1908.
Until he was thrown out on his ear from his Aunt Dobeh and Uncle Zaynvil’s apartment, Shmerl Karp had no leisure to enjoy the clamorous streets of the Jewish East Side. The eviction itself did not particularly distress him; worse things could have happened: He might for instance have remained shackled to relations who used him for a Hebrew slave. But the circumstances surrounding the eviction left him confirmed in his belief in the inherent evils of technology.
For a time Shmerl was satisfied that the innumerable tasks he was assigned throughout the working day—a day which began at dawn and continued into the evening—were a fitting penance; they were the chastening he deserved for the arrogance of his messianic pursuits back in Shpinsk. So he never complained on discovering that he had ceased to be a guest of the Oyzers in their handshake tenement, a discovery that became apparent after his first cup of tea. Childless, the choleric couple had welcomed him into their home with the assurance that he would be the son they never had, then promptly set him to work. He dutifully accepted his role as scullery boy and swabber of slopjars; he swept floors, fetched coal, baited rat traps, hung flypaper, and swatted cockroaches the size of tortoises. In the parlor sweatshop to which the apartment was converted every day of the week, Shabbos included, he functioned as general factotum. He received the bundles of piecework the infant shleppers delivered regularly from an uptown contractor and tied the finished waists and vests into bales slated for a retail jobber, also uptown. He kept oiled and in prime running condition the loop-stitch sewing machines that his Uncle Zaynvil, chewing the wet stub of a cigar, rented to the weary-winged operators who arrived with their greasy lunch bags at daybreak.
Though his tasks kept him largely fettered to the tenement, Shmerl never complained; America was as intimidating as it was enticing, and the unventilated apartment was a safe enough harbor for the time being. The streets, his dour Tante Dobeh assured him with a husky “Feh!” were fleshpots; they were places of pagan amusements in cruel contrast to the surrounding squalor. This much Shmerl could see from the Oyzers’ fire escape. But the city was also a showcase of marvels: the telegraphs, rotary engines, safety hoisters, electric chairs, moving pictures, and elevated railroads that were conveying the New World into a revolutionary new age. Despite having yet to set eyes on all these prodigies, Shmerl was aware of them, his very blood purling along with their hum. But something was missing from the rush to mechanize everything in Creation, he concluded (on the evidence of instinct alone), and that something was, well, the yetser tov, the good intention. The machines of America, he was persuaded, were inspired by Moloch rather than the holy spirit, which seemed to be strictly an Old World phenomenon. Wonder rebbes, lamed vovniks, and every species of hallowed figure that had presided over his youthful imagination remained behind in the Russian Pale. Nor did this new world seem to offer a natural environment of the type that nourished such souls, let alone the denizens of Yenne Velt, the Other Side; for scarcely a tree or a blade of grass could be found in the ghetto, or at least that part of it viewed from a window on Rivington Street. This left only the man-made environment and the harried men and women, worn to shadows by need and greed, who inhabited it. Shmerl supposed on the one hand that, with his intuitive knowledge of the way things worked, he was eminently suited to his new situation; while on the other he had no wish to employ his skills in a place where they could never come to a sanctified fruition—even should those skills result in his being admired by the opposite sex.
So he kept his nose to the Oyzers’ grindstone, picking threads from the finished shirtwaists, wrestling mattresses like recalcitrant drunkards onto the fire escape to be aired; he even learned to operate the eight-pound pressing irons attached by extension springs to the ceiling hooks that rendered them mobile. These had salubrious benefits, increasing the wiry musculature of his upper body (crooked spine notwithstanding) in the manner of the scientific weight-training methods of Eugene Sandow. Meanwhile Shmerl picked up more snatches of the American language—cockamamie, mishmash, bumerkeh, ayeshdworry—from the whispered conversations he overheard among the Oyzers’ otherwise taciturn employees. They were men and women of an indeterminate age, their ashen faces and arms stained liver brown and madder blue from the fabrics they worked with. With eyes leached of light, they seldom looked up from their labor, only to check the time on the clock whose hands Aunt Dobeh moved craftily forward or backward to regulate their progress.
Confusing his deformity with dimwittedness, Shmerl’s aunt and uncle had assumed that operating a sewing machine was too complex an exercise for their greenhorn nephew to master, at least at this early stage of his apprenticeship; and it was true that, while he had grasped the concept of the mechanism at a glance—as well as acquired its nomenclature: shuttle hook, bobbin winder, needle bar, presser foot, feed dog—sewing hems, plaques, and darts involved an expertise he had no special desire to learn. Still, he attended to the machines, as shapely in their fashion as ladies’ calves; he folded them affectionately into their wrought-iron treadles to convert the factory back to a parlor for the couple of hours before the Oyzers (in identical pear-shaped union suits) went to bed. But by day the parlor was once again a beehive of unremitting activity—“a choir of Singers,” quipped Uncle Zaynvil, an inflexible taskmaster not ordinarily known for his humor. Nobody laughed; nobody ever laughed or turned their head or left their work unnecessarily, preferring to suffer from chronic constipation rather than have their movements interpreted as slacking from the task at hand. Because the least unsanctioned action could result in having your wages docked or worse. Nor could Shmerl, despite his blood relation—a connection the Oyzers sometimes called into question—expect any privileged treatment from his bosses.
Sometimes he saw the romance in his drudgery. He thought of Jacob toiling seven years only to be double-crossed by his future father-in-law, of Joseph’s patience in Egypt before attaining his nobility. But Shmerl’s labors were merely for the purpose of lining the pockets of his miserly aunt and uncle, and while he disdained the ambition of a Joseph, he found himself, after some weeks had passed, entertaining a subversive thought or two. Lately his Tante Dobeh’s potted meat and rubbery farfel had seemed small compensation for the long hours of mindless toil; nor did their table talk, which mostly concerned the markup on the needles and scissors they sold their employees, keep him amused. He was made further restless from browsing the personals column of his uncle’s discarded Forverts, The Jewish Daily Forward. In them, young men represented themselves as exemplary candidates for matrimony, spinsters advertised their dowries, and marriage brokers guaranteed prospective bridegrooms a “zivug hashomayim,” a match made in heaven. Wasn’t it time, thought Shmerl in his lonely hours, that he should consider starting a family of his own? Didn’t the Talmud state that a man without a wife was without joy or blessing? And the Zohar went even further, declaring that the unattached individual is not yet a whole being. But as long as he remained in thrall to the Oyzers’ grinding gesheft, he would never have the opportunity or the means to become his own person. At length his frustrated thoughts sought an alternative outlet. Running the irons over a swatch of calico or hauling up a bucket of coal in the dumbwaiter, he might wonder: What would happen if the sewing machines were harnessed to, say, a single enormous dynamo? There were a thousand such sweat factories in the ghetto, each with their pallid operators pumping their treadles with a grim tenacity; yet the whole collective endeavor remained stationary. But combine their efforts and the machines were a potential source of energy that could at the very least electrify all of Manhattan Island, and perhaps elevate this modern Babylon to exalted heights.
