The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  The mongrel Abimelech, who barked at shadows and chased echoes, never bothered to signal the shepherd’s approach. (He adored Dalilah and attempted to court her with acrobatics resembling rabid convulsions, though she spurned his overtures and left him to hump the sultry air.) Iqbal, however, always announced his own advent with the usual insults, most of which remained unintelligible to Ruby. But mostly Ruby was indifferent to the shepherd’s language and satisfied to hunker beside him as he dredged a brazier from his bottomless sack for roasting gobbets of shashlik. Then the two of them would gnaw the leathery meat, their faces slathered with the grease, and afterward Iqbal, still unweaned, would suck the teat of his single goat until it staggered.

  Once, as they sat among the saline bushes in a sandy stream bed, their sheep resting in the shade of the shallow chasm, the sun clouded over and a sudden storm came up. Even Iqbal, attuned though he was to every mood of the weather, was caught off guard. So torrential was the downpour that before the sheep could stir or the shepherds, languid from the afternoon’s hashish, rouse themselves, a flash flood had filled the empty channel like the bursting of a dam. Struggling against the surging current, Ruby and Iqbal attempted to harry their animals to higher ground. Most found footholds among the rocks of the defile and were able to scramble to safety in advance of the rising trough, but a few were deluged by the instantaneous wall of water and carried away. At one point Ruby himself was swept off his feet by the turbulence, and though he didn’t suppose himself in any danger, the shepherd plunged into the rushing conduit to rescue him. An aggravated Ruby found himself clutched by the beard, tugged from beneath the armpits, and dragged up the steep bank of what had become a roaring watercourse. But even then the boy did not let go his embrace (which was leavened now by an element of tenderness) until Ruby shoved him abruptly away, sitting up in time to see the incontinent old ram he’d been trying to save being swept downstream.

  Not long after that the girl came to live at Tel Elohim. Then the shepherd discovered that he had been demoted in his friend’s affections to something like the rank held by Abimelech—to whom Ruby occasionally tossed scraps though mainly the dog had to fend for itself. Soon the Jew was no longer alone and the company he kept was exclusive, so that even Iqbal, who had never been shy about intruding on his solitude, knew enough to steer clear of their dalliance. From time to time, however, Ruby was aware that the boy had not entirely vanished and every so often might catch sight of him standing storklike on a single leg in the distance, leaning pensively on his graven staff. After a while, however, he no longer looked out for the shepherd and had all but forgotten the existence of Iqbal bin Fat Fat.

  Meanwhile Shprintze’s pregnancy was the talk of the commune. For one thing, every pregnancy in the Yishuv was a participatory event and every expectant mother considered the property of the entire kibbutz, since the child she carried was destined to become another hero of labor. This was how the notion of a universal redeemer had been translated into the argot of the Zionist enterprise. That the child in question was also the fruit of an unsanctified union was of little consequence to most, but that it belonged to an individual whose status in the community was dubious at best, made it the more incumbent on the settlers to claim the mother and her offspring as their own. The women especially began to show an inordinate interest in Shprintze, a concern from which the girl retreated, sticking all the closer to the companion whose domicile she now shared. The tension between the misfit couple and the tribe to which they only marginally belonged increased throughout the months of the girl’s gestation, during which she and the semi-retired assassin seldom left the vicinity of his firebrick hut. The hut itself had been somewhat transformed from its previously Spartan interior by the shelves Ruby built to display Shprintze’s books. There were the Yid artifacts as well, the spice boxes and candelabra, that the girl had reclaimed from items the other survivors had discarded, which lent a certain coziness to the decor of what had previously been a monastic cell.

  Contributing to that warmth (infernally whenever the Primus stove was lit) were the dishes that Shprintze served her man. But as cooking was for her a largely make-believe activity like her reading, the women of the settlement, anxious for the health of the unborn, had begun again to leave anonymous offerings on the doorstep. These usually consisted of dense tcholent, figgy compotes, and ragouts, though occasionally some more outré concoction might appear—such as boiled sheep’s eyes in a camel’s-urine marinade seasoned with spices found in no Jewish pantry. (Such reminders that the shepherd had not completely quit the scene were noted only in passing.) While Ruby viewed the commune’s charity as an unbidden invasion, Shprintze appeared to accept it as her due, the propitiation of demons having, as she knew, a long tradition. Their domesticity was in any event something they both seemed to savor, and even Abimelech, who’d always valued his own independence, now stayed close to the hovel. Having come to acknowledge the girl in her delicate condition as his mistress, the dog established himself as the guardian of hearth and home.

