by Steve Stern
Without a word—had they ever exchanged a word?—the hag took in the situation. Jocheved looked on sniffling, hugging her bare breasts as if she meant to stifle them for good and all, while the old woman went straight to the clothes press and in a gesture that had about it something of the miraculous (she was regarded by many as a kishefmakherin, a sorceress) lifted the lid. From its camphor-reeking confines she withdrew a man’s suit of clothes—the dark navy worsted with an alpaca lining and rolling lapel that Jocheved had purchased for her father during better days. Salo, who slept in his peasant smock and sheepskin, had never found occasion to wear it; though he took pride in possessing the suit and pledged to put it on when Mashiach finally arrived, or on the day the rabbi disenthralled himself from the ice, whichever came first. His wife sneered that he was waiting to be buried in his gladrags and, seized with a sentimental urge that he realize that end, had quarreled with the burial society, which pronounced such off-the-rack apparel a desecration.
Passive after the energy she’d expended in cutting her hair, Jocheved looked on with detached curiosity as Shulamith laid out the garments on the sagging featherbed. Nor did she resist as the midwife helped her into first the warm woolen gatkes, then the short-bosomed white dress shirt with its upstanding collar. Next came the hair-line trousers with their double-sewn buttons at the crotch and the single-breasted, round-cut sack coat. There was also a pair of leather bluchers, several sizes too large, whose interiors the old woman padded with newspaper whose headlines described the stewpot of Europe building toward a boil. Still relatively benumbed, Jocheved supposed it was fitting that the vartsfroy who had supervised the girlchild’s delivery should also attend at her rebirth as a pallid young man. Though the clothes hung somewhat baggily on her slender frame, the girl had the odd sensation that she would grow into them. An alien in her own skin, she experienced a composure she hadn’t known since before her abduction; it was a feeling that, while it had little in common with a homecoming, gave her the sense of having been liberated from her outworn self.
Shulamith, notwithstanding her smoky eye and hirsute upper lip, had once had a husband, and with gnarled fingers she meticulously knotted the ash gray cravat at Jocheved’s throat. Then she took up the shears and trimmed the uneven edges of the hair the girl had so recklessly hacked off. Afterward they stood gazing at each other with the sodality of coconspirators who together have defied the law; for even unread women knew the Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, how it deceives not only others but oneself, confounding the soul that finds itself trapped in a stranger’s body.
“Azoy,” said the midwife in a voice whose girlish lilt was chilling for its incongruity, “now you are again brand new?” From the pocket of her calico apron she fetched the couple of gulden she’d received for pawning Basha Puah’s embroidered challah cloth and porcelain cuspidor, plus the curio of a cedar ice cream freezer. In return the girl bestowed a kiss on the kishefmakherin’s wrinkled brow, who (for an instant in Jocheved’s vapory imagination) was a maid again.
After the old woman’s departure Jocheved dropped onto her cot to take account of her circumstances. She was clearheaded enough to realize that the pittance Shulamith had given her would not begin to defray the expense of her project. It was barely enough to bribe a customs official, never mind purchase a passport or shifscarte ticket. And even had she had the funds for the journey overland from Lodz to the port of Hamburg, then on across the North Atlantic, how would she manage to drag along with her a box containing a saint-size block of ice? But these questions, rather than overwhelm her, seemed to pose a merely abstract problem, just as in her uncustomary attire the girl felt the weight of her grief reduced to an almost hypothetical burden. What was more, beyond the lightening of her leaden heart, her masquerade offered obvious practical advantages. For one thing, it would be easier to deal with the perils of travel as a man… as, say, Max Feinshmeker. She pulled the name out of thin air and immediately warmed to it, how its jaunty consonants mocked her own somber aspect, lifting her spirits. If not quite a perfect fit, it was a name that, like her new suit of clothes, she would eventually grow into. She would be Max Feinshmeker, nephew of the deceased Frostbissen couple on the family’s distaff side, a young man for whom the complications of the journey to the Golden Land would constitute a great adventure. Jocheved felt the slightest twinge of excitement at the prospect.
