Ellis Island & Other Stories (22 page)

“Who said,” boomed a strange and enormous voice, “that I am in my right mind?” (It was Rabbi Figaro, of Saromsk.) “God can use even a crooked stick, for nothing can make Him fall. I am Rabbi Figaro, of Saromsk. Whether I am in my right mind or not is an uncomfortable question that will have to be deferred. Our sages within the palace are now debating matters of far greater importance. For many weeks they have been considering the question, ‘What is laughter?’ ”

“What is laughter!” echoed the three boys.

“And in the weeks to come they will look into the allegation that children live in a different dimension.”

“A different dimension!”

“In the fall, they discovered why bread rises.”

“Why bread rises!”

“And, this summer, with the aid of a great glass bell, and an air-pump invented by Rabbi Pupkin, they will find out what fish do at night.”

“What fish do at night!”

He turned to the three young men. “Where did this
meshugah
come from?”

“From the sky,” answered one of them.

“Do tell!” boomed Rabbi Figaro, in derision.

“Truly, Rabbi, he came flying from clouds. Look. You see our three sets of footprints, then Moishe’s going back to get you, and then Moishe’s and yours coming here? Do you see any others?”

The Rabbi looked around. His neck was as thick as a bear’s, he was barrel-chested, and his eyebrows were like black rugs hanging over the edge of a cliff. “No. Are you sure you did not carry him here?”

“We didn’t! We didn’t!” they said.

“Maybe a bird dropped him.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Rabbi Figaro. “I was thinking of a great big bird, as big as the palace, that might have picked you up—just as the fish swallowed Yonah, and just as Rabbi Mocha was carried away by an elephant.” (I had heard those stories, of course.)

“What palace?” I asked, since he had mentioned it twice already.

“You’re facing the wrong direction.”

I turned from the fruit trees and saw a great palace—well, let us say, a small palace—all of brown stone, with leaded windows and slate roofs. Sweet smoke issued from twenty chimneys; lights blazed from within; children in Hassidic dress dashed across catwalks spanning the gaps between high-windowed cupolas; and music drifted down—as Rabbi Figaro pronounced his judgment: “Take this
meshugah
inside. The least we can do is to give him some dinner, since tonight is
Erev Yom haDvorah.
It is an opportune time for him to have fallen from clouds. Who knows? Maybe even a bee brought him.”

They took me inside, but not before I had asked what country we were in. Fully expecting to hear a Baltic sound, a waterfall of skinny Cyrillics, I was much relieved to listen to the perfectly balanced vowels and consonants that smoothly make “America.” “And where are we?” I inquired.

“In Brooklyn,” they answered. “At the palace of the Saromsker Rabbi. Where else?”

As I entered the great hall of the Saromsker palace, every eye was upon me. Although I did not realize it until much later, I was almost completely covered with soot, my hair was bronzed and curled like the hair of a goat, and my eyes glowed from my face like egg whites.

“Who is that!” someone gasped.

“Sh-h-h! That’s the
meshugah
from clouds,” was the answer.

I had been Guido da Montefeltro, Hershey Moshelies, and Whiting Tatoon. Now I was just plain
Meshugah,
or, at best, The
Meshugah
—the “the” being in my case a title of honor similar to Doctor, Rabbi, or Sire.

Since everyone expected me to be insane (the children grew silent in my presence, and regarded me with shifting eyes), it was hard not to satisfy expectations. Perhaps there is that in me very deep which
is
slightly lunatic. In fact, it may be why I had to leave Plotsadika-Chotchki in the first place: I disputed the rabbis’ claim that madness is the same as nudity, and was then accused of both. Only in Plotsadika-Chotchki, whose inhabitants are blessed and cursed with a strange motility of mind, could someone stand fully clothed and be accused of nudity. I had on long underwear, a heavy winter suit, my warm topcoat, fur boots, gloves, a scarf that nearly obscured my face, and a hat past which I could hardly see. “We have concluded that you are nude,” pronounced the representative of the Rabbinical Court, as my two eyes peered out of a mass of wool in which I was practically entombed. But that is a different story.

In the palace of the Saromskers, all I had to do to confirm their suspicions was to clear my throat when asked a question, laugh at an inappropriate time, move awkwardly, roll my eyes, or say something disconnected. For example, a kindly matron with two front teeth that pointed in opposite directions, like the legs of a briskly walking man, asked me how long I had been in America.