  At night by the light of a spirit lamp strafed by moths, they performed their ritual affinities. They read the tales about this one’s headstrong daughter and that one’s bumpkin son in search of their bashert, their fated one. During interludes they stepped out into the evening air, where Ruby would lift Shprintze’s shift to bare her distended belly in a direct challenge to the waxing moon. Sometimes on the pallet that had replaced the folding cot that was too narrow for the both of them, the girl would walk the length and breadth of Ruby’s nakedness with her fingers. She lingered over his scars, each of which had its origin in a different place, so that examining them was tantamount to making a tour of the Holy Land. And though the Baal Shatikah was half a stranger to Ruby now, the pressure of her fingers on his wounds revived each episode (in Nur Chams, Al-Qibilya, on the Damascus Road) with a sharpness that was a relief from the more excruciating pain of loving and being loved.

  They never discussed what they would do when the baby came, so permanent a condition did Shprintze’s tumescence seem. And while Ruby was constantly thumping her belly to test for ripeness, placing an ear to her extruded navel to hear the burbling beneath, while he rubbed her like a lamp containing a captive genie, he never expected that anything would really emerge. Of course, neither prospective parent had any education in these matters, nor was there a resident physician to advise them, but there was scarcely a woman who had not been schooled in midwifery. So, when the labor throes began and Shprintze gave herself up to wave upon wave of banshee shrieks, Ruby lost what was left of his pride and, leaving Abimelech to guard the girl, ran down the hill, calling to the women for help. They had apparently been waiting for just such an alarm. With them they brought provisions for almost every eventuality, though once they’d arrived at the hut on the ridge, the midwife-in-chief, a Rumanian immigrant with a nubbly frown, discovered the one thing they were missing. For there on the doorstep wrapped in a date frond was a gift: a taproot shaped like a seahorse, which the woman, sniffing before licking, determined to be a rare herbal parturifacient: “Der kishef!” she proclaimed. Magic! She had her assistants mash it to powder with a pestle, stir it into a glass of mint tea, and administer it to the caterwauling girl, who was soon after delivered of an infant with pipestem limbs and a gourdlike head—a peevish boy whom she and her demon lover proceeded to cherish beyond reason.

  THERE WAS NEVER a specific moment when Ruby bowed out of military operations altogether. Rather, he had removed himself by degrees, until he was a warrior no more but only the shepherd of a flock of blighted sheep dwelling on the outskirts of a community that regarded him as extraneous. He still had his allies among the fresh breed of freedom fighters, young men in flared breeches and riding boots who had replaced their maimed and imprisoned forebears. They had been reared on tall tales of the Baal Shatikah’s deadly expertise, and assured one another that when the time was ripe the old campaigner would rise up phoenixlike to deal the coup de grâce to Israel’s foe
s. Whenever the opportunity arose, they attempted to curry favor with him, singing his praises within his earshot and entreating him to fill the vacuum left by the martyred Yair Stern, though Ruby seldom dignified their blandishments with a response. Moreover, the presence of Revisionists in their midst had always been a source of controversy among the settlers, who had never asked for their protection in the first place and were additionally irked at having to carry the dead weight of Ruben ben None. But after the birth of his son, when the women had rallied to the young mother’s aid, things began to change.

