The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  In the meantime she continued to ration the biographical tidbits that Bernie felt ashamed of not having requested in the first place. He knew she wasn’t naturally talkative, and her confidences, not easily rendered, were meant to provoke similar utterances from him. But he couldn’t get past the fact that she was a girl, and regardless of how dramatically his own life had been altered since the Great Thaw (his term) Bernie Karp had never mastered the knack of talking to girls. Of course this one was different; this one followed him around. He’d spent his years in a virtual sleepwalk, his small joys derived from spasms of passing interest that, always a secretive kid, he kept to himself. Now an immeasurable joy had awakened him to another reality and, friendless as he was, he had a desire to relate what he’d learned, but the vocabulary for communicating that information was unavailable. Once in a while, however, he might submit apropos of nothing some crumb of dogma gleaned from his reading:

  “Did you know, there are 903 different kinds of death? The most difficult one is the croup, which is choking, and the easiest is death by kiss, which is likened to drawing a hair out of milk. This is from Tractate Berakhot, and from the medieval Sefer Yetzirat we read…”

  She would look at him expectantly, but when the words, detached as they were from emotional moorings, petered out, her anticipation turned to disappointment and even scorn. So they walked primarily in silence along suburban streets, strayed through the thickety woods behind the school, and strolled beside the banks of the septic river through the remnant of a slate-gray February into an even bleaker March. Having abandoned his trips to the downtown synagogue and shelved for the meantime his plans for bar mitzvah, Bernie would sit with her in a booth at a coffee bar in the very strip mall from which the rabbi’s academy had decamped. It was clear to him that Lou was making sacrifices to be with him; he knew that even her lusterless friends now snubbed her, that those who’d written him off as a wing nut (which included all and sundry) now banished her to the same category. He felt he owed her something and resented that she should make him feel that way. At the same time he was thankful that she no longer interrogated him, though once as they sat nursing cocoa amid the strumming of a lank-haired folk singer to whom no one was listening, she had the temerity to ask him,

  “So when do you reckon on leaving your body again?”

  She might have been inquiring after his adherence to a railroad timetable. Bernie assured her he didn’t know, that anything might trigger an involuntary departure though he remained unable to take flight at will. Clearly impatient with his response, she said almost testily, “Let me know when you feel one coming on again.” Then prey to an apparent change of heart, she softened, hastening to add coquettishly, “And when you go, maybe you could take me with you?”

  The question surprised and confounded him. Who did she think she was? Who, for that matter, did he think she was? It was enough that she pried into the private domain of his spiritual life; now she aspired to enter it physically as well? Again, as upon their first meeting, he wanted to flee. A sudden deep distrust of the girl stung his heart. Okay, so here on earth he was a dweeb, a regular kunyehlemel, but aloft he was something else: like in that tale of Rabbi Eliezer’s about the country that contained within it all countries, and in that country was a city that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that city a house that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that house a man who bore all this within him—and that man was he, the boy Bernie Karp, when he was enraptured. Nothing in the world he’d inhabited these sixteen years was as real as his extraterrestrial forays; everything else was phony: his neighborhood, phony; the houses with their plantation colonnades and lantern turrets, phony; his family was phony. Nothing could touch the places he’d ascended to for authenticity. While on the other hand, nothing on earth—he had to concede—was quite as real to him as Lou Ella Tuohy. But nobody could accompany him on his excursions, and if he had been able to take her with him, which was impossible, wouldn’t he be depriving the planet of a precious natural resource? It was a sentiment he could no more articulate than he could explain where it was he went.

  What was abundantly clear, however, was that while she kept him tethered to the terrestrial (for he’d yet to make an ascent since he’d met her) you couldn’t really blame the girl. After all, she’d never inspired in him the kind of appetite that had consumed him in the days before the rabbi’s unfreezing. This was a good thing, for as the Shulchan Arukh stated unequivocally, he who gazes at even the small finger of a woman in order to enjoy its sight commits a sin. Not that Bernie set much store by such prohibitions, but if life happened to comply with them, then so much the better. Lou, of course, tended to mask her looks more than augment them, though her soft features were never totally obscured, and even without the subtler cosmetic embellishments of the popular girls, she was fetching. But preoccupied with loftier concerns, Bernie felt no carnal itch for her whatsoever, and since desire was not an issue between them, he had lately begun to relax in her company. But that was before this afternoon, when she’d gone and spoiled their friendly relations with her invasive request. And then, compounding the outrage, she made another, inviting him in her annoyingly off hand manner to come see her room.

