1907.
When the ferry from Ellis Island deposited Shmerl Karpinski (his name recently shortened by a harried customs official to Karp) on the bustling wharf, he shut his eyes to keep out the stimuli that threatened to overwhelm his brain. But the hastening crowds into which his fellow immigrants had already begun to dissolve, the clangor of horse cars and the rattle of the elevated train, assaulted his ears; they upset the peacefulness of the “laboratory” back in Shpinsk, which he was trying to reconstitute behind closed lids. Opening them again, he waited for his gaze to light on something that made sense, and saw the young man from the ship seated beside the driver of a dray whose bed contained a worm-eaten wooden casket. Shmerl had seen the youth before through waves of nausea while clinging to the splintered rail of his berth in steerage, trying not to roll off into the broth of vomit and slops. The atmosphere below decks was suffocating from a multitude of private functions made public, but while the whole of the steerage class groaned in time to the drumming pistons of the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, the young man—perched on a barrel and peering out of a porthole at the sawtooth sea—seemed to retain a meditative poise. Shmerl saw him again in the crush of passengers who, mutinous after their long confinement, had emerged from their quarters to overrun the lower deck once the promised city hove into view. Some had shinnied up a mast and climbed into the rigging, where they became entangled like bugs in spider webs. All craned their necks for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in her verdigris robes and the glinting towers at the foot of Manhattan Island, itself appearing to float like a low-lying argosy. Everyone looked toward New York, America, all except the staid young man with his handsome face and the worsted suit he seemed never to remove; leaning on the taffrail, he gazed across the expanse of chartreuse ocean the ship had just traversed, as if less interested in where he was going than where he’d been. Lonely since being dispatched by his family to save him from conscription (and to distance him from a community grown ever more censorious of his behavior), Shmerl Karp envied the youth his apparent self-containment. Since they were about the same age, he might have introduced himself, but Shmerl didn’t like to impose, and his slight humpback tended to make him rather shy.
The driver cracked his whip and the wagon bearing the casket drove off, leaving Shmerl to assume that the young man’s aloof demeanor had its origin in his grief for a loved one who’d passed away (as had perhaps a dozen others) during the voyage. But that was all the time he could spare for contemplating strangers now that he had his own welfare to negotiate. Still reeling from an ordeal that had left him barely ambulatory, he was unable amid that head-splitting Babel to grasp the concept of terra firma. After weeks of seasickness, during which he felt he’d regurgitated his very soul, Shmerl had been shunted from steamship to steam launch to the turreted fastness of Ellis Island. There he was made to suffer through stations of functionaries asking bewildering questions in pidgin Yiddish, checking his answers against the ship’s manifest with the severity of clerical seraphs verifying his name in the Book of Life. Doctors thumped his chest, testicles, and gibbous spine, inverted his eyelids, labeled him with chalk, and festooned him with paper flags; then they directed him back into the pitching ferry, where he scarcely understood that, instead of being detained in a holding cell reserved for undesirables, he’d been given a license to enter the Golden Land—which swirled about him now in a flurry of internal combustion engines and clopping hooves. But while the other immigrants, met by family or landslayt, had disappeared with their duffels and eiderdowns into the chasms between the commercial towers, Shmerl still tottered on the dock among pecking seabirds, wondering how best to proceed.
What did he really know of America anyway, outside of the rumors that on arrival everyone became an instant millionaire, which had already proved to be patently untrue? Only a few phrases in New Yorkish such as “awpn der vinder” and “kosheren restoran” were familiar to him; he knew also the address of an aunt and uncle who, when informed of his coming, had responded in a letter that was the equivalent of a grunt. Also he understood that in these turbulent streets the distance from heaven was even greater than it had been in his impoverished and pogrom-ridden Ukraine. Beyond that Shmerl knew little and had nothing besides a carpet bag containing a few scraps of clothing and some designs for inventions that had no practical application whatever. It wasn’t much to begin a new life with, though standing there on that alien shore he felt that his old life, such as it was, was already lost to him. Of an essentially retiring disposition despite the nuisance he’d made of himself back in Shpinsk, Shmerl believed that the person he was meant to become had yet to be born.
For a time he’d been a model yeshiva student who, since his bar mitzvah, had dutifully accompanied his father, Reb Todrus Karpinski, a junk-monger, to morning and evening prayers, and to the oily pool of the ritual bath on Shabbos. Shmerl was well versed in scripture, fluent in the 613 mitzvot, able to cite hair-splitting discrepancies between the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. His specialty had been parsing knotty halakhic conundrums, such as: What is the degree of defilement to a house cleaned for Passover when a mouse brings in a crumb of chometz? During his adolescence, however, when Scheuermann’s disease began to deform his spine and his fellows started making fun of him, Shmerl became more remote. At the same time he was wracked by physical discomfort, not necessarily restricted to his back, which he sublimated into an intensely pious streak. Its symptoms included periods of dreaminess during which he might be seen wandering alone with his peculiar stoop among the moss-mantled stones of the cemetery. He lingered, as well, beside the waterwheel that powered the lumber mill, where he became possessed of the notion that the wheel was for propelling the earth through time. Then it was all he could do to suppress an impulse to plunge an axe handle into the gears that turned the wheel, thus testing his theory and perhaps preserving his town from further aging.
Though he’d always had a healthy respect for traditional religious prohibitions, Shmerl began to look furtively into mystical and alchemical texts. In a corner of the mildewed study house he pored over books reserved for householders past the age of forty. Grown restless with the thorny dialectics of pilpul discourse, Shmerl secretly attended the third meal at the home of a local Chasidic rebbe, a rancid old gentleman whose beard was sprinkled with fried groats. In his homily the rebbe declared: “Is not a figure of speech, God’s longing for His feminine aspect, his Holy Shekhinah, which since the destruction of the Second Temple is exiled along with the Israelites.” It was an ongoing drama with regard to which the sage exhorted his disciples to play matchmaker to the reunion of haShem with His better half. Seized with a desire to participate in this cosmic romance, Shmerl began to research ways of actively promoting the reunion, which would bring an end to Diaspora and raise the fallen earth to the height of the celestial Jerusalem.
