by Steve Stern
The rabbi’s thick eyelids wavered as his fingers groped for the snuffbox on the table before him. Taking a pinch, he stuffed it up a hairy nostril, sneezed, and wiped his nose with his beard. Then, slightly revived, he reached for Benjy, whom he lifted with a wheeze onto his lap. The Padauers’ little curiosity went stiff, wincing at the old man’s sour breath and piss-pot odor as the tzaddik proceeded to bounce him on his knee. Unforbearingly, Benjy submitted to the inspection of his turtle-shaped head and pointy ears, but when the old man stuck a fat finger in his mouth, he clamped down reflexively with one of his few remaining teeth. Seemingly unfazed, the rabbi pried himself loose and returned their bogus child to the custody of his parents.
“These type shretelekh,” he uttered, “they ain’t known to have a poisonous bite.” He nonetheless offered the offended finger for a disciple to kiss.
Morris and Mama Rose looked at one another dispiritedly, but Rabbi ben Yahya wasn’t finished. In a phlegm-filled voice from deep in his throat, he began to list all the things Benjy was not: he was not from sitra achra, the provenance of demons; he was neither lantekh nor kapelyushnikl, who hailed from horeh khoyshdekh, the mountains of darkness, and were no damn good. Theirs was a member of a relatively harmless race of underground folk—“and this one, the pitsvinik, he got left in him no mischief at all.”
It was Rose who first attempted to state the obvious: “Then the peanut is not”—which Morris undertook to complete—“our son?”
“Cholileh,” said the rebbe. “God forbid.”
The noise in the room had reached a pitch that precluded conversation, the dervish dancing of the enraptured disciples causing the building to tremble as from another aftershock. In the midst of it the Padauers raised their voices to ask the rebbe if he knew what might have happened to their original offspring, him of the flaxen curls.
Eliakum ben Yahya cupped a hand to his tufted ear so that they had to repeat the question, but again he was unable to hear. After failing a third time, Morris, in his frustration, shouted, “What should we do now with him?” indicating the creature.
“Him?” said Rabbi ben Yahya, sinking back into his former torpor. In fact, he appeared to be quite unwell. “Why not show to him a good time?” he breathed. “Is playing now they tell me on the Hotel Peabody rooftop the New Pygmy Minstrels, that it’s fun for the whole family I’m led to believe.”
Then he closed his eyes and the downcast Padauers, taking hold of little Benjy again, had to agree they could use a night out, which they hadn’t enjoyed since their courtship days.
Even as his uncle chased after his wife’s ghost as far as Market Square Park, Muni Pinsker sat on his cot in his odorous underwear chronicling the event. He didn’t need to be in the park to observe the episode. If he left his narrow room at all, it was only to fetch another inkwell or nib or more stationery; he visited the watercloset when necessary, shared with Pinchas the food that Mrs. Rosen sent across on a tray suspended from the pulleyed clothesline, then hurried back to his room. In the scribe’s ranging mind, experience and narrative occurred with a simultaneity that made it impossible to know whether the act prompted the story or the story the act.
Tonight Muni munched a stale rugelach from the dish he’d taken to the kitchen to offer Pinchas, who was absent, but Muni never missed him since he followed his uncle’s every movement in the history he was busy composing. Or was it the reverse? His uncle did whatever Muni wrote that he did. Along with ongoing events the nephew recorded others that came before and after, which also somehow happened concurrently: such as General Bedford Forrest’s cavalry charge through the doors of the Gayoso House Hotel, and a monthlong camp meeting on the bluff, where the bull pen was filled with straw so that attendees who got the holy shakes would not be injured—all of which took place even as the butcher Makowsky and Bluestein the mohel merrily prepared to circumcise young Nathan Halprin’s heart.
These things Muni cited while remaining holed up in his cell for an indefinite time, time itself having become as still as standing water. The length of his tangled hair and beard attested to the fact that time still flowed, however, and the music from the fiddle outside his window was both doleful and demoniac.
