The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You did all that.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong? Is anything wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “In my dream,” he said, “in my dream I was napping. Not dreaming a dream, only dreaming my nap.”

  “Yes?”

  “Dreaming sleep.”

  “Yes? Dreaming sleep? Yes?”

  “Dreaming the darkness. Dreaming the dark.”

  “Oh,” I said, “oh.”

  “So I didn’t know when I woke up.”

  “Oh,” I said, “oh,”

  “Because I’m without sight,” he said. “Because I’m without sight and couldn’t tell if it was the satisfied comfort of fulfilled coze and snug or only the dark, ordinary blackness of the blind.”

  “Oh, Edward,” I said.

  “So I had to try to turn my head.”

  “Oh, Edward. Oh, Eddy,” I said, and didn’t bother to echo his words this time or ask him questions. Because I was no longer interested—this is my rabbi mode now—in playing straight man, in feeding him lines, my faked incredulity and poised astonishment. It was too awful. He was making me uncomfortable. Because this is just ballast I do, only the dappered-up charm of my phony accommodation, ingenuous as a host on a talk show egging on a naive guest. Maybe, awash in my agog wonder, by playing to reason, I could make out I was playing to God.

  “Or grab the safety rails of my raised hospital sides. I had to. To see if I’d throw up. To see if those liquids in my inner ear would move. And start the long rinse-and-tumble cycles of my spinning day. Help my father,” he growled suddenly, his sightless, bobbing, handsome head loose on his neck as he sought a kind of random, flailing contact with me. “Work for Charney,” he urged, “work for Klein. Help my father, help my brother. Help my mother and sisters put together an estate that will help me keep body and soul together after they’re gone. Please, Rabbi,” he pleaded, “provide, provide!”

  I got word my friend died and, when Connie came by for Stan Bloom’s Get-Well-Soon prayers, I had to tell her it had been called off.

  “He died?” Connie said. “Stan Bloom died?”

  “We’ll pray,” I said, “for the repose of his spirit.”

  “He died?”

  “Hey, Connie,” I said, “it happens. People die. It’s a fact of life.”

  I began the El moley rachamim.

  “El moley rachamim,” I prayed, “shochen bamromim, hamtzeh, menucho, nechon al kanfey hashchino, bemaalos k’doshim ut’horim kezohar horokeea mazirim, es nishmas Stanley Bloom sheholoch leolomoh, baavur shenodvoo z’dokoh b’ad hazkoras nishmosoh. B’gan eden t’hay M’nochosoh. Locheyn baal horachmim yastireyo beseser k’nofov leolomim—”

  “He died?” she said. “Stan Bloom died?”

  “—ve’itzror bitzror hachayim es nishmosoh—”

  “Stan Bloom,” she said, “Stan Bloom died?”

  “Connie,” I said, “hey, I’m praying here.”

  “He died?”

  “What’s all this about then?” I said, a little angry now, a little steamed. “He was my friend. You never even met him.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.”

  “He’s dead? Stan Bloom’s dead?”

  “Prayer’s like any other treatment, Connie darling. Unless you catch it early enough … Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan Bloom until he was already down for the count!”

  “You said you could pray him back to health. You said … Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so grisly!”

  “Come on, Connie,” I said.

  “I hate it here,” she said. “I hate looking out my bedroom window and seeing all those dead people.”

  “You don’t see dead people. Why do you say you see dead people? You see markers. You see a few markers. It’s like seeing a sign on the corner with the name of the street written on it. Why do you say you see dead people? If we lived on Jefferson Street and outside your window you saw the sign on the corner, would you say you saw Jefferson? Would you tell me you saw Elm or River or Michigan or Maple? Be a little reasonable, why don’t you? You see a few markers here and there in a field. Don’t say you see dead people.”

  “I hate it here, I do, I hate it here, I hate it!” she said over and over with her hands on her ears to drown out my objections.