Shmerl told himself that such thoughts were foolish and dangerously out of place, but he could no longer ignore his own discontent. There came a night when, lying in his nest of scraps in front of the stove installed in an empty fireplace, he couldn’t sleep for his rampant imaginings. Despite the cold weather that gripped the city, the tenement remained close and stale from the lingering vinegar odor of the departed laborers. Eyeing the machines, Shmerl decided that he’d suffered his servitude long enough to warrant a holiday. Not that there was anywhere in particular he wanted to go, not on the planet at any rate, since his fancies tended toward more empyrean destinations. With his latest brainstorm brewing, he reasoned that a minor experiment would hardly disturb the fabric of the universe, and try as he might to resist what he regarded as an impure impulse, he nevertheless succumbed in the end to temptation. He rose after midnight and stole out of the apartment, braving the wind in his thin Prince Isaac jacket to venture beyond Rivington Street for the first time since he’d arrived in New York.
What surprised him was that the sleepless city, even at that small hour, was less menacing to walk in than it had been to descry through a filmy third-floor window. In fact, Shmerl was so distracted when passing the all-night coffee saloons and dancing academies, the stalls piled with fish like segmented rainbows lit by blue carbide flares, that he nearly forgot his mission. On a corner a soapbox orator exhorted a phantom audience concerning the crimes of the idle rich; a puppeteer walked a gypsy marionette around a circle of lamplight; a quorum of Chasids gathered beside a hoarding to bless the new moon. Remembering himself, Shmerl began trolling the construction and demolition sites that interrupted the tenements, delighted at how readily available were the scraps of aluminum, copper wire, and iron nails he required for his bricolage construction. Back in the apartment he blew on his stiffened fingers, then removed from his carpet bag the electromagnet complete with alkali battery he’d brought with him from across the sea. That and his Book of Wonders were the only vestiges of his shameful old life he’d permitted himself to take along on his journey.
In truth, it was not a complicated operation; he’d undertaken more ambitious procedures back in Shpinsk, and his uncle’s tool chest was more replete with precision instruments than any he’d previously had access to. But by the time he’d assembled the mechanism and fastened it to the curlicued struts of a sewer’s treadle, looping the elastic belt around the flywheel, Shmerl was too fatigued to see his experiment through. It was still dark out and there was time for a catnap to restore himself before testing the success or failure of his motorized Singer; dawn, he assumed, was still hours away. He crawled onto his piecework pallet lulled by a sweet suspense, ignoring the window shades turning from gray to a pale lemon hue. Nodding off, he saw a swarm of raggedy wage slaves pedaling their machines across the face of the moon on their way to celestial ports of call. He awoke to screaming, and only later, after the Oyzers had sent him packing, was he able to piece together what had happened.
“JEWS, GIVE TZEDAKAH,” crooned an old man with a flowing beard and helical sidelocks stationed beneath an awning on Christie Street. “For the righteous of Palestine, give halukkah, your pennies for the destitute of Jerusalem…” His voice a touch too mellifluous for his wasted face, he rattled the soup tin that served for a pushke in the failing light of day. The tin rattled from the buttons and pins that citizens lacking spare change had dropped in, believing no doubt that something was better than nothing. Did they think that because he was ancient he was also blind? (Though blindness had sometimes figured in his arsenal of afflictions.) Finally someone deposited an actual coin, and the old man muttered a blessing barely distinguishable from a curse before retiring to a drafty cellar nearby to count up the day’s take. There he removed the false beard and earlocks, peeled the crusted putty from his cheeks and nose, and hung up the mud-daubed caftan and the shtreimel that resembled an ermine babka. He sat down at a table covered in an oilskin on which puddles of wax had congealed, spilled the coins and other items from the tin can, and with slender fingers protruding from ragged mittens totted up the negligible amount he’d collected. Max Feinshmeker, née Jocheved Frostbissen, was growing tired of this particular ruse and would soon feel compelled to adopt another, a transformation he had repeated several times throughout that frigid winter.
He could see his breath in the cellar storeroom beneath Tzotz’s Dairy Restaurant on Delancey, where he kept company with barrels of pickled sturgeon and tubs of sour cream. Tzotz the proprietor, for charity’s sake, had agreed to let the mendicant kip there awhile before he returned (this was his story) to the Holy Land. Over the long winter months he’d slept in an assortment of cellars, three-cent lodgings, and detention cells, assuming a variety of disguises in his effort to remain elusive. Uneasy with each new incarnation, however, Max had tried on and discarded a dozen impostures, employing them a week or so before rejecting them for good. It was a sound enough strategy, he reasoned: Before his enemies had time to unmask him in one guise, he would already have taken another—though Jocheved sometimes insinuated that, in donning and doffing these serial personae, altering his character with each new subterfuge, he was looking in vain to find his own true self. She needled him that way persistently, urging him to continue the search for Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr in his zinc-lined casket, which quest was all that seemed to matter to her.
“We’re alone here without a pot to pish in,” was Max’s routine complaint, which he was sometimes observed by passers-by to mutter aloud. “We’re hungry and dirty and even if I had the pittance for a shvitz, I couldn’t use it for fear they might discover you—and all you can think of is a corpse on ice?”
“He’s not a corpse,” Jocheved would reply through Max’s own mouth, making him feel like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Asleep.”
At this Max would sock his brow with the heel of his hand. “Farvos?” he asked. “Why why why is the old kucker so important to you?”
And here Jocheved always chose to keep mum, as if the answer should have gone without saying. It did go without saying as far as Max was concerned, because it made no sense. But discordant agendas aside, there was the real and present danger of Pisgat’s threat hanging over his head.
At first he’d considered becoming the girl again, if only temporarily—that would have been the most practical disguise; but Jocheved wanted nothing to do with herself, nor was she willing to assume any other version of a female, neither maiden nor balebosteh, and Max couldn’t battle her. “You don’t want anymore to be yourself,” he complained, “yet you snipe at me for staying under wraps,” a point her silence suggested was well taken. And so, disguised as Ig Smolensk, who welcomed greenhorns fresh off the boat, soliciting their dues for an imaginary landsmanschaft; or Chaim Fut, who received alms for a rare and disfiguring skin disease; or Reb Itzik Saltpeter (sometimes the Blind), who sold Jerusalem dirt for sprinkling on stiffs and begged remittances for the saintly Jews of Palestine, Max Feinshmeker remained incognito. But all these assorted masks came later, after he’d pledged himself to vigilance and stealth and then set about failing miserably at both.
