by Steve Stern
It was then that the character in the turned-around golf cap and tatty plus fours drew alongside him. “You’re so pretty,” said the fellow, dressed as if for the links of Gehenna, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker. My Uncle Zalman ain’t too pleased with you that you didn’t send him his cash.”
In an instant the broad world shrank to the size of a slum, the Balut having overtaken the Tenth Ward, and Max understood precisely what had transpired: how this raffish character with the lazy eye had lain in wait for him from the outset, betraying the old ice mensch by snatching the money that was owed him and leaving the greenhorn to take the blame for the theft. Now the fellow, recalled by loose ends, had come back to complete what he’d begun, and if Pisgat never recovered his cash, at least he would be avenged.
Suffused with a fatalism that nearly neutralized his fear, Max responded, “So why you didn’t send him the money yourself?”
“Who, me?” The fellow feigned indignation. “What do I know what happened to my uncle’s money? Maybe in a game of chance you lost it? You greenies do get fleeced so easy. Shtrudel,” nodding in the direction of a sizable crony who had closed in on Max’s left flank, “ain’t this the one made off with Uncle Zalman’s gelt?”
But Max didn’t wait around for Shtrudel’s verdict. Spurred by Jocheved’s memory of assault and abduction, he shrugged off the hands that attempted to grab him and broke away, making a headlong dash around a corner and diving into the first alley he saw. The alley was blind, with a slat fence at its terminus, which Max hit at a dead run and scrambled over, dropping into an unpaved courtyard on the other side. Afraid to look back, he flung himself over a low brick barrier, crossed another yard, and climbed another fence into yet another alley, fueled in his flight by equal parts exhilaration and terror. The alley debouched into a doglegged defile of a street that smelled of the river, in which a few stolid residents were roosting like teraphim on their wooden stoops. The slate roofs of the narrow houses leaned conspiratorially toward one another, so that only minimal sunlight was admitted into the street, where a small party of pedestrians were making their way toward the end of the block. Distinctive for their shared disabilities, they progressed with a will: a man with a single leg who swung himself along on a pair of crutches like a fugitive pendulum; another in an opera cape, wearing opaque spectacles, flailing left to right with a Malacca cane. A woman veiled in a woolen shawl emerged from a tributary alley hauling a wagon containing a quadruple amputee, his face like a prow, his trunk a fat bowling pin decorated with medals. All were advancing in the direction of a decrepit brick building with a tin-plated door and no sign.
Wherever those poor souls were headed, Max figured it was a place no healthy citizen was likely to go, and so he followed. He reached the tin door, got a foot in just before the door slammed shut, and squeezed inside, where he nearly tumbled into the wagon that the cowled woman was dragging behind her. Its wooden wheels clanked loudly down the short flight of ill-lit stone steps, and Max, once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, marveled at how the little sack of a man managed to remain so steadfastly erect in his bouncing conveyance. At the foot of the stairs there was a windowless catacomb lit by flickering sconces, where patrons in various stages of affliction were seated at tables and milling about a whiskey bar mounted on wood-staved kegs. Having hopped on his good leg to the bottom of the steps, one of the cripples who’d preceded Max hung up his crutches and unfastened a leather harness to release his stump, which he unfolded into a perfectly serviceable limb. The blind man had meanwhile cast off his cane and smoky glasses with a flourish to elbow his way toward the bar, where a couple of customers took turns sucking beer from a tube protruding out of a bunghole. In his wagon the limbless veteran, wriggling on his back like a bug attempting to right itself, had also begun to regenerate missing arms and legs; while his female attendant dropped the shawl and peeled away the festering sores stuck to her cheeks, revealing herself as a woman of tolerably pleasant features.
Where some recovered lost appendages and faculties, others were busy pruning and abrading themselves, applying jellies and scabs, rubber bald caps with wens, prostheses that simulated bone diseases and malformations. Some worked with straps and trusses to achieve amputations, while others hunkered around a woodstove heating fixatives and gels for sculpting artificial wounds. A bird-breasted gent with a pedagogical manner demonstrated on his own person before a small circle of students how to counterfeit furuncles, lesions, stigmata, and gangrene. Those not involved in inflicting or healing mutilations admired their own handiwork in murky mirrors; some inspected a well-stocked wardrobe rack or contented themselves with conversation over needled beer.