At the news of Katie’s untimely passing imparted to him by Jenny Bashrig, who abandoned the Pinch soon after, Pinchas Pin never budged. He stayed fixed to the kitchen chair he’d sat vigil in for weeks. Banished from the bedroom by a wife who didn’t want him to witness her suffering, he had wondered if his obedience were due to consideration or cowardice. Still he’d trusted her to the care of Doc Seligman and the watchful Jenny; told himself that when the crisis passed, as it must, she would welcome him back into her presence, where he would find her hale and lovely again, and less cruel. But that outcome had not ensued, and so Pinchas was determined to remain obstinately unmoving until such time as Katie’s fate was reversed. After all, there had never been a satisfactory diagnosis, and an affliction without a name was no affliction at all, and therefore had no power to vanquish its victim. So, mulish, he sat and waited beyond the time when garments should have been rent, mirrors turned to the wall, the burial society called in to wash the corpse. Never mind: tradition no longer figured in Pinchas’s frame of reference, just as illness and death had no place in the present-day Pinch. His neighbors, with their chronic complaints of shingles, piles, furuncles, goiters, and fatty hearts, were not complaining anymore. They had surrendered to an epidemic of unbridled felicity that supplanted illness and death; dying they would now have regarded as bad form.
The lights that streamed through the kitchen window from the jubilee beyond made auroras of the waving chintz curtains, while Pinchas continued to sit in dull denial. Grief at this stage was its own anesthesia: he felt nothing. Oh, maybe some bitterness, as when he suspected that his wife’s malady was his punishment for failing to lie with her as her husband these past several years. But if so, hadn’t he been punished enough? “Katie, come back already!” he shouted, then had a laugh at the sheer idiocy of his outburst; then forced himself finally to his feet and went to see if she might have obeyed his summons.
He was met at her door by a sickly-sweet odor that filtered into his nostrils and penetrated his guts where feeling began to return. The resulting pain was exquisite, as when (wrote Muni) frozen limbs begin to thaw. Stumbling into the bedroom, he found a blue marble woman—her ice-gray hair threaded with rust—laid out in her nainsook chemise as on a tomb. But before Pinchas could fall upon her as his pain dictated, a thing happened that would have violated the limits of his freethinking consciousness, had that consciousness not been already so savaged: for Katie’s spirit—he assumed it was her spirit though it wasn’t in the least diaphanous and looked instead uncommonly alive—had begun to detach itself from her dormant body and, once free, rushed directly out of the room. Pinchas watched her departure, wondering if he were the catalyst, that even in the tranquility that had succeeded her suffering, his wife preferred to elude his regard. But so urgent and quick did her risen shade appear that it rendered all but superfluous her supine form; it was in every way the animated likeness of the original, which confused Pinchas as to whether you could even say that the ghost was deceased. And as dead was still not a concept he was able to attach to his wife, Pinchas managed to overcome a disabling anguish and lumber after her out the door and down the hall.
“Katie, my dove,” he called to her, “this is foolishness, no?”
He had some vague intention of overtaking the apparition, because the more distance her spirit put between itself and his wife’s remains, the more permanent did that separation become. He realized as well that this logic, unique to the moment, was at the same time entirely groundless, though it must have some basis in reason—mustn’t it?—since Pinchas was a reasonable man.
“Och, Katie,” he cried, “I’m loving you beyond logic!” and would follow her, dead or alive, wherever she led. Or so he believed.
Once outside, Pinchas sloshed into the canal that th
e neighbors declared had its source in Eden, whose surface the shade walked briskly across. For their part his neighbors, if not playing at being shopkeepers and artisans, could be seen prospecting with strainers for the nacreous dream residue that bobbed like manna atop the shimmering stream. The jeweler Gottlob led his goose of a daughter through seasons that changed from one block to the next, bundling and unbundling her in her peacoat accordingly; the pharmacist Blen waved a butterfly net from his wherry to try and snatch a monkey-faced ziz bird out of the air. The North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened in the back of Makovsky’s to propose names for emotions that no one had previously experienced. So preoccupied were the citizens of the Pinch with their manifold phenomena that they scarcely noticed the bespectacled merchant in pursuit of his wife’s fugitive ghost.
