A Blessing on the Moon

by Joseph Skibell

  “Ola, he’s your father,” I tell her.

  Her hair is braided and she looks at me through glasses so thick that her eyes resemble two large beetles trapped beneath the lenses. “He’s a murderer,” she says bitterly.

  “But he isn’t,” I say. “He hasn’t killed anyone.”

  “The war’s not over yet.”

  “Ola. Be reasonable.”

  “He’s profiting from someone else’s death, isn’t he? Aren’t we all? It’s just as bad.”

  “Until my sons or even my daughters can reclaim it, what point is there in letting the house stand empty? The soldiers would only put their horses in it.”

  “But no one asked you.”

  “How could they, child? I was dead.”

  “You only say this because you think I’m going to die. The truth is, you hate having us here.”

  She is right, of course, on both counts. She reads my thoughts apparently as quickly as they cross what’s left of my face. When I don’t answer her, she attempts to consume the meal her mother carried up. I look away as she devours, without hunger, the sausages. The squalid grease pools down her chin. My eyes trace the fading brown shadows that line the wallpaper. It’s bad enough she’s so young and a Gentile, but does she have to compound my guilt by gobbling down treyf? I should speak to her of this, but what can she do? Inform her mother that she will eat only ritually clean foods? Where would they find anyone to reconsecrate the kitchen and the pots? No, to mention it at all is to call into question the entire friendship, which I’m certain is illegitimate from any point of view.

  She lifts the cup from the tray, rinses her mouth with the last of its contents, swallows the mixture, and wipes her lips, not on her arms this time, but on a napkin, as I have shown her, in an attempt to please me. I raise my eyes from the wooden floor. A delicate black mask frames her eyes, a shadow beneath her skin, giving her the expression of a quizzical bandit. I know she does not eat so greedily because she is recovering from whatever is inside her, killing her. No, her appetite has returned because she is in love. With me. I have become the center for her of a universe that is daily shrinking. Preposterous, I tell myself. I do not know the exact laws regarding the living’s relationship with the dead, but I am certain, from any point of examination, that our liaison is unclean.

  12

  She has found a small collapsible telescope and a compass beneath her bed, in a toy chest one of my children must have forgotten about long ago. Her pleasure in this simple discovery is endearing to watch. She begs me to please take her to the roof to search for the moon, as soon as the night is clear, as soon as her health will permit it. Squirming around on her bed, she spies through the window on her neighbors, muttering imbecilic phrases of her own invention, which I take to be her impression of two pirates in conspiracy.

  She sleeps with the compass tight in one hand and her arm curled around the spyglass, lying half in shadow outside the lamp’s trembling circle of light. I sit near her bedside, attempting to catch up with my account in the ledger book, retrieved from my offices across the courtyard, but my words are as dry and my sentences as circular as wood shavings. The Rebbe has been gone now for so long that I have given up any thought of entering the World to Come. Perhaps during all the days and years of my life, when our holy men spoke of it, I had heard incorrectly or misinterpreted some vital phrase. True, I could have studied more or even asked for clarification. But my mind was too much on business and I have only myself to blame. If only I had stayed closer to the Rebbe after my death, instead of wandering around so much, perhaps I would not have missed his sudden departure. Together, we would have ascended, migrating through the Heavens, a joyful song in our mouths, and I would have forgotten all about this world and its travail.

  Ola yawns and stretches in her sleep, mumbling nasally the phrase “empty shoes.” She repositions herself in her pillows and the telescope falls to the floor with a soft, almost apologetic clink, the sound of yet another thing breaking. Bending over, I retrieve the cylindrical tube from the floor, raising it to my eye, and peer through it out the window. The lens has sustained a crack, not severe enough to dislodge it from its casing. I scan my town and see it, as it were, divided in two, the vein in the lens rendering everything slightly askew.