Having wandered the dense streets around Division and East Broadway during the first night after his arrival, bone-weary, mortally dispirited, and ravenous, Max had snatched a solitary orange from a bin. His inaugural theft, it was an act prompted as much by his hypnotic attraction to a fruit he’d never seen as by extreme hunger. He was caught red-handed. The grocer, whose wizened frame belied his dogged strength, grabbed the thief’s wrist with both vicelike hands and wouldn’t let go. He hailed a cop on the beat, who handcuffed the thief, then flagged a hack-drawn black maria, which transported Max in disgrace to the well-worn back steps of the nearby Essex Market Courthouse. There he was frog-marched by a pair of gin-soaked warders through a corridor and down a ringing spiral stair into a subterranean cell block echoing with the cries of unseen prisoners, where he was locked up for the night. It was a three-by-seven stone cell with built-in iron berths and a noisome slop bucket, but so played out was Max that he took some solace in simply having a roof over his head. He might even have slept, had not a slit-eyed cellmate, leaning against his upper berth and boasting of petty swindles in an underworld patois, kept finding excuses to touch his person: “Used to I fenced your fawneys which the tiny forks would hoist for Red Augie, him that flashed a rare handle to his physog…” Reclining on his pallet, Max of course had no clue as to what the fellow was talking about, though he winced every time the man rested a clammy hand on his shoulder or arm; and once, as Max began to doze off in exhaustion, his cellmate squeezed him between the legs, pincering air. So horrified was Max by the intrusion—which equally shocked the intruder, who shouted, “You ain’t a cove, you’re a tum-tum!”—that his bladder let go; it was that long since he’d had access to a private facility. Ashamed of the dampness and the ensuing odor, abused by the leering speculations of his cellmate, and afraid of giving vent to Jocheved’s outrage, he lay in a tight fetal ball throughout the remainder of the night. In the morning, despite his long fast, Max could scarcely face the bowl of glutinous gruel delivered through a slot in the door; though for the sake of his enfeebled condition (and indifferent to the dietary laws he’d already abandoned), he forced himself to choke it down.
Hauled into the dock at the Essex Market tribunal, he understood nothing of the proceedings. The courtroom was a circus of aggrieved and bedraggled humanity, the pews swarming with professional criminals—pickpockets, prostitutes, firebugs, horse poisoners, two-bit confidence men—as well as drunks and vagrants guilty of a clumsy desperation. Court reporters slouched in the casement windows; runners colluded with jackleg lawyers squirting tobacco juice between their teeth into brass spittoons. All appeared oblivious to the pounding gavel of the judge issuing pleas for order from the bench. Beet-faced, the judge dispensed draconian punishments—this one for the water drop cure at Blackwell’s Island, that one to the treadmills at Ludlow Street—which a wry-necked shorthand stenographer conscientiously recorded in her log. When it was Max’s turn, the arresting officer stood to recite the immigrant’s alleged offense, but in the absence of the greengrocer, for whom the affair had apparently ended with the apprehension of the thief, there was no one on hand to press formal charges. Nevertheless, the judge was reluctant to let such an obvious felon go scot free. “How do you plead?” he demanded, careless of legalities, while Max shook his head in incomprehension, anticipating the worst. Then a spruce, brilliantined young man in silk suspenders stepped up to offer his services in Yiddish. Max was ready to accept help from any quarter, when the man was interrupted by another, this one in rumpled attire, with a doleful bloodhound face, who explained that the pushy fellow was an opportunist and had not the greenhorn’s best interests at heart; whereas he, clutching a battered briefcase bound with twine to his threadbare vest, was the true voice of the oppressed. Having said as much, he set down the briefcase, hooked his thumbs in his sweat-ringed armpits, and began to declaim in orotund fashion; but the speech, despite its repetition of catchwords—“bourgeois toadies,” “bloated plutocrats”—was entirely lost on Max.
The judge had begun banging his gavel again, ordering the attorney to keep silent, when a brash voice whispered in Max’s ear that “nisht gedeyget, don’t worry,” she would look after him. She was—when he turned—a plump woman in her middle years, acrid with the fragrance of rose water and perspiration, her grin slightly predatory, her coral wig shaped like a ziggurat. In the brief hush that succeeded the curtailment of the lawyer’s peroration, she spoke up, informing the judge with all due respect that she would stand surety for the greenhorn. “Give to me in custody the boy, and I will guarantee he should behave himself and personally put him in the way of gainful employ.” Impatient to move on to cases of more moment, the judge agreed to remand Max into her care.
IT WAS EASY enough for Shmerl to guess what had happened: the cutter, the baster, and the finisher, along with the three lady stitchers, had come in early that morning as usual, and as usual had avoided any friendly chitchat preceding their work in his uncle’s shop. (Chitchat was discouraged as leading ultimately to guild socialism.) They all removed their coats, the stitchers grumbling under their breath that only one machine had been returned to its operational position; then they rearranged the machines and sat down to work. The pasty-faced Pearl Voronsky sat at Shmerl’s customized Singer and started without preamble to stitch a hem. Leaning over her machine to position the fabric beneath the needle bar, she began to pump the pedal, only to find that the pedal, activated by the elementary friction-drive engine that Shmerl had installed in the undercarriage, pumped away on its own. The needle began its rapid pecking, the pedal its automatic seesawing motion, the improvised fan belt rotating at an ever increasing speed. Then a loose strand of the girl’s mousy hair was caught in the sewing mechanism and was itself sewn in a literal “lock” stitch into the fabric, yanking Pearl closer to the treadle platform with each tick of the needle. Finally her head, as if leaning nearer to hear a secret, was yanked to the level of the metal platform and her scalp torn loose with a sickening pop from her skull. The bleeding was profuse, her screaming shrill, general chaos having erupted in the parlor. The noise awoke Shmerl whereas a kick in the behind from his uncle, making his customary entrance after the arrival of his workers, had not. There was no question on the part of Zaynvil, squinching his brow above the tufted bulb of his nose, as to who was responsible for the disaster; he’d had advance notice from abroad of Shmerl’s monkey business and had been warned that he should be on guard against it. Nor did Shmerl deny his part in the debacle. Without protest he accepted his uncle’s hasty justice, seconded by a scowling Tante Dobeh handing him his bag, and allowed himself to be bum-rushed out the door.
On the street it was winter, the banked snow peppered with soot, and now both homeless and penniless, Shmerl considered his options. He might present himself to Messrs Westinghouse and Edison, whose new patents were announced almost daily in the Forward, which had assumed the task of educating its subscribers in scientific as well as political revolutions. It outlined in detail the uses of the labor-saving and pleasure-giving devices that these elui, these modern Prometheuses, had begun to conceive in rapid succession. Surely such venturesome men had need of a lad with Shmerl Karp’s gifts. But this latest fiasco was the final straw, and beyond contrite, Shmerl found himself actively deploring the notion of secular progress, which clearly led only to disaster. “What place is there in the Golden Land for a wizard who’s sworn off wizardry?” he asked, then felt instantly ashamed of the self-pity implicit in the question. Sorry as he was for the pain that his runaway sewing machine had inflicted on an innocent, Shmerl was in any case relieved to be away from Rivington Street. His pauper’s status served him right, he supposed, though recalling Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse’s, the happy orphan whose adventures were serialized in the Yiddish dailies, he was secretly a little thrilled by his situation. For all around him thrummed America, which he still didn’t approve of, though he had to admit that, barren as it was of holiness, its streets had spectacle and drama to spare.