Using as his handbook a volume called Sefer Sheqel ha-Qodesh by the medieval kabbalist Moses de Leon, he began to clear cobwebs from the interior of the tumbledown storage shed behind his father’s junk shop. In lieu of the called-for crucibles, alembics, and bird-beaked vases, he culled from among items deemed too shoddy even for the shlockmonger’s shop an array of patched pots and dusty bottles. Discovering in himself a heretofore unrealized knack for construction, he stacked broken bricks in an inverted funnel to approximate an open-hearth stove. Raw materials such as copper and zinc lay around in abundance, but for the substances he would need as catalysts in his transformational processes, he appealed to the barber and chemist Avigdor the Apostate. A freethinker with a cynical view of his community’s naïveté, Avigdor nevertheless stocked his shelves with jars of leeches and quack remedies to humor his superstitious clientele. Accustomed as he was to strange requests, however, the fox-faced apothecary (known to have eaten shellfish) was unused to yeshiva bochers inquiring after quicksilver, powdered lodestone, and cinnabar, to say nothing of rare herbs such as ypericon. When asked what he planned to do with these items, Shmerl was prepared with a story about a correspondence chemistry course, a pursuit he thought the freethinker would approve of. It was in any case easier than explaining that he meant to perform, in microcosm, processes that the universe might then repeat writ large. Naturally Avigdor was not deceived, but sensing mischief on the part of the boy (and curious to see where his activities would lead), he accepted an oxidized flatiron and the skeleton of a parasol in exchange for the desired ingredients.
“In the interest of advancing secular education,” said the apothecary, with a wry tilt to his lips.
Of course, Shmerl might simply have prayed for change as the Jews had done for generations. But in heated competition with his fanciful nature was a pragmatic temperament that refused to make hard distinctions between the miraculous and the purely technical. And now that in adolescence the scales seemed to have fallen from his eyes, he saw clearly that the Jews of Shpinsk, and by extension the whole Pale of Settlement, were in urgent need of salvation; there was a compelling demand for heroic action on the part of some passionate young idealist. Everywhere he looked Shmerl saw men and women compared to whom his own affliction was negligible. There were boys his age who’d hacked off digits and wrecked their insides from drinking lye to exempt themselves from the draft, old men who’d been kidnapped as children by agents of the czar from whose army they returned decades later like hungry ghosts. Malnourished infants whimpered while their mothers went mad from the vermin that swarmed in their sheitl wigs. The centuries of persecution and degradation had left the Jews physically and morally depleted, their prayers ineffectual. What was required now was yichud, a conjunctio, the union of heaven and Earth that would transform the Jews of Shpinsk into a robust and beatific species, their constitutions as hardy as those of Russian muzhiks.
His initial efforts were inauspicious. In an attempt to extract the Fifth Essence, called the Elixir of Life, from a mixture of ground antimony and dog waste distilled in a battered samovar, Shmerl produced instead a drizzle of vile gray liquid afloat with crescents like cuticles. He took a cautious sip and puked, then waited in vain for his spine to straighten and his mind to expand in boundless clairvoyance. His disappointment was accompanied by vertigo and a weakness in the knees, which buckled under him, leaving him in a heap on the cold clay floor of the shed. That was how his father, come to investigate the rumor of a trespasser in his storehouse, found his oldest son. With a host of other sons too numerous to keep track of, Todrus and his wife, the footsore Chana Bindl, were generally too preoccupied with making ends meet to concern themselves with the shenanigans of their spawn. A crafty type with an eye for the favorable prospect, Todrus took in at a glance the condition of his son, along with the furnace and the urn spouting copper tubing, the jar of cloudy liquid resting on an anvil. His nose twitched at the scent and, dipping a pinkie into the jar, he dabbed his tongue then lifted the jar to quaff its contents, after which he breathed fire and pronounced Shmerl’s elixir (“Batampt!”) a perfectly serviceable schnapps. He cuffed the boy’s ear for engaging in unlawful acts, then ordered him to begin the immediate manufacture of his potion by the barrel, and later Todrus hauled in a squiffy rabbi to bless the distillery. This was the beginning of Shmerl’s temporary enslavement to his father’s bootleg operation, on the merits of which Todrus converted his junkshop into a provisional tavern. It was a short-lived venture, however, since his son’s mephitic cordial turned out to have debilitating side effects, such as temporary blindness.
In the meantime Shmerl persisted in his experiments, whose results remained unsatisfactory. While he would have preferred to work in solitude, now that his labors were popular gossip, he was often surrounded by inquisitive siblings eager to offer themselves as guinea pigs. Though he tried to discourage them, his little brothers made a game of snatching up his decoctions fresh from the still and swilling them neat. One of them, the web-toed Mushy, was confined to the outhouse for hours during which he lost his baby fat and the ability to laugh; whereas the eight year-old Gronim was seized with a steely erection that kept his little petsl stiff for a day and a night. Then came the explosion that formally concluded the alchemical phase of Shmerl’s investigations. He had been hoping to recreate the esh m’saref, the refiner’s fire that transmuted base elements into a liquid philosopher’s stone, which insured strength, health, and eternal youth and postponed death indefinitely. (It was a process also said to render common metals into gold, though Shmerl had no interest in that particular consequence.) He was cooking sulphur together with charcoal and saltpeter in the brick furnace, and had a pulverized rind of ethrog on hand to feed the growing flames, when a blast occurred that blew out the flimsy wall of Todrus’s storeroom. Burning debris sprayed a salvo of torches over the swayback roofs of the Jewish quarter, causing the shingles to catch fire. The whole shtetl might have been consumed in a single conflagration had not the Water-Carriers Guild been summoned to form a bucket brigade from the town pump. Shmerl himself emerged from the rubble uninjured but black as pitch, his hair and eyebrows in patches where they hadn’t been singed away; his clothes were in shreds, his modesty protected only by the remnant of his knitted tallit koton. Appearing like some cacodemon hatched from one of his own makeshift retorts, he frightened the children and reinforced the general opinion that he had become a dabbler in the black arts, one to be shunned for looking into things he should not.
Around that time a maskil, a self-appointed representative of the Jewish Enlightenment, appeared in Shpinsk. He drove into town in an awning-covered caravan, a rattletrap conveyance run by a windy mechanism trailing fumes, which he parked on the market platz beside a vendor of cracked eggs. Then climbing onto the caravan in his frock coat and natty beard, he rolled back the awning to reveal a gallery of modern marvels as yet unseen in the Jewish Pale. He introduced to a skeptical crowd, among whom the young Shmerl Karpinski stood riveted, a gas turbine engine which he jerked into motion by revolving a dogleg crank. The resulting din caused babies to squawl and a draft horse to bolt in its traces. He exhibited neon gas in vacuum tubes linked together like glowing wurst, and an electromagnet entwined in a copper helix that pulled cutlery from a knife-sharpener’s sack several yards away. For a pièce de résistance he used his own ramrod body to conduct a direct current between a live wire in his left hand and a glass bulb in his right, thus challenging the light of the sun in an overcast sky. The crowd of mostly peasants, tradesmen, and truant children watched in rapt fascination, while the local Chasidim spat “Kaynehoreh!” against the evil eye. But for all the maskil’s disclaimers to the effect that the items he demonstrated had exclusively practical purposes, Shmerl—never keen on the distinction between science and magic—thought the power in these contrivances might be harnessed for more spiritual ends.