  “Connie,” I said, holding her, stroking her hair. “Connie Connie Connie.”

  “I hate it! I hate it! I hate it here, I hate it! I hate it!”

  “Connie Connie Connie. Connie Connie Connie. Connie Connie Connie,” I told my child.

  “Please,” she sobbed. “Please?”

  “What, sweetheart? Please what?”

  “Let’s go away. Let’s go away from here.”

  “Leave our home?”

  “Daddy, our back yard is a cemetery!”

  “It’s beautifully landscaped.”

  “It’s perpetual care!”

  “Kids these days. I tell you, you can’t put a thing past ’em.”

  “Stop joking me! I’m not a tough customer!”

  “Can’t you tell I’m teasing? Maybe I was giving you a little more credit than you deserve.”

  “I’m a little girl. Smoke rises from some of the chimneys here even in summer! You smell flowers all year round. Even out of season you smell flowers, even in winter! Everyone is always all dressed up! The florist and the man in the dry cleaner’s. The barber wears a suit and tie, the man who drives the wrecker! I’m only fourteen years old. I shouldn’t have to live around all this goddamn death!”

  “It’s all right to let me know what’s on your mind once in a while,” I said, “even if you talk back, but don’t you ever say ‘goddamn’ to your father. I’m a rabbi, young lady, and don’t you forget it!”

  “You’re a goddamn fool!” she shouted.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “You’re a fool!” she screamed. “You’re a goddamned fool!”

  “Please God,” I prayed suddenly, “You-Who-Hear-Everything, You didn’t hear that! It was a slip of the tongue. She didn’t mean it. She was having a bad dream, she was talking in her sleep. Don’t strike her dead tonight when she’s just drifting off. And whatever You do, don’t You go disfiguring her, or crippling her legs for life, so no man will ever want to marry her unless it’s out of sympathy, and the only job she’ll be good for is sitting outside in the cold against a tall office building selling pencils out of her hat. CONSTANCE GOLDKORN OF LUD, NEW JERSEY, would never have said a thing like that if she’d been in her right mind, and she does too honor her father and also obeys some of the rest of Your commandments.”

  “Oh,” said my daughter, “you think you’re so cool. You think you’re so cool. But you know something? You’re just an asshole.”

  I slapped her face but she was already crying.

  My wife was in the doorway.

  “What happened? What’s wrong? Why is she crying?”

  “She’s got a fresh mouth.”

  “Darling,” she asked Connie, “what is it, what’s wrong?”

  “She’s got a fresh mouth. She called me a fool, she said ‘goddamn.’ She said I’m an asshole.”

  “Did you? Did you say these things to your father?”

  “She sure did. I was saying the El moley rachamim for Stan Bloom.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Shelley said. “Why would you do such a thing? He was praying the El moley rachamim for his old friend, Stan Bloom. Connie, he was talking to God!”

  “Sure,” Connie said. “That’s when he prayed I’d be crippled. That I’d lose my legs.”

  Shelley stared at me.


  “That stuff she was saying, she really ticked me off.”

  “Just because I’m so scared here, Mama. Just because I’m always so scared.”

  “Scared? You’re scared here? What are you scared of?”

  “I hate it here, Mama. I don’t have any friends my own age. They’re afraid to come. The place stinks of dead people. Anyway, it isn’t as if he was a regular rabbi. All he does is bury people.”

  “It’s where I work, it’s what I do.”

  “You’re really frightened?”

  “Oh,” Connie said, “it’s terrible.”

  “You’re lonely here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You miss your friends?”

  “How can she miss what she never had?”

  “See?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I only mean—”

  “He prayed God would disfigure me, that He’d throw acid in my face.”

  “I never prayed God would throw acid in her face. I never said that. That’s not my style.”

  “Didn’t you say about being struck dead in my sleep and that my face would be disfigured so no man would marry me?”

  “No.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “I’m not lying! I prayed He wouldn’t do those things! Didn’t I? Well, didn’t I!”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so, but that’s not how it sounded, that’s not what he meant.”

