The Entertainer and the Dybbuk

by Sid Fleischman

  From town to town, the ventriloquist found himself checking his hotel closets. He had to make sure they were empty before checking in. By the time he reached Marseille, he had money in his pocket again and he felt he’d left the dybbuk somewhere behind. He would like to have helped the ghost kid who had saved him from the Germans, but the kid’s request was too weird.

  The Great Freddie was booked for the week at the Club Terminus, recently opened across from the railroad station. His leg on a chair, clutching his dummy in the spotlight, he was getting laughs. All went well until the vampire tried to sink his fangs into The Great Freddie’s neck. “You can’t bite my neck, Count Dracula,” he was saying. “You’ve got no teeth.”

  He felt a breath of air escape his lips.

  “Gefehlt ist gefehlt!” exclaimed the dummy.

  That hadn’t been the ventriloquist talking. The hair stiffened on the back of his neck. Who was speaking German? Not him.

  The Great Freddie struggled to recover his calm. He spoke slowly, as if to double-check every word as it came forth. “I didn’t know you speak German,” he heard himself say to the dummy. “I hope you didn’t join the Nazi Party.”

  He felt another puff of wind rise from his throat as the count appeared to answer. “Of course not! What do you take me for? A dummy?”

  The audience laughed, followed by a burst of applause. The Great Freddie went nose to nose with the dummy. He felt cold sweat popping out under his starched white shirt. It hadn’t been him talking with his lips barely apart. It was the young Jewish kid, throwing his voice. The Great Freddie was possessed by the dybbuk!

  He struggled through to the end of his routine, anxious to get off the stage. Once he had escaped the spotlight, he fled in a fury.

  Back in his dressing room and alone, he burst out, “Okay, you smart-ass kid, what do you think you’re doing? Where are you?”

  “Where do you think?” came the answer from Freddie’s own throat, as if he’d swallowed a telephone.

  “Get lost!” the ventriloquist growled. “Beat it! I won’t have a demon under my skin.”

  “Who said a demon? That’s not kind. A mere dybbuk, I told you. Harmless as a slice of rye bread.”

  “You’re bothering me!” Freddie exclaimed. “Scram! Buzz off!”

  Ignoring him, the dybbuk said, “Professor, did you hear the laugh we got? Practically an ovation. Your old routine was so full of moth holes you could strain borscht. How could I resist giving you a hand?”

  “Nazis! No one wants to think about the war anymore. It’s over.”

  “Not for me it’s over,” said the dybbuk. “I have unfinished business.”

  “Finish it somewhere else.”

  “But we need each other.”

  “We, again?” protested the ventriloquist.

  “I could be your best friend. I don’t see any others hanging around. And I told you, I grew up with actors. Comedians, too. At the age of three I was already performing in Odessa. I can do voices. You want to hear me do Churchill? Roosevelt? The Three Stooges? I know all the Jewish shtick. The stage business.”

  “I don’t want your Jewish shtick!” said The Great Freddie. “Hit the road!”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Look, kid—”

  “Avrom Amos.”

  “I’ve got a date after the show. I don’t want a brat like you tagging along!”

  “That fake Spanish dancer? I caught her act. She’s got feet like woodpeckers. What a noise.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “You want to be alone? I’ll make myself scarce.”

  “Better than that. Bail out! Beat it!”

  At that moment the Greek acrobat came in and looked around. “You talking to someone, Freddie?”

  “Talking to myself,” replied the ventriloquist, breaking into a sweat.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was a balmy night. The Great Freddie and his black-haired dancer stepped out into the street. They found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant for a late bite to eat. It was almost midnight.

  “The way you’re glancing behind, Freddie, you’d think we were being followed,” remarked the Spanish dancer, who had hoop earrings large enough to jump through. She wore a fox fur thrown around her neck, out of season on a warm night.

  Freddie picked up the soiled menu. “What’ll you have, Consuelo?”

  “You order for me,” said the dancer, checking her makeup in a compact mirror.

  Freddie froze as he felt a puff of air rise from his windpipe. “What’s the matter, fräulein? Can’t you read anything but German?”