Banished from what was left of the storehouse and forced to keep out of his ill-tempered father’s sight, Shmerl had since reestablished his base of operations in the vine-tangled ambience of Yakov Chilblain’s abandoned flour mill. This was a spongy structure, nearly reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation, that the Shpinskers generally regarded as haunted; imps, it was said, rode the windmill’s ragged sails, and vampire bats flew out of the sack loft at night. But Shmerl was undeterred. A rationalist, he knew that imps and demons, though real enough, were merely pests that could be vaporized with the proper apparatus—such as a coil heated by electricity generated from a Voltaic pile composed of a stack of magnetized coins. (The coil also generated a hearthlike warmth, which was incidental.) He read about this phenomenon in The Book of Wonders that he’d obtained from the maskil along with a sheaf of diagrams in exchange for some waste product (a pearl?) from one of his former experiments. It was the first profane book that Shmerl had ever owned, and while initially he resisted opening it out of guilt, he was soon immersed in its illustrated descriptions of the technological revolution that was so late in arriving in Shpinsk. Then, rather than being put off by the book’s lack of a doctrinal bias, the boy set about discovering ways to render that catalogue of utilitarian inventions supremely impractical.
There followed a period of feverish industry. With a sense that he was doing work for which he’d been divinely ordained, Shmerl gathered tools and materials, and what he couldn’t locate in the detritus behind his father’s shop, he dispatched his little brothers to find. Natural scavengers (some might have called them thieves), they brought back to the mill odds and ends that might double as crankshafts, pistons, and connector rods; they hauled their acquisitions up the ladder into the creaking loft, where Shmerl hammered them into shapes that ultimately evolved into engine parts. From Kabbalah he’d learned of the peculiar faculty of the Holy Ari of Safed, who could liberate souls that in the course of their gilgul, their metempsychosis, had become trapped in random objects on earth. With that in mind he girded a railroad spike in an armature of brass, mounting it between the poles of electrified magnets, which caused the spike to spin like a dreidl. His little brothers scrounged horsehair brushes that Shmerl looped about a length of pipe, explaining as he worked the concept of a “pressure drop.” This was the inhalation that would occur between the rotating brushes and the vacuum formed from the effect of the spinning spike. He fastened the entire gizmo onto a blacksmith’s bellows, whose accordion frame he replaced with a canvas nose bag, then mounted the reverse bellows—dubbed di neshomah zoiger, the soul-sucker—on a garden cart, which he and his brothers pulled in broad daylight over the ruts of Sheep Dip Alley to the doorstep of the Karpinskis’ crumbling abode.
He’d determined that his family’s dwelling should be the first to be sanctified by scourging it of the souls wedged in its various fissures and crannies. Even before he’d said the appropriate blessing and connected the wires to the alkali cell, inciting a mechanized uproar, before he’d begun to aim the articulated stovepipe into the room’s obscurer corners, Shmerl had attracted a sizeable audience. Neighbors looked through the rag-stuffed windows and word soon reached the junkman and his wife, who came scurrying over from Todrus’s shop on the market square. What they saw when they joined the other rubbernecks was their son wrestling a fat silver serpent that dove beneath the hulking clay stove from which a hen was sent packing; it nosed among pickle casks, rattled the garlic braids, and burrowed into every recess of that cluttered house. Chana Bindl, high-strung and perpetually pregnant, swooned in a heap of dimity skirts, so that Todrus had to send to Avigdor’s for smelling salts. Then Shmerl, with an extravagant gesture, yanked the wires to break the circuit and removed the equine receptacle from the bellows, wrenching it open in the hope of setting free a cluster of imprisoned souls. He didn’t know exactly what such souls would look like, but was reasonably certain the dirt that spilled from his contraption onto the floor was not their residue. Chana Bindl, having been revived, grew distressed again at the revelation that the rooms she so scrupulously scoured had remained full of grime, while her husband stood chewing his whiskers, conflicted in his kippered heart. His son had become on the one hand a figure of derision whose notoriety extended even to the goyim, while on the other he’d conceived a machine that cleaned a house in a manner your besom or feather duster couldn’t have touched. Even as he lurched through clouds of dust to furl his fingers about Shmerl’s scrawny throat, the junk dealer asked him what it would take to construct a fleet of similar carpet sweepers.
But the downcast inventor judged his machine a failure of no redeeming metaphysical value, and assuring his father through a pinched windpipe that he could do whatever he wished with di neshomah zoiger, Shmerl was already contemplating a new direction for his research. The Book of Wonders in its outline of the history of aerodynamics declared that recent developments had taken technology to the very threshold of manned flight. Shmerl envisioned a wholesale exodus of the Jews, enabled through innovative engineering to make aliyah to the Upper Yeshiva without having to die. His own mistake, however, was to fix his propeller—fashioned from the windmill stocks whose shredded sails were replaced with taut muslin—to the interior rafters rather than the roof of the family’s hovel. He’d feared that instead of waking up in Paradise, his parents would open their eyes to a house with its roof torn asunder and midnight pouring in. As it was, the unholy racket roused Todrus and Chana Bindl from their rude mattress, whence they staggered forth in rumpled gowns to gaze blearily upon the thrashing blades. But even as the junkmonger sputtered and fumed, his wrath was checked by the breeze that cooled the room and fanned the brow of his agitated wife, who went directly into labor.
Shmerl, however, was disconsolate. He vowed to build another engine powerful enough to raise the roof of the entire planet and stir the stars into wheeling spirals, but his faith in his own abilities was severely impaired.
He returned to the mill to find that the combined weight of the various machinery parts had finally collapsed the rotting floor of the loft. A shambles, the place was the outward expression of Shmerl’s internal despair, the perfect analogue—he judged—to his arrogance and grand designs. Bereft of illusion, he concluded that all his efforts were suspect, all merely in the interest of distracting himself from another kind of yearning; though despite his intrepid investigations, he was shy of the maidens, who were put off for their part by his reputation and the bell-shaped curve of his spine. No self-respecting marriage broker would ever approach him. Consumed by remorse for his own vanity, Shmerl languished in the millwright’s wrecked quarters beyond the Shabbos boundary and the reach of a father who sought to turn a profit from his blunders.
“Every day is Yom Kippur,” he declared to his little brothers, who’d grown bored with his misery and were happy to leave him alone.