  “Oh, how it sounded, what I meant! As if Talmudists don’t spend entire lifetimes arguing over a comma, what’s meant by whether something that happened happened on a hill or at sea level.”

  “Look,” Shelley said, as no-nonsense, sensible and serious as I’d ever seen her, “I don’t have a very clear idea of what’s going on here. I don’t even know if it would make that much difference if I did. All I know is that the two people I love most in the world aren’t being very kind to each other.” Connie had stopped crying but was fretting with some yarn that had loosened on her sweater. “Listen to me!” Shelley said sharply. “Do you know how it hurts me, how it should hurt all of us, or how disgraceful it is when people who are supposed to love and protect each other lose that kind of control? Well, do you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Connie said.

  “So am I,” I said.

  “It’s probably something to do with the misconceptions we have about what one another is thinking. Jerry,” she said, “it’s true I’ve made good friends here, dear and wonderful friends. The mothers of the children in my car pools. The girls in my group. Old Hershorn, the stonecutter. Reb Shull and Reb Tober. Others in the congregation. But it’s not as if I was a hundred years old. I’m still young. You are too, Jerry. And if Connie’s even half as miserable as she says she is—”

  “I’m twice as miserable,” Connie said.

  “Well,” said Shelley, “there you are. It isn’t as if there’s anything really holding us here. You could get another place. At least it isn’t too late to start looking.”

  “You’d move? You want to move?”

  Then, as suddenly as I’d shifted from one language to another when Connie and I had been quarreling, Shelley’s finger was at her lips and she darted an anxious glance in our daughter’s direction at the same time that she seemed to be warning me. “Life is too short. Stan Bloom’s should have taught us that much. So then,” she announced with conviction, “if that means we have to say good-bye to the good friends we’ve made here, pick up and leave Lud, I guess we’ll just have to say good-bye to our friends, pick-e-le up and leave-e-le Lud!”

  five

  LEAVE Lud? Leave Lud? What were they, crazy? I’m Rabbi of Lud! It’s like being Rabbi of Walden.

  Anyway, I’d done it. I’d done it already. In ’74. I was Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline from March 1974 to April 1975. The plan was, I was to take care of the spiritual needs of the Jewish construction workers, conduct Friday night services for the Orthodox back-hoers and forklift truck and heavy earth-moving equipment operators, and lead all those frum pipe fitters, drillers, welders, hod carriers, riveters, riggers, roughnecks and roustabouts through the long arctic Shabbes. When the pipeline was finished I was supposed to send for Shelley and the kid and try to get on at this shul in Anchorage.

  Wasn’t that a time!

  With all the federal money and government contracts that were involved, the construction companies weren’t taking any chances. Men and women were hired on from all over. All races and religions, all sexes, creeds, colors and appetites. There were Filipinos, boat people, wetbacks from Mexico. There was a rumor, and I believe it, that some Russians had managed to cross the Bering Strait from Siberia and that two or three of them, legendary in cold, in snow and ice, were actually promoted to gang foremen before they were discovered and repatriated back over the ice to Russia. I ask you, only in America or only in America?

  But the scale of the thing! All that stir and drudge, all that hubbub and hustle! The sheer damn monumentality, I mean. Really, it was like we were building these pyramids of the latter-day.

  Which didn’t make me Moses.