So buoyed was he by the sights of the neighborhood, in fact, that he knocked about its streets a day and a night before realizing how tired and hungry he’d become. Everywhere the hucksters and pullers-in, warming their hands at ashcan fires, beckoned you to step with them behind the scenes, though the streets outdid their most eloquent come-ons. At a bookstall an arrogant peddler snatched a volume from a potential buyer and informed him that “this one ain’t for you,” while on a fire escape above them a blanket-bundled prodigy played a mournful rhapsody on a violin. A scribe with a fiddlehead beard squatted on a bucket, offering to pen salutations to your ancestors “that I promise will stink from Isaiah”; a city editor emerged from a basement press festooned in teletape aflame from an ash that had dropped from his cigar. These were attractions that Shmerl could afford, whereas he lacked the means to enjoy even the cheapest cafeteria fare—a fact he remembered once his eyes and ears (gone numb from the cold) were sated, leaving his stomach to make its own demands. That’s when he applied to a storefront Canal Street mission for a bowl of soup tasting of solvent, and in the mongrel tongue he’d been refining over his weeks in the sweatshop, inquired through still chattering teeth after a job. He knew there were factories of every type in the ghetto, foundries and tool and die shops, garment factories, of course, by the score; but Shmerl thought it best to keep his distance from machinery, and he’d had enough of the rag trade to last him the rest of his days.
A couple of luckless Litvaks in the mission, both of whom had submitted to baptisms for the sake of nominal cash rewards, exchanged confidential winks as they advised him concerning a situation. Taking Shmerl’s malformed measure, the more talkative of the two remarked, “It’s a job I think maybe this one was born for,” scribbling a Pitt Street address on a scrap of paper. Locating the street number only a few blocks away, Shmerl found there a small clutch of men milling about outside a wagonyard gate, stomping their feet and rubbing their hands to promote circulation—a dance the greenhorn found it natural to fall in step with. Around midnight the wooden gate of Levine’s Livery Stable swung stridently open, and grizzled old Levine himself appeared in his mangy mackinaw. He began without ceremony to count heads, then told the men in the mixture of zhargon and English that was a standard Tenth Ward parlance to line up. A motley bunch that included a pair of scarified Negroes and a monkey-jacketed Chinaman, they seemed familiar with the routine, forming a single file for the purpose of receiving long-handled shovels from the toothless contractor. Falling in with them, Shmerl asked the chap in front of him, the bill of whose cap was pulled over one eye, “What are we?” and was informed in a Galway brogue, “We be night scavengers.” Without comprehending, Shmerl had the impression he was participating in a mysterious rite.
The wagon, a storm lantern swinging from its rear axle, trundled out into the ghetto streets, as the men alongside it began shoveling horse manure from the pavements into the maggoty wooden bed. Sometimes the shit stood in pyramids like cannonballs, sometimes in delicately balanced coproliths, or in mounds like brittle meringue and fresh paddies spread over the cobbles and trolley tracks. Where the stuff lay on the macadamed roadway, it could be scooped up efficiently and tossed onto the growing heap, but often the more obstinate turds had to be prized from fissures and sinkholes and flung into the wagon like clay pigeons sprung from traps. A few of the men, between shovelfuls, pulled slab bottles from their reefer pockets and took deep drafts to stave off the cold; then they would reel and occasionally break into sentimental song (“She is more to be pitied than censured…”), some teetering and falling face forward into the slush where they were left to lie. Without the benefit of spirits, Shmerl nevertheless found the exercise bracing, itself sufficient to warm his bones, and the stench of excrement, mitigated by the frosty air, was no worse than the odor of anguish in the Oyzers’ shop. Hauled by a brace of stilt-legged plug horses that Old Man Levine had constantly to cajole, the wagon rolled as far as the East River wharves, where its contents were unloaded onto freight scales before being dumped into a garbage scow. The skipper of the scow exchanged some salty small talk with the contractor, handing him his commission as a gang of sparrowlike urchins crept from the shadows to leap atop the piles of drek. Hovered over by mewling seabirds, they picked through the shit in a futile search for trophies worth salvaging.
When the night cart returned near dawn to the wagonyard, Levine dismounted his squeaky vehicle to dole out their token wages to the stalwarts who’d survived the dung circuit. The laborers dispersed in their several directions, leaving Shmerl to totter alone in the odorous yard, chewing his chapped lower lip. “What’s a matter, you froze?” asked the shambling old contractor of the greenhorn, who replied with unguarded candor, “I dunno where I should go,” just before he crumpled to the ground from exhaustion. Examining him with a blood-rimmed eye, Levine grunted it wasn’t his problem; then, a soft touch for both animals and oddballs, he relented, scooping up Shmerl and half-walking, half-dragging him to an uninsulated tarpaper shack where he could sleep. The shack, hung with horsetack and bridles, abutted the stables, and in exchange for cleaning them, for watering the crow-bait horses and strapping on their feedbags, for delivering the tribute money to the Jewish Black Hand in their headquarters behind Sam Schnure’s saloon, and for shoveling shit, Shmerl could have the run of the rickety outbuilding. On top of that (and depending on the weekly levy imposed by the Yid Camorra) he would receive a salary of around two dollars a week. With his wage plus the chickpeas and potato peels he foraged from the Hester Street market—he was, after all, a seasoned scrounger—Shmerl was able to keep himself alive and relatively fit, as well as to sock away a little something for a rainy day. In most respects the wagonyard regimen was even more punishing than the sweatshop, but unlike the sweatshop it had its rewards.
For instance: Shmerl would sleep through the mornings and wake to perform his appointed duties, which were generally completed by early evening. Then his time until the dead of night was his own. He would stroll into streets whose mercantile tenor had begun to take on by that hour a more recreational mood, the cafés filling with drones from the factories who shed their torpor on the spot, transforming themselves into poets and firebrands. Among their ranks were the artistic young ladies in their tulip-shaped walking skirts, whose ordinarily drawn faces appeared flushed with public and private passions. Admiring them through plate glass, Shmerl thought that, given his own double life (for he was a drek shlepper with the soul of a dreamer), he had much in common with these zealous young people, though he lacked the self-assurance to mingle among them. Besides, temptation was itself a form of idolatry—or so he told himself before finally turning away from the cafés and dancehalls to go meet the nightwalking crew.
