The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  He never had to wait long. Marching orders were received from the heroes of the Resistance, who were all reputed to be half-mad: such as Orde Wingate, the philo-Semitic British colonel who’d become a sort of Lawrence of Palestine and liked to repeat with his unorthodox night squads the battle strategies of King Saul. Later came the storied leaders of the Underground like Gideon, Raziel, and the redoubtable Yair, figures whom the Yishuv simultaneously despised for their brutality and lionized for their courage. Like his uncles who reserved their independent right to attach themselves to any movement that took their fancy, Ruby swore allegiance to no special group. But he seldom missed an opportunity to participate in the lightning raids on Arab villages, where the men were pulled from their houses and selected for execution according to height or length of beard, and the women, to prove they weren’t concealing small arms, were made to bare their breasts. He tossed grenades into market stalls where the resulting carnage was indistinguishable from smashed pottery and the pulp of burst melons. Whenever there were mass attacks there was mass retaliation, but when individuals were hit a more personal response was called for, and here Ruby’s peculiar talents came into play. Always swift, he was groomed as well in furtiveness and in handling the Sten guns and pipe bombs he was familiar with from another life. He could be a sniper, a sapper, a strangler, an artist with the shiv or the ice pick (his stealth weapon of choice), and he preferred what his commanders also favored: that he work alone.

  About hatsorer, the enemy, he had no detailed knowledge beyond what his fellows professed concerning Arabian culture at their fireside counsels: that they prayed on their knees with their butts in the air, inviting bullets; that to the Ishmaelite the yahudy were all wallah al mitha, the children of death. For all Ruby knew some of his victims might even have been guilty of the crimes for which they were punished, though that was not the point. What was the point? To fill the world with terror, the way a deaf composer makes music, and for this Ruben ben None had a kind of genius. Professional that he was, he left calling cards inscribed in Arabic by the partisans’ propaganda minister, notes he stuffed into some newly carved orifice, reading AKHAZA ASSAR W’NAFA ELLAR (Revenge has been taken and the shame done away with). This, he was told, was a message the enemy would comprehend. Though he took no pride in his deeds, neither did he feel any shame. He was aware that there was an end to which the Baal Shatikah was a means, but though he cared not a whit whether the nation of Israel ever came into being, he did what was expected of him to further that cause.

  One night in thirty-six or -seven during the latest Arab rebellion, Ruby was dispatched with three other militia members to ambush a busload of Muslim pilgrims on their way to visit a shrine near Ein Musmus. Somewhere along the Afula Road, however, they were intercepted by a British patrol that had barricaded the highway. The patrol had been alerted by one of the informers, who abounded in those days when so many Zionists were horrified by the sanguinary tactics of the Underground. Just as the bus, with the pilgrims clinging to the luggage on its roof, disappeared over the brow of a hill, an armed blockade was erected ahead of the commandos, who swerved about only to face another obstruction behind. A shootout resulted during which three of the four passengers in the bullet-pocked landau were injured; the fourth, in the rumble seat next to Ruby, died on the spot, shards of his skull embedded in Ruby’s throat. The survivors were taken to the Jerusalem Central Prison, a massive stone citadel converted from an old Russian hostel, where after a brief stay in the infirmary they were confined to the zinzana cells on the jail’s lower level. When they were well enough, they were taken one by one from their isolation into the harsh light of the interrogation chamber, where they were tortured. The battery of questions was as relentless as the physical battery to the soles of their feet, which were whipped with leather falakot, a persecution made the more senseless due to the gag that prohibited them from answering inquiries. Cigarettes were stubbed out in their ears, fingernails and toenails extracted with plyers, their beards uprooted by the fistful. An officer donned rubber gloves with a physician’s fastidiousness to pinch their testicles; their noses were clothespinned and pitchers of water poured down their gullets in such volume that it seeped from their ears. Then they were taken back to their confinement to recuperate for the next round of abuse.