  IT WAS MUCH as she’d described it, if a little less otherworldly: the wilderness of dog-eared paperbacks—some draped in mildly gamy castoff garments—scattered about the floor, the Matisse dancers thumbtacked to the wall, the ancient marmalade cat with its molted tail resembling a fishbone, the peacock feathers in a Mason jar. To get there they had traversed the living room, its walls as flimsy as a Japanese teahouse, where her mother, a faded woman in Capri pants and hair curlers, sat on a ruptured sofa in front of the TV. She was dandling on her knee a sticky-faced infant with eyes as dull as Orphan Annie’s, watching a game show. Lou had introduced a fidgeting Bernie, whom her weary mother ignored, reminding her daughter that her shift at the Hub started in an hour. Lou said yassum, then hustled Bernie into her bedroom and locked the door behind them, inviting him to sit on her bed between the cat and a family of pretzellimbed sock monkeys. (He would have preferred to sit elsewhere, but there was no chair.) She put on a CD of a singer with a French accent, whose adenoidal trill sounded as if she were strapped to Julius Karp’s vibrating recliner. Bernie looked toward the locked door as the girl settled herself beside him, opening the clasp of a quilted diary filled with crabbed writing, from which she began hesitantly to read.

  “He comes back to me from the outer reaches of the galaxy like Rimbawd the poet, who come home with one leg to his mama and baby sister telling stories about crossing deserts with a caravan of guns and slaves. I give him tea with opium and look after him like that other Lou, which is my namesake, who looked after Nitchie, Rilkie, and Frood.…”

  Bernie was just beginning to realize that the person to whom she was ministering in her fantasy was him, when she abruptly left off reading to announce, “It’s all a crock, id’n it? Truth is, Bernie Karp, you don’t really know shit from Shinola.”

  He had started to tremble, feeling never so out of place. What did she mean by making him the captive audience to her flaky journal? Did she think she was casting some kind of a spell? He was all for exploring the heights, was himself a veteran of celestial altitudes, but this girl contained unplumbed depths that frightened him. Also he noticed—all right, so he’d already noticed—that she was wearing a skirt today, a short, tiered denim mini, and her spindly, criss-crossed legs were encased in striped woolen warmers pulled above the knee. Bernie had never been so conscious of her legs, and when she caught his eye, he became aware that she was aware.

  In the face of what he took as her flung gauntlet, he understood it was now his turn to make some reciprocal disclosure. “It all started,” he began, working hard to overcome his diffidence, “when I found an old rabbi under the frozen foods in my parents’ deep freeze—” But no sooner had he embarked on the tale than she int
errupted him.

  “It’s okay, Bernie, you don’t have to make up stories on my account. This ain’t a competition.” Having said which, she tucked her knees under her chin, allowing the skirt to fall back, revealing the blue-veined underside of her thighs above the stockings and the scallop-shell gusset of her ribbed underpants. Bernie grew dizzy, and as Lou watched the blood depart his head for nether regions, she grinned. It was the first time she had smiled in his presence.

  “So,” she said speculatively, “if you can’t carry me to heaven one way, maybe you can take me another?” Then she pulled up her sweater to expose her small breasts with their nipples the size of pink catkins. Her rib-cage framed the hollow of her belly like a pair of wings in whose shadow the tattoo of a tiny scarab crawled from her navel.