Of course, one could argue there were any number of favors that might be more easily obtained by a woman—a notion that turned Max Feinshmeker’s stomach and filled him with disgust. This early evidence of her dual disposition prompted a fluttering in Jocheved’s breast: She was Max, a skeptical, forward-thinking youth, a staunch adherent of Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement, and disdainful of the outdated tradition the girl had been raised in; though that tradition, like the persistence of the girl herself, still cramped his modern attitudes and worried his bones. Jocheved’s thoughts then returned ruefully to the matter of capital, to the documents that might have to be forged, the unfriendly world that must be navigated between her ramshackle ghetto street and America. With all this in mind she rose from the chair and propped the stiff-crowned derby at a gallant angle on her handsome cropped head. Then she set off in the direction of Pisgat’s icehouse without a clue as to how she would proceed but with a lightness of step that the defeated daughter of Salo Frostbissen would never have been capable of.
SHE RAPPED AT the wire-glass window in the door of Zalman Pisgat’s disordered office, while behind her porters in leather aprons shouldered sides of beef like wounded comrades and wheeled trolleys stacked with leaky produce crates.
On being admitted Jocheved announced tentatively, “I’m Max Feinshmeker,” and inspirited by her own declaration, “a near relation of the Frostbissen clan on the maternal side. I’ve come to relieve the proprietor of this establishment of the casket and its contents abandoned by my Uncle Salo at his demise.” It was the speech she’d rehearsed all the way from Zabludeve Street.
The ice mensch scratched the prickly pear of his jaw. Like everyone else he’d heard the tale of Salo’s bloody quietus; he’d even been questioned by the police concerning his employee of some twenty-odd years, though as long as Jewish crime didn’t spill beyond the confines of the ghetto, such investigations remained largely a formality. Salo’s death had reminded Pisgat, first, of the existence of the watchman, a timeworn fixture who barely earned his keep, and then of a long-forgotten item stored on his premises; he’d been half-expecting that someone might turn up to reclaim it. Old goat that he was, he had hoped it might be the girl, the story of whose fall had also reached his ears, and he was visibly disappointed that another representative of the family had come in her stead. Turning up the flaps of his plush cap to release his jug ears, he wondered aloud what had become of Jocheved.
Agitated, the girl nevertheless managed to keep Max’s sober façade from cracking apart. “The daughter is indisposed,” was all she was willing to say.
“A shame,” said old Pisgat, finally too busy to pursue the subject further. He was glad at any rate of an opportunity to rid himself of an incommodious object that had taken up precious space in his icehouse these many years; though on the other hand he was reluctant to engage in any transaction without realizing a profit.
“So what do you want the thing for?” he inquired cagily, as if he might have designs of his own on the relic.
The girl shuffled in her outsize shoes. Why indeed was she so intent on making herself the curator of her father’s archaeological curiosity? “I want,” she squared her shoulders, expanding her straitened chest, “to give the rebbe a proper resting place.”
Pisgat took a pinch of snuff from a briar box, stuffed it into a hairy nostril, and sneezed, wiping his nose on a sleeve. “What’s wrong with here?” he asked, batting his red-rimmed eyes, for it had occurred to him that he might extend an imaginary lease on the storage area.
“I want to put him somepla
ce,” her answer framed itself as a question, “more permanent?” She winced internally at her own lack of conviction.
The proprietor raised a shaggy brow. “Pisgat’s icehouse is going away somewhere?” No reply from the lad forthcoming, he leaned back in his swivel chair and grew thoughtful: It was indeed a scandal that the frozen tzaddik’s remains had been kept above ground for such an unconscionable time; he should have been interred long ago. “But you, excuse me, don’t look like a religious; takhe, you don’t even look like a Jew. So what’s the old fossil to you?”
“He’s…,” the girl floundered, then rallied, recalling her mother’s mandate, her father’s blind faith; the rabbi was, for better or worse, her destiny too. “He’s a sacred trust of our family that I owe it to my Uncle Salo to take care of him.”
