from buckshot? I know when I’m being lied to, honey. What does a country girl like me need with a traveling man like you who doesn’t level with her?”

  Freddie stared at her, bewildered. “Do I know what you’re talking about?”

  “I got the goods on you. You fibbed to me. You lied. You’re Jewish as a bagel. You should have leveled with me. What’s wrong with being a Jewboy?”

  “Sensitively put,” Freddie declared sharply.

  “Then why don’t you put me down? Where’s your backbone?”

  “I did level with you. I’m not Jewish.”

  “Liar!”

  “We had this out once before. You don’t know B from buckshot.”

  “Ha!”
Her voice rose an octave. “Shut my mouth, or shut yours! I got wised up! You snuck into the synagogue and got that bar mitzvah thing done. You’re lying in my face.”

  He fumbled for something to say. His head spun. “That wasn’t me, Polly!”

  “You got a twin? One of the bit players from my film was there in the synagogue. He saw you.”

  Freddie gazed at her. His mouth fell open like a hooked bass. There seemed to be no air in his lungs. How could he tell her he had only stood in for a dybbuk? That he was possessed by a demon? She’d take him for a genuine nut. There was just so much that romance could bear.

  He gazed at her a long time, and she waited. Finally he said, “Okay. You got me, Polly. I’m one of the chosen people.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Great Freddie was held over at the Crazy Horse for seven weeks. The dybbuk lost no opportunity while in the spotlight to pursue the German SS officer. He’d know the vulture even out of uniform.

  “Can I tack up a wanted poster now?” asked the dummy.

  Freddie was taken by surprise. “What wanted poster? The Nazi child killer?”

  “That’s him.”

  “But you said he changed his name.”

  “Look for the number on his wrist—J117722. He probably hangs around stamp shows.”

  “How do you know?” It never failed to surprise Freddie that audiences sat still for the dybbuk’s broadsides.

  “If you had trunks full of stolen stamps, where would you go? To church?”

  Freddie was aware that the war had turned Germany into a country of muggers and housebreakers. Silver candlesticks, paintings off the walls, jewels—nothing the Jews owned was safe from grab-and-steal by their fellow Germans, not even gold teeth.

  “So your Colonel Junker-Strupp had an eye for grabbing stamp collections,” The Great Freddie remarked. “And if he’s on the run, he’d need to raise cash by selling off rare stamps.”

  “Aha!” exclaimed the dybbuk. “My plan exactly.”

  “What plan?”

  “To track down the stamp collector. Mr. Freddie, take my advice and hold on to your socks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, what I got to say, you’re going to jump out of your socks in front of the whole audience.”