  Bernie straightaway lost his head. Before his brain could intercede to insist that he had no interest in the girl’s bare anatomy, he lurched forward to embrace her, his nose and lips nuzzling her breasts. Her rapid breathing fueled his own, which chuffed like a locomotive as he felt her hands caressing his spine; then she was yanking at the waist of his jeans, overlarge since he’d lost so much weight, pulling them down along with his shorts over his bony hips without bothering to unzip them. Now they were tussling, embroiled in a heedless roughhouse while trying to stifle each other’s nascent hilarity, rolling about as if caught in a wildfire that tickled rather than burned. More clothes were shucked in the process, though Bernie, swept into a near delirium, couldn’t have said exactly how. During the fracas the cat was displaced, rearranging itself in its lassitude among the monkeys, themselves upended like bodies tumbled under a steam shovel’s plough. (The image reared up as a last desperate damper to passion, then just as quickly dissolved.) When she touched him at his root, the first intimate touch he’d ever received from another, he sprang to such rigid attention that he thought his organ would pop its cork and fizz like a Roman candle. She canted her hips to remove her powder blue panties with one hand while holding onto him with the other, guiding him toward the bow-strung sinews of her parted thighs. He almost wept to realize what was happening, how she was about to introduce him to the waking world’s premier mystery; but just as he was poised to enter the flesh of a living girl, feeling himself more present on the material plane than ever before, his soul brimmed over and was launched clear out of his body. Looking back from the stratosphere with a thousand eyes, Bernie glimpsed the frustrated diminution of his desire and heard the girl saying before he surrendered himself to eternity,

  “If you can’t take me with you, at least bring me something back.”

  1908.

  Until he was thrown out on his ear from his Aunt Dobeh and Uncle Zaynvil’s apartment, Shmerl Karp had no leisure to enjoy the clamorous streets of the Jewish East Side. The eviction itself did not particularly distress him; worse things could have happened: He might for instance have remained shackled to relations who used him for a Hebrew slave. But the circumstances surrounding the eviction left him confirmed in his belief in the inherent evils of technology.

  For a time Shmerl was satisfied that the innumerable tasks he was assigned throughout the working day—a day which began at dawn and continued into the evening—were a fitting penance; they were the chastening he deserved for the arrogance of his messianic pursuits back in Shpinsk. So he never complained on discovering that he had ceased to be a guest of the Oyzers in their handshake tenement, a discovery that became apparent after his first cup of tea. Childless, the choleric couple had welcomed him into their home with the assurance that he would be the son they never had, then promptly set him to work. He dutifully accepted his role as scullery boy and swabber of slopjars; he swept floors, fetched coal, baited rat traps, hung flypaper, and swatted cockroaches the size of tortoises. In the parlor sweatshop to which the apartment was converted every day of the week, Shabbos included, he functioned as general factotum. He received the bundles of piecework the infant shleppers delivered regularly from an uptown contractor and tied the finished waists and vests into bales slated for a retail jobber, also uptown. He kept oiled and in prime running condition the loop-stitch sewing machines that his Uncle Zaynvil, chewing the wet stub of a cigar, rented to the weary-winged operators who arrived with their greasy lunch bags at daybreak.

  Though his tasks kept him largely fettered to the tenement, Shmerl never complained; America was as intimidating as it was enticing, and the unventilated apartment was a safe enough harbor for the time being. The streets, his dour Tante Dobeh assured him with a husky “Feh!” were fleshpots; they were places of pagan amusements in cruel contrast to the surrounding squalor. This much Shmerl could see from the Oyzers’ fire escape. But the city was also a showcase of marvels: the telegraphs, rotary engines, safety hoisters, electric chairs, moving pictures, and elevated railroads that were conveying the New World into a revolutionary new age. Despite having yet to set eyes on all these prodigies, Shmerl was aware of them, his very blood purling along with their hum. But something was missing from the rush to mechanize everything in Creation, he concluded (on the evidence of instinct alone), and that something was, well, the yetser tov, the good intention. The machines of America, he was persuaded, were inspired by Moloch rather than the holy spirit, which seemed to be strictly an Old World phenomenon. Wonder rebbes, lamed vovniks, and every species of hallowed figure that had presided over his youthful imagination remained behind in the Russian Pale. Nor did this new world seem to offer a natural environment of the type that nourished such souls, let alone the denizens of Yenne Velt, the Other Side; for scarcely a tree or a blade of grass could be found in the ghetto, or at least that part of it viewed from a window on Rivington Street. This left only the man-made environment and the harried men and women, worn to shadows by need and greed, who inhabited it. Shmerl supposed on the one hand that, with his intuitive knowledge of the way things worked, he was eminently suited to his new situation; while on the other he had no wish to employ his skills in a place where they could never come to a sanctified fruition—even should those skills result in his being admired by the opposite sex.

