The Frozen Rabbi (35 page)

Leaving the two-wheeler in the doorway I stepped inside the Keep, where the air was scarcely cooler than in the warehouse proper, and grabbed hold of the rope alongside my papa. Turning his head to look at me, his eyes salmon pink in the absence of his spectacles, he seemed to see a stranger; then he turned away only to look back momentarily, taking advantage of my occupied hands to pull down my mask—whereupon he gave my torrid cheek a pinch and grinned a foolish grin. Again taking hold of the rope, he resumed muttering what sounded like a mix of devotions and numerical formulae. Together we did make some progress, managing to elevate the coffin a few inches from its bier, but a plume of smoke with a flaming pistil had invaded the locker, promising to turn the place in a matter of minutes into a crematorium. At the same time flames from the ceiling were sliding down the rope, which sizzled as it snapped in two, dumping the casket back onto the sawhorses, which, themselves on fire, crashed to the floor in a dazzle of embers. Stymied for no more than a heartbeat, my papa attacked the casket as if he thought he might wrestle it upright with his bare hands. Judging his effort useless, I took hold of his shoulders to pull him away from his unavailing labor, but he twisted out of my grasp with a violence that made me shudder, so much did his rage remind me of my own. I realized I would have to knock him senseless in order to haul him out of there, but before I could move forward with my intention, a beam dislodged from above swung down in a shower of sparks to pin my father beneath it. I bent to try and remove the impediment, searing my fingers on its charcoal surface while Papa lay groaning facedown under the weight of the spar. Unable to get a grip on his torso or the torch of his ginger hair, I tried pulling him by the ankles but succeeded only in dragging the beam along with him. It was then that a second rafter toppled, splintering into cinders that left my father nearly buried beneath a mound aglow with salamanders of ash. I stumbled about, looking for a tool with which to dig him out, vaguely aware of having been injured myself, my fingers blistered, head gashed, lungs gasping beyond their capacity to breathe more smoke. Then all at once the room began to recede and I was somewhere else, in a place where if you fell you were raised up again, higher perhaps than you had ever known.

I was riding someone’s broad back through the inferno, gliding out of the Castle and into the street, where I half expected my conveyance to take to the sky. Instead, I was gently set down coughing and sputtering onto the curb, where I proceeded to swallow great gulps of air in an effort to displace the smoke in my lungs. Wiping my eyes with my fists, I turned in time to glimpse my rescuer—shoulders stretching the seams of a peasant shirt, a neck as thick as his shaven head—disappearing again into the Gehenna of the icehouse. After some minutes of throbbing anticipation I watched him reemerge, having apparently duplicated himself; for he was accompanied by his identical twin, the two of them straining under the burden of the scorched and dripping cedar casket. They set it down with a weighty thud on the pavement beside me, as from my slump I pointed with a cauterized finger toward the burning building.

“My papa,” I mouthed, and the stocky pair exchanged puzzled glances. Then they turned back toward the Castle just as a tremendous explosion rippled the surface of Canal Street like a beaten rug. A black cloud the shape of a giant cauliflower with a fiery stalk rose from the wreckage of the icehouse and merged with the sunrise over the river to the east. I leaned against the casket, pressing my cheek to its dampness, inhaling its mildewy odor as I sheltered from the hail of rubble. In the distance the sirens, whistles, and bells drew closer, sounding like a parade that heralds the end of the world…

…read Bernie to Lou Ella, as they sat in the crotch of a live oak in the botanical gardens or over a bowl of cobbler in a booth at the Dixie Café—while she assured him that, notwithstanding the cannibals, Ku Kluxers, and motherfuckers among her own relations, his family had a lot to answer for. Bernie, for whom his great-grandfather’s burning alive was also news, was inclined to agree; and the closer they came to the end of Ruby’s journal, the more he felt that answer should come from him. But not yet, not yet; there was more of the story left to read, and Lou Ella urged him to continue. She clearly cherished the time they spent tracing the history of the Family Karp’s peregrinations while she and Bernie themselves peregrinated about the city of Memphis seeking out the scruffier corners—abandoned recording studios and heartbreak hotels—where a sanitized present had yet to laminate the past. Both he and the girl were conscious of enjoying an interlude. It was a period during which Bernie Karp, energized by his affection for Lou, his almost lover, and by extension for everything else on earth, was changing in discernible ways. For one thing, he was no longer satisfied with the visionary journeys that now seemed to him so selfish and self-absorbed. Sure, it was nice to become one with the Godhead and all that, but in the end, as the sages said, “Life is with people,” and if you couldn’t take anyone with you, what was the good of leaving your body at all? That said, Bernie had no clear idea of what was next in store for him, though whatever it was he knew it would involve taking as Lou said “the bull by the pizzle.” Still, while Lou Ella had been instrumental in persuading him that he shouldn’t miss out on the experience of dwelling on earth, herself a prey to forebodings, she now campaigned actively to postpone whatever was coming.