  For a long time, there is nothing moving, nothing to see, but then, along the river, my eye trails a young boy running in the thickets near its banks. The sky is purple in the dawn. He flies through the grasses, as though chased, perhaps caught out too late. He hadn’t expected the sun to rise so soon. Can it be that one of us is living still, hiding out somewhere along the river? The boy is carrying something, food perhaps, and when his hat blows off his head, he does not hesitate or look behind. Neither does he stop to retrieve it. Instead, he pumps his arms harder, jumps into the air, and disappears through the crack in the lens. He is gone. I search the banks but cannot find him. A silver glow seems to emanate from where he must have jumped into the reeds.

  The sky changes its mind, dropping buckets of red over the blue, until finally the dawn reveals itself as a soft yellow light. Ola stirs, opens her eyes. She pushes her arms like rolling pins across her face.

  “Panie Chaim,” she says, putting on her glasses. “Tell me …”

  “Yes, my Ola?”

  “What happens when we die?”

  “We mustn’t speak of such things,” I tell her. She looks worse than ever this morning, worn out, as though the effort it cost to sleep the night has exhausted her completely.

  “Who will come for me?” she says, sitting up on her elbows. “Jesus or the Virgin Mother?”

  It takes a moment for me to understand these words and when I do, I don’t know what to tell her. She’s a child, after all.

  “It’s not exactly like that,” I say.

  “But you’ll be here to guide me?”

  “Ola, please.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “What is the truth? Who knows the truth? Do I know the truth?”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Such nonsense!”

  “Panie Chaim?”

  “No,” I say, sighing brusquely. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  How can I tell her the truth, that we wander the earth like an audience at intermission waiting for the concert to resume, unaware that the musicians have long since departed for home?

  “It’s like listening to beautiful music,” I say, trying to sound wistful.

  “That’s the angel song,” she says knowledgeably.

  Ah, but these people have such simple faith!

  “Is that what it was?” I say.

  “That’s what the Father says.”

  “Yes, but you can hear it all the time,” I say. “You don’t have to die for that.”

  It’s a deafening silence, I think to myself.

  “If you’re good,” she says.

  “If that’s what the Father told you, then, of course, it must be so.”

  They fill their heads with such rot, these priests! How we feared them as children, in their black ghouls’ cloaks. They’d rap our heads with knuckles as hard as rocks if they caught us so much as looking crossways at their church. We used to run by, as children, on our way to cheder, our hearts pounding against our ribs, out of fear for these black demons, certain they were neither man nor woman with their pointy beards and their wide billowing skirts.

  “I’ve been good,” she says. “Haven’t I?”

  “Of course you have.”

  “I cried when they killed you.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “I didn’t want them to.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “The guns were so loud.”

  “Were they?” I say. “I didn’t notice.”

  “Terribly so.”

  “I don’t remember.” And in truth I don’t. “In any case,” I say, “it didn’t hurt.”

  To change the subject, I tell her a story of two pious Jews, two Hasids, who fi
nd a boat that takes them to the moon. The boat leaves the river and sails into the sky, where the night is thick with the moon’s luminous tide. On the way up, the two men argue about who is to blame for what is happening to them. They blame each other, naturally. But when they arrive, they discover pots of silver waiting for them there. These they load onto their boat, which they have tethered to a long rope girdling the moon. But the silver is too heavy for the boat, and they have piled so much of it into their frail craft that the boat sinks, pulling the moon out of the sky and leaving the earth in darkness.

  13

  Because the night is finally clear, we ascend the interior staircase to the roof. Ola is so weakened that the large coat I force upon her is almost too heavy for her to wear. She kicks off the bulky leather shoes I brought for her at the first step, unable to lift them, and continues in her stocking feet. I brace her, one hand on her arm, the other steadying her back, and slowly, a step at a time, we take the stairs. Although she must periodically stop, she refuses to sit. Instead, she presses her meager weight into me and lays her head against my chest, until she is able to summon the strength to resume.