  When his gag was removed, Ruby, tight-lipped as ever, refused even to divulge his name—what, after all, was his name? Then he heard one of his interrogators remark in an aside to his senior officer that the previous chap had offered as his sobriquet the very original, “My name is Death.” Which gave the Baal Shatikah a competitive pang. “My name is Death!” he asserted, and though his voice rasped from his injuries, so loudly did he make his claim that others along the corridor, upon hearing him, echoed the same declaration from their cells. It was the closest Ruby had come to laughing out loud in an age, and as for the torture, it was a blessing, really, as the exquisite pain revived the anger he could no longer generate on his own.

  Then one day the torture stopped and the prisoners were marched into an open-air courtyard where an ad hoc affiliation of a military and civic tribunal summarily condemned them to be hanged. They were issued the red sackcloth uniforms reserved for the doomed and transferred to above-ground cells to await execution. Ruby’s companions were permitted to share a common cell, but the Baal Shatikah (whom the Brits never learned they had in their custody) was housed alone in deference to his own request. There in a tomb-size compartment with its bucket and lice-ridden bourge, Ruby set about determining his options for escape. This was not so much from any ardent desire to avoid the gallows as from an internal engine fueled by the years of barbarous application. He was further vitalized by the discovery, in a floor crevice where an earlier prisoner had secreted it, of a rusty razor blade. But before he had decided whether to use the blade to begin a tunnel or simply to slit a guard’s throat, the question became moot; for the wall of the adjoining cell was blown away, taking with it the cinderblock partition separating that cubicle from Ruby’s own.

  It happened that his partners in crime, Aryeh and Asher, had taken it upon themselves to deprive the British command of their vengeance. Drunk on the idealism of Jewish revolution, Ruby’s neighbors called themselves Hasmoneans and were frequently heard singing the Revisionist anthem: “Soldiers without names are we.” In their ecstatic anticipation of dying for the Homeland, they had a fragmentation grenade smuggled into the jail inside a pineapple. What they had in mind was to detonate the grenade on the gallows, thereby going out like Samson taking the Philistines with him. But when they learned that the other prisoners were to witness the execution, they opted instead for a kiddish hashem, a private martyrdom. Singing “Hatikvah,” they hugged each other with the grenade wedged between their chests like a shared heart and together pulled the pin. The building was rocked to its foundation, and through the film of dust from the rubble and the mist of blood from the fallen, Ruby walked out onto the stone flags of the prison compound. While the guards were still stunned, he scaled the wall, rolling over the barbed wire on top, which claimed his uniform and bit his flesh, then dropped to the Jaffa Road on the other side. There he prevailed upon the first beggar he found to render up his rags.

  He hid in attic rooms open to the weather, in flooded cellars; grew his beard and cut it again, cut his hair and grew it back out; wore cartwheel hats, tarbooshes, and sometimes the hijab burnoose and veil of the devout Muslim woman, his eyes rimmed in antimony. At some point Ruby got word to Yig and Yez that it was too dangerous for him to return to Tel Elohim. They tracked him to a fleabag safehouse in Nahariya and teased him that the mug shot that hung now in every post office in Palestine failed to do him justice, though at least the price on his head was handsome. Then they grew solemn as they informed him that his Aunt Esther and her husband Zerubavel, secretary of the Committee for National Liberation, had been identified among the martyrs at Kibbutz Szold, and Ruby had to think for a moment to remember who they were. Later on he rec
eived the news that his uncles themselves had been captured by a British squadron lying in wait for them as they set out to mine the railroad works at Emek Zvulun—for the targets of the Irgunists had shifted from Arab to Occupation holdings. They were hanged on the ramparts of the Acre fortress, whose scaffold (it was said) afforded a view over the delft blue Mediterranean as far as Europe, which like the Holy Land was becoming a charnel house.