Once, during a twilight constitutional, lonely and full of a yearning he dared not name, Shmerl ventured as far afield as the Bowery, amazed as always that he could see so much of the world in the space of so few blocks, that he needed no stamped document or visa to travel from one district to another. Here was Babel all right, though he seemed to have lost the capacity to judge it; predators and victims alike now appeared to him as merely the naturalized citizens of the urban landscape, just as the borderline between the spirit and the flesh was virtually indiscernible in this corner of the globe. The storefront chapel rubbed elbows with the hot-sheet hotel, the oyster bar with the Yiddish theater, beneath whose bulb-studded marquee a band of Chasids had gathered to exorcise the abominations within. Sandwiched between a music hall and a shooting gallery, with the Third Avenue Elevated roaring overhead, was a gasoliered façade with an ornate triple M painted above its arched entryway: The Museum of Miracles and Misfits, admission one thin dime. It was no doubt wasteful to spend a whole dime to see “miracles” when there were sights enough along any city street, but lured by the garish monstrosities depicted on the banners outside the building, Shmerl impulsively turned over a coin to the man in the booth and entered the hall.
Inside was a great gaslit firetrap of an exhibition hall hung with cheap tapestries, smelling of peanuts or broken wind, where human curios sat beside here a water pipe, there a gramophone, on raised tinsel thrones. There was a fat lady with chins spilling glacier-like toward her fardel-size breasts, her proscenium skirts lifted slightly to reveal a boy with leopard spots peeking from underneath. There was a living skeleton with cheese-straw bones, the bearded girl in crinoline billed as an “infant Esau,” a pair of wild Patagonian children said to be the link between the orangutan and man. A giant in a military tunic held an identically uniformed dwarf in the palm of his hand; the two-headed Liesl-Elise, Siamese twins joined at the buttocks, obligingly showed their point of juncture without (as the high-flown barker assured the families) any infringement upon their modesty. There was a leather-skinned Indian who claimed to remember Captain John Smith. They were all a little unnerving, not so much for their abnormalities as for their frank and accomodating manner, more than willing as were most to impart their singular histories. More disturbing to Shmerl than the breathing oddities, however, were the inanimate ones: the monstrous so-called mermaid abob in a jar of formaldehyde, the cabinet containing the head of President Garfield’s assassin, the four-legged rooster, the man encased in a block of ice.
The barker, a tiddly gent in shop-soiled evening dress who called himself Professor Nimrod, with a monocle and a permanently flexed brow, explained the attractions that couldn’t explain themselves. But despite his extravagant claims for their authenticity, the pickled grotesqueries—the “mermaid” resembling the hybrid of a fish and a marmoset, the ice man scarcely visible in a berg the green of rancid milk—remained less popular among the spectators than the vital and articulate exhibits. Still, Shmerl saw no reason to disbelieve: The Professor’s ballyhoo (“This frozen phenom is your actual corpus of a medieval Israelite mage preserved en glace like a fly in amber, imprisoned by the curse of a rival sorcerer…”) was certainly arresting. And if you peered hard enough into the cloudy ice, its edges ebbing away from the box that enshrined it, you could just make out the lineaments of a beard and belted caftan, the prayer shawl and courtly fur shtreimel of a rabbi or holy man. Then there was the canted, half-rotten casket the specimen was displayed in—which hadn’t Shmerl seen somewhere before? It troubled him that he couldn’t place it, as did the fact that, notwithstanding the frigid temperatures outside, the museum’s interior, warmed by steam heat and the legions that passed through it, was causing the ice to melt slowly away. Which was why, after the Professor had completed his narrative, Shmerl approached him cap in hand, rehearsing a hesitant proposal in his head.
The room was emptying out as the crowd, to make way for a new influx of patrons, was encouraged to pass through a curtained portal toward a melodrama entitled “Mazeppa’s Last Ride” that was about to commence in the little theater beyond.
“The ice that it’s melting,” Shmerl humbly volunteered, “I can for you restore.”
The Professor studied the immigrant a moment, as if he were an item presenting itself as a potential exhibit. Then, in a voice that gained volume as he spoke, he let the young crookback know that his offer had indeed struck a nerve. He told Shmerl that frankly nobody was much interested in the old back number anyway and it was a fact that the ice would soon deliquesce, leaving him with nothing but a moldy Hebrew cadaver on his hands. The truth was, he continued, increasingly exercised, that the thing wasn’t really worth the trouble of its upkeep; the museum was doing just fine with its live curiosities. Then having reached the height of his dudgeon, he relaxed his features, allowing the monocle to drop out of his eye and dangle medallionlike from its cord.
“You want him?” he said at last to his petitioner, “he’s yours.”
ON THE TROLLEY ride over to Norfolk Street she introduced herself, holding forth a pudgy palm: “Mrs. Esther Weintraub, widow,” as if being relict were her occupation, “but please you can call me Esther.” Then shouting over the lurching horsecar and its yammering passengers, she qualified her title: She was a grass widow, actually, her husband among the multitude of the missing whose photos were posted daily in the gallery of farshvoondn menschen in the Forward. She’d been in court as her landlord’s witness in a suit against a defaulting tenant and had stuck around to watch the nogoodniks receive their due, when she’d taken pity on the bewildered immigrant. “To my own big heart I am a slave,” she declared, squeezing an ample breast. She was a dressmaker by trade but admitted to an arrangement with her landlord, Mr. Opatashu, a fine gentleman and scholar who like herself was a native of Velsh. In his magnanimity he’d allowed her to remain in her apartment free of charge in exchange for her services as “janitress.” She gave the word a certain dashing cadence, then immediately assured Max he shouldn’t get ideas; there was nothing improper about their relationship. She chattered on, a bit hysterically, Max thought, about what a useless lump of suet was her husband and how well rid of him she was; in fact, she was doing fine on her own, a sheynem dank, and therefore in a position to lend assistance to a newcomer such as… What was his name again? “Oh yeah, Max; don’t worry, Max, I will waive for you your first month the rent till you make a salary,” grazing his cheek with her fingertips. “Connections I got with a certain garment manufacturer. What you mean, you got no skills? Everybody gets off the boat is lickety-spit a Columbus tailor…”
They arrived at her second-floor walkup, where the broad-beamed widow bustled about rattling coals in the grate and removing baggy undergarments from a line strung across the kitchen, while Max sat in a slump at the deal table. She continued nattering about how she’d yet to take in a boarder herself, but surely Mr. Opatashu would not begrudge her the extra income. Still, she paused to speculate while primping her wig, there was the landlord’s potential jealousy to consider… Weary as he was, Max was alert enough to feel squeamish at finding himself in the woman’s charge; this wasn’t what he’d had in mind. But the apartment was warm and he was glad to be out of jail and off the street, doubly grateful for the stuffed chicken neck and lokshen noodles that Mrs. Weintraub (he couldn’t bring himself to call her Esther) served him with his tea. She also boiled a cauldron of water on her cookstove, fogging the windows, tooting her horn all the while about what a resourceful lady she was. “Agunah they would call me in the Old Country, but here the husband leaves, you are free to find another, no?” Max didn’t think so but held his peace, realizing it wasn’t necessary for him to speak at all. The widow poured the steaming pot into a large tin washtub, then carried a basin out to a common spigot in the stairwell, returning to mingle the cold water with the hot, testing it with her fingers as she might have done for a child. When she was satisfied that the temperature was tepid enough, she told Max to go ahead and wash himself; afterward, while she laundered his own (pinching her nostrils theatrically to indicate them), he could change into some of her husband’s old clothes. Then she retired to the bedroom to give him his privacy, humming a music-hall air as she departed.
