The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  “Ain’t you heard?”

  “Guilty as charged,” he added, still playful. “Heard what?”

  She lurched uninvited into his office and plunked herself down in the only available chair, where she began to rock restlessly back and forth—this despite the chair’s immobility. “The Mayor’s been on TV,” she announced a little breathlessly, studying the turquoise toenails at the tips of her sandal-shod feet. “He’s ordered the House of Enlightenment shut down till further notice. Seems they mounted an investigation into the affairs of Rabbi ben Zephyr, whose place of bidness is s’posed to stay closed pending the findings.” At which point she stopped rocking and stared up at Mr. Karp with heavily shadowed eyes.

  This was troubling news indeed. The Mayor, Gaylord by name, a beetle-browed throwback to the apartheid South, had already been heard making veiled references to the New House’s imprudent mixing of the races. But Julius couldn’t get past the fact that the bearer of these ill tidings had yet to present her credentials.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “A bunch of the Rabbi’s followers,” the girl went on, “hacksawed the chain across the front door, and now they’re holed up inside the auditorium, which it is presently surrounded by cops. They want to arrest the lot of them, Rabbi included, for trespass and unlawful entry. The shit’s done hit the fan.”

  “Is there an echo in here?” inquired Julius of the ceiling, loosening the knot of his tie. He wasn’t sure what he found more disturbing, the news of the event itself or the instrument of its communication. “I repeat, who are you?”

  With a hint of uncalled for defiance, Lou Ella stated her name, adding almost inaudibly, “I’m Bernie’s girl.”

  “What’s that?”

  She repeated her avowal.

  “Bernie? My son Bernie?”

  “You maybe know another?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young lady,” snapped Julius more or less on principle, since reproach was never his strong suit. Then he tightened his tie again, musing out loud: “Bernie’s got a girl?” It was a confidence he needed to digest at his leisure, but the girl went right on talking.

  “He’s playing with fire, your boy. He thinks he’s some kind of a saint, which maybe he is, but that ain’t the point.”

  “You’re talking about my Bernie, the couch potato of Canary Cove?” But even as he said this, he was aware that the kid had changed, changed utterly, though he was damned if he knew exactly how.

  “He’s my Bernie now,” murmured Lou Ella, straightening her spine for a proprietary instant before slumping again. “But mostly he don’t belong to anyone, leastwise his own self. He ain’t hardly a member of the human race no more. Do you know what a zaddik is?”

  Julius assumed she was using some arcane teenage jargon. “Nooo,” he tendered hesitantly.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Karp, where you been?”

  “Where have I been?” he wondered aloud. “Making a hard-earned buck is where.” And if what she’d told him was true, then a goodly portion of that income was in serious jeopardy. But who was this little minx in her circus regalia to challenge him? “Let me get this straight,” he said, matching her vexation with his own. “You’re my son’s girlfriend? Since when does Bernie have girlfriends?”

  But Lou Ella had no intention of backtracking. “A zaddik is a kinda Jewish swami. He suffers for everybody. The dude’s like in possession of all his mystical organs.”

  “Eh?”

  “Ecstasy and him are like this. He can leave his body whenever he wants, sometimes even when he don’t want, and rise up to glory or descend to the underworld to fetch back the soul of a person who died too soon. He’s also known to escort the dead to the afterlife and only hangs around this world for the sake of his flock…”

  All of which seemed neither here nor there to the home appliance merchant, who was growing more on edge by the moment. But despite the girl’s unwelcome intrusion and the dire circumstance she’d come to impart, Julius found himself still dwelling on the news of his son’s affair of the heart, which had given him an unexpected twinge. Maybe the kid was normal after all.

  “Your common or garden zaddik,” continued Lou, “can heal the sick too, which I ain’t seen Bernie do yet, though he got my little sister, who’s a might slow, to say her first word. Boykh, I think it was. He’s pretty good for self-taught, though he insists on giving the rabbi credit for teaching him everything he knows.”

  “His girl,” uttered Julius, squinting at the garish intruder over the rims of his glasses. “Who’da thunk it.”