  I feel as if I am cradling a dear coatrack in my arms, so light is she and her bones so stiff, were it not for her shaking and her trembling and the fevered heat she’s giving off. This I can feel in my own cheek where it meets the top of her head. My children used to hide in this staircase. We’d search for them for hours. A silly game, and soon enough we learned where we could almost always find them. Ester worried they might fall, God forbid, playing on the roof, but the roof held no interest. It was the staircase that fascinated. They called it “the tunnel,” so dark it was and tantalizing with its biting cedar smells. Ester, too, liked the tunnel, but only when she was in labor and needed to walk. So many times we climbed these narrow stairs, much like Ola and myself now, me bracing Ester, gripping her arm, pressing my hand into her back. Of course, she wasn’t light and stick-like like Ola, but heavy and round, like a herring barrel. I could practically have rolled her up the staircase! The walk in the night air on the roof helped to calm her, as we waited for her midwives to arrive. And on the roof is where they would find us, Ester in a heavy heap of skirts, her dark triangular eyes staring over the railings and across the town into the sky, as though searching the Heavens for the soul of her incubating child, waiting for it to arrive in its whiteness and its purity. It took all three midwives to lift her to her feet. This they did by surrounding her, these three little sisters, a small army whose job it is to bring more life into the world. With their arrival, I am suddenly cut adrift and rendered superfluous. Rooted to the spot, I stand watching their red and yellow and green babushkas disappearing through the rooftop doorway, my Ester borne among them, as though weightless, forgetting me entirely. I might light a cigar and smoke a little before returning to my office to pretend to work until the baby is born. On the staircase now, I have a vision of myself striding across the roof of my house, a cigar clenched happily in my teeth. I am young and whole and my family is growing beneath my feet.

  “Why are you crying, Panie Chaim?” Ola asks.

  I’m surprised to see her face looking intently into mine, her eyes trapped and enlarged behind her thick spectacles. Moving back and forth, searching my eyes, they look not a little like butterflies attempting to awaken.

  “There are tears rolling into your beard,” she says, brushing them away with the back of her hand.

  “We should hurry,” I say, “before the night is over.”

  “Panie Chaim,” she says.

  “Yes, Ola?”

  “Nothing,” she changes her mind. “I’m a silly girl. It’s a stupid question.” She looks so frail, this coatrack with her braids and her enormous glasses thick as whiskey tumblers, standing against the inside of the roof’s doorway, hidden in its shadow, trembling, coughing. I wipe the bloody phlegm she spits up with an old handkerchief, as red as a carnation.

  “There was a boy, in my school, that I liked, but …” She doesn’t know how to finish her sentence. “I never knew what to say to get him to like me. I’m not beautiful, like your daughters.”

  “My daughters?” I say.

  “I’ve seen their pictures. My father and mother hid them away, but I know where. In the garage. How beautiful they were.”

  I find I can barely remember their faces.

  “It’s just as well,” she says, blushing. “Never mind. Forget it, forget it. Open the door. Please. Let’s go up, let’s look at the stars and see if your Hasids have returned the moon yet to the sky.”

  I find that my voice has fled. It’s no easier knowing what to do when you’re dead. What can I say to her? Nothing, nothing. She is dying and so, instead, I simply watch her, spinning around where the moonlight should be, her arms reaching out to catch the stars. The night sky is a thick lavender and the stars are cold and blue. Her breaths make small clouds as they leave her mouth. So this is what laughter looks like, I think to myself. She is laughing. She is laughing and I don’t know why.

  She opens the telescope, holds it up to her eye, and peers into the sky.

  “Hey,” she says. “It’s cracked!”

  14

  Things do not go so well after that. Ola’s fever returns and increases dangerously, her already disastrous weight falling even further. Late into the night, she burns like a log on the white bedsheets, giving off the faintest glow, staining the sheets with a red shadow. I can’t help noticing this curiosity as I pace the three sides of her bed, my arms folded tightly against my back.

  Outside, there is the clatter of a wild rain.

  “Panie Chaim,” she says, waking, making a hoarse effort to talk.

  “Ola, no speaking, sha, save your strength.” The words sound ridiculous as soon as I pronounce them. For what is she to save her strength?