On the crest of the little hill that was formed by the great oak’s uprooting, Katie paused a moment as a breeze stirred her auburn hair and pasted her chemise against her well-knit bones. Above her in the violet sky a cloud hung from a crescent moon like a rag from a scimitar; an owl hooted and the merchant’s phantom wife ducked without a backward glance below the surface of the earth. She sank among the inverted limbs that extended into the fissure as if she were descending a staircase. Having mounted the hillock behind her and peered over the brink into darkness, Pinchas balked in his pursuit; he’d come (it seemed) as near to the abyss as his tether would stretch. Weak from days without eating and further debilitated by a fathomless sorrow, he was snapped back to a plausible sanity: Katie’s ghost was not Katie; the wraith swallowed up by the earth’s open maw had nothing to do with his beloved wife. Hysteria had given way to a soberer rationale: he was a retail merchant again, and rather than follow a shade into the sunless unknown, Pinchas elected to turn around and retrace his steps back home.
He left the park and again confronted the spectacle of a neighborhood he perceived as a perverse impersonation of itself. But no sooner had he arrived at the bank of the canal than he realized that he’d succumbed to a stunning failure of nerve. Katie’s specter had more vitality than the corpse growing stiff back in the apartment to which he knew he couldn’t bring himself to return; the ghost had the greater claim to his allegiance, and Pinchas hated himself for having turned around. Isolated from his preposterous community by grief, he belonged to neither this world nor any other. Deeply ashamed, he stepped into an empty coracle moored to a hitching post in front of Poupko’s Hosiery and began paddling toward the place where all the lunacy had begun.
Mr. and Mrs. Padauer were leaving as Pinchas arrived. As they passed him on the landing above Hekkie’s Hardware, they were debating whether it was actually possible to travel beyond the borders of the Pinch.
“Mama,” Mr. Padauer was saying, “it’s like there’s around the neighborhood a Shabbos boundary, and can’t nobody come in or go out.”
“But we got special an exempt from the rebbe,” she countered, to which her husband concurred, though he had no recollection of having received such a thing.
Pinchas stepped undeterred into the dusty shtibl, where the Hasids were behaving as if it were Yom Kippur eve. They were performing the kaporeh ritual, twirling roosters by the spurred ankles above their heads. So rapidly were they twirling the chickens that the birds had begun to function as propellers, lifting the chanting fanatics into the air while feathers fell all around them like snow. Pinchas had to duck beneath the elevated disciples’ kicking feet as he approached the slumbering rebbe, with whom he had never before stood on ceremony. Still, he was a little daunted by the old man’s waxy countenance and stertorous breathing. But in his desperate need for answers, he gave the holy man’s shoulder a vigorous shake, until his lids began to open like jimmied clamshells.
“My Katie died and her ghost went in the hole in the park,” he stated defiantly.
“So you say,” replied the rebbe with a yawn, automatically reaching for his snuffbox.
Taking his response for indifference, Pinchas felt himself becoming incensed; he was on the verge of blaming the old kocker for his broken heart and demanding to know what he was going to do about it, when he remembered that Eliakum ben Yahya was not responsible. He and his band of zealots might be blamed for turning the Pinch into a sort of supernatural funfair, but he’d played no apparent part in Katie’s demise. No one was culpable, he reminded himself in an effort to calm his outrage, though he still couldn’t manage to rule out his own guilt. Then Pinchas became aware that the rebbe was posing a question.
“So why you didn’t follow her?”
“What?” said Pinchas, who’d heard him perfectly well.
The rebbe emitted a restive grunt. “Why you didn’t go after her?” he repeated.
“To what end?”
“Tahke, to bring her back.”
Again Pinchas was near to erupting with rage, until he realized, again, that the real target of his anger was himself. Hadn’t he gone to the park with that very purpose in mind before the madness of his resolve stopped him cold? Nevertheless he felt obliged to restate the irrefutable. “She’s dead!”
“So go where go the dead and bring her back.”
This was too much; he was being mocked. He’d compromised his integrity by seeking an audience with the old charlatan only to be humiliated for his trouble. “It’s what I deserve,” he supposed. But on the other hand, why had he come here if not for confirmation that the laws governing the conventions of the ordinary were in abeyance. And where wouldn’t he go to fetch back his Katie?
