The Frozen Rabbi (2 page)

Then the Prodigy lay before them on a mound of snow, and his gathered disciples, puffing like steam engines, were at a total loss as to what to do next. It was surely a blessing to have their tzaddik back in their midst again, apparently intact even if frozen stiff, but what now? In former days it was the rebbe himself to whom they would have applied for advice, but he was unavailable for comment. There were the texts of holy writ to consult, though even the most sedulous scholars among them—those who prescribed what portions of Torah one should consider during intercourse, or whether it was permitted to pee in the snow on Shabbos (which was tantamount to plowing, which was work, and so forbidden)—even they knew of no passages pertaining to the current quandary. Then one of their number, Fishel Ostrov, the shovel-bearded yeast vendor, proposed that they light torches to thaw the holy man on the spot. His theory was that Rabbi Eliezer, during his raptures, was proof against the depredations of time and the elements, and that once the ice was melted, he would be restored to them in all his prior vitality. There was a thoughtful buzzing among them until a wiser head prevailed.

“Know-it-all,” accused Berel Hogshead, the teamster, insisting that the risk was too great, since, once thawed, the rebbe might begin to putrefy and his bones become—God forbid—food for the worms. Better they should put him somewhere for safekeeping, so that at least he would remain in one piece until he chose to burst forth from his repose of his own accord. More buzzing in the affirmative as Yosl King of Cholera, neither Chasid nor mitnagid but simple opportunist, stepped forward in his capacity as proprietor of the Boibicz icehouse: “Your honors, for a nominal fee…”

THE
BOIBICZ
ICEHOUSE
was a windowless granite grotto dug into the northern slope of a hill at the edge of the village by giants or fallen angels in some antediluvian age. That was the legend, anyhow. All Yosl Cholera knew was that he’d inherited the icehouse after the death of Mendel Sfarb, its former owner, whose family claimed to have had it in their possession since the Babylonian Exile. The business was Mendel’s guilty gift to the orphan who had been his ward and virtual slave from the age of six. From outside, the sunken structure with its domelike stone protrusion resembled an age-encrusted tomb, which made it a most suitable repository for the Boibiczer Prodigy; it was a place where his body could lie in state, so to speak, resistant to decay until such time as he saw fit to come forth again—or so his followers maintained. Much to Yosl’s annoyance the Boibicz Chasidim insisted on honoring their rebbe’s resting place as they would a sacred sepulcher: They warbled their prayers (excepting the prayer for the dead) at its entrance, placed messages in the cracks between its stones, and took turns inside cleaning the sawdust and flax that collected around the holy man’s transparent berth. Though they cautioned one another not to diminish its mass, they discreetly shaved slivers from the block of ice, which they sweetened with dollops of honey and devoutly sucked. Since they refused to acknowledge the Prodigy as officially deceased, the Chasids were unable to elect a successor and thus came to be known for their veneration of the refrigerated rebbe as the Frozen Chasidim.

Diverting as were the antics of credulous fanatics, however, the inhabitants of Boibicz had other concerns to reckon with. Edicts and ukases were being issued by the imperial government in such dizzying succession that what was permitted in the morning was often forbidden by afternoon. The most recent stated that, for their own good, the Jews would be barred from leasing inns, taverns, and shops in the villages outside the Pale of Settlement. In addition, no new Jewish settlers would be allowed in the villages and hamlets within the Pale, a decree that often stranded merchants returning from business trips or families from High Holiday worship in nearby towns. The Byzantine logic of these laws defied the understanding of even the most learned Talmudists, but as a consequence, many longtime citizens of Boibicz had begun to find themselves homeless, and for those still in residence the writing was on the wall. Eventually the Jews came to anticipate a wholesale exodus from a place that had been a home to their families for generations, though at that prospect they continued to drag their heels. In the end it took a delegation of their neighbors, chaperoned by a regiment of Cossacks dispatched by the government and operating under the blind eyes of the local police, to expedite their departure.

For all the chaos that erupted on that winter morning just after the Festival of Lights, the perpetrators went about their business almost mechanically, though the violence was no less savage for being deliberate. Without fanfare they entered the dingy Jewish quarter and smashed the shop windows, hauling out bolts of cloth, pedal-driven sewing machines, spirit lamps, unplucked chickens, anything that fell to hand. They defecated in the synagogue vestibule and wiped their goosefleshed behinds with the torn vellum scrolls of the Torah. Feivush Good Value, melammed and tradesman, they hanged from his own shop sign by his patriarch beard; they swung Shayke Tam, the idiot, by his heels, squealing because he thought it was a game, until his feeble brains were splattered across the shtibl wall. Those who fled to the woods were hunted down and beaten to splinters, though most who stayed put survived, among them Yosl Cholera’s son Salo, who’d taken refuge in the icehouse.

