The Entertainer and the Dybbuk (4 page)

B
y the time the act opened at the Crazy Horse, Freddie had forgotten why dybbuks chose to leave their graves. But Avrom Amos had not forgotten.

“A small favor? Can I ask?” the dybbuk muttered. Freddie was facing the mirror to apply makeup for the first show of the evening.

“When you say small, I duck.”

“Remember, the Germans killed me? Two weeks before my bar mitzvah?”

“You mentioned it,” said Freddie.

“You know what is a bar mitzvah?”

“A ceremony of some sort.”

“To be declared a man among Jews, a boy must have his bar mitzvah when his thirteenth birthday arrives. By then, my parents were dead. My sisters and little brother—even I was dead.”

“Yes. I'm sorry, Avrom Amos.”

“I told you dybbuks return to finish something left undone among the living. But it's not too late.”

“For what?”

“My birthday is coming up. I want you to fix up my bar mitzvah.”

“Ah. So that's why you possessed me!”

Said the dybbuk, “Not exactly. But it's a start.”

“For what?”

The dybbuk ignored him. “Listen. For what I came back to do, I need to be a man. A mensch. It's not for a boy in short pants.”

“So you need a rabbi or someone to declare you a grown-up—is that it?”

Freddie could almost sense the dybbuk giving a shrug. Avrom Amos said, “Can you imagine a dybbuk walking into a synagogue and saying, ‘Rabbi, I just dropped in from the sky. How about a bar mitzvah?' The rabbi
would strike his head and shout, ‘Meshugge! Crazy! Out!' That's why I need you.”

Freddie now felt on guard. “For what, exactly?”

“You walk into the synagogue and let me do the talking.”

“Stand in for you?”

“That's the idea.”

“But I don't look thirteen!”

“It doesn't matter. Older, even, is okay. Do you think I am thirteen? I feel I have grown a hundred years older.”

“And I'm not Jewish!”

“You don't have to shout,” said the dybbuk.

“I'd like to help. But count me out.”

Said the dybbuk, “You may have noticed, Professor. I stand in for you.”

Freddie asked himself if he'd ever won an argument with his new partner. He had a feeling he was going to lose this one. He needed the dybbuk in the act. How would he pull off his great tricks without Avrom Amos?

He finished dressing. “Okay.” He sighed. “But don't expect me to wear one of those funny hats.”

“It's a package deal,” said the dybbuk. “I guarantee nothing.”

F
reddie ran into a former girlfriend at his agent's office. Their old romance quickly burst into flames.

Playing small parts in French-made films, Polly Marchant was a showgirl from the American South. She was bouncy and bright and given to making faces. Polly could cross her eyes. She'd muss her blond hair when she
felt like it. She had changed little since they had broken up the year before, though now she wore her hair cut short and as tight as a bathing cap.

They began to joke about getting married. Nothing serious. Joking. Polly confessed that she had announced in her diary that she had fallen madly in love, if he'd care to peek. Freddie didn't keep a diary, but his face announced it to the world.

The dybbuk had little patience with the flirtatious sweet talk he heard. He could do voices, and occasionally dropped in a comment from the cowboy actor Gary Cooper. “Yup. Yup. Yup.” He abandoned Freddie for hours a day, mumbling to himself as he
brushed up on his Hebrew. And he needed to go over the prayers he remembered from the past.
Baruch atah Adonai…
He would have to read out of the Torah scroll, something from the first five books of the Bible. But memory wasn't enough. He'd need last-minute schooling. Some polishing.

On his dates with Polly, Freddie was glad to find himself free of the dybbuk. The two Americans were walking along the Champs Elysée when she said, “Darling boy, why didn't you tell me you were Jewish?”

He stopped short. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I do declare, everyone knows it. You
won't work on the Sabbath. And that Jewish dybbuk you use in your act. Of course it's nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I'm not ashamed. I'm not Jewish.”

“You don't have to hide it from me,” she assured him.

“I'm not hiding anything.”

“On the level?”

“I promise you.”

“How disappointing!” Polly exclaimed. “Can you imagine me dragging a Jewish husband home to Alabama? Wow!” She crossed her eyes. “Some of our redneck neighbors would haul out the tar and feathers.”

“I'm one-eighth Cheyenne. Won't that do?”

On the following afternoon, the dybbuk asked Freddie to accompany him to the cheder, a Hebrew school he'd located near the Eiffel Tower.