In the meantime the world around them had begun to catch up with Lou Ella’s bleak assessments of its status. While Bernie might command in his flights an aerial view of history, Lou had her own brand of second sight and seemed not at all surprised when the world began to show signs of being in its final days. It was an attitude in keeping with her Pentecostal background, though she judged the rabid voices from that quarter as themselves material signs that the end was at hand. She was a complicated girl, at odds with her own fatalism, who seemed to take for granted the toppling of the towers by terrorists in New York City and the nation’s berserk response; she anticipated the thirst for vengeance that would fan the flames of an already smoldering planet, presaging a universal conflagration. In the name of protecting the homefront, faceless bureaucracies had overnight rolled back liberties to a degree that constituted a shadow police state, and the subsequent paranoid atmosphere left citizens unable to distinguish between real and imagined threats. There was also a crackdown on illegal aliens which, if anyone bothered to notice, the formerly frozen rabbi happened to be. Not that the current climate had put a damper on his enterprise; on the contrary, as fear gave a healthy fillip to the quest for spiritual solace, the times proved especially favorable for Rabbi ben Zephyr’s project. Citizens of the Mid-South flocked to the New House of Enlightenment in unprecedented numbers, and announcements in the papers, always interested in the rabbi’s proceedings, trumpeted his plans to franchise his ministry worldwide. Naturally, the more publicity he received, the more voices were raised in dissent of his methods. Aside from the cautionary bromides of the clergy and the usual canards regarding the Elders of Zion, there were those who attributed cultish tactics to Rabbi ben Zephyr’s community of disciples; there were charges by professed “escapees” from his center that the rabbi and his followers were guilty of coercion, brainwashing, and gross sexual misconduct. Nor did it help matters that the Boibiczer Prodigy had recently been heard making extravagant claims from his pulpit, including the not-so-veiled suggestion that he was, if not the Messiah himself, then at least a harbinger of same. All of which made its way into the local papers, invested as they were in keeping his controversy alive. Still, his defenders remained in the majority, always more ardent in singing their rebbe’s praises than his detractors were in citing his imperfections.

They quoted from the official tracts and testimonials disseminated by the House of Enlightenment, ghostwritten by Bernie’s father’s accountant-turned-publicist, the versatile Mr. Grusom. Then there was the rabbi’s own memoir, which you could now find on sale in chain stores and airport newsstands and which stood to become a classic of inspirational literature in the vein of
The Prophet
or
Autobiography of a Yogi
. Bernie had dutifully dipped into the slickly packaged
Ice Sage
as a companion piece to Grandpa Ruby’s journal, then passed it along without comment to Lou Ella, who had a peculiar tolerance for such narratives. She appreciated the gloss this one provided on the more prosaic chronicle outlined in Bernie’s grandfather’s ledger. Ostensibly
The Ice Sage
(also ghosted by Grusom, who convinced the rabbi that his original title,
The Erotic Tzaddik
, was undignified) was Rabbi ben Zephyr’s own version of his spiritual adventures during the time his body was immersed in the ice of a horse pond on Baron Jagiello’s estate. There, while his head was wreathed in a nimbus of static tadpoles and minnows, his spirit attained the highest rungs of the world to come. He’d sat in the celestial academies, participating in roundtable discussions with prophets and patriarchs parsing the thornier points of the ancient mysteries. Meanwhile his body had been carved from the ice and carted halfway round the globe. The family responsible for shlepping him about for the better part of a century was given short shrift in the rabbi’s recounting; they were merely a means to an end, and if he acknowledged their efforts at all, it was only by way of explaining his geographic mobility. Also, though the book was subtitled “Rabbi ben Zephyr’s Adventures with God,” God Himself was seldom mentioned. The text focused instead on techniques for overcoming phobias, realizing desires, and taking control of your life by exploiting the power of something called the Light of Creation. The hallowed mystical tradition was de-Judaized, its esoteric elements soft-pedaled in an effort to pander to a popular audience. Having perused as much of the memoir as he could stomach, Bernie couldn’t help feeling saddened by how the Prodigy had among other things co-opted his family’s history for his own purposes. But then it was the rabbi’s history as well, wasn’t it?—to bend, fold, and swindle as he saw fit. Still, the book seemed a betrayal of the days they’d spent together in the guesthouse and the basement rumpus room, that distant time when the hidden rebbe had condescended to instruct the boy in the ways of the inexpressible and to help him in his first limping efforts to translate his grandfather’s journal.