Looking warily over his shoulder, Max shucked his filthy garments, then couldn’t help remarking the satin-smooth contours of Jocheved’s body, graceful despite its sour pungency, hateful for its latent provocation. He lowered himself with a deep sigh into the tub, his inky hair (badly in need of a trim) fanning the surface of the water, the cares of the moment seeping out of his pores along with the rising steam. So relieved was he for this respite from his trials that he began to think of Mrs. Weintraub as a godsend. But no sooner had he relaxed in the luxury of his bath than the widow herself waddled back in, and snatching up a loofah mitten from the washstand set upon Max.
“Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I’m a old married lady; you got nothing I ain’t already seen.”
When he felt the sponge stroking his neck and shoulders in fluid figure-eights, Max practically swooned, so soothing was it to be touched by another; but when the mitten began to slide over his collar bone and down the gentle slope of his chest, he came to his senses and, crossing his arms in front of him mummy-fashion, abruptly submerged himself. Under water he supposed there were worse things than revealing his true gender to this wanton woman, which surely would have discouraged her overtures. But Jocheved was more resolute than that; she thought she might prefer to drown. Opening her eyes under the sudsy water, she was almost wistful, imagining herself sinking to her rest in a watery grave where wrecked galleons were guarded by undulant octopi. But despite the seductive submarine vista, the girl’s eyes were smarting, her lungs rebelling in their hunger to breathe, until Max resurfaced with a huge gulping intake of air. He found himself alone again in the kitchen, Mrs. Weintraub having apparently taken the unsubtle hint. Climbing hurriedly out of the tub, he snatched up the absent husband’s clothes that the widow had left folded over a chair, and without stopping to dry himself pulled them on as he fled the dumbbell flat.
Looking back, Jocheved mourned the loss of her father’s mossbacked funeral suit, which Max had left behind.
After the relative calm of the apartment, the street seemed even more riotous than before. A milk float collided with a beerwagon, the drivers climbing down from their respective vehicles to pummel each other’s ears. The bitter wind whipped the pantlegs and flapped the coattails of Mr. Weintraub’s ill-fitting garments, and a steam-driven motorcar, braking too late for an alley cat, sounded an unearthly horn. America was tohubohu, a madhouse, and it galled Max that he had endured such an arduous journey to reach it. Surely there must be more to this country than met the eye; there must be places scoured of sweaters and shmeikelers, with room to breathe. But the Lower East Side of New York was where the Jews were, and given the mameloshen that was his sole means of communication, Max saw no alternative but to lose himself in the melée of the ghetto. He decided, as what choice did he have, to rededicate his energies to survival, but when he tallied up the talents he might call upon to that effect, he found himself wanting. He could make ice cream, couldn’t he? though Jocheved was adamant in her contempt for the profession that had led to her downfall, and Max had already proven that he had no gift for sneak thievery. Of course, there were any number of menial jobs, but to remain at a single occupation over time would leave him exposed in a way that would put his life in further jeopardy.
On the other hand, cold and bedeviled as he was, Max also felt somewhat revitalized; he had a full belly and was reasonably protected from the elements by the errant husband’s hand-me-downs, the shell coat and the large bowler hat that jugged his ears. Maybe, thought Max—though the thought flew in the face of his better judgment—things would work out after all. Perhaps Pisgat’s operatives would never find him on this side of the Atlantic, in this roistering district where everyone strived to reinvent himself. Who knew but that the old so-and-so was bluffing with his threats, playing on the youth’s gullibility; surely prospects would present themselves to such a well-knit lad as he.
It was then that the character in the turned-around golf cap and tatty plus fours drew alongside him. “You’re so pretty,” said the fellow, dressed as if for the links of Gehenna, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker. My Uncle Zalman ain’t too pleased with you that you didn’t send him his cash.”
In an instant the broad world shrank to the size of a slum, the Balut having overtaken the Tenth Ward, and Max understood precisely what had transpired: how this raffish character with the lazy eye had lain in wait for him from the outset, betraying the old ice mensch by snatching the money that was owed him and leaving the greenhorn to take the blame for the theft. Now the fellow, recalled by loose ends, had come back to complete what he’d begun, and if Pisgat never recovered his cash, at least he would be avenged.
Suffused with a fatalism that nearly neutralized his fear, Max responded, “So why you didn’t send him the money yourself?”
“Who, me?” The fellow feigned indignation. “What do I know what happened to my uncle’s money? Maybe in a game of chance you lost it? You greenies do get fleeced so easy. Shtrudel,” nodding in the direction of a sizable crony who had closed in on Max’s left flank, “ain’t this the one made off with Uncle Zalman’s gelt?”
But Max didn’t wait around for Shtrudel’s verdict. Spurred by Jocheved’s memory of assault and abduction, he shrugged off the hands that attempted to grab him and broke away, making a headlong dash around a corner and diving into the first alley he saw. The alley was blind, with a slat fence at its terminus, which Max hit at a dead run and scrambled over, dropping into an unpaved courtyard on the other side. Afraid to look back, he flung himself over a low brick barrier, crossed another yard, and climbed another fence into yet another alley, fueled in his flight by equal parts exhilaration and terror. The alley debouched into a doglegged defile of a street that smelled of the river, in which a few stolid residents were roosting like teraphim on their wooden stoops. The slate roofs of the narrow houses leaned conspiratorially toward one another, so that only minimal sunlight was admitted into the street, where a small party of pedestrians were making their way toward the end of the block. Distinctive for their shared disabilities, they progressed with a will: a man with a single leg who swung himself along on a pair of crutches like a fugitive pendulum; another in an opera cape, wearing opaque spectacles, flailing left to right with a Malacca cane. A woman veiled in a woolen shawl emerged from a tributary alley hauling a wagon containing a quadruple amputee, his face like a prow, his trunk a fat bowling pin decorated with medals. All were advancing in the direction of a decrepit brick building with a tin-plated door and no sign.