  The dybbuk! Consuelo threw an icy glare at Freddie across the small table. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Funny, no—insulting, yes,” replied the dybbuk, crowding out Freddie’s own voice. “Senorita, you’re as Spanish as sauerkraut. The way you dance reminds me of German soldiers goose-stepping.”

  Her face went pale. She stood up, tipping over a glass flower vase. She peered at The Great Freddie with a blaze of contempt. “Are all Americans pigs?” she muttered, and walked out.

  Freddie sizzled. He clenched his jaws but managed to speak. “Dybbuk! I’m going to break your Jewish neck, if you have one!”

  “I was doing you a favor,” the dybbuk replied. “I can smell a German a mile off. She can’t hide from me.”

  “You’re loco!”

  “She’s Nazi rotten. That show-off fox fur around her neck, biting its own tail. A Spanish lady? No. I saw used clothing like that all over Germany. Stolen. Stripped off the backs of Jewish women pushed alive into the gas chambers. One look at your dancer and I broke into a sweat. She’s trying to pass for a Spanish somebody with no blood on her hands.”

  The Great Freddie ignored the glances from a nearby diner, who must have thought he was mumbling to himself. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “What if I’m right? That fräulein can’t fool me. She’s given me so many Nazi salutes she still sleeps with her arm in the air.”

  Freddie gave his fingers a loud snap. “I’m through fighting the war. Stop hanging around me! Stop possessing me! Stop talking from my lips! Vanish!”

  “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “Wanna bet?” Freddie replied. He left a tip on the table and walked out. Bristling, he glanced back, as if he might have left the dybbuk sitting there. Not that cheeky kid. No such luck.

  CHAPTER 5

  At the crack of dawn, Freddie sat through a candlelit mass in a small church a block from his hotel. As soon as the service ended, he stopped the little priest before the holy man could disappear into the shadows.

  “Father,” said the ventriloquist. “Can you perform an exorcism?”

  “You know someone possessed?”

  “And how. It’s me.”

  “You may be imagining it,” said the priest.

  “I’m not imagining anything.”

  “There is a young priest in Lyon who is talented at plucking out demons by the scruff of the neck. A contribution to the church would be a blessing.”

  “I could pay something now and the rest later,” said Freddie. “I have big show dates coming up in Paris.”

  The priest folded his arms patiently. “Perhaps it would be enough to mark the sanctified cross on your forehead with holy oil. Tell me about this demon of yours.”

  “It’s a dybbuk.”

  The priest’s arms dropped. “A dybbuk! A Jewish spirit?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  The priest broke into a crusty scowl. “My son, are you making a joke? This is a Catholic church. We don’t do Jews.” And then he smiled. “Go find yourself a rabbi, and Jesus be with you!”

  A moment later, Freddie was out on the street, not knowing which way to turn. Were there any Jews left alive in Marseille after the slaughter? Some of the French, defeated by the Germans, had collaborated with the Nazis. They had rounded up their Jewish countrymen and packed them into cattle cars for the death camps.

&nb
sp; Freddie stepped in and out of a few shops, asking if anyone could steer him to a synagogue. A butcher peered at him through watery blue eyes and said, “You don’t look Jewish.”

  “You don’t look Bulgarian.”

  “I’m not Bulgarian,” replied the butcher defensively.

  “I’m not Jewish,” Freddie said.

  Almost at once, it stung him that he’d bothered to clear himself. That must have been the lonely Nebraska child moving his lips. What had he known about anything? He’d changed adopted parents and religions almost as swiftly as streetcars.

  While he had sat on church benches, he had seen that the denominations barely tolerated one another, but almost all of them despised the Jews. He’d never actually laid eyes on a Jew, but he had kept on the lookout for men with Old Testament beards who were trying to conceal their tails and who wore black hats to hide their horns. He had supposed that even their kids his own age smelled powerfully of brimstone, like boxes of smoldering kitchen matches. He had been relieved to learn that he was merely an orphan, and not a Jew.

  Where were all the taxis? He was standing on the curb ready to whistle one down.

