Mother India

by Tova Reich

  In all of the Americas, north, south and middle, Shmelke told me, his favorite stop was Cusco, the old Inca capital city in Peru. He and his followers settled into the Mottel Patel just beyond the astonishing stonewalled Inca ruins of Sacsayhuamán, on a hill overlooking the city. The setting inspired teachings about the temporal nature of human existence, a passing shadow, a fleeting dream, as well as about the rise and fall of empires and nations, and attempts throughout history by human predators to exterminate whole peoples—why some survive, such as we Jews, and others disappear, for instance, the Incas. It was also of course an occasion to reflect on walls—walls that protect, walls that divide, and so forth—Walls that are worshipped, Shmelke added pointedly, such as our own Western Wall in Jerusalem, a form of idolatry, didi. But even Herod the Great could not have constructed walls of such magnificence and perfection as the walls of the fortress or temple or whatever it was of Sacsayhuamán—giant, smooth boulders fitted together without mortar to perfection like a jigsaw puzzle so that even the thinnest blade of a knife could not be inserted between them. Who were the master masons that built these walls? The Spaniards believed it was the work of demons. Others are convinced it was extraterrestrial aliens transporting the giant stones in their spaceships from a faraway planet in a distant solar system, and setting them down on this hill, since such a creation is beyond human power.

  But whoever was responsible, for us it was an almost ideal setting, my brother recalled: Walls behind which we could seek the privacy and seclusion in nature to meditate, to practice our hitbodedut and converse with God in solitude from the depths of our souls with such closeness and intimacy, as with a loving father; large open spaces within the walled compound in which my Hasidim could dance ecstatically in circles for hours as tour groups in identical logo hats came and went led by guides holding aloft an umbrella to show the way under the sun, stopping as they trudged back to their buses to drop coins and bills into the cups my boys held out. They were young, my wild boys, busting with energy and enthusiasm in their white, knitted kippot and striped, blue-and-gold kapotes, their beards and peyot flying like birds. I don’t hold them responsible for what happened, they were soaring on spiritual heights, on the condor wings of the one above. But in short order the Incas showed up as if risen from the dead, climbed up the hill in their bright woolen ponchos, blowing on their bamboo windpipes. Who knew they still even existed? We thought the Spanish had taken care of them all. We had no intention, God forbid, of poaching on their territory.

  For a week or so, it is true, there was competitive dancing. They were a strange looking bunch, short and squat, stomping around in their striped blankets and vaudeville bowlers, men and women, some even cloaked in the full skin of a llama performing their Andean flash dances, but in the end we had to do the right thing, and cede the turf to them. They claimed to be the indigenous stock, the true Canaanites from time immemorial. I wasn’t about to argue with them. Who is an Inca? Who is a Jew? If you say you’re an Inca, fine by me, you’re an Inca, as long as in return you respect my right to be whatever I decide I am, even the extraterrestrial who built these walls. Because up on that hill, there was no question that in their minds, we were the aliens come back to stake our claim on the rocks.

  Still, there was no profit in fighting it. Under the circumstances, for practical reasons alone, it was obvious that in this instance we were the ones who must yield. I don’t blame those so-called Incas, Shmelke said, everyone has to make a living, they just couldn’t deal with the competition. I still regard Cusco as one of the best places we visited. I would recommend it with five stars if I were writing a guidebook, but I was in flight, I had no time for such indulgences, I was not a tourist, I was running for my life, and so I mounted my steed, my trusty wheelchair, and I led my flock down the hill to our next station, whatever it might be, taking along as a convert their best panpipe player, renamed Yehuda Puma. Even now, didi, he is busking in the street outside Kali’s temple, collecting rupees for our cause. The music penetrates my soul, my spirit, my anima, my neshama, you can feel within it the breath of life, struggling.

