The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  The agent plucked from the lapel of his cutaway a tiny silver spoon with which he proceeded to sample the goods, chewing with methodical concentration before declaring the morsel satisfactory; then removing an envelope from his pocket, he tossed it to Max, who snatched it out of the air like falling manna. He supposed he was expected to count the money, which he had just enough presence of mind left to do, feeling the eyes of the proprietors upon him all the while. Stammering that all was in order, he stuffed the money back into the envelope, tucked the envelope into his inside coat pocket, and bowed to the agent with a slight spillage of raven curls. The fish eggs were then loaded into the wagon and buried in straw, on top of which were nestled, as a further decoy, sacks of groceries and bottles of vintage Sauterne. Then the agent departed without ceremony, leaving Max to the good offices of the Gebirtigs, who insisted he call them Asher and Tsoyl.

  Obviously well compensated for their part in the relay of merchandise, they seemed also well informed concerning Max’s commission on behalf of the glaciated old man. “Be assured,” they told him in a homey Ashkenaz idiom, “will be looked after respectfully, your zayde, till you return from making his funeral arrangements.”

  “I have first to visit the office of the Western Union,” Max announced, as per Pisgat’s instructions (and lest it be thought he had other plans for the cash). This too the Gebirtigs seemed to anticipate.

  They gave him explicit directions as to how to reach the telegraph office on Delancey Street and described the procedure for wiring the money back to Poland. Feeling as if the cash in his pocket were a hot potato he must promptly dispose of, Max set off with a purpose into the jostling unknown. He had been told his destination was only a few blocks away, but the welter of the Lower East Side streets was immediately disorienting, and alone he remembered that, notwithstanding his pocketful of ill-gotten gains, he was without a sou to his name. Of course, once he was rid of the money, his empty pockets would at least preserve him from the risk of robbery, but despite his apprehensiveness he couldn’t help entertaining other possibilities. Given all Max had endured during his journey, would old Pisgat begrudge his skimming a scant few bills from such a thick bankroll, just enough to tide him over till he managed to secure a foothold in America? It was safe to say he would never be in possession of such a fortune again, and how, when it was gone, would he support himself, never mind see to the perpetual care of the ice-girt oddity? Thinking of which: Temporarily liberated from that weighty encumbrance, Max had the sense that his task was done. So what was to prevent him, other than Pisgat’s threats (and Pisgat was very far away), from taking the money and disappearing into the country’s interior, where he might perhaps purchase a kingdom and rule over a tribe of grateful savages? What, in any case, was the alternative? He supposed he would have to appeal to some benevolent society for a few dollars with which to rent a hole in the wall, then take a job in the rag trade—the industry in which he’d been told all greenhorns were employed—thus insuring his indenture to pisher wages for the rest of his days. On the other hand, already a smuggler, why not a thief? But still in the process of inventing himself, he decided somewhat grudgingly (nudged by Jocheved) that Max Feinshmeker was a man of his word, and anyway he just wanted to put this nerve-racking chapter behind him.

  He paused on the corner of an avenue congested with market stalls, carts sporting garlands of tinware, trussed and flapping geese, bins piled with alps of eyeglasses, felt slippers, and celluloid buttons, wing collars like a nest of albino butterflies. Garbage choked the gutters, creating swamps into which women in brogans chased shoplifting urchins who ducked under the bellies of draft horses dead on their feet. From every fire escape hung the doubled-over carcass of an airing mattress, from every storefront an illustrated placard boasting a giant scissors or molar, its legend inscribed in holy and unholy tongues. Max paused to look left and right, realizing that in weighing his options he had forgotten the Gebirtigs’ directions, if indeed their directions were accurate; he’d lost all track of his whereabouts. Everyone around him was in motion as if desperately searching for something they’d lost, or leastwise bent on their next purchase or sale—everyone, that is, but the lanky golf-capped character in his patched plus-fours lounging in the doorway of a nearby bakery. Hadn’t Max seen the very same character lounging in another doorway a few blocks back? Or was it half a world away? Because, while any comparison to the Balut was invidious, the faces among this coarse congregation might have been the same ones he remembered from Jocheved’s native slum. It was as if, minus the mired motorcar or the manhole cover rattling above a subway like a gyrating coin, he’d traveled this far only to wind up where he’d begun.