The summer wore on with a soupy heat that set the lice seething, which in turn bred an epidemic of typhus that swept through the shtetl of Shpinsk, sparing neither goyim nor Jews. There were so many funerals that the processions trotted back and forth in relay fashion from cemetery to shul. The wailing of women along the route could be heard all the way to the ruined mill, where a passing installment peddler left word that one of Shmerl’s brothers—Pinya, was it, or Melchizedek?—had fallen prey to the plague. Said Shmerl, ripping the lapel of his jerkin, “It should have been me.” The younger brother had been taken in retribution for the sins of the elder (this was his logic) and though other siblings had from time to time perished in the starveling Karpinski household, this death harrowed the conscience of the inventor as no other; the pain was acute and ineffable. While it was too late to sacrifice himself in his brother’s stead, there was still another course of action that lay open to him; yet for what he considered, Shmerl was sick with apprehension. Though the ancient texts strongly decried necromancy, he located an obscure passage in The Book of Bosmath bat Shlomo that included the prayer: “Baruch mechayei hameitim, blessed is he who raises the dead.” But however often he repeated it, Shmerl could never quite believe it was true.
Still, there was no time left to tarry; tonight was the watch night and tomorrow the dead boy’s body would be committed to the earth. Working full throttle according to certain principles of Faraday and Clerk Maxwell detailed in the journals his brothers had pilfered from Avigdor, Shmerl electrically magnetized a horseshoe. He surrounded the shoe with a halo of wooden spools bundled in soft-iron wires and insulated copper coils, further equipping the device with a notched lead gadget called a commutator, like a viper with a rubber boot heel in its jaws. Then he lowered his completed dynamo into the case of a mahogany coffee grinder and hung it around his neck by a barber’s strop. As he crept into the house in the small hours of the morning, Shmerl discerned among the usual odors—petroleum, onions—another smell, tart as citrus, which he determined as death. It was not an unfamiliar odor; death was practically a member of their family, but tonight, as he stood watching his father and mother at their vigil, seated on tea crates at either side of the corpse, Shmerl experienced a sadness beyond words. Slumped in his threadbare tallis, Todrus Shlockmonger snored fitfully, while his mobcapped wife, even as she suckled the newborn at her breast, also nodded in sedentary slumber. The dead boy, cocooned to the chin in his miniature shroud, was laid out on a mat on the floor between them, a flickering havdalah candle at his head.
The Karpinskis had mourned a number of children in their time, and wasn’t Chana Bindl already nursing the dead boy’s replacement? (Though this one was a daughter, which hardly counted as a replacement at all.) But despite the repeated incidence of expiring offspring, Shmerl detected a unique oppression in the atmosphere, a pall of centuries that was his duty to dispel. Kneeling, his joints creaking from the weight he carried, the inventor inserted the electrodes into the florets of the dead boy’s ears, then stood again to turn the rotary handle attached to the handmade dynamo. No sooner did the whirring begin than a visible reverberation of dancing sparks traced an outline around the entire corpse, which sat abruptly upright, jiggling as if to shake off the torpor of rigor mortis. Then either the whir of the machine or the delirious knocking of Shmerl’s heart at the walls of his chest—or perhaps it was the clattering of the coins ejected from the corpse’s eyes—frightened the baby, which began to bawl, rousing in their turn the junkmonger and his wife. Chana Bindl looked, shrieked, and passed out again, while Todrus sat gazing with eyes on stems at his dead son, who jerked like a monkey to the tuneless instrument played by the demonic organ-grinder standing over him.
Though he and his wife had enjoyed the chance benefits of Shmerl’s inventions, this time the outraged junk dealer could see nothing at all redemptive in the boy’s experiment, nor was he inclined to forgive him his monstrous crime. Neither, when the word got out (as it always did) of Shmerl’s iniquitous tampering with God’s decree, were the Jews of Shpinsk, their tolerance exhausted, willing to indulge him further. “For whoever doeth such things,” they quoted Deuteronomy on the subject of sorcerers, “is an abhorrence unto the Lord,” and not a week after his sacrilege the inventor received notice of his imminent induction into the army of the czar. The timing suggested some meddling on the part of the community, especially since, when Todrus protested that his son was a hunchback, the townspeople assured him that the government was willing to make an exception in Shmerl’s case. The junkman railed that the boy had dug his own grave, but in the end there was nothing for it—short of giving him up to a military that would purge him of Jewishness and separate him forever from his tribe—but to appeal to the services of the smuggler Firpo Fruchthandler. Thus, with the sale of Shmerl’s soul sucker and celestial elevator to Ben Tzion Pinkas, the local shylock who’d grown rich from a spate of recently pawned nuggets and gems, the Karpinski family raised the money to hire Firpo. The bibulous smuggler then spirited Shmerl in the back of a donkey cart, rolled up in a rug under cages of fantail pigeons, across the border into Poland, whence he could make for the coast and from there book passage to America.
AS THE KAISER WILHELM steamed into New York harbor, Max Feinshmeker, standing amid the throng of immigrants at the bow, twisted his neck toward the stern. He looked back toward the titanic green lady and the broad bay’s narrows into the open sea, to make sure that the past was keeping its distance. There had been several occasions during the month-long journey from Lodz when he felt that the past had not only overtaken him but had invaded his very being in the form of the whore Jocheved, who sometimes wanted to die. She constantly reminded Max that he had no family, no home, that his soul was so ravaged it could no longer cushion him from the insults of a hostile world. “This is news?” Max would reply, but Jocheved was a malevolent dybbuk, and there were times when she had encouraged the young man to throw himself overboard. Then he would imagine himself bobbing in the steamship’s wake, watching its great bulk diminishing as it churned toward a blood orange horizon, while he sank into a dark and distinctly un-Jewish element. In truth, the vision had a certain consolatory appeal, and there were moments when Max, in his loneliness, might have succumbed to the dybbuk’s urging, were it not for the aged Chasid encased in a block of ice atop three quarters of a pood of beluga sturgeon roe.
For the sake of the contract with his patron Zalman Pisgat, Max was obliged to keep himself in one piece. He was sworn to deliver the goods safely into the hands of the agent of an American financier, who despite his fabulous wealth enjoyed a bargain, especially if it involved a little risk. (Although, to the novice smuggler’s mind, the risk was entirely his own.) Upon receipt of the caviar the agent would hand over an agreed-upon sum that Max would then wire in its entirety back to Lodz. He was to take no percentage for himself, his compensation having been the investment that the ice mensch had already made in his journey, an investment for which old Pisgat expected a tenfold return. And if that sum were not remitted by a certain date, Zalman Pisgat would then be forced to inform parties less magnanimous than himself, whose operatives would track Max down and tear out his spleen. Max appreciated the forthright simplicity of the arrangement and admired how the humble icehouse proprietor was connected to a criminal network whose reach dissolved the distance between Europe and America. Such was the nature of Max’s motivation; while Jocheved, when she wasn’t feeling suicidal, had her own reasons for making the trip, which involved an allegiance to her frozen inheritance that remained largely inscrutable to the smuggler. Not that he didn’t try to fathom her attitude, as he sat beside the reinforced casket under hanging flanks of beef in a railroad reefer car, or later on in the steamship’s refrigerated hold. But Max preferred his own practical incentive: that he was enlisted in a mutually beneficial business covenant, which footed the bill for the journey across what was left of Poland into Prussia and farther on.