For all that, Bernie was worried about old Eliezer, just as he worried about a world that had lately claimed his attention. It seemed to him that each time he looked up from reading to the girl, yet another international atrocity had occurred. Lou Ella would plead with him to keep his head down, don’t stop reading, and when he wavered, she pumped him with questions about the handwritten script: Why, for instance, had Ruby, whose native language was English, chosen to pen his confessions in a spiky Yiddish? She was convinced they would discover the reason if only they forged ahead; the tale was especially suspenseful now that Ruby and the frozen rabbi were headed their way—that is, coming to Memphis.

“How do you know?” asked Bernie, who translated haltingly as he went along and knew no more of his grandfather’s fate than did the girl.

“‘Cause I’m psychic,” she replied, one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching into the backseat to shove a pacifier in her baby sister’s open mouth. “And besides, they have to get to Memphis so your daddy who ain’t been born yet can meet your mama and have you.”

At that Bernie became thoughtful. “Do you know,” he mused, “I’m about the same age as Grandpa Ruby was when he killed his father?”

“It wasn’t exactly murder,” qualified Lou, though Bernie remained un-consoled. He gazed through the windshield at the passing rat-hole projects, where stray bullets from drive-by shootings nightly claimed the lives of children asleep in their beds, and somehow felt implicated in his grandfather’s crime. The guilt was perhaps an indulgence that helped correct the imbalance in his system, because lately he felt altogether too much at home in his own skin. It wasn’t right to feel so at home on a planet going to hell in a handbag. How could you reconcile, for instance, the precarious footing of current events with the scent of lilac that penetrated the brain like some metaphysical spice? Everything he observed had its extra dimension: a throng of starlings was a tattered flag whipped by the wind; the holes in a matzoh were a mysterious Braille. If he farted he recalled Isaiah: “Whereof my bowels shall sound like a lyre”; when Lou wiped egg from Sue Lily’s lips clouds passed from the face of the moon. The backwater of Memphis was a safe harbor on the coast of eternity where he lingered with the girl, his lust subdued now to an enduring affection. On the other hand, Bernie had a gift, and it seemed to him it was high time he used it for the greater good.

“Awesome,” said the girl, unimpressed. “So why don’t you get a job?”

Bernie agreed that that was probably a good idea. His attendance at school during what should have been his junior year was intermittent at best, and eventually his self-involved parents would return the phone calls from his teachers and his scofflaw existence would be exposed. When that happened he should be prepared to secure his own independence. Wasn’t it anyway shameful that he still occupied a room in his family’s house, where he spent his days riffling the books he’d “borrowed” from the genizah at the Anshei Mishneh shul?—texts for apprentice holy men whose pages were marked with hairs from his first growth of beard, their Hebrew characters becoming entwined with his
DNA
. At the same time, though she assured him it wasn’t a problem, Bernie was also ashamed that it fell to Lou to foot the bill for their junkets. She bought the gas for her mother’s Malibu and paid the checks at the Arcade Diner across from the train depot with funds from clerking at a video store after school. That meant their time together had become more compromised, limited as it was to the evening hours after Lou Ella, who’d finally acquired a license despite years of driving without one, had dropped her mother off at work. It also meant that Sue Lily was always with them, though Bernie had come to accept the toddler as a docile appendage of his darling Lou.