  In any case, despite Jocheved’s better judgment, he approached the loiterer, inhaling the aromas of baking strudel that reminded Max of how hungry he was, and inquired, “Zayt moykhl, reydstu Yiddish?”

  “What other mother tongue would have me?” the loiterer responded in the vernacular, breaking into a grin that threatened to burst the pustules stippling his downy cheeks.

  Subduing a shudder, Max asked him please the way to the Western Union. The young man instantly hopped down into the street paved in herring bones and broken glass, taking hold of Max’s arm to point him in a southerly direction. But no sooner had he done so than another youth, a bulkier one with a buzzard’s beak poking from under the bill of his cap, slammed into Max from behind, spinning him like a compass needle one hundred and eighty degrees.

  “Klutz!” Max’s companion shouted at the youth, who forged ahead through the press of pedestrians without stopping. He let go of Max in order to make an exaggerated show of straightening his new friend’s disarranged coat. Then issuing somewhat mystifying directions (“You’ll want to turn left at Purim then pass on through the valley of dry bones”), he saluted with a click of the heels, about-faced, and took off like the other into the market melee. Over his shoulder he flung a proverb: “Eyner hot dem baytl,” letting loose a fusillade of laughter as he broke into a run, “der tsveyte hot dos gelt.” One has the wallet, the other the cash.

  Max knew before he checked his pocket that the envelope containing the money was gone.

  He realized also that he was lost, famished, exhausted, and now a marked man on a foreign shore where he hadn’t a notion of where to turn. Tears welled in his eyes—Jocheved’s tears, of course, but trailing through that dingy quarter it was he that was too reluctant to appeal to another stranger for advice. Regarding exactly what? There seemed nothing left to do but carry on trudging aimlessly until he dropped, which was surely imminent. So this was the Golden Land—this wagon rut where the setting sun was reflected in the beer spilled from a growler by the child sent to fetch it? Across the way a fishmonger spread the gills of a carp until it resembled a striking cobra; an evicted family surrounded by a drift of bedding lit a yahrzeit candle on their front stoop. And again Max had the feeling that he’d been here before, an impression corroborated by the reappearance over the road of the Gebirtigs’ place of business, to which he’d come full circle. It comforted him somewhat to remember that he was expected. Entering through the Ice Castle’s gas-sconced arcade, he located the joint proprietors at adjacent bill-laden desks in their mezzanine office, where he asked if they would mind extending his zayde’s storage a little longer. “A few days yet I need to find a funeral plot.…”

  Father and son exchanged a look, then turned to Max as if he were certifiable. “What are you talking a frozen person?” wondered Asher Gebirtig, and Tsoyl, who’d clearly not fallen far from his father’s tree: “Eyz-kugel he thinks we sell here made from human beings.” They had never heard of such a thing. And truly, as he stood there before them in desolation, Max himself was almost willing to believe that the rabbi was a fantasy hatched by the demented Jocheved under the influence of her meshugeneh father; her family, the Frostbissens, they were always a peculiar brood. But stuck in a charade whose motions he felt helplessly condemned to go through, he demanded to revisit the
ir treasury, and finding it bare of the reinforced wooden casket with its frozen occupant, threatened the proprietors with the police. Asher laughed heartily and reminded him he was in no position to make threats, while Tsoyl said that if he wanted to play that game, they would see his threats and raise him a couple more. Although Max had little idea what Gebirtig Junior was talking about, in the end he understood there was no recourse left him but to depart the premises and seek solace elsewhere.