“I'll wait out here,” Freddie said firmly.

“That won't work,” said the dybbuk. “Just let me do the talking.”

“I'll be a fish out of water,” Freddie protested.

“Pretend you're a pickled herring.”

The Hebrew teacher, the melamed, was an Algerian Jew with eyes as dark as fire pits. The Great Freddie was quickly registered as Avrom Amos Poliakov. A small school chair at a small desk became his. “Sit, and pay attention,” said the melamed.

“I have lost my yarmulke,” Freddie heard himself say. What was that? My what? The teacher dug out a small black skullcap. Freddie slapped it on his head and cursed the dybbuk under his breath. The lesson began with a prayer.

“Baruch atah Adonai…”

Inwardly, Freddie crossed his arms and tried to tune out.

“Reb Poliakov,” said the teacher as they finished the hour. “I notice you don't move your mouth when you repeat after me.”

“I never move my lips. I'm a ventriloquist.”

After three weeks of listening to the dybbuk's struggle with the Torah, Freddie
discovered that a phrase or two was stuck inside his head.

“Baruch atah Adonai…Shema Yisrael…”

Finally, just before they were to go on for the 9:30 show, Freddie muttered to the dybbuk, “What's playing inside my head like a phonograph record? What am I saying?”

“Don't lose any sleep. It's not your bar mitzvah.”

“I could be cursing my best friend.”

“I'm your best friend.”

They approached the wings of the stage and waited for the curtains to part. “So what do the words mean?”

“You're asking God to listen to you,” the dybbuk said. “It starts every prayer. So, as the
Torah says, ‘
Shema Yisrael
, let us break a leg.'”

Freddie laughed. He'd never heard the show-business prayer delivered with ancient Hebrew thrown in. That should guarantee a nifty performance.

S
ummer was settling in. An early dusk, pumpkin tinted, lit the Paris streets like the flare of a match. The sidewalk tables were filling up. Freddie, in a rush along a narrow side street, passed a neighborhood café. A ragged boy in a coat with bulging pockets stood at the window looking in. Freddie barely spared him a glance.

“Stop,” said the dybbuk.

“What now? We'll be late for our show.”

“The world will end? Don't you rich Americans have eyes?”

“What are you talking about?” Freddie asked.

“That kid at the window. He's hungry.”

“How can you tell?”

“What's he looking at inside? Suits, the latest styles? His stomach is growling.”

“You heard it?”

“I can hear an empty stomach at ten kilometers. And see how his pockets are bulging? He has everything he owns in those pockets. Give him a few francs so he can eat.”

“Avrom, what do you want me to do, feed every street kid and beggar in Paris?”

“Why not?”

“We're going to miss our curtain.”

“Let them hold the curtain,” said the dybbuk. “If you can't spare a few francs, take it out of my account.”

“What account?” Freddie replied scornfully. He supposed Avrom Amos was seeing himself hungry at a café window, with everything he possessed in the world stuffed inside his pockets.

Freddie dug wrinkled paper francs out of his pocket and shoved them into the hand of the street kid.

“Here. Get something to eat.”

When Freddie reached the Crazy Horse, and after hastily pinning a fresh flower in the buttonhole of his tailcoat, he strode center stage. The curtains parted. He rested a polished black shoe on a chair and sat the dummy on his knee.

The puppet looked at him. “Do I know you?”

Here we go, thought the ventriloquist. “I'm The Great Freddie.”

“What makes you so great?”

“I can throw my voice upstage into that barrel.”

“You get paid for throwing up?”

“I didn't say that,” protested The Great Freddie. “I can toss my voice anywhere.”

“How about my pocket?”

“What do you want your pocket to say?”

“Keep out!”

“Why are you all dressed up?” Freddie hoped to get the dialogue back on track. “Aren't you Count Dracula?”

“That shlemiel of a vampire? I'm a dybbuk.”

“A what?”

“A nice Jewish demon. I haunt people.”

“That doesn't sound nice to me.”

“Is fighting wars nice?” replied the dybbuk.

“The war's history. Yesterday's newspapers.”

“Not for me. I placed a want ad. Let me look at the audience.”

“Are you searching for a friend?”

“A rat.”

“There are no rodents in this cabaret,” Freddie said. Where was this dialogue going?

The dybbuk said, “Keep your eyes peeled for a rat with two legs.”

“An unfortunate pet? Did you name him?”

“No. He already had a name.”