  The inveterately private couple still refrained from placing their off-spring among the pool of infants in the children’s house while they did the work of the collective, work they had in any case opted out of. But since Yudl’s delivery and his subsequent cranky demands, the new parents had found it necessary to reintegrate themselves little by little into the society of the kibbutz. In exchange for pabulum, nappies, and the quinine-laced formula the baby required, Shprintze began to take her turn again among the mortals. With the squinch-faced infant dangling marsupial-like from a sling around her neck, she arranged the books in the recently established colony library, where she infiltrated the small Hebrew collection with her Yiddish texts. Lest his son be regarded a pariah like himself, Ruby offered his services for odd jobs, again displaying the talent for tinkering he’d inherited from his own starry-eyed papa. He devised a mechanical scarecrow to frighten away birds from the vineyard, used his skill at setting booby traps to blow a hole for a rainwater cistern, and recalling his sojourn among moonshiners designed a still for the manufacture of potato schnapps. In his absence his neglected flock strayed into alien pastures, where they were slaughtered by hostile neighbors to the dismay of nobody but Ruby himself, who silently mourned their sacrifice to higher priorities. No longer afraid of him, the colonists relaxed into a general impression that paternity had tamed the assassin: He was judged a reformed character whose past all somewhat self-righteously forgave. So when the circuit-riding rabbi traveled through the settlement on his sumpter nag, they felt confident enough to approach the regenerate Ruby about having his son circumcised. He had no reason to refuse provided he be allowed to guide the palsied old rabbi’s knife—“like,” observed a waggish onlooker, “cutting a wedding cake.” The remark inspired the colonists to propose that, as one good turn called for another, the rabbi might as well go ahead and consecrate the mother and father’s union. “They can stroke the prepuce,” the same wag suggested, “till it spreads to a bridal canopy.”

  Since there was no time to advertise the spur-of-the-moment event, the wedding was a modest affair. Still, the few women in attendance insisted that, maiden or no, Shprintze should wear the communal bridal gown, which they altered then and there to fit her no longer so boyish frame. Also made available was a much recycled gold-filled wedding band, a decanter of plum brandy, and the machinist Kotik Gilboa playing “Rozhinkes mit mandlen” on his fiddle at the bride’s request. The handful of IZL boys drew straws for the honor of standing up for the Baal Shatikah, and the ceremony—the old rabbi seemed anxious to wash his hands of it—was over in a matter of minutes. Ruby crushed the glass with his heel as if stomping a dormouse and, with the colicky Yudl squirming larvalike between them, kissed the bride. Then the witnesses toasted their health before dispersing, though one uninvited guest, tarrying with his dog behind a medlar at a distance of some hundred yards, continued to look on with an invidious eye.

  However tentative, Ruby’s reentry into the life of the settlement gave him an aura of accessibility, which made the young bravos of the revolutionary underground think he might now be fair game; and so they came calling. By this time the mood of the Yishuv had altered, and even the most accomodationist among the settlers were now in favor of hastening the departure of the British at any cost. The abuses of the centuries had culminated in such obscenities that enough was finally enough: Amale-kites be blotted out, give us a home! For his part Ruby was so wracked by devotion to his wife and child that he could scarcely abide the thought of leaving them for even a day. But when the lads, some of whom had seen action in Europe in the Jewish Brigade and so could not be easily ignored, appealed for his assistance, he listened; though when they insisted that his participation in the next major tactical strike would be a boost to morale, he deprecated the idea: His soldiering days were over. But eventually they began to wear down his resistance, and in his new capacity as member in good standing of the Kibbutz Tel Elohim, Ruby was at last persuaded to yield just this once to their pleas.

  This was during the Days of Awe, when the newlyweds ate apples and honey and attended Rosh Hashonah services in the sweatbox of the cinderblock chapel. Shprintze wore the toweling sling containing the baby, which Ruby had almost come to regard as an auxiliary appendage, almost as if mother and son were one flesh; and though the whiffy Yudl might have been an obstacle to their intimacy, his doting father found the contrary to be the case: He adored his wife and child as a single entity. While it amused him at first that the baby’s unhappy face did seem to partake of the demonic, he now insisted with Shprintze that the boy appeared more normal every day. After the heat of the shul even the arid air of the biscuit-dry Galilean hills was refreshing, and the couple strolled along with the congregation down the gravel road to the irrigation well. Dividing a fistful of challah crumbs between herself and her husband, to the accompaniment of the baby who hadn’t stopped bawling since his bris, Shprintze invited her man to perform the tashlikh ritual with her. This involved tossing the crumbs representing their sins of the past year into the well.

  “Better,” said Ruby, thinking of all the years prior to the last, “I should throw the whole of myself in.” But Shprintze assured him it wouldn’t matter anyway, since during the holy days when the Book of Life remained open, no one could die. Then it seemed as if the ritual they observed was their real life, while demon and demoness was something that Ruby and Shprintze only played at to add spice to their unpublic hours.

