by Rhoda Lerman
“I’m not staying.”
“They were out of line. It’ll work out.”
“They couldn’t even call me Rabbi?”
“They’re still mourning for me. Give them time.”
“What am I doing here if I’m not the Rabbi?”
“Yussele, maybe for a nice Reform synagogue in Santa Fe for nonobservant Jews, maybe for them you’re a rabbi, do a little service, a lot of weddings, talk politics on Shabbas. But for us you have an uncircumcised heart. You aren’t attached. Somehow Babe and Grisha know this. Subliminally.”
“They know they can’t make me suffer?”
“They know you don’t feel their pain. A real rabbi feels pain. I told you. The hiccups.”
“I don’t want their pain.”
“So why should they call you Rabbi? When your heart is broken, then you’ll be a rabbi.”
“Maybe I don’t feel pain, but God knows I’ve sacrificed a lot to come out here, to help. They don’t even think I’m here to help them. That little gem I hold you responsible for.”
“How could I get them out here if they thought it was because they were insufficient? I had to give them a cause.”
“And you had to give me a cause. So what’s true? Who’s insufficient? Me or them?”
“Let me tell you a story.” Yussel’s father took his beard in his right hand. “The first Bobover Reb, this is about him. He’s eating a fish. A Hasid comes up to him with a request his barren wife should have a child. The Bobover holds the fish in his hand and he tells him a story. He doesn’t give the Hasid to eat. He just gives him the story. He tells him that there were four young men who were very poor. They wanted to make a trip for the holidays to Lublin to stay with the Seer but they had no money for food, horses, lodging. So they decide if one dresses up as a rabbi and one dresses up like his attendant, they’ll get rides, what to eat, where to sleep. So they dress up. And it works. They are welcomed at an inn. They are given fine rooms, good food. Then the innkeeper comes to the Rabbi, weeping, and says his little girl is very sick, could the Rabbi help. The four young men look at one another. The one who is making believe he’s a rabbi knows he has to go to help, although he knows he has no power to heal because he’s only making believe. But how can he say no? So he goes in and leans over the little girl in the crib and says prayers. So he prays to HaShem to make the little girl better. Then he goes as fast as he can to his room, tells everyone to get dressed fast and get out of there. On the way out the innkeeper runs after the four and gives them money, he is so grateful. They finally get to Lublin to the Seer and spend the holiday with him. Then it’s time to go home. On the way home, they pass the inn, although they dare not stop there. The innkeeper runs out. They are so scared. He tells the make-believe Rabbi that his child is well, thank God, and he is so happy. He insists they come in and let him give them a fine supper and fine rooms. What can they do? They eat and sleep like kings. In the morning the innkeeper gives the make-believe Rabbi money.
“This is all too much for the other three. They want to know what happened, maybe their friend is a rabbi in disguise. What did he do? What did he say? Finally he says, ‘I don’t know any more than you do. But when I went in and saw how sick the little girl was, I said to myself: “You’re a fake. But the innkeeper, he’s a Hasid, he’s a good man, he believes. Why shouldn’t HaShem do something for a good man? He doesn’t have to do anything for me. I’m worthless. But this innkeeper who is weeping and this child who is dying, for them He could do something. So I said a few prayers. I don’t know any more than that.’
“So the Rabbi, who was still holding the fish, told his Hasid, ‘I’m a nothing but you’re a good man. Why can’t HaShem do for you?’ And within the year the Hasid had a child.
“So, Yussele, give it a year. Maybe you don’t have to be a rabbi the way they think you should. You can still heal the baby.” Then his father rolled over, snapped his fingers at the candle, which relit itself, leaned over Yussel, and ripped a hair from inside Yussel’s nose. “All stories are true. Even my lies.”
The pain rode up his nose, exploded like horseradish through the universe of his head, his body. He rocked over the pain, held his nose, said through it, “What did you do that for?”
His father stood above him, holding the single hair between thumb and forefinger like a treasure in the light of the candle. “I’m bringing it back. See, I’ll tell them, my son feels pain. Believe me, my son’s okay.” His shadow slipped upward into the point of the tent, disappeared.