  Outside, the strange and the familiar tended to cancel one another out, so that Max looked upon the multitudes escaping the brick kilns of their tenements with an undiscriminating eye. He had strayed into a dark street under the El train stanchions, where red lanterns hung from the lintels of narrow frame houses on whose doorsteps women in dusky dressing sacques displayed their ankles. Despite his diminished condition, they nevertheless called out to the pretty boy to follow them upstairs, while other boys, men, and even a nervous, bearded patriarch clutching his phylactery bag heeded their enticements. It was then it occurred to Max that Jocheved might be similarly turned to good use. Perhaps, given his predicament, it was time to end the masquerade and admit defeat: the attempt to become Max Feinshmeker had failed. Max was at any rate a man who, due to his carelessness, would be fingered now by his former employer for retribution. So what better disguise could he assume for his own protection than that of the girl he had disguised himself to protect in the first place? But Jocheved was more stiff-necked than that; for all her indifference to her own extinction, she still reserved in her breast a flicker of something like pride. Max was sui generis; he had no forebears and could not be expected to share her sentiments. But while her sympathy for him made her waver, she owed it to her father to recover the by now melting contents of the family’s eroded hope chest.

  2000.

  Floating somewhere outside of time and space, Bernie heard his name called from a corner of a distant planet.

  “Mr. Karp,” asked Ms. Drinkwater, his biology teacher; “Bernie Karp,” she asked in the throaty voice that irreverent kids would impersonate to her face, “can you shed some light, so to speak, on the process of photosynthesis?”

  From his disembodied vantage, Bernie knew many things. He knew the Shi’ur Komah, the measurement of the body of the Creator, whose height was 236,000 leagues; he knew that the measure of a league was three miles, the mile 10,000 cubits, the cubit three spans, and that a single span filled the entire world. He knew that heaven was full of windows through one of which he had glimpsed the hindquarters of the deity Himself and that the vision was as real as it was imaginary. This was a paradox that could not be translated into any earthly tongue and would evaporate upon his reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. But of photosynthesis he sadly knew nothing at all, having neglected his Biology homework, just as he had his Remedial Hygiene and Small Engine Repair, to say nothing of his failure to con the square-dancing diagrams for his Phys Ed class. Viewing himself from such an awful distance—an empty husk with kinky hair in a navy sweatshirt, his textbook on the desk before him tented over a compact edition of Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews—Bernie felt suffused with pity. He no longer saw the classroom with its laboratory paraphernalia through the lens of Paradise; instead he saw the room in all its dreariness, the air riven by desires trapped within its phlegm-colored walls. It was an ill-starred environment that touched off the compassion that signaled the moment when his free-floating essence, lonely for the clueless youth he’d abandoned, reinhabited the stoop-shouldered body of Bernie Karp.

  He was welcomed back to Olam haZeh, to the ordinary world, by the uncontrollable sniggering of his peers over his inattention to Ms. Drink-water’s query—though his abrupt animation prompted a universal intake of air. No sooner had he returned to himself, however, than he experienced a painful sense of contraction, the cosmos once again confined to the narrow dimensions of his protuberant skull. He could still recall the concept that sparked his transports: how the stories of Torah, as retold in The Legends, functioned as templates for locating the coordinates of a vast hidden world, but all that was reduced to foggy abstraction now. And as to the definition of the process of photosynthesis—A nechtiker tog, as the rabbi would say: Forget about it.

  “What was the question?” asked Bernie, in an attempt to buy time.

  The teacher, in her sensible serge, her face bleached from the chalk dust that earned her the nickname The Abominable Snow Woman, rolled her eyes, which was the cue for the class to resume its sniggering. Bernie understood the strategy; other teachers had employed it as well: They ingratiated themselves with recalcitrant classes by making themselves complicit in the mockery of Bernie Karp. The butt of much humor herself, the elephantine Ms. Drinkwater was taking the opportunity to deflect some of it in Bernie’s direction. “Photosynthesis,” she repeated, “the subject of the experiments we’ve been conducting all week. What is it?”

  He made a stab. “It’s got something to do with chlorophyll.” And on second thought: “Or is it fluoride? Something they put in the water so you can’t have babies?” More laughter, though some of it cautious, as if he might after all be correct.