Without Zalman’s endowment the trip would have been out of the question, an unimaginable hardship given the added burden of the cedar box and its outlaw freight. As it was, Max had traveled in relative comfort, looking out of boxcars and wagon-lit windows at a countryside whose beauty his consciousness, bred in the ghetto, was ill prepared to take in. There were purple meadows spattered with crimson poppies from which clouds of finches started up at the sound of the train, fields of sunflowers, cherry orchards, linden groves that were the remnant of a primeval forest cleared for pastures. Peasant cottages like overturned longboats bordered the rivers and canals; thatched hermitages protruded from grottoes, and onion domes sprouted like toadstools amid the rolling plains. The roads meandered like the unraveling threads of the old regimes, from whose frayed fabric a million poor Jews had tumbled. They clogged the highways and station platforms, the Jews, trudged the gauntlets of inhospitable villages, lugging their chattels and scrolls and trailing goosedown like surf. Periodically their ranks were swelled by the youthful fusgeyers tramping with their tents on their backs and singing hymns: “Go, yidelekh, into the wide world…”; then the tattered company would march in step with them, expanding their chests until the young people had passed them by, after which their weary feet would drag again.
It was the continuation of a trek that had started in Egypt, then passed through Jerusalem and Sefarad into Eastern Europe, where it took a breather for a brief millennium—a long slog during which many fell, and even those who could afford to ride were not immune from humiliation: like the boy Max had witnessed in the crowded rail car mocked by soldiers who clipped off his sidelocks. How resigned he had been, as if the abuse were an initiation he had to endure in order to enter America—for they were all (with only marginal Zionist exceptions) on their way to America.
All this Max observed with a certain detachment, buffered as he was by Zalman’s stipend, which is not to say that the excursion was without peril. The rail leg of a journey that should have taken only a matter of days took instead a fortnight, and there were constant interruptions when officers carrying weapons came aboard to inspect documents and passports. (Forged by Pisgat’s associates, his papers consolidated an identity to which the smuggler still had only a tenuous connection.) Sometimes they were accompanied by physicians threatening the spot examinations Max dreaded. Then he would have to dip into his funds and hand over another installment of the sweeteners that Pisgat had settled on him. But the funds were limited, and at the rate he’d had to dole them out along the route, oiling palms at every juncture, Max knew he would arrive on the other side with empty pockets. Still, bureaucratic obstacles notwithstanding, he owed Pisgat a debt of gratitude for partially clearing the way for him, because at each depot and border crossing he would be called upon once again to present his papers and explain the frozen stiff he was transporting (this was his story) to his bereaved family across the sea for burial. It was an anxious trip at every turn of which suspicious officials had to be silenced with zlotie, then marks, dissuaded from their insistence that the young man submit to disinfection and quarantine. No wonder that by the time the train reached the coast Max was fresh out of sops for insuring the secrets that lay beneath the ice and his own increasingly fusty suit of clothes.
In the louche North Sea port of Hamburg, sailors with their painted doxies and passengers on board electric trolleys ogled the invasion of the Jewish unwashed—who were hounded through the city as far as the seawall by a corps of money changers and bogus ticket agents, cheapjacks and impostors. Speaking a Yiddish he could scarcely make understood, Max once more asserted to officials that his papers were in order and the deceased already approved for transport, its ice-bound condition a guarantee against putrefaction. While all the time he thought: Azoy gait, so be it, I’ve done what I could; let them confiscate the box and everything it contains. Let them discover the contraband payload and fling me into a dungeon; it’s immaterial to me. Or were these the thoughts of Jocheved, with whom Max was so often at odds? In the end, though, the ticket was validated, the bill of lading stamped, and the casket carted by porters up the gangplank into the bowels of Rolling Billy, as the crew called the gargantuan flagship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Max straggled behind them into the ship’s yawning hold to make certain that the rabbi was well situated among the racks of splayed and gibbeted mutton, the crates of perishables and cases of brut champagne.
He was assigned a berth in the third-class section, where he slept alongside the retching masses in a stench to which Max himself, stewing in Salo Frostbissen’s funeral suit, contributed. Two days out the ship hit a storm, and the steerage passengers, pasted against the bulkheads when not tossed into one another, declared that the vessel was lashed to Leviathan’s tail. In fair weather they fought over the gruel ladled from the common kettle into their dinner pails, only to spew it later on into the aisles, creating between bunks a moat in which the pious stood davening. Compromised laws of kashrut aside, Max was unable to eat in such an environment, though he might occasionally nibble a bit of fruit or dried fish that some shy maiden, blushing vermilion, would press upon him. Such overtures, however, made him as uncomfortable as did the viscid-eyed victims of nausea and dysentery gulping air whose oxygen was usurped by foul gases. The toilets were bogs, the showers briny trickles that Max had anyway to avoid for fear of revealing his secret anatomy. Every bodily function involved an irksome covert procedure, often in the presence of men whose exposed parts were abhorrent to the girl concealed beneath Max’s apparel, which was why he kept as much as possible to himself.
When not trying to inhale a salty breeze through a porthole below decks, he preferred to keep company with the rabbi, during spells in which he established an uneasy intimacy with his charge. In the polar climate of the ship’s capacious meat locker, Max would plunk himself down on an asparagus crate, shivering in the dense air from the ammonia compressors that was scarcely more breatheable than the Sheol of steerage. Still he preferred the solitude, where he was seldom interrupted in his meditations concerning the past that he hoped to outdistance. Picturing the basement flat back in Zabludeve Street, as vacant now as a plundered crypt, he would make an effort at shoring up his new identity, though Jocheved invariably kicked out the props. He thought about his bedfellows in third class and wondered what, aside from their shared rootlessness, they had to do with him. What had become of the faith that bound him to his own kind? He wondered as well about the assertion of Jocheved’s father, Salo Frostbissen, for whose sake his daughter had been willing to shlep an ungainly impediment halfway around the world. How could the watchman have believed that the rabbi (who would be carrion were it not for his artificial preservation) was still somehow alive? It was a conviction to which Jocheved also paid lip service, if feebly, though Max could only disdain her credulity with a scorn that she assured him was mutual.
The smuggler had to exercise stealth during these visits, since the storage hold was technically off-limits to passengers—especially third-class passengers admonished not to stray from their confines, their very presence constituting an offense in the better quarters. But as the route through the ship’s entrails was lengthy and circuitous, Max could scarcely avoid the occasional confrontation with a purser or ordinary seaman. Then he would try through gestures and snatches of fractured German to explain his unauthorized presence, while the crewman, who already knew him by reputation as the lad with the refrigerated relation, would wave him past without further interference. At first Max couldn’t account for their leniency, though ultimately he came to understand that his looks were a factor in their favorable disposition, just as they had been for the railroad officials and border guards. And while Jocheved had only contempt for the comely features she shared with the smuggler, Max was, himself, not above exploiting them for the sake of survival. Of course, his face could just as easily have become a liability, particularly in steerage, where the girls were forever finding excuses to approach him, which was all the more reason not to bathe.