“I am knee-deep in the intense light of blazing fruit,” was my answer.

“I don’t understand,” she said meekly.

“Of course not. You know nothing of the strange rhythm of blue adults.”

“Oh,” she said, moving away, “please excuse me, I must tend the gefilte fish.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Do go to him. They are such delicate creatures, and they give you everything they’ve got. It’s a
mitzvah,
you know, to rub them all over with salad oil.”

This was a good game—the price of my dinner in that excellent place.

How joyful it is to discover a really enormous room. They are, certainly, a mark of civilization—their widening proportions quietly draw out the soul, and the dark and gentle borders which agitate and swirl beyond one’s sight allow a scrupulous, shielded, infinite perspective. No wonder cathedrals and great churches are built to be silent and airy. For us, the Jews, the great rooms were mainly of the imagination, of longing, though some actually did exist—examination halls, libraries, and houses of assembly. They were comparatively small, but the borders of darkness within them were able to strike up conversations with infinity. So with the great hall of the Saromsker Rabbi. Everyone was there, in an architect’s dream, a Renaissance canvas through which glances shot in a hundred directions and random motion balanced out in satisfying symmetries.

“The bee!” screamed the Saromsker Rabbi, Rabbi Figaro, a genuine
meshugah
himself, perched halfway up the wall upon a little platform draped with gold-embroidered red velvet. “God bless the bee! I will tell you why, and then we shall feast and dance in his honor.

“The bee hardly ever rests; but when he does it is with a humble, puzzled look which seems to say, ‘I was almost sure I had more to do.’ The bee is a peaceful, efficient machine, a carrier of great heavy buckets on hanging airborne legs.

“Rabbi Texeira, who was very holy, was a beekeeper. He spent five years digging deep into the ground. Of course, everyone thought he was crazy, especially when he passed four hundred feet, but he kept on digging until, at six hundred feet, he struck a source of endless steam. This he took two years to tame and pipe to the surface. ‘So?’ the people said. ‘What can you do with a hot pipe?’ That was in the summer that Rabbi Texeira began to build his much deplored and seldom understood glass house. It took five more years to complete, nearly bankrupted everyone, and, in the end, it covered several large fields. Long before that, however, they had lost hope for Rabbi Texeira of the red beard. After all, his glass house had no floor, and the rainwater flowed in because it was built on a slope. Then Rabbi Texeira planted acres of flowers within it, and, to everyone’s amazement, they grew in winter because he heated the house with the steam he had dug. Rabbi Texeira’s bees were able to work year round, producing three times as much honey as they had done before. Because bees love work, they were grateful and never stung him, so that he didn’t have to dress as a beekeeper. The village sold vast amounts of honey and grew wealthy, and then became even wealthier by selling fresh flowers in the middle of winter. Invalids quickly recovered in the sweet summer air of the glass house, and young men and young women were married there—after falling in love while working together amid the wildflowers as snow fell and blizzards raged outside. So prosperous did the village become, that the Cossacks decided to seize it. One cold day in March, two hundred of them on wet black horses charged from the north, silver swords drawn, icicles on their mustaches. The Jews gathered at the synagogue that they had built in the glass house, held up the Torah, and prepared to die. As they watched the horsemen roll like thunder down the last hill, they said,
‘Shma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad,’
because they had no weapons and did not know how to fight. Then their hearts raced, the hair on their necks stood as straight as thistles, and they cried and trembled in awe.
Five hundred thousand bees
rose in a yellow-and-black cloud from hundreds of hives, dipped under the walls, and assembled in a solid mass outside. They rolled toward the horsemen, with the sound of ten thousand engines. Two hundred bees would easily have been enough to drive them back. But half a million! Half a million bees were a match for all the armies of Europe assembled together. The Cossacks fled in terror. When word of what had happened reached the Czar, he realized that this small village had become the military center of the world, and from then on they were allowed to live in perfect peace and tranquillity. The village grew as Jews fleeing pogroms came for shelter, and soon it became a small autonomous republic. Rabbi Texeira, instead of being a king, simply tended his bees, picked flowers, and made sure that the children were acquainted with the early history of the place.