The fact was, he had scarcely strayed beyond the shadow of the icehouse since the day he’d stumbled upon Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr suspended beneath the surface of the lake. Though the frozen rebbe was scrupulously looked after by his followers, Salo, having taken a surprising interest in his discovery, had conceived the idea that the holy man was his own personal charge. He kept his ears alert to the stories the disciples told one another of the Boibiczer Prodigy’s wondrous feats of piety, and when no one else was about, the artless boy (in age already a young man) took his turn sitting vigil beside the block of ice. He admired the old man’s tranquility while expecting, like his disciples, that at any moment the ice might yawn and crack open and the rebbe irrupt from his slumber. It was an event he had no desire to hasten, however, so easeful was the waiting. To show cause for his hanging about the ice grotto, the boy made gestures toward helping his father, but when the King of Cholera realized it was the frozen rabbi rather than the entrepreneurial impulse that enlivened his son, he dismissed the boy once again as a lost cause. Moreover, Salo’s chronic attachment to the icehouse had been noted by his waggish peers, who gave him the nickname of Salo Frostbite, which stuck.

So it was that, on the morning of the pogrom, Salo was seated on a cabbage crate, gazing at Rabbi Eliezer’s slightly distorted features, their beatific peacefulness having invaded his timorous heart. All about him the stacked slabs of ice were carved into shelves and niches, which contained fish, fowl, and barrels of kvass. In one recess Leybl the hatmaker’s poker-stiff dog Ashmodai awaited the spring thaw for its burial. Rime coated each jar and jeroboam until it resembled a vessel made of spun sugar; ice stalactites hung from the vault of the ceiling like fangs. But the warmth Salo felt in the rebbe’s presence (enhanced by his sheepskin parka, whose collar he pulled over his ears) practically deposed the arctic chill of the grotto in its subaqueous light, a light that seemed to emanate from the ice itself. “The Chasids sit shivah while you sit and shiver,” Salo’s father had complained, but in the rebbe’s presence all the fearful chimeras of the boy’s imagination were dispelled, and the world seemed almost an idyll, a winter pastorale. As a consequence, Salo never heard the cries of the tortured and defiled, the keening women and the breaking glass, nor did he smell the smoke from the burning synagogue. It was only when the sexton, Itche Beilah Peyse’s, who’d lost his mind, began to howl like a hyena in the street that Salo’s own peace was finally disturbed.

Bestirring his broad behind to go and see what was happening, he crawled up the slippery ramp and wriggled out of the hatch through which the large rectangular ice cakes were slid into the grotto. He stumbled down the hill into the village, past the Shabbos boundary markers where the snow was stained in patches with what appeared to be plum preserves. Outside the door of the smoldering timber synagogue a mother tried to revive her fallen son by pumping air into his lungs with a pair of bellows; a violated daughter begged her father on her knees in the ruts of the market platz not to disown her. The procession of wagons hauling bodies, already becoming rigid, to the cemetery vied with the jauntier parade of peasants carrying off samovars, chamber pots, a trumpet-speakered phonograph, a cuckoo clock. Plodding forward in his klunky topboots, Salo accidentally toppled the cantor Shikl Bendover, who had died of fright still standing, like Lot’s wife. He paused to reerect the dead man, then realized what he was doing, and understood that the scene he had entered eclipsed any active fancies his mind might entertain. It put to rest forever his habit of ghoulish invention, for which Salo, who began then and there to grow up, was grateful.