  I arrived in Alaska on March 27, 1974, ten years to the day exactly since the great earthquake that nearly destroyed Anchorage, moved the entire Chugach mountain range five feet to the west and sent Valdez and much of southern Alaska tumbling into the Gulf of Alaska. And I tell you that even in March’s soapy, sluggish light I’d never had such an impression of distances. It was as if a mile were more profound than a mile, like those last few meters, say, compounding beneath the summits of great altitudes for mountain climbers. I’d not been the only passenger to gasp when I looked out the little porthole window of the plane as we came in over Anchorage to land and seen all that vastness and stretched space. (And it was the same on the ground, as if, in those steep, boggling latitudes, the fun-house principles took your senses, the near pushed farther off, middle distances moved to the horizon, and the horizon had somehow been pulled over its own edge and was already sliding down another side of the world.) “Mother of God, will you!” proclaimed one fellow, and “Sheesh!” another. And these weren’t tourists, mind you, signed up for the sights, the points of interest. To tell you the truth, they scared me a little. I had been too long in Lud maybe, good, comfortable old Lud, too long among disturbed, distressed and distracted people, but Jewish disturbed, distressed and distracted people. These folks were like echt goyim, or no, not goyim, echt or otherwise, not anything religious at all finally, so much as just your off-on-a-tear, boys-will-be-boys, wild-oat-sowing, salad-day drunks, brawlers and killers. Like me, most of them had answered the Alyeska company ads in the paper to get here, but not half a dozen among them seemed to have left actual houses. They seemed like men airlifted off oil platforms. They came down from watchtowers in forests, a lighthouse’s tight, spiral stairs. Sleeping in scaffolding, gantry, snug cement cubbies along the infrastructure of municipal industry—car barns, little rooms behind steel doors in subway tunnels. They lived on houseboats, or maybe in tents. They lived on sleds by sidings on railroad tracks, in converted buses, near mine shafts, in the wide cabs of trucks, and long trailers near high wooden fences on the rough, muddy, broken-glass-littered ground of construction sites.

  “Boy,” I told the guy sitting in the window seat when the hostess brought our lunch, “if I had a nickel for every tattoo.”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’d be a lot richer.”

  “What about it?”

  “And maybe I wouldn’t itch so much. Yours don’t itch?”

  But I was wrong to be afraid of them.

  Though the plane had landed just after five, it was almost seven in the evening by the time I checked into the Travelodge. Anchorage wasn’t much, not the city it is today, but the airport was a sort of no-frills O’Hare, booming, busy, unadorned as a discount department store and everywhere still under construction. Getting a cab was murder. Or rather getting out of the airport’s two narrow, crowded lanes and into open t
raffic was. Virtually every four-wheeled vehicle in town had been pressed into service as a taxi. (I had to share a ride into downtown Anchorage with a fellow in some guy’s metered wrecker, my two suitcases stuffed into the back with his duffel bag by the pulleys and chains, the big iron hook heavy as an anchor.) It was a kind of Marne, some Dunkirk of heroic gridlock.

  I tried to call Shelley, couldn’t get through to the desk, went, in my robe and pajamas, out to the lobby to a pay phone I’d seen when I checked in, but the line, which in the tiny motel lobby looked more like a milling mob—or even the deadlocked traffic in the streets—than anything as procedural as a line, was too much to deal with and I started back to my room.

  “What’s your name, honey?” a man asked who saw me in my bathrobe.

  “Leave it alone, Spike,” another man told him. “You forget it’s Alaska? You ain’t never heard of the high cost of living? Wait till you put some of that pipeline graft into your pockets before you try to make out with the hookers.”

  “Ah, shit,” the first man said, “what’s money for?”

  It was already after nine o’clock and too late to try to call Shelley in New Jersey. There was no room-service menu, the desk was still busy, and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to get a table in the dining room, so I ate only what I was able to choose from the candy and soft-drink machines and went to bed with a sort of false satiety. This combined with the strange racket I heard in the streets—sounds of traffic, punches, the raucous camaraderie of drunks—and reminded me again of the Marne and Dunkirk impressions I’d had earlier. It really was like wartime. Like being in some sleazy R&R town away from the fighting. Also, there’d been that ribbing I’d taken in the lobby. It had been good-humored enough, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them. Some were just kids—it was the beginning of the post-hippie era—intent on an adventure, out to pick up a trade, earn a few bucks and smoke some good dope under the aurora borealis, but that’s not why I was wrong to be afraid of them either.