Max recalled having heard of places where the blind were made to see and the lame to walk, but those were holy places, and this dank dungeon didn’t seem particularly sacrosanct. Of course, there’d been any number of phony beggars in Lodz, but who knew that they were the products of such elaborate industry? Having edged wide-eyed down the steps into the cellar proper, Max could overhear English spoken all about him in a variety of broken dialects and accents, including Galitzianer. He made bold to inquire of a landsman with a bleb the size of a cupping glass on his forehead, “Where am I?” and was told in stagey Daytshmersh, “This is what is known as a cripple factory.” Grinning with a show of black-capped teeth, his informant continued: “A western franchise, if you will, of what in Europe they call a court of miracles, though some would say a court of last resorts.”
It was further explained that the customers might have the use of the costumes and props that the beer cellar provided gratis, so long as they signed a contract, notarized by the proprietor, promising to share a fixed percentage of their supplicant’s proceeds. This guaranteed that the majority of patrons would return the fruits of their mooching to the cellar as to a company store.
That was how Max initiated the series of impersonations that would see him through the lean winter months. Panhandler by day, he took shelter by night in a shadow Manhattan, sometimes sleeping in the Municipal Lodging House on its barge locked in North River ice, or in the faded opulence of the HIAS quarters in the old Astor Library. There were hapless periods when, lacking the price of a flop, he slept outdoors with one eye open on top of a steam vent or a heating grate; nights when his daylight appeals had gone well and he might rent a closet-size crib above a barroom, the company of mice being preferable to the public sanctuaries that left him vulnerable to deviants and thieves. Occasionally, sick and tired of dissembling, he might briefly forgo the accessories that rendered him maimed or blind to take an unskilled job: once as a buttonhole puncher, another time a suspenders peddler—the latter activity affording its own style of camouflage, adorned as he was in galluses like a willow tree. With each new occupation he assumed a new name: Chaim Fut, Itche Grin; but mostly he remained under cover and hustled. Every so often he was granted a holiday, as during elections, when the Tammany bosses provided free lunches to anyone who voted repeatedly for their candidates, but even then Max was afraid to lower his guard. Of course, as a girl, as Jocheved, he would have been eligible to take shelter in more benevolent refuges such as the Daughters of Rachel Home for Wayward Jewish Girls, a place of tender mercies or so he’d heard. But Jocheved had as good as drowned in Mrs. Weintraub’s washtub, so little was her voice heeded anymore in Max’s affairs; and Max himself was so lost in his Igs, Chaims, and Abednegos that he’d forfeited the memory of precisely who he was supposed to be.
As a consequence, Jocheved’s pleas that he should continue the quest for Rabbi ben Zephyr, which alternated with her disturbing indifference to her own fate, fell on deaf ears. Doubly disguised, Max tended to forget about the submerged Jocheved altogether, except during those functions whose privacy Max had to make no end of degrading efforts to secure. Then there were the fiddles, his expanding rag-bag of deceits, the latest involving the sale of little sacks of sand scooped from the gutters, which he pitched as Jerusalem earth. Still, it was only a matter of time
before the current ruse was discovered: the charities that dispatched their itinerant ambassadors—some begging alms for the outworn parasites of Jerusalem, others for the young pioneers of the Yishuv—often clashed with each other, while both factions were on the lookout for impostors. So on this particular night Max had decided to retire old Reb Saltpeter. Then, unthinking in his marathon weariness, he put on the shell coat and bowler of Mrs. Weintraub’s absconded husband without resorting to any cosmetic effects. Only half conscious of having returned to his original disguise—though aware enough of having missed it—he ventured out into Delancey Street to purchase a bit of kippered herring or maybe a piece of fruit. It wasn’t lost on him either that the evening’s weather showed signs of a warming trend, or that he was lonely.
As he strolled toward a produce stand beneath the shuddering uprights of the Second Avenue El, a fellow in a floppy golf cap turned about jockey style stepped up to greet him familiarly: “You’re so pretty,” he said, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker.”