  On the other hand, the worst place we stayed was our final stop in Africa—Western Sahara, not even a country, as far as I know, a territory ruled by Morocco, at least the part of it that our spaceship touched down on bearing our rocks. Thank God the good old reliable Mottel Patel stood out to receive us like a beacon even there, perched in the distance on those miles and miles of sand as far as the eye could see. Other than that, there was nothing there. Nothing! Gurnischt mit gurnischt, I’m telling you. Some tents, a few nomads shuffling around scratching their balls, Bedouins, Berbers—who knows what?—and camels. All the time my wheelchair was getting stuck in the camel hoo-ha. The only positive thing about the place, didi, was that it was like a frontier town in the old West from the cowboy shows, lawless. They never even heard the word extradition, they had no diplomatic relations with anyone, nobody bothered to even recognize them, there was no chance they would ever hand me over. But the place was so inhospitable to human habitation, like the landscape of that distant planet from which we Jews were said to have hauled down the stones of Sacsayhuamán, that at times I even considered turning myself in. Expatriate me, please, I’m begging you, turn me in, get me out of here. Anything is better than this. Think of all the treasure you can acquire from the Israelis to stuff into the carpet saddlebags of your camels in exchange for this old cripple with a long white beard stuck in an antiquated wheelchair. They didn’t know much about the world, these tribals, but one thing they did know for a fact: flip a Jew upside down and shake him, and the coins pour out of every hole, enough to adorn all the wives of Arabia.

  Luckily, just as I was about to give into this irrational urge and surrender to some boss man, the king of Morocco himself did me a favor and kicked me out—not in a deal with Israel, he just wanted me gone, he didn’t care where in the world I went. He had heard the false rumors regarding the indecent charges leveled against me. It was not in the interest of the good name and image of his degenerate nation of debauchers to harbor even within the borders of this disputed territory such a reputed deviant and pervert as I so falsely was accused of being.

  I regret to report, didi, that these trumped-up charges involving me reached the ears of the king from fellow Jews—for the slanderers let there be no hope, may they perish in an instant, may they be cut down, uprooted, smashed—Israeli Mafia and criminals of Moroccan descent given safe haven in Marrakech and Casablanca in exchange for baksheesh, bankrolling the realm. Murderers and extortionists and money launderers like themselves were one thing, the kingdom could handle that; but an alleged sex offender was intolerable, insupportable in terms of pubic relations. Harboring such a fugitive from the point of view of the officials could damage a country’s good name, ruin its image in the eyes of the civilized world, yes, but even more important, the way our Jewish gangsters so cynically calculated, it could seriously jeopardize by racial association the asylum granted to them.

  And I had been so good to these guys in Israel. I had done them so many favors, rescuing their sons and other low-life relatives from drugs, murder, gang warfare, crimes of rape and sex offenses, arms dealings, and so on and so forth, reaching out to their troubled youth, drawing them close, using my powers to rehabilitate their children, turning them into pious, religious Jews who prayed with such fervor three times a day. The transformation was breathtaking, everyone marveled, you can see my handiwork even today, these Sephardi and North African returnees to the faith dancing rapturously in circles and carrying out the good work of our ashram. And this is how they thanked me? Where was their gratitude? You may wonder, didi, how it is that I know they were the ones who squealed on me to the king. The answer is, one among them whose son I had saved from sure madness and death due to heroin addiction, plucking the kid right from the brink—that father still possessed a shred of decency, and he alerted me. I cannot mention his name, his life would not be worth a single dried-up tu
rd of a constipated camel. But he gave me a heads-up, and moreover arranged for a private jet to transport us in the night over the waters and snowcapped mountains to Switzerland, another haven for criminals who could afford it. How it galled me to be regarded as a criminal, didi, I cannot even begin to tell you.

  As my brother, Reb Breslov, formulated it, the unique attraction of Switzerland consists of two factors—money and sanitation. For him, the problem arose when these two values collided. From Lugano Airport they were conveyed in a fleet of limousines like dignitaries headed to the World Economic Forum, up over five thousand feet into the Swiss Alps to Davos, and settled into their magic mountain. On the face of it, this might be considered an obvious welcome change from the squalor of Western Sahara, but the problem was, it rained nonstop, through the summer and into the fall, so that even carrying out the daily practice of hitbodedut within the splendor of nature was a dispiriting, sodden affair. Most of the time they were stuck in the sanitarium of their Mottel Patel noshing chocolate, going stir-crazy staring at the cuckoo clock, Shmelke recalled.

  It all fell apart in the month of October, when several thousand of his followers made a pilgrimage up the mountain from every corner of the globe with their families and other assorted relations to join him in celebrating the holiday of Sukkot, to partake with their rebbe in the Feast of Tabernacles, sit at his holy table and grab the blessed leftover crumbs from his plate. They put up their personal huts all along the promenade in the center of posh, immaculate Davos, constructing them out of cardboard and plastic and whatever salvageable materials they could find from the hidden trash dumps of this elite burg, reinforcing them with their own garbage, which they generated continuously, including soiled paper diapers and other toxic wastes, covering them with roofs of straw and twigs and a fantastic collection of material culture and junk.