  Lou Ella tilted her head, dangling an earring like a tiny tomahawk. “You still hung up on that? Well, if it makes you feel any better, we never done it, though it wadn’t for want of trying.”

  Julius wasn’t sure the information did make him feel better, but it was finally more than he needed to know. The girl had been in his office only minutes and already she’d led him far beyond his comfort zone. “Whoa,” he said, hands raised like a holdup victim.

  “Fact is,” Lou was relentless, “if we was just regular sweethearts, I’da prolly lost interest in him by now. But, Lord help me, I got a soft spot for the shmegegi.”

  The unadorned declaration made the retailer doubly squeamish. “Why are you telling me all this?” he nearly shouted.

  “‘Cause I think I’m gonna lose him. That is,” she conceded, “if I ever had him.”

  Julius considered calling security—did the Showroom have security? The girl was unstoppable.

  “He’s in trouble. He thinks he can save the rabbi, and he’s gone to the New House to try and do I dunno what.”

  The thought of his laggard son venturing where angels feared to tread struck his father as absurd. “Shouldn’t you both be in school?” it suddenly dawned on Julius to ask, though he himself was stunned by the irrelevance of the question.

  “That place is a hornets’ nest.”

  “School?”

  “The New House! Ain’t you been listening?”

  He had, but enough was enough. “Well,” said Julius, clearing his throat with a sound like a faltering transmission, “what do you expect me to do about it?”

  Lou Ella glared at the agitated merchant with her fishiest eye, then let it go. In fact, she had entertained some fantasy in which she and Bernie’s father joined forces to come to the aid of his son, even as Bernie rescued the rabbi from an uncertain fate. But there sat Julius Karp wearing the helpless expression of someone in the midst of taking a pratfall. Her lower lip trembled as she muttered, “Nothin’, I guess.”

  “Then why drag me into this in the first place?”

  “I just thought you oughta know. Also,” she admitted, “I wanted to share the worry with somebody else.” Feebly, “You know, like spread the wealth?”

  “Okay, so now I’m worried. Are you happy?”

  “No, but I’m a teensy bit relieved.”

  “Glad to hear it. So what happens now?”

  She shrugged and rose from the chair, aeons older, turning with a sigh to slouch toward the office door. “Tragedy I s’pose.”

  As the girl made her melancholy exit without so much as a fare-thee-well, Julius was left stranded at his desk, harried by unbidden memories. So it seemed that the Karp family’s affinity for untoward behavior had indeed leapfrogged the appliance merchant to bedevil his son. There was cold comfort in the knowledge: for the curse he had ducked all his life, in afflicting Bernie, had as good as circled back round to bite Julius in his own tush.

  Autumn 2002.

  He approached the New House of Enlightenment along a suburban street strewn with leaves and jackknifed squad cars flashing red lights. The tabernacle itself was surrounded by sawhorse barriers, onlookers from the neighborhood pressing against them as flak-jacketed police with bullhorns warned them to stay back. There were media vans, attendants fussing over broadcasters with perfect hair, pinning mikes the size of blood ticks to their lapels as they faced the cameras. Some enterp
rising children had set up a lemonade stand. The general air of expectancy seemed to Bernie, however, to have less in common with a crisis than the anticipation of a parade in which celebrities were due to appear. Maybe his own legend had preceded him and when he approached the barricades, explaining, “The rabbi is my teacher; I’m the one that discovered him,” the crowds would part and the cops wave him through. But that wasn’t likely. Besides, even if he was able to convince the authorities that he could be of assistance, they would no doubt attach such conditions that in the end he would be forced to betray the rabbi rather than rescue him. And rescue was what Bernie had in mind.