  Freddie suddenly thought of Bill Billy, his first dummy. He’d carved the head out of a chunk of sugar pine. He had dressed the puppet in bib overalls cut down to size. The nose, painted with red freckles, was a dowel eleven inches long. Like Pinocchio, every time Bill Billy stretched the truth, his nose grew longer.

  The puppet had been The Great Freddie’s ticket out of the wheat fields of Nebraska. Bill Billy had caught a killer piece of shrapnel during the war. Freddie had buried him in Germany.

  A taxi pulled up at last. Freddie leaned forward and told the driver to find him a Jew.

  “Any particular Jew?” asked the driver.

  “There’s more than one?”

  “A few are coming back.”

  “I’m looking for a rabbi.”

  The taxi driver hesitated and then nodded. “I’ve seen some work going on in a synagogue in the old port quarter. There may be a rabbi.”

  When the taxi pulled up at a small, thick-walled building with most of its windows broken out, Freddie took it to have been abandoned during the war. A burst of heavy hammering came echoing from inside.

  Freddie saw a wide-shouldered man on a ladder paneling one of the walls. He wore a small, embroidered skullcap, a yarmulke, that seemed to cling to his head by faith alone. He had a young, wispy beard that reminded Freddie of Spanish moss swaying in the breeze. With the man’s sleeves rolled up, Freddie could see a string of blue numbers tattooed along his wrist.

  Freddie had seen tattoos like that before. The numbers revealed a past of horrors in the German death camps, where the Nazis had branded each Jew with a number that couldn’t be washed off. The rabbi had somehow escaped the gas ovens.

  “Was this a synagogue?” Freddie asked, peering at the shambles of a building.

  “It still is. But not ready for business yet.”

  “I need to find a rabbi,” said Freddie.

  “I’m a rabbi. Wait a moment while I hit my thumb again.” He finished driving in the nail and climbed down from the ladder. “Rabbi Moise Bindle,” he said, extending his fist of a hand and a smile.

  After a shake, Freddie said, “My name is Freddie. Fred T. Birch. I’m an American.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I have been possessed by a dybbuk.”

  “Congratulations,” remarked the rabbi, who seemed at ease in the English language. Later, he explained that he’d grown up in Brooklyn.

  “I want the dybbuk yanked out,” Freddie declared. “Exorcised.”

  “Who wouldn’t? But I have never talked to a dybbuk, face-to-face. They don’t hang around street corners, you know. They’re rare.”

  “Not rare enough. This one is a smart-mouthed pest.”

  Like the priest earlier, the rabbi patiently folded his arms. “Nu. Introduce us.”

  Freddie felt his muscles ease. Now he was getting somewhere. “Dybbuk!” he commanded. “Avrom Amos, meet Rabbi Bindle.”

  “Vie gehtz?” said the rabbi, by way of greeting.

  Freddie relaxed his jaw to allow the dybbuk to take over freely. He waited for the faint tickle in his throat. The slight puff of breath. But Avrom Amos had gone hard of hearing.

  “Listen, dybbuk. Your rabbi wants to talk to you.”

  Freddie waited for the now-familiar blustering voice. But not a word flew from his lips. Not a sound.

  “Dybbuk!” he demanded. “Speak up!”

  A pin-drop silence.

  “Nu?” said the rabbi.

  Freddie began to shout. “None of your dybbuk tricks! Talk!”

  The rabbi peered at Freddie as if the American might be a lunatic. They waited for several moments more, but the dybbuk had shut up like a clam. The rabbi asked, “Are you sure you have a dybbuk?”

  “Positive.”

  “A shy fellow, eh?”

  “Shy as a brass band!”

  The rabbi isn’t believing me, Freddie thought. Who could blame him? “Try something, Rabbi. Anything!”

  “So you won’t go away disappointed, I’ll blow the ram’s horn. The shofar. If there’s a dybbuk, the noise of the ancients should chase him out.”

  “I’ll be obliged,” said Freddie, though he wondered if the rabbi was now only humoring him. Probably.

  “But without the power of a minyan, who knows?” the rabbi added, as if to qualify the outcome.

  “A what?”

  “A quorum of ten Jews. Righteous Jews. Good men. Without a minyan, a holy service has no teeth. But you are troubled, and what harm can the shofar do?”