“Rabbi Nachman, on the other hand, was afraid of bees, and used to hide in a butter churn from May to September. It didn’t take very long for him to lose his mind: the churn was small, dark, and hot, and it smelled of old butter. One August, as Rabbi Nachman was suffering intensely and looking forward to emerging in September (when the air was relatively bee free), he had a dream. He had many strange dreams—as a man might if his knees touched his shoulders from May to September—but this one was a revelation. In it he was taken to Heaven in his butter churn and rolled up to the feet of God. God was very angry, and, like a turtle, Rabbi Nachman hid deep inside the butter churn. ‘Do you think that I couldn’t get you out of there if I wanted to?’ asked God, terribly irritated. Rabbi Nachman was afraid to answer. ‘It would be so easy. I wouldn’t even have to break it open. All I’d have to do would be to put a thousand bees in it, just like that.’

“Rabbi Nachman shuddered.

” ‘All right. Stay there. Why are you afraid? Don’t you like music?’

” ‘Yes,’ peeped Rabbi Nachman, from deep inside the churn. ‘I like music.’

” ‘Don’t you like humor?’

” ‘Yes,’ peeped Rabbi Nachman. ‘As a youth, I was fond of humorous circumstances. I particularly liked wry expressions, mistaken identities, and circumstantial fusion.’

” ‘So why don’t you like bees?’

” ‘I don’t understand.’

” ‘Why don’t you like bees?’ God shouted, and the world was clapped by thunder.

” ‘I hear you, Majesty, I hear you,’ said Rabbi Nachman, trembling.

” ‘I created bees the same day that I created music and humor. I made it so that bees are the visual manifestation of both. Transcribing symphonies into bees, and vice versa, is most amusing, and a good joke is nothing more than a bee in disguise. Can’t you see that?’

” ‘I see that, Sire,’ answered Rabbi Nachman.

” ‘No, you don’t,’ sighed God. ‘I’ll have to invent a way.’ And then God looked at the churn, which exploded from Rabbi Nachman, its pieces shattering into the silence of the universe. Rabbi Nachman found himself naked at the feet of God, and he had to shield his eyes because the light was too bright. ‘Rabbi Nachman,’ said God, ‘you are now a bee on earth.’

“Suddenly, Rabbi Nachman found himself several feet above a mountain meadow, flying in a hill-hugging ellipse, looking for the brightest flower. He was a bee in Germany, in 1266. At this point, his wife rattled the top of the churn to tell him that it was dinnertime, but not before he felt with magnificent intensity what it is like to be a single living note in music; and to trace lines long ago predetermined in the air; and not before he realized that a coat of yellow-and-black fur, two lantern-like antennae, and buzzing wings are the basic materials of humor. Because…

“Anyway, Rabbi Nachman awoke with the fluorescent tracings of a bee’s life shining brightly in his eyes. He knew that the bees fly in parodies of the celestial spheres; he knew that their hive dances are religious in intent and have nothing to do with informing other bees of where good flowers are, since all bee flight is solidly predetermined (besides, they can talk); and he knew what a bee feels at the edge of the forest on a perfect summer day in Bavaria in 1266. He came out of his churn, and moved right away to become an apprentice beekeeper.

“And then there is Rabbi Pintchik of Birdislaw, whose daughter Katrina fell in love with a bee. But there are a hundred thousand stories about rabbis and bees, and a million stories about people and bees—about those who have loved and hated them, those who have thought that they were bees, those (such as myself) who were born understanding the bee language, about mistaken identities (they do look alike), heroism in defense of the queen, the art and industry of bees, their devotion to justice, sad stories of persecution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

“I can only say one thing,” said Rabbi Figaro in a storm of emotion, “which is, that if there is a child in this room who has trampled a bee under his boot, he should be deeply ashamed. I know that there is such a child. I suggest that he make amends by being good for the rest of his life, and by creating good works—not just for bees; but for people.”

Rabbi Figaro climbed down a long ladder to the floor. Every child was silent, because most children have, at one time or another, trampled a bee under their boot; and their parents, too, were full of remorse. When Rabbi Figaro reached the ground, he did a little dance that took just a second, It was a very strange dance indeed. “Enough!” he screamed. “All is forgiven. God bless the bee!”