  Having by now understood that his tenure as public guru had run its course, Rabbi ben Zephyr would have no choice but to accompany his onetime apprentice to some safe remove, where the holy man could again resume his original destiny as a hidden saint. But how to spirit the rebbe from the siege of the House of Enlightenment to some sanctuary beyond the reach of the law was a problem Bernie had yet to resolve, though he was confident that a solution would present itself when the time came. Meanwhile there was the more immediate problem of securing an audience with the old man in the first place. It occurred to him he might simply sidle through the police line, vault the barriers, and make a dash for the doors, but that would invite a doomed pursuit by the metro SWAT team, members of which were on hand for just such an event. And besides, Cholly Sidepocket, the rabbi’s implacable bodyguard in his mirror glasses, chinchilla coat, and matching cap, had planted himself in front of the doors with folded arms, ready to repel anyone who dared to seek entry or take a bullet in the attempt. Bernie recalled a meditation of Shlomiel ben Hayyim of Dreznitz that rendered one invisible, but the technique had unpredictable side effects. Then a third option suggested itself, and making an abrupt about-face, the boy backtracked along the street of single-story ranch houses, their raked lawns anchored by bags of leaves tilting like fat kids in a sack race.

  Behind him the voice over the megaphone, calling on the occupants of the New House to “Come out and save your sorry selves from future harm,” was somewhat annulled by the bracing nip in the November air. In a block or two Bernie came to a place where the pavement was interrupted by a storm grate overarched by an inlet with cast-iron teeth, fixed into the lip of the curb like a snarl. Looking left and right, he sank to all fours and rolled his thin self between the iron teeth and the grate. He dropped some six feet into a shallow catchbasin full of sludge and standing water, stirring a swarm of drowsy mosquitoes and splashing ooze over his sneakers and jeans. From there he hauled himself into the mouth of a circular drainpipe through which, ducking his head, he proceeded at a simian stoop. It was dark in the pipe, but Bernie—veteran explorer (or so he told himself) of the obscurer reaches of the psyche—progressed with a blind assurance.

  After a short incline, the tributary pipe spilled over a shelf into the storm drain proper, where he lowered himself into the deeper, broader conduit. But no sooner had he planted his feet on the sewer’s pitched bank, unhunching his spine, than he lost his footing and slid down the slope on his backside into a trough the mixture of rainwater and raw sewage. Soaked and slimed to the skin, he made an attempt to rise only to slip again, his floundering efforts to regain his balance reverberating in the concrete tunnel. The outfall from the previous night’s downpour had apparently backed up the passage, bringing with it a deposit of detritus that clogged the sewer like an unvoided intestine, and it took Bernie some moments to finally stand. Then, covered in muck as if he’d crawled from a primordial bog, he inched his way back up the slope to a less slippery purchase, where he cautiously began his forward progress again.

  While the housing development above was of a fairly recent vintage, the sewer network beneath it seemed a holdover from some dark age. Unlike the sanitary system in Bernie’s own neighborhood, which transported sewage efficiently toward flush tanks and treatment facilities, this cloaca-like passage appeared to have survived from a time when plagues of yellow jack were bred in miasmal sinks below the ground. Slowly Bernie’s eyes, aided by tracers of light that penetrated the odd manhole cover, began to adjust to the gloom. There were other sources of illumination as well: sunlight slanting through the intermittent gratings, hanging pale-yellow parallelograms along the walls, whose fungus-laden masonry contributed to the atmosphere of a catacomb. Farther on, however, the floor of the tunnel itself began to come apart, breaking up like a fractured ice jam, where the stream of shmutz slopped over jagged concrete slabs into a cesspool. The pool, which contained the sediment of a wrecked civilization (TV chassis, dolls leaking electronic innards skittered over by rats as big as piglets), had spread to the width of a small lagoon; and beyond the lagoon the hydraulic cement of the sewer had given way to a pitch-black cavern like the mouth of Gehenna itself. It was a gaping blackness that seemed to beckon the feculent kid. Having memorized the coordinates in Rabbi Levi-Itzchok’s Way of the Righteous Transmigrant, which mapped the soul’s journey to infernal regions, Bernie was as much intrigued by subterranean as astral navigation, and had a powerful impulse to investigate. But wise to temptation, he realized he was peering into the darkness through the eyes of his nefesh, his spirit, which was inclined to see the mythic in the commonplace. He reminded himself that this was not the time for otherworldly spelunking; his first loyalty was to assiah, the literal world of action in which he still had urgent business to attend to.