Once, having taken a wrong turn in the depths of the vessel, he descended through an open scuttle and found himself in a brass and lead jungle among grease monkeys swinging from exposed ducts and flues. Bare-chested toilers caked in ebony dust wielded shovels from atop a hill of soft coal, feeding the maw of a belching boiler whose flaming tongue set the dials on the pressure gauges spinning crazily. Giant turbines whined a counterpoint to the shooshing of screw propellers ploughing the unseen waves, while Max stood nailed in the hatchway by the glowering of the stokers, which chilled Jocheved’s blood. Their attention, however, was abruptly recaptured by a crookbacked immigrant in a shabby jerkin, his neck craned like a turtle peeping from its carapace. Appearing to have stumbled out of a jet of steam expelled from a whistling slide valve, he commenced asking questions he seemed simultaneously to answer, in a Yiddish the stokers couldn’t have understood. “So does it make by you a difference, the quadruple expansion of your twin-screw propulsion engine, which requires 560 tons coal a day…?” The stokers peered at the interloper with uncordial bloodshot eyes while Max made his getaway.
Another time Max climbed an unfamiliar companionway that turned a corner into a carpeted staircase, emerging into an opulence like nothing he had ever beheld. Still aboard the windward-riding steamship, he had entered a palace where lounges and plush smoke rooms bordered a grand saloon, a chandelier like a diadem dangling from its ceiling. There was a baroque dining room appointed in ornate carvings, gilt-framed mirrors, bas-reliefs, and stained glass; a library with a blazing fireplace and a marble mantel, Tiffany gas lamps the rich relations of the hurricanes that scattered shadows in the benighted quarters below. Trespassing amid all that splendor, Max could scarcely believe that such a place occupied the same planet as steerage.
In a palm court luxuriant with potted orchids beneath a vaulted glass dome, a bushy-haired man in a boiled tuxedo shirt, his rolled sleeves showing powerful forearms, was performing card tricks before an audience in evening dress seated in white rattan chairs. There followed a round of polite applause after which a slight, bird-breasted woman in puce tights appeared bearing an assortment of properties. She proceeded to manacle and strait-jacket the solemn magician, then helped him into a steamer trunk, which members of the audience were invited to encompass in chains. The darting assistant then drew an ornamental screen about the trunk and, gravely pronouncing the name of the presentation, “Metamorphosis,” disappeared behind the partition. Mere seconds after she’d vanished, however, the magician himself stepped forth to universal gasps and riotous applause. Folding back the screen, he unlocked the locks, removed the chains, and lifted the lid, as out popped the lady assistant, straitjacketed and handcuffed.
So spellbound was Max by the performance that he’d forgotten what a distraction his unlaundered presence might be in such genteel surroundings. He could have retreated unnoticed had not a filigreed matron with terraced chins, seated at the end of the row of chairs, pointed at him to exclaim in a piping contralto, “You’re bleeding!” He looked down to see that the dampness which had seeped through the crotch of his pants had leaked a droplet of blood onto the bottle green carpet. Fleeing toward the promenade in a frantic search for the hatch that would lead him back to the ship’s kishkes where he belonged, Max felt a renewed disgust for the female body he was forced to accommodate. Didn’t the men in shul thank God daily for not having been born a woman? Nor did it assuage his humiliation to recall how the gentiles of Lodz clung to the age-old belief that male Jews had monthly emissions. Still, there was the consoling afterthought that Jocheved, having had no womanly discharge since her abduction, had at least not been impregnated during her ordeal.
Looking over his shoulder for the rest of the voyage, Max was scarcely aware of their proximity to the New World until the ship, escorted by spouting tugs, nudged into its berth at the flag-bristling Hamburg-Amerika wharf. The first- and second-class passengers streamed down the gangplanks to be absorbed by welcoming crowds, while the rabble of steerage, teased by their close encounter with the mainland, were unloaded onto launches that ferried them to Ellis Island. Max had held out the hope that the special circumstances of his alleged funereal mission and the burden it entailed might somehow exclude him from diversion to the Isle of Tears. But the casket with its licit and illicit contents was lowered by cargo net along with the baggage of the other prospective greenhorns, then transported to the island and dumped in a cordoned area pending further inspection; nor could it be reclaimed until its owner had been admitted through customs. This prompted a period of forced separation from his property that caused Max his greatest anxiety thus far.
On the island the candidates for immigration were herded through redbrick portals into the cathedral-size echo chamber of the receiving hall, the sunlight slanting down from high windows like crossed swords. Tagged with numbers and letters, the logy assemblage were made to wait hours on hard wooden benches, then rousted from their languor and hustled into stalls according to nationality, driven between the paint-chipped railings as into an abattoir. Stations of uniformed examiners awaited them, as Max dredged his empty pockets for the bribes that no longer remained. He steeled himself to face the first inquisitor, at whose shoulder stood a spade-bearded gent—apparently there to act as interpreter—with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society insignia stuck in the band of his bowler hat. A relentless battery of questions ensued, designed to determine whether Max were a lunatic, convict, anarchist, polygamist, or otherwise potential parasite and threat to the state. Encouraged by subtle jerks of the interpreter’s head to answer every query (how else?) in the negative, he was then shoved along toward a doctor in a dirty smock, who ordered him to open his shirt just short of revealing the tender buds of Jocheved’s breasts. Thankfully inattentive, the doctor concluded that Max suffered from neither leprosy, consumption, nor any other “loathsome or contagious disease,” then passed him on to yet another doctor seated on a stool surrounded by a circular hospital curtain.
This one, with a cigarette dangling from fleshy lips, was in the process of lifting with one hand the sagging belly of a burly peasant in order to inspect his external genitalia with the other. The sight of the big man standing there with his trousers about his trunk-like ankles made Max rigid with panic. All the accumulated tensions of the journey revisited him with a gathered force that rocked his entire frame, until he had no way of measuring whether his fear was proportionate to the situation. Flinging madly about in his brain for some reason that might exempt him from the examination, he fixed on the gory excuse of an injury inflicted by rampaging hooligans during a ghetto episode. Perhaps the tale might inspire a sympathy that would stay the doctor’s hand from exploring the conspicuous absence in Max’s pants.