  RUBY STOOD ATOP the watchtower in the hot khamsin wind and swiveled the mercury-vapor beam. He aimed it in the direction of the Arab village in the valley, where a dog barked, a muezzin sang, and the strings of an oud were being tuned. Beyond the village were the slopes of the Galilee, the massif of Mount Carmel, and the coast above Haifa scalloped with coves wherein lay the tramp vessels of the Beth Aliyah. These were the ships teeming with refugees fleeing a continent whose crimes were so incomprehensible that even its victims could not pronounce them. When they weren’t too busy blowing up British installations, the boys of the Resistance worked in concert with the Hagganah to spirit these illegal immigrants secretly ashore from their coffin ships. Once on dry land the refugees were dispersed to the outposts of Kfar Saba, Gan Hasharon, Kiryat Anavim, and Beit Haarava, which absorbed them. Sometimes Ruby joined the rescuers, if only to distract himself from the endless rounds of bombing post offices, bridges, barracks, and trains. As effective an assassin as ever, he found himself increasingly disengaged from such operations; his famous battle frenzy seemed to be lately in mothballs, and he’d begun to eye the survivors dredged from the sea as if they might embody something he’d lost. He was invariably disappointed, ready to toss the lot of them back overboard again; Master of Silence that he was, he couldn’t seem to forgive them for having no language with which to express what they’d seen.

  Slated for tonight’s catch was a crowd of refugees aboard a fishing trawler operated by a Greek ally of the Jews called the Goose. To retrieve them, once he was relieved from sentinel duty, Ruby descended the watchtower and pulled the knit cap with its elliptical eye slits over his head; he climbed into the tin-can Minerva alongside the others and was driven to the coast, where he boarded a launch and rowed out to net the survivors. They were the usual collection of phantoms and wraiths, none of whom would ever entirely occupy their own lives again, but there was among them a girl with a shorn head like a gosling’s who for some reason caught Ruby’s eye. She was wearing a long skirt of drapery-thick flannel beneath which her legs were carelessly parted; she carried slung peddler-wise over her shoulder a pillowslip containing what appeared to be books. There was nothing especially prepossessing about her, no distinguishing feature beyond the dreamy cast of her eyes—so why should his first sight of her prompt such a prickling in Ruby’s brain? Then a word from the Baal Shatikah (words from that quarter being in such short supply) and the girl was dispatched to Tel Elohim, where Ruby might continue to follow her progress.

  He was hard-pressed to explain the feelings she awoke in him, feelings he neither welcomed nor rejected but only suffered like an infirmity. What was it about this particular chit of a girl that intrigued him? You certainly wouldn’t have called her beautiful. Her pale complexion was sprinkled with freckles that appeared to be in the process of peeling like dried mud, her hooked nose was as narrow as a rudder, and the remnant of her auburn hair resembled sagebrush. But for the patched lilac skirt she chose to wear despite the heat, and the slight swell of her breast, there was little about her to indicate that she wasn’t a stripling boy. Her emerald eyes, however, unlike the inwardly focused orbs of her fellow “illegals,” were wide open, their pupils (when not peering into a book) fixed intensely on a place whose center, Ruby decided, was everywhere. Among the vague emotions she provoked in him was a curiosity to see precisely what it was she was looking at.

  Her name was Shprintze, which Ruby learned the way he learned everything else about her, by spying—and she remained Shprintze even as the other girls were trying on Tamara, Tirzeh, and Gabi, in the hope that a new name might erase the stain of the old. Like the other newcomers she performed the tasks the commune assigned her with a ready obedience, looking in her draggled skirt and head rag every inch the rustic peasant maid. The problem was she was playing the wrong part. Unlike the others she’d refrained from burning her old clothes and drawing new ones from the common pool, the khaki shorts, olive drab shirts, and lace-up boots that were the uniform among Zionist homesteaders. She was a milkmaid, a laundress, a bird nester; wielding her pruning shears like talons she chased sparrows from the grape arbor; she harvested olives from the grove behind the children’s house, pressed the pulp between millstones, and cranked the centrifuge that separated water from oil with the motion of a schoolgirl swinging a rope. But to Ruby’s practiced eye, as he watched her toting pails or cradling a peck of oranges in her apron, she seemed only to be making believe. While the others began in time to be assimilated into the life of the colony, Shprintze—not unlike the Baal Shatikah himself, who’d built a hut beyond the settlement’s barbed-wire perimeter—remained aloof. She did not contribute to the impromptu truth-telling sessions conducted after meals in the dining hall, when the survivors broke down in their confessions and submitted to the consolations of the commune. (The kibbutzniks had become seasoned hands at ministering to hysteria.) Nor did she ever, at least in Ruby’s hearing, attempt to use the sacred tongue.