  So he kept his nose to the Oyzers’ grindstone, picking threads from the finished shirtwaists, wrestling mattresses like recalcitrant drunkards onto the fire escape to be aired; he even learned to operate the eight-pound pressing irons attached by extension springs to the ceiling hooks that rendered them mobile. These had salubrious benefits, increasing the wiry musculature of his upper body (crooked spine notwithstanding) in the manner of the scientific weight-training methods of Eugene Sandow. Meanwhile Shmerl picked up more snatches of the American language—cockamamie, mishmash, bumerkeh, ayeshdworry—from the whispered conversations he overheard among the Oyzers’ otherwise taciturn employees. They were men and women of an indeterminate age, their ashen faces and arms stained liver brown and madder blue from the fabrics they worked with. With eyes leached of light, they seldom looked up from their labor, only to check the time on the clock whose hands Aunt Dobeh moved craftily forward or backward to regulate their progress.

  Confusing his deformity with dimwittedness, Shmerl’s aunt and uncle had assumed that operating a sewing machine was too complex an exercise for their greenhorn nephew to master, at least at this early stage of his apprenticeship; and it was true that, while he had grasped the concept of the mechanism at a glance—as well as acquired its nomenclature: shuttle hook, bobbin winder, needle bar, presser foot, feed dog—sewing hems, plaques, and darts involved an expertise he had no special desire to learn. Still, he attended to the machines, as shapely in their fashion as ladies’ calves; he folded them affectionately into their wrought-iron treadles to convert the factory back to a parlor for the couple of hours before the Oyzers (in identical pear-shaped union suits) went to bed. But by day the parlor was once again a beehive of unremitting activity—“a choir of Singers,” quipped Uncle Zaynvil, an inflexible taskmaster not ordinarily known for his humor. Nobody laughed; nobody ever laughed or turned their head or left their work unnecess
arily, preferring to suffer from chronic constipation rather than have their movements interpreted as slacking from the task at hand. Because the least unsanctioned action could result in having your wages docked or worse. Nor could Shmerl, despite his blood relation—a connection the Oyzers sometimes called into question—expect any privileged treatment from his bosses.

  Sometimes he saw the romance in his drudgery. He thought of Jacob toiling seven years only to be double-crossed by his future father-in-law, of Joseph’s patience in Egypt before attaining his nobility. But Shmerl’s labors were merely for the purpose of lining the pockets of his miserly aunt and uncle, and while he disdained the ambition of a Joseph, he found himself, after some weeks had passed, entertaining a subversive thought or two. Lately his Tante Dobeh’s potted meat and rubbery farfel had seemed small compensation for the long hours of mindless toil; nor did their table talk, which mostly concerned the markup on the needles and scissors they sold their employees, keep him amused. He was made further restless from browsing the personals column of his uncle’s discarded Forverts, The Jewish Daily Forward. In them, young men represented themselves as exemplary candidates for matrimony, spinsters advertised their dowries, and marriage brokers guaranteed prospective bridegrooms a “zivug hashomayim,” a match made in heaven. Wasn’t it time, thought Shmerl in his lonely hours, that he should consider starting a family of his own? Didn’t the Talmud state that a man without a wife was without joy or blessing? And the Zohar went even further, declaring that the unattached individual is not yet a whole being. But as long as he remained in thrall to the Oyzers’ grinding gesheft, he would never have the opportunity or the means to become his own person. At length his frustrated thoughts sought an alternative outlet. Running the irons over a swatch of calico or hauling up a bucket of coal in the dumbwaiter, he might wonder: What would happen if the sewing machines were harnessed to, say, a single enormous dynamo? There were a thousand such sweat factories in the ghetto, each with their pallid operators pumping their treadles with a grim tenacity; yet the whole collective endeavor remained stationary. But combine their efforts and the machines were a potential source of energy that could at the very least electrify all of Manhattan Island, and perhaps elevate this modern Babylon to exalted heights.