  There they lived in those flimsy booths for eight days oblivious in their ecstatic state to the rain as it continued to pound down, eating, sleeping, praying, singing, dancing rapturously in their ethnic costumes, which became less and less interesting as the days passed, drenched through and through. When the luxury hotels and shops lining the avenue refused to allow them in to use the facilities, they made do in the street beside their booths and behind municipal buildings, or squatted along the river, the men separated from the women of course. “What? Do you think this is India?” the town bosses demanded of my brother when they barged one day into the super-sukkah that had been erected for him in his Mottel Patel parking lot to accommodate his tisch. They went on to remind him that Switzerland had an extradition agreement with the State of Israel. Within twenty-four hours, if this eyesore weren’t removed and the freaks weren’t gone, he would be handed over to the Mossad or Shabak or whoever the appropriate Jewish authorities were. They had done the math. No amount of cash was worth turning their exclusive paradise into an Indian slum.

  India! Why hadn’t he thought of India before? Why did he keep missing the signs? Despite the personal and racial insults and innuendoes heaped upon him by the fat town burghers, as Shmelke recounted it to me, he would always be grateful to these Swiss anti-Semites for pointing him in the right direction, sparking the idea, telling him where to go. Now he could hear me at last, calling out to him from Mother India across the vast distance, he said, faintly at first, but then with increasing urgency and distress. There are times when your ears can be opened even by the most despicable of wretches, he said. I hear you, sister. You are pulling my umbilical cord as you were wont to do so playfully in our mother’s womb, how well I remember it. I’m coming, didi, I’m on my way.

  Over the seven years of my brother’s flight, stopping at many more spiritual stations than I have strength to record, until he arrived in the earthly India for my sake, he said, and found physical refuge at last (but too late, too late for me—and you), he reached out to me once only. I recognized his voice on the phone instantly, it was my own blood voice calling to me, resonating from our shared gestational chamber, though he never identified himself by name, it was not necessary. “I am now going to the most dangerous and symbolic of places. If you are contacted, say, please, that you are my sister, so that things will go well for me, and my soul will live because of you.”

  And I was contacted, relentlessly, within the limited brackets of the attention span of the public. It was one of those times during my brother’s journey that his movements surfaced in the media. It was also the exceptional occasion when he did not opt to stay in a Mottel Patel, but instead took up residence with his closest followers in Block 5 at the Auschwitz death camp. He chose Block 5 because of its museum display of mounds of prosthetic limbs, crutches, and similar artifacts confiscated from inmates, to which he ceremoniously added his own wheelchair. For the interim, he was transported on the back of the sheriff, Buki ben Yogli.

  The action was titled, Occupy Auschwitz. Every attempt by the Polish officials who ran the complex and museum to eject him and his band of loyalists was fearlessly resisted, dismissed, derided. My brother would not even look at them, or speak to them directly. Astride the shoulders of Buki ben Yogli, framed by the dark opening of Block 5, he would address the mass of his Hasidim gathered outside. He would address them in the softest of voices, and they would repeat what he had just said word for word, clause by clause, in unison, booming it out. Exceedingly quietly my brother said, “The motherfuckers locked us up in this shithole against our will. Now that we voluntarily demand to be here, the motherfuckers are kicking us out. Fuck them!”—and his boys in turn shouted it out. This was an occasion when such language was permissible, my brother ruled, even necessary in the name of heaven for the sake of capturing the attention of the world, unfortunately sick and tired of Jews still kvetching about their Holocaust; a shock to the system was needed to get them to focus. From the perspective of the authorities, the only way to shut them up would be to drag the crippled rabbi out along with his groupies, or turn them over to the Israeli kapos. Either way, it would not be pretty for Polish–Jewish relations.

  “I am a child Holocaust survivor,” my brother practically whispered from his Buki ben Yogli heights.

  “I am a child Holocaust survivor,” his Hasidim screamed on cue.

  He pointed to the dark interior, to three protruding ledges of planks behind him lining the wall in the barrack. “That’s where I slept, on the bottom level of that triple-decker, squeezed in the middle, between ten grown men, the diarrhea from the prisoners above us dripping down through the slats all night long, like leaking toilets, covering us with shit.” His words were repeated, amplified. Who needed microphones?