He stepped into the smoky, slat-shingled dwelling that he and his father called home, where he discovered to his head-swimming sorrow that he’d been made an orphan like his father before him. Yosl King of Cholera lay on the raked clay floor in the stiff leather apron he’d donned for work, his head pincered by his own ice tongs. The handles of the iron tongs branched above his crimped skull like a giant wishbone, the blood streaming in crimson ribbons from his ears. Salo retched down his front and fell to his knees, leaning forward to touch those of his father’s features that were still recognizable: a blue knuckle swollen from arthritis, a pooched lower lip like a water leech. For an indefinite time he lay prostrate without the least inclination ever to rise again, until he remembered that he now had a higher calling. Wiping his mouth and dabbing at his eyes, Salo crawled forward to wrench apart the ice tongs. He got to his feet and began to rummage in the debris of the ransacked hovel, eventually locating a pair of candles which he lit with a sulfur-tipped match and placed at either end of the murdered man’s outstretched form. All the while murmuring Kaddish, he threw a cloth over the ancient mirror, its surface clouded with floes of mercury; then he squeezed himself behind the tile stove, scalding his tush in the process, and pried loose a wallboard in back of which Yosl had hidden his meager treasures—a handful of groschen and some ducats as worthless as slugs, an unsigned postcard with a sepia view of Lodz, a dented thimble that had belonged to his wife. Salo thrust it all into a capacious pants pocket along with the crust of black bread with dried herring that his father had laid aside on the table for his lunch. Stooping to right a toppled chair, he found himself gripping it tightly, swinging it into the stovepipe, which burst apart, releasing a naked tongue of flame that tickled the ceiling. He emerged from the cottage just as Casimir, a sooty-eyed Polish porter with hair like thatch, was tugging along Yosl’s pussle-gutted mare by a frayed piece of rope; and though he knew the beast to be next to useless, Salo straightaway turned over his inheritance (minus the postcard and thimble) to the porter in exchange for redeeming the skewbald nag. Then, as the roof shingles of his former home began to curl upward, tugged at by threads of smoke, Salo took up the reins of the mare, whose name was Bathsheba.

He was aware, of course, that Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, if he belonged to anyone, belonged to his worshipful followers. But the Frozen Chasidim and their families were packing up their belongings as was everyone else, and nowhere amid that doleful exodus of clattering barrows and carts heaped high with candlesticks and featherbeds did Salo spy any monumental block of ice. Ingenuity had never been his strong suit; indeed, Salo had never had a strong suit, but drawing from a fund of proficiency that he decided then and there was his father’s legacy to his son, he undertook to replace the metal-rimmed wheel on Yosl’s delivery wagon. When he’d managed over the course of an hour to unhobble the wagon, he hitched it to Bathsheba, whose sluggish forward propulsion seemed entirely owing to a chronic flatulence. Salo stopped at the old log prayer house long enough to appropriate the cedar casket that leaned against an interior wall beneath the half-collapsed roof. This was the single battered casket that the village had recycled for the funerals of the past hundred years. Loading it onto the wagon, the youth continued to lead the horse up the hill to the icehouse, where he studiously addressed the heavy mechanism of a block and tackle coiled at the threshold. He proceeded to snake the pulleyed device through the hatch and down into the stygian grotto, then lowered himself after it for the purpose of attaching the cables to the ice. Back outside again, awakening muscles that had slumbered for the greater part of his seventeen years, Salo hauled the rebbe by main force from his catacomb up the wooden ramp into the failing light of day. Then, sweating profusely despite the bitter cold, he slid the block of ice up a second, makeshift ramp of sagging planks onto the bed of the wagon. There he began to chip at the edges with his father’s axe until he could shove the block, wrapped in burlap for further insulation, over a final improvised slope into the casket. Since Bathsheba’s slack belly dragged the ground as if she were fed on cannonballs, there was no question of mounting the wagon; so Salo tugged at her reins and set off walking without further delay (as who was there left to say goodbye to?) in the general direction of the city of Lodz, which lay some leagues beyond the Russian Pale.

F
inding an old Jew in the deep freeze did not at first alter Bernie Karp’s routine in any measurable way. Overweight and unadventurous, he had no special friends to tell the story to even if he’d wanted, which he didn’t: It was nobody’s business. But even Bernie had to admit to himself that something had changed. It was still late summer and he continued, as was his custom, to spend most of each day in front of the TV, munching malted milk balls and digging at himself. Images passed before his eyes without leaving distinct impressions: In a comic sketch a failed suicide bomber was comforted by his veiled mother to gales of canned laughter; in another a little girl kept God in her closet; a heartwarming Hallmark drama portrayed a Navy
SEAL
romancing a mermaid; and a reality-based program dispatched a disabled couple on a blind date to Disneyworld. There were elections, massacres, celebrity breakups, corporate meltdowns—all of which tended to evaporate like snow on a hothouse window upon entering Bernie’s brain. Still, he remained a passive captive of the flickering screen in the faux-paneled basement, which was largely his private domain. The only new wrinkle in the fabric of his days was that, while surfing the myriad channels, Bernie would also fan the pages of the ledger book in which the grandfather he’d never known had chronicled the history of the frozen rabbi in an alien tongue. He riffled the pages the way you might finger worry beads, and periodically he would rise and shuffle over to the freezer, where he rolled aside the game hens and packaged ground round to make certain that the old man was still there.