Yussel could still feel the thin arm across his waist, his father’s tired head resting on his shoulder. And then, because he couldn’t stand to think about where his father had come from, where he was going back to, Yussel, a pious man, a married man, allowed back into his head, into his bed, into the hollow where his father had been, the Flower Child in her HARVEY MILK FOR MAYOR T-shirt and the guys she knew and he was the guys she knew and he felt the hot honey of his teen-age days pouring into the wounds his father had left in his soul and then he really couldn’t stand himself. So he washed, said prayers, got back into bed again, thought only of Shoshanna’s little hands stroking his forehead. Sometime that night he dreamed something large was sliding over his waist where his father’s arm had been and that the something large curled into something round and slept next to him for warmth.
12
YUSSEL WOKE UP TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING, FELT A LUMP IN HIS stomach, found himself prone, which isn’t a kosher position, rolled over onto his left side, which is not only kosher but good for digestion. The lump didn’t go away. He couldn’t tell if it was heartburn or depression.
He sat up on the edge of Grisha’s bed, sighed, rinsed his hands, mumbled the Eighteen Benedictions, thanked God he woke up with a lump in his stomach and not in his pants, thanked God he wasn’t a woman, thanked God he was going back to Far Rockaway, stuck his head out of the tent, and, as they say in the Torah, lifted up his voice in a voice that shook the land, and yelled for Ernie. “Ernie!”
What had woken him up was a woman presenting a Music Minus One “Gong Show” live from the mountain. “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” She didn’t know all the words. It was a sin for Yussel to listen to a woman singing live. Her voice blasted, bounced off the mountain, aimed for his tent, sank into his stomach. She sang something very intimate he shouldn’t hear.
Yussel tossed his blanket over his head and shoulders, went outside, yelled for Ernie again. The morning was cool and dark, like standing inside a glass of iced tea, the flagpole clinking, the moon still in the sky, not a star missing from the sky. The woman’s voice cracked and scraped against the rocks. Babe’s chickens woke up, joined in. There was nothing seductive about her voice. It was the loneliness in it, like a wolf cry in the wilderness, that gave him a lump in his stomach. “Ernie!”
Ernie came running, stumbling, rubbing his eyes, buttoning buttons on the fly of a pair of wool khaki army pants.
“I don’t want to hear a woman singing! I bought you a sound system, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t hear her.”
“How could you not hear her?”
“Stand still,” Ernie whispered in awe. Ernie grabbed Yussel’s arm.
Yussel grabbed Ernie’s arm. Something large and leather-cold slid between his legs, over one bare foot, out of his tent.
Ernie whispered again. “You know how many sandwiches you could get from her if she was a salami? Jesus, I wish she was an Isaac Gellis salami.”
So did Yussel. All of it passed over his foot in a slow slide into the dark. Maybe six feet long, as thick as his arm. Yussel’s hand was white on Ernie’s arm.
“She likes Grisha.” Ernie laughed a dirty laugh. “She thought you were Grisha. So, what do you want to hear? ‘Hatikvah,’ Peer Gynt, Jewish aerobics?”
Yussel washed his hands again, poured the basin water over his polluted foot. “Hatikvah” blasted into the dark morning, the lights went on in the Arizona, in Babe’s bus. He heard voices i
n the tents. It had been a mistake to turn on the music because now everyone was waking up and someone was sure to see him leaving, try to stop him, plead with him to stay, carry on. Yussel groped for his shoes, his clothes, tossed his pajamas into his overnight, looked both ways out the tent door, and took off.
Very softly, he walked around the tents, around the adobe huts, over snake holes the size of number-ten grapefruits. Just as he ducked around the far side of the Arizona, a woman stood in his path. His heart stopped. It was still too dark to see her features. He smelled musk. Why do women have to smell?
She whispered a significant whisper. It was the same voice from last night that said he looked like a Moses. “I know who you are, Rabbi. Don’t think I don’t know who you are.” Natalie, saying what she used to say to his father, whom she’d decided was the Messiah.
“Sure you do, Natalie. I’ve known you since we were kids.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Yussel didn’t ask what she meant.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
He shouldn’t have said, “Don’t tell anyone.” He was being funny.