  The action, planned for just before Yom Kippur, involved robbing a bank, which Ruby considered a purposeless exercise. The eroding British occupation, clearly on its last legs, had lately resorted to desperate measures: They attempted to enforce curfews after bombings and cordoned off various settlements, though nothing helped; the harassment of their troops and installations was unrelenting. Having realized that keeping the peace between Arabs and Jews—a plague on both their houses—was more trouble than it was worth, the occupiers were all but ready to pull up stakes and bugger off forever. But the directorate of Lehi or Palmach, or whatever high command the boys were taking their orders from these days, had decided that ordinary life should be disrupted at every instance in order to prove that the Brits had lost control. So one simmering September morning, having bid a guilty good-bye to his wife and child, Ruby set out for Tel Aviv with a carload of callow guerillas in a backfiring old canvas-roofed landaulet. The vehicle’s smelly interior was crammed with lads singing “Hazak hazak venithazak, from strength to strength we grow stronger,” until their older comrade, by the authority they’d vested in him, told them to please shut up.

  After an interminable couple of hours they arrived in the city, where they proceeded to bungle the whole operation. The robbery of the Barclay’s Bank in Nahalat Benjamin Street itself went off smoothly enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. It didn’t help that the dauntless Baal Shatikah, curled up in a craven funk, had refused to leave the car. Giving up on him, three of the boys, themselves seasoned conspirators, tied bandannas over their faces, entered the art deco building with an empty suitcase, and emerged minutes later, as the alarm began to sound—two of them with weapons drawn while the third lugged the suitcase now bulging with piasters and pounds sterling. They jumped into the car and urged the driver to step on it, but the driver, a recent recruit from whose rabbity eyes the tears were streaming, may have been infected by the behavior of their celebrity passenger; because instead of heading along the prescribed es
cape route down Allenby, he became disoriented and steered the car into the nearby Carmel Market. He ploughed into a throng of shoppers at a Gazos stand, wounding several including a little girl in a hijab, whose legs were crushed beneath the screeching wheels. In the succeeding melee a mixed crowd of Arabs and Jews, united for once in their outrage, attacked the car (which was mired in produce) and dragged out its passengers. The boy in the watchcap hugging the suitcase to his chest, having received a boot to the gut, dropped his burden onto the pavement, where it burst open, releasing a blizzard of currency. Their anger instantly transformed to greed, the mob scrambled over one another in pursuit of the fluttering bills, and under cover of the commotion Ruby managed to make a getaway on foot. He took cover under the beach promenade among starfish and discarded “French yarmelkes,” waiting for shame to overtake him, but instead felt only relief at having preserved himself for the sake of his family. After dark he stole from his hideout to catch a ride in a sherut packed with winery workers headed north from the port, arriving around midnight at the village of Qever Shimon from which he walked seven desolate kilometers to Tel Elohim.

  Despite the early hour there were lights on in the long dining hall, and the short-wave radio, perhaps broadcasting news of the botched robbery, could also be heard. The kibbutzniks would be seated at their benches apportioning blame, and though Ruby wondered if other militia members had escaped the fracas—or had they been apprehended, beaten to death?—he crept past the hall in his anxiousness to return to his family. Trudging up the powdery slope, however, he found himself unable to hasten his steps, his legs teetering as if suddenly bowed with age. Ordinarily Abimelech, who seldom deigned to greet him, would be snoring beside Shprintze on the plank bed Ruby had constructed for his wife and himself, but tonight the dog was outside cavorting in front of the hut, performing the stunts he generally reserved for Dalilah. Ruby heard his son’s hiccupping cries as he approached, which was nothing unusual, he was a fractious child; though upon entering the vine-knitted dwelling, he wondered that his wife could sleep through the sobbing of the kaddish at her breast. (Ruby had also built a cradle on rockers but the baby hardly slept in it.) He sat down in utter exhaustion on the mattress beside his bride, her features cameo-pale in the dim interior, and made to remove her arm from around the child. But when he touched it, he recoiled and sprang back to his feet, because the arm, scaly and cool, began to slide away from the bundled infant like a plump tourniquet unwinding and plopped onto the plywood floor. There, incandescently white, it lengthened and coiled and lengthened again as it slithered out the open door, where under a red moon in a lapis sky it grew dark and stiff as an axle. Then a slim figure with a sack slung over its shoulder, followed by a prancing dog, came forward from the shadows to lift the staff from the ground and, while Abimelech whimpered after them, pad swiftly away.