  “I’m burning up,” she says.

  I place a hand on her forehead. It’s like touching a hot motor.

  “I’m on fire,” she says, collapsing into a convulsive fit of coughing.

  “Tomorrow, the doctors,” I say. “Surely they will bring you a little morphine, Ola. Tomorrow.”

  “But I’m on fire now, Panie Chaim. Please,” she says, reaching for my fingers. “Cool towels. Please. I need something to cool me down.” She snatches back her hand to hug herself as she rolls over in bed, suffocating under a heavy blanket of wheezing.

  Like a sleepwalker, I find myself moving through these hallways towards the kitchen and filling up a basin with cold water and small blue sheets of ice, which I chip from the block in the icebox. I drop six white hand towels into the basin, quickly, in order not to freeze my fingertips. Upstairs, at her bedside, I wring them out, one at a time, freezing my hands anyway. She is as pale and as still as a corpse, her little broomstick legs locked tightly around a pillow. I smile, if only to reassure myself, uncertain what this ruined body needs from me. Slowly, I lay a towel against her burning forehead. She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, her body relaxing like a tired hound. I swab another towel along her neck and then move it beneath her shift and across the bony coat hanger of her shoulders. She coughs, but not deeply this time, and a small tear escapes from beneath her sealed eyelid.

  “That feels good,” she says. “So cool and good.” She rolls onto her stomach, her arms braided against her chest and her abdomen. Taking a new towel from the icy basin, I swathe it across her back, along the knobby river stones of her spine. Instantly, she pulls a sharp breath in between her teeth. I guide two towels along her back, down her legs, until they are swaddling her feet.

  “Again,” she says, and I repeat the motion with fresh towels, returning their predecessors to the basin. She releases her arms from beneath her chest, and I rub them down with my icy cloths.

  She returns to her back and, raising her shift, offers up the flat expanse of her belly. She is naked beneath the shift and I hesitate before placing the wet towel above her little sex, but feel ridiculous in doing so. I’m a dead man,
after all, and old enough to be her grandfather. She’s dying. And besides, my body no longer presses its lecherous claims on me. However, when I take the last of my cooling white towels and position it there with a matter-of-fact, if tender, frankness, her eyes again close and her neck elongates, twisting and growing flush. Her grey skin marbles and stands up in glistening goose bumps. Her chin juts towards the ceiling. Her arms tense, locking at the elbows, and she lifts her body almost imperceptibly, turning it towards me. Her long flat feet rise to find my shoulders, digging into the wings of my vest. She exhales audibly, her mouth slack, her brow knotted in serene incomprehension. Damp strands of matted hair cling limply to her head. Her mouth opens in a gaping frown and I see that her teeth are as rotten and as crooked as a rabble of thieves. I release the towel, allowing it to lay, where it has fallen, on her belly.

  “Perhaps, Ola, it would be best if … ,” but her fingers find my fugitive hand, returning it to the cloth as a jailer might a prisoner to his cell. And not unlike a prisoner, my hand obeys with a docile resignation, and even slight relief.

  Soon the bed is creaking with a furious monotony. Her feet have pushed beyond the nests they made in the shoulders of my vest and her heels are digging forward now against my back. Her hands flap about her two negligible breasts like birds of prey, then fly away with bits of her innocence in their beaks. If the Rebbe returned at this moment, what a dressing down he would give me! The increasing rattle of her tubercular moaning will, I fear, return her family to the door, pounding to get in. Ola cries out and I nearly jump with fright when her burning hands blindly find my face. Taking my head in her arms, she uses it like a pole to pull her now naked body from the bed. What she has done with her shift, I can’t say. She falls into my lap with such a loose clatter of bones, that I’m afraid she may have broken one of them. She swallows to catch her breath and I can feel the pounding of her ribs against my motionless heart, against the quiet cavity of my chest. She uses the length of her arm, from her wrist to her elbow, to wipe the streams running from her nose, then slices it in the other direction, like a violin bow, to clear the tears from her eyes.