  He blinked, and the mouth of Gehenna reverted to a sewer tunnel, its ceiling invaded by plastic utility pipes and bundled cables. The cables hugged the wall for a dozen yards or so, then snaked around a corner into a downspout, which, as if following a thread through a labyrinth, Bernie squeezed himself into as well. Because the space was so tight, he had to slither on his belly through the narrow conduit, and while it contained only a minimal trickle of mildly contaminated water, he couldn’t avoid being further dampened and soiled in the process. Then the spout dead-ended in a vertical shaft like a chimney flue, where the PVC pipes and wires veered upward alongside a rusty ladder that led to a metal grille at the top of the shaft. Bernie mounted the ladder and clambered toward the faint glow that filtered through the grille, which he dislodged once he’d reached it by pushing upward with his shoulder and hands. Then he hoisted himself into the basement of Rabbi ben Zephyr’s institute. Here the cables branched around a light-studded panel of dials, switches, circuit breakers, and conductors that seemed to have blossomed directly from the tree of wires and pipes. So tall was the panel that it required climbing to a catwalk to gain access to its upper reaches, which included the main frame of a humming behemoth that Bernie assumed was a type of emergency generator, one that rendered the New House independent of the city’s power grid.

  It was ironic, then, that having negotiated a sulfurous nether precinct to get there, he should hesitate upon surfacing into such a well-lit place. Because something in this glittering display of man-made energy harnessed by the rabbi for the sake of his mercenary program caused Bernie to lose faith in his own wizardly prowess; as if, before that wall of technology, he were reduced again to the talentless lard-ass he’d been in that distant time before the Great Thaw. Who after all was Bernie Karp, caked head to toe in filth, to think he could snatch a corrupt old man from being (perhaps deservedly) crushed beneath the wheels of justice bearing down on him? Was he supposed to throw himself between the spokes?

  “I am,” Bernie had to remind himself aloud, “a wayfaring wonder whose origin is not known, and for me only the impossible has any appeal.” Then having said it made it true. Wasting no more time, he located a spiral stair which he ascended with pinging steps and opened a door into the wide corridor of the main-floor concourse adjacent the gift shop that doubled as a museum.

  Determined not to dawdle, he couldn’t help observing that the shelves of books, baubles, and instructional CDs in their glass cases had been expanded to include various saint’s relics: vials and ampules containing the bodily secretions of a tzaddik whose every em
ission was precious to his followers. In the center of the shop, mounted on a plinth, was an installation featuring the original caftan and ratty mink shtreimel that the Boibiczer Prodigy had worn during his frozen repose. This tattered raiment hung on a pair of crossed staves that loomed above a Kelvinator deep freeze (heaped with plastic sirloins and hams) like a mast on a boat. Bernie was then visited by a brief vision of restoring the rabbi to the freezer in which both of them might sail through caverns measureless to man down to the Gulf of Mexico, where they would fetch up on a tropical isle. Perhaps Lou could come too. When the vision passed, the boy’s attention was drawn to a droning of voices, which grew in volume to a rolling din as he crossed the hall and opened the swinging doors. Poking his head into the great domed auditorium, he saw the large mixed gathering that swelled the galleries and lolled about the artificial turf in the arena where the rabbi’s bima stood. Rather than the sobriety you might have expected of a besieged population waiting for the axe or the tear gas to fall, most appeared as relaxed as a grandstand crowd at a sporting event. While some sang hymns and chanted or meditated yoga-style, many were content to nod in time to the beat of different drummers over their iPods. There was a good deal of snacking, each according to his means: some munching bagels with a shmear, others fried chicken and deviled eggs, while others in designer running suits pulled squab, Camembert, and truffle paté from picnic hampers provided by gourmet markets; they drank bottled water and sparkling wine. At least one young couple were openly necking. Somewhere in their midst a single voice—Bernie spied a character in dark glasses balanced on a chair—was raised in a rallying cry, insisting that given the world’s intolerance they ought all to take their own lives. “Let us die with dignity,” he exhorted them, appropriating the Hebrew term for martyrdom, but no one looked to be paying him any attention. Nor did they seem to heed the muffled harangue from the loudspeaker outside, but carried on in their holiday mood as, presumably, they waited for their charismatic leader to appear.