Wherever those poor souls were headed, Max figured it was a place no healthy citizen was likely to go, and so he followed. He reached the tin door, got a foot in just before the door slammed shut, and squeezed inside, where he nearly tumbled into the wagon that the cowled woman was dragging behind her. Its wooden wheels clanked loudly down the short flight of ill-lit stone steps, and Max, once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, marveled at how the little sack of a man managed to remain so steadfastly erect in his bouncing conveyance. At the foot of the stairs there was a windowless catacomb lit by flickering sconces, where patrons in various stages of affliction were seated at tables and milling about a whiskey bar mounted on wood-staved kegs. Having hopped on his good leg to the bottom of the steps, one of the cripples who’d preceded Max hung up his crutches and unfastened a leather harness to release his stump, which he unfolded into a perfectly serviceable limb. The blind man had meanwhile cast off his cane and smoky glasses with a flourish to elbow his way toward the bar, where a couple of customers took turns sucking beer from a tube protruding out of a bunghole. In his wagon the limbless veteran, wriggling on his back like a bug attempting to right itself, had also begun to regenerate missing arms and legs; while his female attendant dropped the shawl and peeled away the festering sores stuck to her cheeks, revealing herself as a woman of tolerably pleasant features.
Where some recovered lost appendages and faculties, others were busy pruning and abrading themselves, applying jellies and scabs, rubber bald caps with wens, prostheses that simulated bone diseases and malformations. Some worked with straps and trusses to achieve amputations, while others hunkered around a woodstove heating fixatives and gels for sculpting artificial wounds. A bird-breasted gent with a pedagogical manner demonstrated on his own person before a small circle of students how to counterfeit furuncles, lesions, stigmata, and gangrene. Those not involved in inflicting or healing mutilations admired their own handiwork in murky mirrors; some inspected a well-stocked wardrobe rack or contented themselves with conversation over needled beer.
Max recalled having heard of places where the blind were made to see and the lame to walk, but those were holy places, and this dank dungeon didn’t seem particularly sacrosanct. Of course, there’d been any number of phony beggars in Lodz, but who knew that they were the products of such elaborate industry? Having edged wide-eyed down the steps into the cellar proper, Max could overhear English spoken all about him in a variety of broken dialects and accents, including Galitzianer. He made bold to inquire of a landsman with a bleb the size of a cupping glass on his forehead, “Where am I?” and was told in stagey Daytshmersh, “This is what is known as a cripple factory.” Grinning with a show of black-capped teeth, his informant continued: “A western franchise, if you will, of what in Europe they call a court of miracles, though some would say a court of last resorts.”
It was further explained that the customers might have the use of the costumes and props that the beer cellar provided gratis, so long as they signed a contract, notarized by the proprietor, promising to share a fixed percentage of their supplicant’s proceeds. This guaranteed that the majority of patrons would return the fruits of their mooching to the cellar as to a company store.
That was how Max initiated the series of impersonations that would see him through the lean winter months. Panhandler by day, he took shelter by night in a shadow Manhattan, sometimes sleeping in the Municipal Lodging House on its barge locked in North River ice, or in the faded opulence of the HIAS quarters in the old Astor Library. There were hapless periods when, lacking the price of a flop, he slept outdoors with one eye open on top of a steam vent or a heating grate; nights when his daylight appeals had gone well and he might rent a closet-size crib above a barroom, the company of mice being preferable to the public sanctuaries that left him vulnerable to deviants and thieves. Occasionally, sick and tired of dissembling, he might briefly forgo the accessories that rendered him maimed or blind to take an unskilled job: once as a buttonhole puncher, another time a suspenders peddler—the latter activity affording its own style of camouflage, adorned as he was in galluses like a willow tree. With each new occupation he assumed a new name: Chaim Fut, Itche Grin; but mostly he remained under cover and hustled. Every so often he was granted a holiday, as during elections, when the Tammany bosses provided free lunches to anyone who voted repeatedly for their candidates, but even then Max was afraid to lower his guard. Of course, as a girl, as Jocheved, he would have been eligible to take shelter in more benevolent refuges such as the Daughters of Rachel Home for Wayward Jewish Girls, a place of tender mercies or so he’d heard. But Jocheved had as good as drowned in Mrs. Weintraub’s washtub, so little was her voice heeded anymore in Max’s affairs; and Max himself was so lost in his Igs, Chaims, and Abednegos that he’d forfeited the memory of precisely who he was supposed to be.
As a consequence, Jocheved’s pleas that he should continue the quest for Rabbi ben Zephyr, which alternated with her disturbing indifference to her own fate, fell on deaf ears. Doubly disguised, Max tended to forget about the submerged Jocheved altogether, except during those functions whose privacy Max had to make no end of degrading efforts to secure. Then there were the fiddles, his expanding rag-bag of deceits, the latest involving the sale of little sacks of sand scooped from the gutters, which he pitched as Jerusalem earth. Still, it was only a matter of time before the current ruse was discovered: the charities that dispatched their itinerant ambassadors—some begging alms for the outworn parasites of Jerusalem, others for the young pioneers of the Yishuv—often clashed with each other, while both factions were on the lookout for impostors. So on this particular night Max had decided to retire old Reb Saltpeter. Then, unthinking in his marathon weariness, he put on the shell coat and bowler of Mrs. Weintraub’s absconded husband without resorting to any cosmetic effects. Only half conscious of having returned to his original disguise—though aware enough of having missed it—he ventured out into Delancey Street to purchase a bit of kippered herring or maybe a piece of fruit. It wasn’t lost on him either that the evening’s weather showed signs of a warming trend, or that he was lonely.
As he strolled toward a produce stand beneath the shuddering uprights of the Second Avenue El, a fellow in a floppy golf cap turned about jockey style stepped up to greet him familiarly: “You’re so pretty,” he said, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker.”
IT WAS THE young man from the ship. Despite his dowdy apparel, Shmerl was as sure of his identity as he had been of little else during that long cold season of carting dung. He was amazed at how relieved he was to see him, though they had yet to exchange a word, but while Shmerl thought he might now have much to say to him, his anticipation left him timid and reticent. So rather than cross immediately over the road to accost him, he followed the yungerman awhile from the other side. There was, after all, no particular hurry; hours remained before he was scheduled to make his rounds with the shit patrol, and it calmed him somewhat to observe the lad from a distance; saddened him as well to see how the intervening months had taken a toll on his former dignity. After a block or so along Delancey, Shmerl noticed that another, a lath-legged character in knee breeches and a turned-around caddy’s cap, also seemed to be dogging the young man’s heels. Then the caddy cap accelerated his pace, drawing alongside the yungerman to speak to him, upon which the youth, who had paused at a fruiterer’s bin, took off like a streak. Shmerl’s heart kicked at its cage as he watched the lad hotfooting it down the sidewalk, trying madly to dodge the passersby. In flight he looked over his shoulder, then turned around just in time to run smack into the arms of a big fellow in an ankle-length duster who had planted himself athwart his path. Thus embraced, the youth from the ship was manhandled by the duster—along with the caddy cap, who’d bolted forward to grab his collar from behind—into an alley off the crowded thoroughfare.