IT WAS THE young man from the ship. Despite his dowdy apparel, Shmerl was as sure of his identity as he had been of little else during that long cold season of carting dung. He was amazed at how relieved he was to see him, though they had yet to exchange a word, but while Shmerl thought he might now have much to say to him, his anticipation left him timid and reticent. So rather than cross immediately over the road to accost him, he followed the yungerman awhile from the other side. There was, after all, no particular hurry; hours remained before he was scheduled to make his rounds with the shit patrol, and it calmed him somewhat to observe the lad from a distance; saddened him as well to see how the intervening months had taken a toll on his former dignity. After a block or so along Delancey, Shmerl noticed that another, a lath-legged character in knee breeches and a turned-around caddy’s cap, also seemed to be dogging the young man’s heels. Then the caddy cap accelerated his pace, drawing alongside the yungerman to speak to him, upon which the youth, who had paused at a fruiterer’s bin, took off like a streak. Shmerl’s heart kicked at its cage as he watched the lad hotfooting it down the sidewalk, trying madly to dodge the passersby. In flight he looked over his shoulder, then turned around just in time to run smack into the arms of a big fellow in an ankle-length duster who had planted himself athwart his path. Thus embraced, the youth from the ship was manhandled by the duster—along with the caddy cap, who’d bolted forward to grab his collar from behind—into an alley off the crowded thoroughfare.
Shmerl was not the only one who had witnessed the abduction; others behind stalls and in horsecars saw the young man, a hand clapped over his mouth, struggling with his captors as they dragged him off. But while those who’d stopped to watch resumed their business as soon as the unpleasantness was out of sight, Shmerl recognized the event as the fateful moment he’d been waiting for. Confident in the strength that pressing irons and dung shovels had imparted to his stooped physique, he straightened his shoulders as best he could and drew forth from the walking stick he carried a slender metal wand. “Shemhemphorash!” he cried aloud, which was the name of the magic hat of Moses as mentioned in the Sefer Sheqel ha-Kodesh. It was as good a Hebrew battle cry as any he could think of. Zigzagging through heavy traffic, he crossed Delancey and charged the alley, where he began to thrust here and there in the gloom. The stock prod, which he’d devised on the principle of Aaron’s rod (it was a cane with a serpent’s sting) quivered like a fencing foil in his hand. He’d fashioned it with a trigger that sent a six-volt charge from a carbon battery to the platinum spikelet at its tip. The thing was designed for the purpose of encouraging horses in the livery stable to behave, but the nags were already so docile that he’d as yet had no occasion to try it out. This was his invention’s debut, and judging from the response of the young man’s attackers, it worked to good effect—especially now that Shmerl’s eyesight had adjusted to the halflight and he was aiming his thrusts with more accuracy. Both the duster and the caddy cap yowled as if they had fallen into a nest of electric eels; they dropped the blackjack and the naked shiv respectively to clutch at their parts, doubtless as shocked by the bent creature wielding his stinging weapon as they were by the weapon itself.
Having rendered the two assailants temporarily hors de combat, Shmerl sheathed his prod in order to raise their intended victim from the flags and hustle him out of the alley. The young man from the ship gripped his forehead, a thin trickle of blood leaking from between his fingers, but allowed himself to be led at a stumbling dogtrot behind his rescuer. Holding his stick in one hand, Shmerl pulled the youth along by the wrist onto Delancey, where after a short block he turned abruptly into another alleyway. Together they threaded a concatenation of puddled passages, emerging now and again to cross a noisy street only to duck straightaway back into the maze. Eventually they found themselves in a vacant lot strewn with refuse and bed frames dragged outside in the hope that the sun would lure the bedbugs from their slats. The lot was surrounded by a high wooden fence, one of whose boards Shmerl swung aside to usher his friend—Was it premature to think of him as a friend?—into Reb Levine’s wagonyard. Breathing the foul air with relief, he invited the stunned youth into his shanty, where he sat him down on a bed covered in horse blankets, which was lowered from the rafters by a system of pulleys and weights. Then kindling a lantern, Shmerl began without hesitation to attend to his guest’s wound, which amounted to little more than a shallow abrasion crowning a nasty bump on the kop.