Then just as the physician dismissed the balagoula (who’d farted like a horse as his parts were handled) and summoned Max with his rubbergloved fingers to step forward, a disturbance erupted in the next line over. Even above the surflike cacophany of the hall, urgent voices could be heard calling out for assistance—as coincidentally a hospital screen crashed into Max’s, which toppled domino fashion, the wreckage revealing a knot of officials kneeling over a fallen woman. Wearing a headscarf and several layers of skirts despite the heat, she had the look of an open umbrella tossed in the wind as she writhed on the floor in the throes of a seizure. Yellow sputum bubbled from her lips, her upturned eyes as blank as boiled eggs. Heaving a sigh, Max’s doctor got leisurely to his feet and toddled over to the aid of his colleagues, one of whom was struggling to prevent the woman from swallowing her tongue. In the doctor’s absence the HIAS man assigned to him, one half of whose face was contracted in a wink, took up a piece of chalk from the box beside the physician’s stool and made a mark on Max’s sleeve. Confused, Max had yet to budge from his spot when the man yanked him roughly forward by the lapel and, looking both ways, beckoned to the fellow behind him in line. Faint with relief, Max pushed through a turnstile back into the discordant hall, past the quarantine cages where men and women who had failed their examinations were detained.
Reunited with the rabbi and once again aboard the launch, he allowed himself to appreciate for the first time the cloud-banked perpendicular city ahead of him, believing that the worst was surely over. It was an optimism that, for once undisparaged by Jocheved, was borne out by the expedition with which events began to fall into place. Pisgat, who’d assured Max that arrangements had been made at the other end, proved as good as his word. The poker-faced agent of the financier (whose name was not to cross the smuggler’s lips) was there to meet him on the North River docks in the molasses-thick afternoon sunshine. Recognizing him by the plank sarcophagus beside which he stood, the man spared the new arrival no more than a nod before seeing to it that a couple of porters transferred the casket with swift dispatch into the waiting wagon. All fortitude spent, Max was content to climb aboard the wagon himself and place his fate in the hands of his tight-lipped convoy. There was of course much to see as all around him disembarking immigrants were beset by long-lost relations or confidence tricksters posing as such, by labor gang contractors and sweatshop recruiters. There were omnibuses whose rooftop passengers had to remove their hats as they passed beneath the Elevated trestles, kiosks that invited pedestrians to descend into rumbling catacombs beneath the earth, a gothic tower on the side of which frolicked a lady fifteen stories tall in a bathing costume. But Max preferred to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, as blinkered in their way as the nag’s that hauled the wagon, which might now be mistaken for a hearse. The streets of America, he resolved, would offer him no distractions until he had first attended to the business of collecting his wits.
Gebirtig & Son’s Ice Castle on Canal Street, give or take its crenellated turrets and galleried façade, was a bookend to Pisgat’s overseas operation, the two establishments bracketing the whole of Max’s journey. It was true that the present structure was the more imposing, its breadth spanning a whole city block. A fleet of mule-driven delivery vans was parked in the furrowed thoroughfare outside and an army of laborers wheeled dollies and barrows up and down a ramp through the wide warehouse doors. But once he’d stepped over the Ice Castle’s threshold, passing from the torrid month of Tammuz into a frosty Shevat, Max relaxed in the chill environment familiar from a former life. Vertical lifts containing bales of salmon and pyramids of artichokes rose in the chromium light to the upper lofts, where the freight was slid along tramways on sledges, stored in niches carved out of the frozen ramparts like shrines; and Max, unlettered but for the Yiddish romances that Jocheved had browsed on the sly, had the reverent sensation of having entered an archive of ice. Deflated as he was, he was glad to be behind these vault-thick walls leaking sawdust like sand from a thousand hourglasses; he was glad of the business that gave him a reason for being there, acutely aware that, when the business was over, he would be left entirely on his own.
The casket was rolled upright on a handcart into the building’s deepest sanctum, a pine-floored locker where wheels of cheese large as millstones, beer barrels with ivory spigots, and various imported delicacies were stored. There the proprietors, Gebirtig Junior and Senior, welcomed their guests to the Castle’s keep. Well-fed burghers both, wearing identically striped galluses and with fat cigars plugged into complacent grins, they seemed happy to defer to the brisk direction of the financier’s agent. At his command the mammoth green lozenge of ice with its dormant occupant was hoisted by workers from its box by means of a winch suspended from an overhead gantry. Max held his breath as the dripping block dangled in the frigid air from a hawser-thick noose, dipping left and right like the arms of precarious scales. Then the flannel-wrapped pillows of fish roe upon which the ice had rested, smelling surprisingly fresh, were removed from the casket and placed on a butcher’s slab, after which the block was thankfully lowered back into its crib. But what made Max even more ill at ease than had the thing’s visible exposure was the way the two Gebirtigs had scrutinized the ice-entombed rebbe almost as covetously as they had eyed the caviar.
The agent plucked from the lapel of his cutaway a tiny silver spoon with which he proceeded to sample the goods, chewing with methodical concentration before declaring the morsel satisfactory; then removing an envelope from his pocket, he tossed it to Max, who snatched it out of the air like falling manna. He supposed he was expected to count the money, which he had just enough presence of mind left to do, feeling the eyes of the proprietors upon him all the while. Stammering that all was in order, he stuffed the money back into the envelope, tucked the envelope into his inside coat pocket, and bowed to the agent with a slight spillage of raven curls. The fish eggs were then loaded into the wagon and buried in straw, on top of which were nestled, as a further decoy, sacks of groceries and bottles of vintage Sauterne. Then the agent departed without ceremony, leaving Max to the good offices of the Gebirtigs, who insisted he call them Asher and Tsoyl.
Obviously well compensated for their part in the relay of merchandise, they seemed also well informed concerning Max’s commission on behalf of the glaciated old man. “Be assured,” they told him in a homey Ashkenaz idiom, “will be looked after respectfully, your zayde, till you return from making his funeral arrangements.”
“I have first to visit the office of the Western Union,” Max announced, as per Pisgat’s instructions (and lest it be thought he had other plans for the cash). This too the Gebirtigs seemed to anticipate.