Shmerl was not the only one who had witnessed the abduction; others behind stalls and in horsecars saw the young man, a hand clapped over his mouth, struggling with his captors as they dragged him off. But while those who’d stopped to watch resumed their business as soon as the unpleasantness was out of sight, Shmerl recognized the event as the fateful moment he’d been waiting for. Confident in the strength that pressing irons and dung shovels had imparted to his stooped physique, he straightened his shoulders as best he could and drew forth from the walking stick he carried a slender metal wand. “Shemhemphorash!” he cried aloud, which was the name of the magic hat of Moses as mentioned in the Sefer Sheqel ha-Kodesh. It was as good a Hebrew battle cry as any he could think of. Zigzagging through heavy traffic, he crossed Delancey and charged the alley, where he began to thrust here and there in the gloom. The stock prod, which he’d devised on the principle of Aaron’s rod (it was a cane with a serpent’s sting) quivered like a fencing foil in his hand. He’d fashioned it with a trigger that sent a six-volt charge from a carbon battery to the platinum spikelet at its tip. The thing was designed for the purpose of encouraging horses in the livery stable to behave, but the nags were already so docile that he’d as yet had no occasion to try it out. This was his invention’s debut, and judging from the response of the young man’s attackers, it worked to good effect—especially now that Shmerl’s eyesight had adjusted to the halflight and he was aiming his thrusts with more accuracy. Both the duster and the caddy cap yowled as if they had fallen into a nest of electric eels; they dropped the blackjack and the naked shiv respectively to clutch at their parts, doubtless as shocked by the bent creature wielding his stinging weapon as they were by the weapon itself.
Having rendered the two assailants temporarily hors de combat, Shmerl sheathed his prod in order to raise their intended victim from the flags and hustle him out of the alley. The young man from the ship gripped his forehead, a thin trickle of blood leaking from between his fingers, but allowed himself to be led at a stumbling dogtrot behind his rescuer. Holding his stick in one hand, Shmerl pulled the youth along by the wrist onto Delancey, where after a short block he turned abruptly into another alleyway. Together they threaded a concatenation of puddled passages, emerging now and again to cross a noisy street only to duck straightaway back into the maze. Eventually they found themselves in a vacant lot strewn with refuse and bed frames dragged outside in the hope that the sun would lure the bedbugs from their slats. The lot was surrounded by a high wooden fence, one of whose boards Shmerl swung aside to usher his friend—Was it premature to think of him as a friend?—into Reb Levine’s wagonyard. Breathing the foul air with relief, he invited the stunned youth into his shanty, where he sat him down on a bed covered in horse blankets, which was lowered from the rafters by a system of pulleys and weights. Then kindling a lantern, Shmerl began without hesitation to attend to his guest’s wound, which amounted to little more than a shallow abrasion crowning a nasty bump on the kop.
HOLDING HIS ACHING HEAD, Max counted it as an aspect of the stupefaction brought on by his injury that the furniture in his host’s modest quarters appeared to be floating in midair. A table and chair, stove, workbench, and thunderbox all hovered above them amid dangling horse tackle, as if waiting for the shack’s occupant himself to levitate. As his rescuer dabbed at his forehead with the putrid-smelling poultice he’d prepared in a porcelain basin, Max also wondered at the swiftness with which he’d been spirited from the ghetto streets to this peculiar cell; though, accustomed as he was by now to uncommon places, he understood that the ghetto must still be close at hand. He supposed that under the circumstances he ought to introduce himself to this curious figure who had after all saved his life, but the problem was, he seemed for the moment to have misplaced his own name. Itche Fut? Chaim Grin? He felt his face for any artificial asymmetries (the irony of an authentic wound notwithstanding) and recognized its velvet contours.
“Feinshmeker,” he tendered rather formally, offering his hand. “Max.”
“Shmerl,” replied his host, with a hint of familiarity that made Max wonder if they’d met before. “Shmerl Karp,” which may have been the first time Shmerl had pronounced his abbreviated surname aloud. Eagerly he cranked Max’s extended palm with his right hand while continuing to dab with his left at the swelling goose egg on Max’s bare head. “I saw you already on the same ship we come over from the Old Country on.”
Max tried to square this information with the immigrant’s odd environment, such a far cry from the sweatshops and pushcarts and shuls. His gaze strayed again from his host’s smiling face and his shock of upstanding auburn hair toward the items suspended above their heads, and following his glance Shmerl folded the poultice into Max’s own hand. He stepped over to a console containing what looked like a rudimentary keyboard, a bellringer’s assemblage of wooden handles from which ropes of varying widths fanned upward like a web of ratlines on a sailing ship. Then he began with closed fists and a sudden startling show of energy to hammer the individual handles, which caused the airborne objects to begin descending in concert: the lit stove shaped like a cast-iron pig with a percolating coffee pot on top, the laboratory bench laden with frothing beakers full of incandescent purple gas. There was a large construction like a miniature refinery at whose center was an inverted milk can caged in perforated metal strips, surrounded by brackets, gears, belted bicycle wheels, and nodes of fairy lights—the whole contraption coated in a fur of polar rime.
“The machine,” explained Shmerl, giving one of the rimless wheels a spin, which caused coils to glow, an engine to hum, and steam to rise, “that it duplicates the prophet Ezekiel his vision of wheels within wheels. ‘Wherever the spirit wished to go, there the wheels went, for the spirit of living creatures was in the wheels.’ It makes, the machine, a perpetual motion that makes also, when is liquefied under pressure ammonia gas, eppes an everlasting winter.”
On cue the machine belched into a chute, with a tin pan attached to receive it, what was either an enormous multifaceted diamond or a large chunk of ice.
Max gaped in fascination for a full minute before his eyes were again drawn irresistibly toward the ceiling, where a narrow cedar box remained aloft. Once more noting the object of his guest’s curiosity, Shmerl depressed another couple of beveled handles, this time with an outright bravado. Chains ratcheted over iron sprockets as the casket began to descend until it rested on the earthen floor, its lid springing automatically open. “This I think belongs to you,” submitted the crookback.
Max got to his feet of his own accord but allowed Shmerl to assist him as he shuffled over to the box, where, pressing the poultice to his forehead as if to cushion the clapper in his skull, he looked inside. There was Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, resting comfortably in a clear block of ice that looked remarkably none the worse for wear. In fact, unlike the eroded green boulder that Max remembered, this one was pristine, showing the old recumbent tzaddik with his beard and gabardine to fine advantage. Turning back to Shmerl, Max asked him pointedly, “Who are you?” though he could as well have put the question to himself. In his fuddled brain he tried assembling what might pass for current articles of faith: that he was in a shack in a stableyard at the end of March, entertained by an outlandish person quite possibly escaped from an institution or storybook; though this did little to relieve his profound disorientation or to explain how the girl Jocheved could feel so perfectly at home.