  Realizing she’d given the class too much rope, Ms. Drinkwater tried to reel them back in, calling on a pet student who could be relied on for a rote response. But the damage was done and the class remained ungovernable, passing notes and tossing parts of dissected crayfish until the bell rang, when the teacher asked Bernie to please stay behind. By now he knew the drill. She would express an obligatory concern for his pathological woolgathering and send him once again to the nurse’s station, from which the flinty Ms. Bissenet would pass him on to Mr. Murtha, the school’s resident psychologist. Mr. Murtha, whose years of dealing with troubled adolescents had left him a little unhinged himself, would welcome him back like a long-lost nephew. Prefatory to nothing, he would lecture him on the significance of the new millennium and the need to be prepared for the coming apocalypse; then having sown sufficient confusion, he would conclude that their talk had done them both a world of good. That was how it had gone after the day in study hall when a coalition of jocks and preppies had consigned an oblivious Bernie to the top of the library bookshelves; and again after he’d been found in the trash compactor by the janitor, Mr. Spiller, who came that close to turning him into bonemeal. So the boy had no reason to believe that today would be any exception.

  “What’s new, Bernie?” inquired the psychologist with an immoderate grin, as if a melon slice had been wedged between his cheeks. “Still having your,” making rabbit ears with his fingers to signify quotation marks, “out-of-body episodes?”

  Bernie allowed that that was the case.

  Mr. Murtha licked a pinkie to plaster a cowlick that refused to lie down, giving his unruly hair the look of ruffled feathers. He loosened and tightened the clasp of his string necktie as if playing a slide trombone. “Why don’t you describe again in your own words what you think is happening to you?”

  Bernie scrunched his face in thought. Gone was his wary impulse to keep everything secret; and there were times of late when he felt almost reckless, almost ready to tell the world, while on the other hand he suspected he may have already confided too much in this dickhead. “I think,” he said after some consideration, “I’m starting to outgrow myself.”

  “Uh-hmm.” The psychologist nodded before letting his grin expand beyond the diameter of his freckled face, the melon slice becoming a canoe. “Looks to me like you’re shrinking.” And it was true that, since he was no longer tempted by the greasy diet that had sustained him since infancy, no longer particularly interested in food at all, Bernie’s physique had become almost angular. The psychologist leaned back in his chair, twining his fingers behind his head. “Y’know, Bernie, I get all kinds in here—kids that whittle their own arms to bloody stobs, kids that want to blow us all to hell, bad seeds with eyes like lizards and no conscience to speak of. I see girls who soak their tampons in liquid methedrine, boys who can’t keep their peck
ers in their pants, but I never had one yet that couldn’t keep his soul in his body. You know what I think, Bernie?” He seemed to be waiting for Bernie to venture a guess.

  “You think I’m a wack job?”

  “Did I say that?” gasped Mr. Murtha, capsizing the canoe. “I never said that.” Fluttering his eyelids. “But now that you mention it…”

  Then he let the boy know, entre nous, that he viewed Bernie’s spontaneous fugue states as good practice for the Rapture, that maybe there was hope for at least some Jews in these final days. “However,” said the psychologist, “much as I’ve enjoyed our little sessions, let’s face it, we’re getting nowhere.” Raising himself to a posture of official rectitude, Mr. Murtha then declared that, in his capacity as protector of the emotional welfare of the students of Tishimingo High, it behooved him to notify Bernie’s parents of his disorder.

  If in agreement about little else, Mr. and Mrs. Karp showed a solid front in their antipathy to the school psychologist. It was inexcusable that he had dragged them away from their busy schedules (Mrs. Karp had had to cancel an electrolysis treatment) to inform them of what they already knew, that their son was subject to daydreaming. But despite their obvious resistance, Mr. Murtha, in his ex cathedra mode, delivered his diagnosis with unfazed equanimity.

  “It’s my opinion that your son,” shooting Bernie a sidelong grin that the boy expected to spread out of all proportion, though today the psychologist managed to keep it in check, “your son is suffering from a rare strain of what might be termed static epilepsy—that is, epilepsy minus the grand mal seizures but still a variety of what we call saint’s disease…”