HOLDING HIS ACHING HEAD, Max counted it as an aspect of the stupefaction brought on by his injury that the furniture in his host’s modest quarters appeared to be floating in midair. A table and chair, stove, workbench, and thunderbox all hovered above them amid dangling horse tackle, as if waiting for the shack’s occupant himself to levitate. As his rescuer dabbed at his forehead with the putrid-smelling poultice he’d prepared in a porcelain basin, Max also wondered at the swiftness with which he’d been spirited from the ghetto streets to this peculiar cell; though, accustomed as he was by now to uncommon places, he understood that the ghetto must still be close at hand. He supposed that under the circumstances he ought to introduce himself to this curious figure who had after all saved his life, but the problem was, he seemed for the moment to have misplaced his own name. Itche Fut? Chaim Grin? He felt his face for any artificial asymmetries (the irony of an authentic wound notwithstanding) and recognized its velvet contours.
“Feinshmeker,” he tendered rather formally, offering his hand. “Max.”
“Shmerl,” replied his host, with a hint of familiarity that made Max wonder if they’d met before. “Shmerl Karp,” which may have been the first time Shmerl had pronounced his abbreviated surname aloud. Eagerly he cranked Max’s extended palm with his right hand while continuing to dab with his left at the swelling goose egg on Max’s bare head. “I saw you already on the same ship we come over from the Old Country on.”
Max tried to square this information with the immigrant’s odd environment, such a far cry from the sweatshops and pushcarts and shuls. His gaze strayed again from his host’s smiling face and his shock of upstanding auburn hair toward the items suspended above their heads, and following his glance Shmerl folded the poultice into Max’s own hand. He stepped over to a console containing what looked like a rudimentary keyboard, a bellringer’s assemblage of wooden handles from which ropes of varying widths fanned upward like a web of ratlines on a sailing ship. Then he began with closed fists and a sudden startling show of energy to hammer the individual handles, which caused the airborne objects to begin descending in concert: the lit stove shaped like a cast-iron pig with a percolating coffee pot on top, the laboratory bench laden with frothing beakers full of incandescent purple gas. There was a large construction like a miniature refinery at whose center was an inverted milk can caged in perforated metal strips, surrounded by brackets, gears, belted bicycle wheels, and nodes of fairy lights—the whole contraption coated in a fur of polar rime.
“The machine,�
� explained Shmerl, giving one of the rimless wheels a spin, which caused coils to glow, an engine to hum, and steam to rise, “that it duplicates the prophet Ezekiel his vision of wheels within wheels. ‘Wherever the spirit wished to go, there the wheels went, for the spirit of living creatures was in the wheels.’ It makes, the machine, a perpetual motion that makes also, when is liquefied under pressure ammonia gas, eppes an everlasting winter.”
On cue the machine belched into a chute, with a tin pan attached to receive it, what was either an enormous multifaceted diamond or a large chunk of ice.
Max gaped in fascination for a full minute before his eyes were again drawn irresistibly toward the ceiling, where a narrow cedar box remained aloft. Once more noting the object of his guest’s curiosity, Shmerl depressed another couple of beveled handles, this time with an outright bravado. Chains ratcheted over iron sprockets as the casket began to descend until it rested on the earthen floor, its lid springing automatically open. “This I think belongs to you,” submitted the crookback.
Max got to his feet of his own accord but allowed Shmerl to assist him as he shuffled over to the box, where, pressing the poultice to his forehead as if to cushion the clapper in his skull, he looked inside. There was Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, resting comfortably in a clear block of ice that looked remarkably none the worse for wear. In fact, unlike the eroded green boulder that Max remembered, this one was pristine, showing the old recumbent tzaddik with his beard and gabardine to fine advantage. Turning back to Shmerl, Max asked him pointedly, “Who are you?” though he could as well have put the question to himself. In his fuddled brain he tried assembling what might pass for current articles of faith: that he was in a shack in a stableyard at the end of March, entertained by an outlandish person quite possibly escaped from an institution or storybook; though this did little to relieve his profound disorientation or to explain how the girl Jocheved could feel so perfectly at home.