  He could only speculate as to why she chose to remain an outsider, though the answer may have been merely that she preferred the company of her books. Because when she wasn’t performing her impersonations of goose girl or serving wench, she was poring over one of the vermin-nibbled volumes that were the only baggage she’d salvaged from her past. That was the posture in which Ruby was most likely to observe her—sprawled among the flowers called blood of the Maccabees that stippled the meadow just beyond the compound—as he grazed the sheep he’d appointed himself to watch.

  He was as inept a shepherd as he was skilled at the trades of cutthroat and bloodletter. Wanting only the excuse of a task that lent itself to solitude, he had no interest in the science of animal husbandry. He could barely distinguish a lamb from a ewe, and regarded the randy old ram with its shit-stained crupper as merely a shofar-on-the-hoof. He was deaf to advice concerning the best spots to graze them, often leading the herd instead of to grass or stubble into unharvested fields of wheat and flax, which they devastated. He developed some aptitude in the use of the lasso but seldom had occasion to use it, since the kibbutz had voted that branding livestock was too charged a means of identification; and he failed to renew the salt licks that lay about the wadis like a sculpture garden. With the herd dog Abimelech, who belonged to everyone and no one, Ruby had never established any rapport. An odd hybrid of border collie and dachshund, the animal was more effective at terrorizing the flock than at corralling them into their fold. Nevertheless, despite his laxity Ruby had grown rather fond of the sheep. This is not to say he was moved to protect them from predators, diseases, or the poison grasses that caused them to inflate like fleece dirigibles. What he did protect them from, however, was being slaughtered or even sheared, which meant that the herd were in essence pets and a useless burden to the cooperative. Recently the secretariat had issued an ultimatum to Ruben ben None that he should render up the sheep for wool and mutton or relinquish his position to another.

  “When the Third Temple is built,” he broke his usual silence to reply, “you can use them for a blood offering.” Which statement actually satisfied some of the more canonical among the delegates.

  There came an afternoon like any afternoon when he was sheltering from the five o’clock sun beneath a red clay overhang while tending his flock. The agitation that was his companion since the arrival of the girl was accompanied at that hour by the jangling of the bellwether, the bleating of the ewes, and the yapping of the idiot dog Abimelech—all of which Ruby endured like noises plucked upon his tightly strung nerves. Suddenly he was aware of someone’s sandal-shod approach from down the tusso
cky slope to his left, and the girl Shprintze padded into view carrying a book. Having attained the privacy of a spot beyond the settlement’s boundaries and further obscured by a herd of sheep, she hoisted the flannel skirt to her haunches and squatted to pee. At that moment, no longer silenced by curiosity, Abimelech commenced yelping again.

  The girl looked up but did not start and, catching sight of the dog’s presumed master crouched in his cleft, inquired in a tone of perfect ingenuousness even as she continued watering the earth, “Bistu a shed?” Are you a demon?

  Confounded on several counts, Ruby felt cornered and slid farther into the hollow until his back bumped against the dirt wall. For one thing, he was surprised that he had understood the question, so slight was his knowledge of Yiddish, though the language had been in the air again due to the influx of illegals who spoke it. (They never spoke it for long, since mameloshen was regarded as the language of victims and for that reason practically outlawed in HaEretz.) Then there was the nature of the question itself, asked so earnestly that it gave Ruby pause to consider. He’d been a number of things during his years in the Land, few of which had much in common with the lives of regular citizens. In the end, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender, he could only answer, “Ich kayn vays.” I don’t know.

  Dropping the skirt, underneath which she apparently wore nothing at all, the girl rose to her feet and stepped a few paces toward him.

  “Ich bin a shed,” she confided in her flutey voice, and again he was taken aback by her candor. “Ich bin a shlecht yiddisher tochter.” A bad Jewish daughter.