“I knew it.” She wrapped the shawl tighter halfway up her face, turned away from him melodramatically, pregnant now with their secret.
Yussel hid behind the Arizona, waited until she was gone. It was growing lighter. Natalie hated men because she thought they all had one big secret that would give her inner peace. Someplace she’d heard about the wonder Rabbi in Kansas who was giving out answers, so she’d walked to Kansas, arrived at the door of the shul, filthy, ragged, with amebic dysentery they found out later. “If you don’t let me study with you I’ll go out into the world and be a sex machine.” The Rabbi said okay but she’d have to wear a skirt, be clean, keep kosher. Then she could study with him and not be a sex machine. He threw her clothes into the garbage can, gave her Bloomke’s favorite sweater and skirt. Ever since Yussel could remember, her fingernails were chewed to the bone and now and then she’d have bruises on her neck, sometimes new and blue, sometimes old and orange. A bride of violence, his father called her.
When Natalie fought with the Rabbi because he wouldn’t tell her the secret, she’d disappear with this or that dark-haired acned kibbutznik who’d come from Israel to Kansas to see the wonder Rabbi with the answers. “So tell me, Rabbi, I’ve been waiting a lifetime …” she’d say to his father. Nothing the Rabbi could tell Natalie satisfied her because she knew he was holding back the answer. Once she ran away to be a sex machine with a Moroccan Jew who sold fake Gucci bags from the trunk of his taxi, who beat her, whom the Rabbi told her to stay away from or he wouldn’t teach her Torah. The last time Yussel saw Natalie, he’d been visiting his father. She’d come in drenched from a thunderstorm, her hair matted, a bloody nose, a holy book clutched to her chest. The Rabbi didn’t stand up, didn’t approach her, kept rolling the wax into a candle. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from the cab driver?”
“I had an accident in my kitchen, Rabbi. On a cupboard door.”
His father had turned his back on Natalie. She still clutched her holy book; he rolled his wax. “So?”
“I have a problem, Rabbi.”
It was the line that led straight to his circumcised heart. He turned to her immediately, his face softened, he smiled. The room lit up with the sweetness of that smile.
“In the Torah it says …” She flipped, panic-stricken, through pages. She’d been studying with the Rabbi for a dozen years. She was pushing thirty-five, still knew nothing. “You know about milk separated from meat? You want me to read it to you?”
“I know it. I know it. What’s your problem?”
“Do I need a garbage can for meat and a garbage can for milk?”
His father stood, faced Natalie, looked at her with those terrible majestic eyes. “Tell me, why do you have a bloody nose?”
She left, slammed the front door angrily. All night it rained like a monsoon. At daybreak when Yussel got up from the sofa to pack, he looked out the picture window. Natalie was halfway up the small acacia tree on the corner, up in the branches. He could see the soles of her boots. He woke his father. The Rabbi came to the window in his pajamas. He cranked open the side window. “One garbage can. You hear me? One.” Yussel remembered saying, “Why don’t you just send her over to the Lubavitchers?” And his father had answered with pained patience, “Because there’s a soul inside all that confusion. Because someday I may break through. Because someday she may understand. Because that’s our job.” Natalie had climbed down, shook water from her hair, brushed leaves from the suede, gone home.
Yussel slipped past the Arizona unseen, crossed the last hundred feet of flats, climbed the little spur to the mound of highway, tossed his overnight in the backseat of the Shanda. Mishugge people. The lump in his stomach was hardening, sending out vines. He put the AAA Trip-Tik map into his head, thought about what route he’d take back to Far Rockaway, looked around one last time just in case he was making a mistake, which he knew he wasn’t.
A small deer chewed on dried flowers on his father’s grave. The sky blushed pink behind the mountains. Banks of clouds rolled against them, hit the peaks, dropped over them in smoky bagels. The peaks glinted like knives in the rising light. Under the water tower, a silver mirage shimmered like a lake. It was no place for him or his family. He couldn’t find his keys although he was sure he’d left them in the car.
They weren’t under the seats, in the overhead, on the floor. He was on his hands and knees in the back of the car when Grisha banged on the side. Yussel jumped up, banged his own head on the roof of the car.
Rust flaked off the car, dandruff from Grisha’s eyebrows. “Nu?”