“What was it?”

“SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp. You've heard of him?”

“No.”

“Aha!”

“What do you mean, aha?”

“He was the worst of the Jewish child
killers, and you've never heard of him.”

“I have a feeling this is something personal.”

“He caught me. He shot me, personally.”

“I hope you find him,” said Freddie, eager to change the subject. “What do you know about vampires?”

“Vampires are a pain in the neck.”

“Yes.”

“I think I'll buy a pair of platypuses,” the dybbuk continued.

“Why on earth would you want a pair of platypuses?”

“Because they're so hard for a ventriloquist to say without moving his lips. Hey, you did good, Professor!”

Applause, at last. Freddie survived the act somehow, took a brisk bow, and fled the stage. He put the dummy away for the night, forgetting to cover its eyes with the black cloth.

What was it with the dybbuk? This was show business. No place to get even with the Nazis. It was now clear why Avrom Amos Poliakov had chosen a ventriloquist to possess. To play the mouthpiece. To bear witness.

T
he dybbuk's Saturday-morning bar mitzvah struck Freddie as an untranslated page of the Bible. He hardly understood a word being said in the synagogue. So this was the ancient language Moses had spoken. It sounded heavy with Old Testament cobwebs. Mercifully, the ceremony took less than an hour.

A minyan of bearded Jews hung around
him while he stood at the open scroll of the Torah. The dybbuk began to read his appointed text. Freddie moved his lips so that he might appear to be talking. For the first time, he felt like one of his own wooden dummies.

Freddie had bought a dark suit for the occasion. Now he'd put the yarmulke on his head, and a prayer shawl over his shoulders. He looked neither left nor right. He was an imposter. He looked down.

He felt profoundly disappointed for the dybbuk. Where were his parents? His sisters? His little brother? His aunts and uncles and cousins to make it a celebration? Freddie was his only family and friend.

Finally the dybbuk gave a sort of curtain speech. It was brief.

“Now that I am a man, I will conduct myself as a mensch,” he said to the congregation of strangers. “While a child I saw enough blood to overflow the Red Sea. I saw Germans set Jewish beards like yours on fire, and laugh. I hid in sewers. Now I will wish peaceful lives for you all. But not for the Nazis. Not for SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp. It will be his turn to hide in the sewers.”

Him again, Freddie thought. The child killer. Avrom Amos's own murderer.

The dybbuk fell silent. The ceremony was finished. Freddie didn't have to be told. He could head for the heavy synagogue doors.

“Mazel tov!” came a happy fireworks of voices.

“What does that shout mean?” Freddie asked, once they were out on the sidewalk.

“Congratulations.”

“Then,
mazel tov
, now that you are officially a man. With that unfinished business wrapped up, I suppose you'll pack and head for the clouds, or wherever you came from.”

“I'm not finished. Now I can deal with the SS child butcher.”

Freddie whistled for a taxi. “You can't be serious. That German officer was probably killed in the war.”

“Not him.”

“Why did you wait so long to start searching?”

“Do you think I've been twiddling my thumbs since the war? There's no school for dybbuks, you know, to teach us shlemiels all the tricks. It took me a year to track him to Warsaw and another year plus to find his footprints in Berlin. That's when SS Officer Junker-Strupp disappeared.”

“Vanished?”

“Slipped out of Germany, like other war criminals.”

“To South America?”

“I think he's still in Europe. How cunning he was to get himself tattooed! On his forearm.”

Said Freddie, “Not numbers!”

“Yes, numbers. Like a concentration-camp survivor. Who would look for him among Jews?”

“Nazi cunning,” Freddie muttered.

“But I'm cunning, too.”

“I have noticed.”

“I tracked down the German corporal who tattooed him. I got the number. I will track down the counterfeit Jew with J117722 on his right wrist.”

“And then what?”

“I will kill him,” said the dybbuk.

The taxi blew its horn at a child racing across the street. The dybbuk didn't mutter another word. But once they swung around
the Arc de Triomphe, Freddie said, “That's crazy.”

“Did I say it wasn't?”

“How do you think you can kill him? You haven't enough substance to lift a knife or pull a trigger.”

“True. But there is a way.”

“What's that?”

“You can pull the trigger for me.”

Freddie leaned forward and told the taxi driver to stop, surprising a flutter of pigeons. “This is where I get out,” Freddie said, and threw open the door.

“Wait. I'll come with you,” said the dybbuk.