“You ’fraid?” Pinchas was dimly conscious of the rebbe inquiring.
“You damn for sure right I’m afraid!” he barked.
“But you been there before,” reasoned Rabbi Eliakum. “You should know from the way back already.”
Pinchas peered at him in perplexity before grasping the old man’s reference; everyone knew the story: how the young pack peddler had been rescued from his entombment during the Fever. He’d told it so often, leaving open the issue of whether he’d been actually dead and resurrected, that he’d practically leached the tale of any truth, but now the memory recurred in all its stark veracity: Katie had saved him then and had given him now an opportunity to return the favor. Wasn’t that what the rebbe implied? But it had been so long—not since leaving his country of origin—that Pinchas Pin had been called upon to take himself into the unknown.
Seeing how he was torn, Rabbi Eliakum, with a heavy “Oy,” endeavored to raise himself to his feet. Some of his Hasids, spent from the aerial exertion of twirling their chickens, had dropped from the ceiling to lie in a blissful heap among the cross-eyed birds. The rebbe made an exasperated gesture with his bearded chin as if to say they were beyond his influence now. “I’ll go with you,” he asserted. Then taking up his walking stick and a small siddur, which he slipped into the pocket of his caftan, he began to scoot haltingly toward the door. Even through his own forebodings Pinchas could see that the old man was in no shape to play his guide.
“Rabbi, you’re not well,” he cautioned.
“A nekhtiker tog,” pooh-poohed the old tzaddik. “Nonsense, a nice stroll will do for me good.”
Once on a visit to the Pink Palace Museum with Rachel, while standing in front of the case containing a pair of shrunken heads from Borneo, I tried pitching my voice.
“Oy,” I made one of the heads to say, and the other, also in an old man’s voice via Rachel, replied, “You’re telling me.”
An item now, you might have seen us together around town: at a poetry reading at the Bitter Lemon Coffeehouse or an Italian film about a plague of boredom at the Guild Art Theater. We made a road trip at Rachel’s suggestion into the Delta, a pilgrimage to the crossroads where bluesmen bartered their souls to the Devil, and to the grave of William Faulkner, where we shared a fried pie. We watched the sun set over the river, which left an indelible rose madder impression on my brain, even without the agency of LSD. Then we repaired to my apartment—never to hers; I’d yet to be invited to spend
the night at her place—where we fooled around and I read to her aloud.
I guess you could say I was happy. Hadn’t I waited all my days for such a girl? Still, there were times I wished I could get even closer to her, to penetrate her heart’s core as they say. Though wasn’t it enough that, to put it crudely, I was getting laid? So what if Rachel never quite responded in kind to the zeal of my attentions; never mind that her caresses often seemed almost maternal, as if she was moved less by desire than compassion. Not proud, I would take what I could get. Besides, I had sufficient enthusiasm for the drum-tight hollow of her abdomen and the scent of her tar-black hair, the spicy compartments of her mind, to compensate for whatever was lacking in her participation. The fact of our lovemaking was enough for me to build a small universe upon.
The sap from my arrested adolescence surged like an aneurysm whenever she touched me. Meanwhile The Pinch had receded from primary experience to the dimensions of a regular book; its pages ceased to swallow me whole as they had before my association with Rachel, whose history I would sometimes investigate as eagerly as I had North Main Street itself.
“When,” I’d asked her somewhat hesitantly, “did you lose your virginity?”
“Well, there was the unicycle when I was thirteen, and again …”
“Again?”
“… at fifteen, a boy from the planet Mongo …”
“Never mind”—becoming mumpish—“I don’t want to know.”
“What’s the matter, Lenny? Can’t you take your own medicine?”
She was right of course, since even with her I tended to trade mostly in double-talk. Still I refused to let her off the hook: “Were you ever—and you should know I stand ready to avenge you if you were—abused?”
“No,” she said demurely, “but there was the guitar-playing cantor at Temple Sinai—I was his pet—who asked me once if I wouldn’t mind spanking him. I remember I was so flustered I told him I had a cold.”