“Keys.”
Babe climbed the slope up to the highway, rubbed her eyes. You could read by the diamond ring she wore. She saw Yussel’s overnight. “What’s the matter?”
“He can’t find his keys.”
“You leaving, Yussel?”
“I’m leaving.”
Grisha banged the side of the car again. “What’s taking you so long?”
“I can’t find my keys.”
Babe gave Grisha a dirty look, smiled sweetly at Yussel. “Yussy, you have to kosher the kitchen before you go. At least that much.”
Yussel searched in his pockets for the third time. “The kitchen’s not kosher? How do you eat?”
“Cold food, sometimes from the microwave, paper plates, plastic stuff,” Babe said.
Yussel tapped his fingernails on the cracked plastic of the steering wheel. “Just to kosher, that’s all. Not for Shabbas.”
“Also to negotiate about the mikveh when the well-digger gets here. Today, he’ll be here today.”
“You can’t negotiate with him, Babe?”
“He doesn’t do business with women. It’s the West. Men are men. Women are women.”
“So, Yussel, what do you say? Okay?” Grisha’s fingers dug into Yussel’s forearm.
“The water’s already boiling for the koshering, Yussy.”
“Okay, okay, koshering and the well-digger. That’s my limit.”
Babe took the car keys from her apron pocket. “You’ll miss Chaim’s morning service. Go.”
Yussel drove to Chaim’s house. On the way, Grisha passed him in Babe’s Lincoln and Yussel passed his father standing next to a flood ditch, one door gleaming in the sun rising over the desert. Yussel backed up. His father smelled of linseed oil. He wore a creamy satin robe piped in navy blue, a navy blue silk handkerchief folded into his pocket, navy blue silk pajamas piped in cream, navy blue slippers with his initials on the fronts. The other door was lead. His father knocked on it. “A little token of my son’s esteem. My son. Packs and leaves and thinks filthy thoughts about my wife.”
“I’m not going to feel guilty. I’m not staying and that’s that.”
“Tricks, filth, Yussele. Other men’s sons, they’re giving charity, studying Talmud, earning merit for their fathers in the World to Come. My
son …” His father banged on the lead door. “My son packs and leaves and thinks filthy thoughts.”
Yussel could feel the banging zing down to his toes, up and into his nostrils like a tuning fork. He could feel where the hair was missing in his nose. “Don’t blame me. You put yourself there.”
“You can get me out.”
“You put your money on the wrong horse, Totte.”
“If there were another horse, Yussele, believe me, I would have bet on him. My lovely beautiful saintly Bloomke can’t help me. If she’d been a son…. Some horse. A mule, a jackass, I have for a son.”
“You want to walk?”
His father knocked with his knuckles on the doors, then on Yussel’s head, which rang because he hit it with precision on the spot already sore from the Shanda’s roof. His father sighed. “If I were a priest, I wouldn’t have a family. If I didn’t have a family, I’d be a saint today. I’d be sitting today at the feet of HaShem instead of shlepping around with a jackass son. I’ll wait in the car.”
Chaim’s maniac dogs screamed, hurled themselves against their fences. Yussel shielded his eyes from the bright sun to look through a square of thick shower-stall glass cut into Chaim’s front door. Swimming behind the glass, Chaim and his lump-faced low-browed stump-legged Miracles of Creation, who looked as if they’d been grown underground in manure, davened the morning service. Grisha, Feldman, Bingo, Slotnik, Ernie were with them. Seventy-five dollars a week, add Yussel, now it was ninety dollars a week; 360 dollars a month it cost to daven by Chaim.
Chaim, a nobody who came from nothing, living like a prince with his Jewish room service, Yussel’s SL, a cathedral-ceilinged bunker, ebony woodwork, his velvet Maurice Villency matching everything covered in clear plastic, a turquoise bar, picture windows draped like brides in ivory satin, track lighting, a rosewood bimah, a backlit china closet with more silver than Grand Sterling. All of this on a sidewalk and seventeen other houses on sidewalks, near shopping for the wives when they came out, a computer programming business already set up so his people could earn a living in the wilderness. Yussel had goornisht mit goornisht, nothing with nothing.