  Within hours a well-fed bureaucrat was produced, affiliated with the august Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, who delivered a passionate speech about the dangers of abusing Holocaust memory—providing fodder to deniers, anti-Semites, and so on. Moreover, he said, they had certified records to prove that my brother was born well after the war, in Brooklyn, New York.

  “I am a child Holocaust survivor, asshole,” my brother reiterated calmly and evenly, and the chorus echoed this again, syllable by syllable emphatically at the top of its lungs. “My twin sister, Meena, is also a child Holocaust survivor. She was used as a child prostitute, a sex slave. It screwed her up for life, which is why she now lives in India. You can check out our fucking Holocaust creds with my sister, motherfucker”—and every word he had uttered so softly, so wisely and deeply for those with the gift of understanding, was repeated by his boys at top decibel at the rest stop of each designated clause, including my telephone number, which was the last thing he gave them, digits like a tattoo branded on a forearm, and after that, silence.

  When the call came, I provided confirmation. Yes, he is my brother. Yes, we are survivors, my brother and I. After Auschwitz, we are all guilty of surviving.

  After Auschwitz, your existence is illusion, as you were marked for death and only by chance were you spared. After Auschwitz, including the arrival of my brother and his merry band to Indi
a, wherever they stopped on their journey, chimerical places, mirages, too many to recall here, it is all Maya. Their penultimate station was Uman, in Ukraine, in a final attempt to carry out the tikkun of pursuit of the righteous, the resting place of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the most seductive, most healing guru of them all.

  They tried to talk my brother out of making this pilgrimage, his apostles and those who loved him. Way too dangerous, they declared, especially now on Rosh Hashanah when tens of thousands of Hasidim, men only, from all around the world flock to Uman to chant the Tikkun HaKlali beseeching the holy Rabbi Nahman for his intervention in granting a blessed New Year, and also to prophylactically vaccinate their young sons, dragged along for the festivities, from the pollution of wet dreams. It was the Jewish version of the annual Muslim hajj, the Hindu Kumbh Mela, Woodstock, they would be stampeded to death by the herds. The Ukrainian high-rises, slapped together by alcoholics from the cheapest junk, which had been vacated by the locals so that they could rent their apartments to the Jews for extortionate sums, these excuses for housing would crumble and collapse thanks to the pounding and stomping of the Hasidim dancing twenty-four hours a day in ecstatic circles. He would be crushed to death for sure along with the rest of them because, due to the fact that he was crippled in body though not, God forbid, in soul, his apartment would be located on the ground-zero floor, anything higher was not feasible, the elevator, if one existed, chronically out of order, the Sabbath elevator, programmed to stop automatically on each floor on days when it is forbidden to summon it electrically, lost in limbo, the whole pile of schlock would come smashing down upon his head, his precious body parts would be buried in the rubble, their sacred sparks growing more and more feeble. The town would be crawling with drug dealers and bootleggers and prostitutes from end to end, converging on Uman from Kiev and the far corners of the cursed land, Baba Yagas from the black hole of Babi Yar, descending on the Rabbi Nahman mosh pit during this holiday season to service the Hasidim who were soaring on the heights, all their senses ravenous and aroused. Under the circumstances, it was not in his interest to add fuel to the fire by letting himself be seen and recognized in such an environment, considering the nature of the false charges that had been leveled against him, which had launched him into such a mercilessly grueling flight. He would be obliged to go around in public wearing a heavy modesty veil attached to his black hat draped over his face to hide his identity, but above all to conceal such offensive sights from his eyes, to prevent himself from unwittingly catching a glimpse of the short, tight skirts packaging buttocks like two rising challahs, the high heels like a dagger to the prostate, the overflowing milky breasts, the meaty lips, bright, moist red. Above all, his disciples pleaded with him, Uman was now infested with Israeli official types, ruthless enforcers, Mossad, Shin Bet, cops, many of them disguised as fellow Hasidim so that you couldn’t tell who was what. Ukraine had a very strict extradition treaty with Israel, it welcomed these judenrats with open arms, let them do the dirty work. As far as they were concerned, he could be their very own Son of God, JC himself (not to compare, God forbid, to separate by thousands upon thousands of separations), it would not stop them from snatching him in a flash and turning him in for thirty silver shekels, disappearing him, handing him over to the Pharisees, they were shameless, without scruples. No one would ever see him again, except maybe in a glass booth Israeli-style like a freak in a circus, or an iron cage Russian-style like an animal in a zoo before he is dumped into the sea and finds his resting place at last in the belly of the big fish.