“Hmph.” Pisgat shrugged, reassuming his professional demeanor. “Call for the legacy, you pay for the funeral. Naturally there’s a fee to convey the thing from my place of business, plus the outstanding rent on the space it’s occupied since your uncle’s passing.” He named an extortionate sum.
The girl was momentarily taken aback, but despite all she’d been through Jocheved still had an instinct for fair and not-so-fair trade, and where her shrewdness left off, Max Feinshmeker’s (she felt) began. “On second thought,” she said considering, “forget it,” and started to turn on her heel.
“Wait a minute!” Pisgat shouted. “What’s a matter, you never heard from negotiation? Or maybe you mean to bluff a bluffer?”
Jocheved turned again, searching her mind for more leverage; she was after all doing the old fortz a favor—but just as she was about to offer that insight, another man shouldered his way through the office door. This one wore the sealskin reefer that was a common livery in the twilight world of which the girl had some bitter knowledge.
“I got outside in my wagon a shipment beluga caviar, three-quarters pood fresh off the boxcar from Vilna,” the man informed the proprietor, who told him shah, couldn’t he see they were not alone? Tapping a sharpened tooth with the handle of his horsewhip, the man continued to disregard the youth as he issued his ultimatum: “You want it, you don’t want it? I got other customers standing in line. The g’vir Poznanski, him with his palace on Piotrkowska, is prepared to pay top zloty, no questions asked. Make up your mind, the stuff won’t wait.”
Snapped Pisgat: “Didn’t I tell you I have already a buyer with an order from the millionaire Belmont in America, USA? This is guaranteed. Only a few arrangements I got first to make.”
Pisgat’s visitor, heavy-set, with greasy hair like matted seaweed straggling from under his cap, chewed impatiently on his braided whip. “I gah arery arraymum uh my om.” Unclamping his teeth, “And don’t think I don’t know what happened to the sevruga that got seized at the border last month.”
“Then why you even came here?” barked Pisgat.
The middleman relaxed into irony. “Think of it as a courtesy call.”
Kibbitzing, Jocheved was only just able to catch the drift of their discourse, while the worldlier Max seemed to comprehend more. By “arrangements” the ice mensch meant contacts for smuggling contraband undetected over an obstacle course of customs agents and border guards. In this instance the shipment involved a case of black market caviar transported by land to Lodz from the Gulf of Riga. The legal export of such a luxury item was apparently out of the question: International tariffs and duties would be prohibitive, and the taxes alone on imported delicacies—or so Max assumed—could be excessive to the extent of canceling one’s return on the initial investment. There might even be a loss of revenue. You could camouflage the caviar along with other less levy-heavy perishables, but those items would still warrant transport by sealed boxcar and later in a ship’s refrigeration hold, thus inviting careful scrutiny. Besides, since the aforementioned seizure, Pisgat’s network had by his own admission broken down.
In an effort to stall the middleman, the ice mensch allowed that things were difficult, but he needed only a couple of days to reestablish his connections and pave the way for the shipment. Until then the sturgeon roe might be kept safe from spoilage in his icehouse.
“A couple days and Poznanski returns to his Black Sea dacha,” said the middleman, taking another bite out of his whip.
The ice mensch sputtered that the rich man should burst from pleasure. “May disease enter his gums!”
Meanwhile Jocheved, her confidence increased several fold by Max’s ingenuity, had concluded that here was a chance that would not come again. The idea she’d hit upon and refined while giving ear to their felonious exchange was this: It would be more economical to facilitate the legal transport of a dead relation for burial in a family plot overseas than to finance a clandestine consignment with all the elaborate palm-greasings that entailed. And what better cover for the fish roe than the rigid rabbi (his casket reinforced and lined with lead, or better zinc), whose frozen condition would ensure the freshness of the merchandise upon disembarkation in the Golden Land? As the self-possessed Max Feinshmeker, Jocheved stepped forward to present her alternative.
“Gentlemen,” she began, clearing her throat, lowering her voice an octave or two. “Gentlemen, perhaps I can be of service.”
1999.