  The rabbi unlocked a mahogany cabinet and removed a ram’s horn. It glistened, yellow with great age. Returning to Freddie’s side, he lifted the shofar to his lips. “You hard of hearing, young American?”

  “No.”

  “You will be.” The rabbi held the end of the shofar inches from Freddie’s left ear and blew. A wailing blast came forth that almost knocked Freddie off his feet.

  “Out, dybbuk!” commanded the rabbi. “Uneasy intruder! Pesky spirit! In the name of the Almighty, flee the body of this nice American. A Gentile. What do you want to bother him for? Come a little closer, dybbuk, and listen. I, Moise, son of Isaac, son of Yankel, command you to obey. Jump out! Run for the good of your soul. Refuse and I will fill you like a pincushion with curses and oaths and painful maledictions! Are you listening, dybbuk? I command you to harm no living creature, especially this American! Leap out, and I will reward you with blessings and forgive the troubled mischief that drives you. Nu? Agreed? Baruch atah…”

  Finishing the Hebrew prayer, the rabbi lifted the ram’s horn to Freddie’s ear and blew. Once more, the ventriloquist felt as if he’d been hit with a two-by-four.

  Freddie peeled off French francs to help the rabbi rebuild the synagogue, and soon was flagging down a taxi.

  He felt buoyant. He was eager to believe the whole whoop-de-doodle had worked. Maybe the dybbuk had been scared out of his skin by the ancient blast of the ram’s horn and had left without saying good-bye.

  Once Freddie was back in the small elevator of his hotel, a familiar voice burst into the air. “The ram’s horn! That wasn’t a friendly thing to do!”

  “You’re back!” Freddie exclaimed.

  “I was never gone,” said the dybbuk.

  “What do I have to do to get rid of you?”

  “Try chicken soup.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The passing rain had turned the streets of Paris into a scattering of broken mirrors. Black umbrellas had sprouted like mushrooms. It was already spring.

  But a frost had settled in the theatrical office where Freddie sat across the desk from the gravel-voiced man who found him work. Viktor Chambrun had himself been a performer, a baggy-pants comic. After losing an arm in the war, he’d become an agent in Paris, booking other acts across Europe.

  “Sorry, kid,” said the agent, his voic
e rasping like a file. “You’ve been canceled at the Crazy Horse.”

  “Why?” asked Freddie, startled. He was counting on the Crazy Horse to give him a leg up into the big time. It was a popular tourist cabaret.

  “The director booked another ventriloquist. One who doesn’t move his lips.”

  “But my Count Dracula routine is a hit.”

  “Where? Transylvania?” With his remaining arm, the agent lit a cigar. “I’ll get you a spot in one of the cellar clubs. At least you’ll eat. You’re not ready for the top spots. And that vampire is about as funny as indigestion. Sometimes I wonder if you were cut out to be a straight man to a piece of wood, Freddie.”

  “I hold my own.”

  “Maybe it’s time you went home. The war’s over, soldier.”

  “I’m not giving up on the Crazy Horse,” said Freddie firmly. Now he regarded it as Mount Everest. He wanted to climb to the top.

  Freddie left, dismayed and angry. Go home to what? A sunburned neck in the wheat fields? He wandered the misty streets. Now the black umbrellas made him wonder if all Paris was going to a funeral. He sat down at a sidewalk café and ordered a black coffee.

  He felt a tickle of breath. “I heard,” said the dybbuk, in a voice that seemed to rise from Freddie’s stomach.

  “I don’t need your sympathy,” Freddie replied.

  “Who’s giving it? You want to play the Crazy Horse? I’ll fix it.”

  “Get lost.”

  “Shlemiel. Let me do the talking.”

  “I can’t shut you up.”

  “Shmendrik. Let me talk in the act. You won’t have to move your lips.”

  Freddie jerked up his head. “What did you say?”

  “I said—”

  “Never mind. I heard you. Can you talk through my nose?”

  “Easy.”

  “Then I could tape my lips shut.”

  “You could drink a bottle of Perrier.”

  “While the count is talking a mile a minute.”

  “Two miles.”