They gave him explicit directions as to how to reach the telegraph office on Delancey Street and described the procedure for wiring the money back to Poland. Feeling as if the cash in his pocket were a hot potato he must promptly dispose of, Max set off with a purpose into the jostling unknown. He had been told his destination was only a few blocks away, but the welter of the Lower East Side streets was immediately disorienting, and alone he remembered that, notwithstanding his pocketful of ill-gotten gains, he was without a sou to his name. Of course, once he was rid of the money, his empty pockets would at least preserve him from the risk of robbery, but despite his apprehensiveness he couldn’t help entertaining other possibilities. Given all Max had endured during his journey, would old Pisgat begrudge his skimming a scant few bills from such a thick bankroll, just enough to tide him over till he managed to secure a foothold in America? It was safe to say he would never be in possession of such a fortune again, and how, when it was gone, would he support himself, never mind see to the perpetual care of the ice-girt oddity? Thinking of which: Temporarily liberated from that weighty encumbrance, Max had the sense that his task was done. So what was to prevent him, other than Pisgat’s threats (and Pisgat was very far away), from taking the money and disappearing into the country’s interior, where he might perhaps purchase a kingdom and rule over a tribe of grateful savages? What, in any case, was the alternative? He supposed he would have to appeal to some benevolent society for a few dollars with which to rent a hole in the wall, then take a job in the rag trade—the industry in which he’d been told all greenhorns were employed—thus insuring his indenture to pisher wages for the rest of his days. On the other hand, already a smuggler, why not a thief? But still in the process of inventing himself, he decided somewhat grudgingly (nudged by Jocheved) that Max Feinshmeker was a man of his word, and anyway he just wanted to put this nerve-racking chapter behind him.
He paused on the corner of an avenue congested with market stalls, carts sporting garlands of tinware, trussed and flapping geese, bins piled with alps of eyeglasses, felt slippers, and celluloid buttons, wing collars like a nest of albino butterflies. Garbage choked the gutters, creating swamps into which women in brogans chased shoplifting urchins who ducked under the bellies of draft horses dead on their feet. From every fire escape hung the doubled-over carcass of an airing mattress, from every storefront an illustrated placard boasting a giant scissors or molar, its legend inscribed in holy and unholy tongues. Max paused to look left and right, realizing that in weighing his options he had forgotten the Gebirtigs’ directions, if indeed their directions were accurate; he’d lost all track of his whereabouts. Everyone around him was in motion as if desperately searching for something they’d lost, or leastwise bent on their next purchase or sale—everyone, that is, but the lanky golf-capped character in his patched plus-fours lounging in the doorway of a nearby bakery. Hadn’t Max seen the very same character lounging in another doorway a few blocks back? Or was it half a world away? Because, while any comparison to the Balut was invidious, the faces among this coarse congregation might have been the same ones he remembered from Jocheved’s native slum. It was as if, minus the mired motorcar or the manhole cover rattling above a subway like a gyrating coin, he’d traveled this far only to wind up where he’d begun.
In any case, despite Jocheved’s better judgment, he approached the loiterer, inhaling the aromas of baking strudel that reminded Max of how hungry he was, and inquired, “Zayt moykhl, reydstu Yiddish?”
“What other mother tongue would have me?” the loiterer responded in the vernacular, breaking into a grin that threatened to burst the pustules stippling his downy cheeks.
Subduing a shudder, Max asked him please the way to the Western Union. The young man instantly hopped down into the street paved in herring bones and broken glass, taking hold of Max’s arm to point him in a southerly direction. But no sooner had he done so than another youth, a bulkier one with a buzzard’s beak poking from under the bill of his cap, slammed into Max from behind, spinning him like a compass needle one hundred and eighty degrees.
“Klutz!” Max’s companion shouted at the youth, who forged ahead through the press of pedestrians without stopping. He let go of Max in order to make an exaggerated show of straightening his new friend’s disarranged coat. Then issuing somewhat mystifying directions (“You’ll want to turn left at Purim then pass on through the valley of dry bones”), he saluted with a click of the heels, about-faced, and took off like the other into the market melee. Over his shoulder he flung a proverb: “Eyner hot dem baytl,” letting loose a fusillade of laughter as he broke into a run, “der tsveyte hot dos gelt.” One has the wallet, the other the cash.
Max knew before he checked his pocket that the envelope containing the money was gone.
He realized also that he was lost, famished, exhausted, and now a marked man on a foreign shore where he hadn’t a notion of where to turn. Tears welled in his eyes—Jocheved’s tears, of course, but trailing through that dingy quarter it was he that was too reluctant to appeal to another stranger for advice. Regarding exactly what? There seemed nothing left to do but carry on trudging aimlessly until he dropped, which was surely imminent. So this was the Golden Land—this wagon rut where the setting sun was reflected in the beer spilled from a growler by the child sent to fetch it? Across the way a fishmonger spread the gills of a carp until it resembled a striking cobra; an evicted family surrounded by a drift of bedding lit a yahrzeit candle on their front stoop. And again Max had the feeling that he’d been here before, an impression corroborated by the reappearance over the road of the Gebirtigs’ place of business, to which he’d come full circle. It comforted him somewhat to remember that he was expected. Entering through the Ice Castle’s gas-sconced arcade, he located the joint proprietors at adjacent bill-laden desks in their mezzanine office, where he asked if they would mind extending his zayde’s storage a little longer. “A few days yet I need to find a funeral plot.…”
Father and son exchanged a look, then turned to Max as if he were certifiable. “What are you talking a frozen person?” wondered Asher Gebirtig, and Tsoyl, who’d clearly not fallen far from his father’s tree: “Eyz-kugel he thinks we sell here made from human beings.” They had never heard of such a thing. And truly, as he stood there before them in desolation, Max himself was almost willing to believe that the rabbi was a fantasy hatched by the demented Jocheved under the influence of her meshugeneh father; her family, the Frostbissens, they were always a peculiar brood. But stuck in a charade whose motions he felt helplessly condemned to go through, he demanded to revisit their treasury, and finding it bare of the reinforced wooden casket with its frozen occupant, threatened the proprietors with the police. Asher laughed heartily and reminded him he was in no position to make threats, while Tsoyl said that if he wanted to play that game, they would see his threats and raise him a couple more. Although Max had little idea what Gebirtig Junior was talking about, in the end he understood there was no recourse left him but to depart the premises and seek solace elsewhere.
Outside, the strange and the familiar tended to cancel one another out, so that Max looked upon the multitudes escaping the brick kilns of their tenements with an undiscriminating eye. He had strayed into a dark street under the El train stanchions, where red lanterns hung from the lintels of narrow frame houses on whose doorsteps women in dusky dressing sacques displayed their ankles. Despite his diminished condition, they nevertheless called out to the pretty boy to follow them upstairs, while other boys, men, and even a nervous, bearded patriarch clutching his phylactery bag heeded their enticements. It was then it occurred to Max that Jocheved might be similarly turned to good use. Perhaps, given his predicament, it was time to end the masquerade and admit defeat: the attempt to become Max Feinshmeker had failed. Max was at any rate a man who, due to his carelessness, would be fingered now by his former employer for retribution. So what better disguise could he assume for his own protection than that of the girl he had disguised himself to protect in the first place? But Jocheved was more stiff-necked than that; for all her indifference to her own extinction, she still reserved in her breast a flicker of something like pride. Max was sui generis; he had no forebears and could not be expected to share her sentiments. But while her sympathy for him made her waver, she owed it to her father to recover the by now melting contents of the family’s eroded hope chest.