Bernie was beside himself with relief at the rabbi’s homecoming, though the delinquent holy man scarcely acknowledged him, brushing past the open-mouthed boy in his haste to talk with Bernie’s father. It seemed that in his three days of wandering, the old man had seen a lot of life, and returning bug-eyed and bathed in sweat—the fedora battered, the sportcoat soiled, the loud parrot necktie hanging from his throat like a noose—Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had reached a stunning conclusion about the world he’d recently awakened to.
“Shopping bazaars it’s got, and Dodge Barracudos and Gootchie bags made I think from the skin of Leviathan, churches from Yoyzel it’s got big as Herod’s Temple, but it ain’t got a soul.”
All this he communicated breathlessly—less judgmental than plainly impressed—to Mr. Karp, who, relaxing in his postprandial recliner, appeared confused at first as to just who the intruder was. He was doubly disturbed, once he’d recalled the prodigal’s identity, that the old man should have planted himself directly between his chair and the wide-screen television—on which he was viewing his favorite program, a comedy called Nobody Likes Larry about a harassed family man. When his wife, looking up from a novel whose cover featured a woman swooning into the arms of a grenadier, reminded him that this was the fugitive from the deep freeze, Julius Karp snapped that he knew perfectly well who it was. On that note Mrs. Karp popped a Spansule from her heart-shaped pillbox and rose to tiptoe exaggeratedly out of the room. Meanwhile the bedraggled rabbi kept on reporting his reconnoitering of latter-day America, or at least the representative slice of it he’d seen.
“The people, they are such chazzers, all the time gobbling: gobble gobble; they feast on everything that it’s in their sight. They eat till their bellies swell by them like Goliath his hernia, and shop till their houses bulge from the electronic Nike and the Frederick of Hollywood balconette brassiere, but they ain’t satisfied.”
Jerking a lever as if shifting a gear, Mr. Karp brought his Stratalounger to an upright position. He was mightily irked at the way the old freeloader added insult to injury, compounding the crime of his return with an uninvited lecture on ethics. A firm believer in free-market economy, Mr. Karp resented the notion, tired as it was, that there was any higher principle on earth than goods and services. How dare this phantom of the ice box presume to instruct him, Julius Karp, citizen merchant—and in his own borrowed finery yet.
“Riches they got would make a Rothschild blush,” continued the rabbi, who seemed more gleeful than provoked; in fact, he seemed intoxicated, “but they ain’t got what makes them happy.”
“So?” said Mr. Karp, trying to keep a lid on his impatience. He’d heard the same commonplaces from Rabbi Birnbaum in his High Holiday sermons, though Birnba
um had the discretion to qualify his assaults on mammon so as not to offend the comfortable congregation who paid his salary. But from the perspective of his thronelike recliner, in front of which the wizened petitioner stood hat in hand, Mr. Karp (subvocally groaning) felt obligated to hear the old man out. “What exactly are you getting at?”
“I’m proposing,” the rabbi humbly submitted, “to restore to the people their soul.”
“Oh,” replied Mr. Karp. “I thought you might have something really ambitious in mind.” He sniggered over his witticism.
Unfazed, the rabbi went on. “A betmidrash, a study house I will establish, that they can come in it, both yehudim and goyim, and be born all over again. I got already my eye on a little place by the Rebel Yell Shopping Plaza…”
“Take it easy!” cautioned Mr. Karp, raising his hand like a traffic cop. “Now let me get this straight: You want to open up some kind of a religious institute where people come to study? Study what?”
“‘Study’ I don’t use in the traditional sense. More like, what you call them, exercises.”
“You mean like those Plottie classes my wife took once and went to bed for a week? Aren’t you a little out of shape for that sort of thing?” Again he chuckled.
“I’m talking spiritual exercises,” said the rabbi, with dignity. Then he complained that his feet were sore and asked if Mr. Karp would mind if he took a load off.
“Be my guest,” said the appliance merchant, though the invitation resonated unpleasantly in his gut.
The old man lowered himself with a grunt into the armchair that Mrs. Karp had vacated, so that both men now sat facing the TV. On its screen the put-upon family man, importuned by a marriage counselor to get in touch with his feminine side, had been moved to don his wife’s apparel in secret. An invisible audience guffawed like honking geese.