The Rabbi of Lud (19 page)

“It’s like everything else. The price of Torahs is higher in Alaska. It’s like what it costs for your breakfast.”

“And the menorah?”

“What about it?” he said. “You know what a knop, a cup, and a flower sets you back these days? Beaten gold?”

“Come on, Philip. What’s going on here?”

“Or shittim wood by the cubit and half-cubit?”

“In that ark I’ve got coming.”

“That’s right,” he said softly, slyly. “In that ark you’ve got coming.”

“How do you do it? How is it done?”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s nothing. There’s nothing to it. It’s no big deal. It’s not important like the kind of thing you do. It’s only money. It’s no big deal. It’s like a value-added tax. We’re a community. Everyone belongs. Whoever handles an item, whoever orders it, or makes it, or stocks or modifies or services it, or, like me, maybe just only even picks it up and delivers it, gets to goose up its price a tick. It’s, I don’t know, like a chain letter or the pyramid club. You know that sooner or later it’s got to come crashing down around your ears, but in the meantime, so long as the balls are all up in the air and you make sure that the last to sign on is somebody else, it works. Or seems to anyway. Alaska is a scam, man.”

“I don’t understand your system,” I told him.

“If I told you it’s tied up with grants and subsidies and government dough and oil depletion shit and blind-siding the taxpayer, would it be any clearer to you?”

“No.”

“That’s because you’re spiritual,” Philip said, beaming. “I
knew
I’d thrown in with the right guy. I knew I wasn’t making any mistake when I pitched my tent next to yours.”

I stared at the small biblical fortune the madman had strewn in my lap.

“Go on,” he said, “why don’t you give her a lick? I can see you’re just itching to try.”

“Give her a lick? Itching to try?”

“Why don’t you up and pray us the hell out of here? Use your powers!
Rub
that old God bag! Come on, I’ll help you!” He picked up a Torah in a blue velvet parochet and began to spin between his palms one of the wooden handles around which the scroll was wound. “I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight!”

“Hey,” I shouted at him, knocking his hands away, “hey, hey you! What is this? What do you think you’re doing? What do you think this is?”

“Who’s that?” Philip asked suddenly. He nodded toward my side of the airplane.

Standing just where one of the black bears had stood half an hour earlier, there was an old man.

He looks so cold, I thought. Where, I wondered, were his shtreimel, his kopote? What had he done with his kittel? Why was he outdoors without his gartel, his tallit katan? What was the reason his payes had been shorn? And why was he snowbound, abandoned in wilderness like some lost, Jewish Lear?

(Because I recognized him at once. Here was Shelley’s leathered, dreamboat Jew, her fringed, blue-banded, prayer-shawled Prince. And I hadn’t even seen his face yet. In our steep pine roost, settled in our mounting like some bizarre cocktail ring, we were above him looking down.)

“Far out. Who’s
he
supposed to be,” Philip whispered, touching the Torah, “the genie from out of this bottle?”

“Hello,” I said, the ordinary greeting as odd-sounding and queer to me under the circumstances as if I’d pronounced it “halloo,” abrupt and vaguely frantic as someone in Shakespeare. As if to say “How now, my lord,” or “Ho, by your leave!” or “Good morrow, cousin.” Or thought to say, “Who’s there? Stand and unfold yourself. I charge thee speak!”

“Welcome,” he said. (And still hadn’t seen his face or risen above my perception of his chill despite the knit cap he wore under his hooded parka, his insulated boots, ski gloves and scarf, his padded thermal bearing. Maybe it was just his being so isolated. So lone a figure in such stripped, lone elements might have looked chilled in desert too.)

Then he leaned back to look at us.

There’s something wrong with the Plexiglas, I thought. There was a glare, a distortion. Some phenomenon of the thin, freak air, an anomaly of the light, like sunshine lasered in a magnifying glass. I shaded my eyes but failed to reduce the glare. “It’s bright,” I said.

“It is,” Philip said.

“Wait,” the old man said, and placed an arm across his forehead, shielding his eyes as a shadow covered the Plexiglas and things became visible again beyond the hard, clear glass.

And he wasn’t old. His features seemed those of someone vigorously middle-aged, though there was something shrugged and bent about his stance, a sort of drawn, willful hunger (despite the well-fed aura of his arctic outerwear) in the way he arranged himself on the world, like the fierce, opinionated sufferings of an anchorite, some wandered-Jew quality to his ideas perhaps, even though I didn’t know his ideas, even though I … I don’t know. Maybe he was fifty. Maybe the length and fullness of his beard had given me an impression of age. (Though how could I have seen his beard before I’d seen his face?) Perhaps the sense I had of his singleness. Listen, look, I
don’t
know. I’m in even deeper than my rabbi mode, or anyone’s mode, rabbi or otherwise. Because what we’re talking about now, the area we’re into here, are spiritual sightings, the UFO condition. Two steady, responsible guys, one a family man, an official, out-and-out rabbi, the other a pilot, accredited, licensed to fly the more exotic air lanes, above the caribou herds and musk ox and seals. (And the sky is not cloudy all day.) Somewhere over the reindeer. People you’d trust with your credulity. Though one, granted, was an odds-on crackpot. (But religious. Hadn’t he proclaimed himself a believer, and wasn’t all his pilot’s mumbo jumbo about angels and attitude, busted minimums, turbulence, eminence and the civil evening twilight, a sort of prayer?)

Listen, look, I told you I don’t
know.
I
told
you this was different, and that I’m in even deeper and way past the ordinary rabbi mode altogether. All right, okay, listen. I’m backing and filling, I’m vamping till ready. I
haven’t told you about his beard yet!

It was made out of miniature flowers.

He was an old Jew with a beard made out of flowers.

A tight bouquet of daisies and irises, jonquils, lilacs, orchids and lilies. Poppies, roses, dahlias and dandelions drawn through a long green salad and lattice of stem. There was foxglove. Buttercups were in it, tulips, white baby’s breath, blue bachelor’s buttons, gladiolas, peonies, columbine. Flowers like rubies, like diamonds, like opals and sapphires. There were bright vermilions and blooms like a yellowed ivory the color of sunshine on snow. Pink carnations were mixed in, lavender freesias, sweet peas, nasturtiums, chrysanthemums, phlox. A gold-and-purple, red-and-emerald beard. A black-and-orange, brown-and-violet one.

(And I hadn’t even seen it yet, not face to face, was still in the plane, kept from it by the Plexiglas, separated from it by the Plexiglas the way glass mitigates and intervenes vision in a jeweler’s showcase. Still thinking, if you must know, of what Philip had been telling me about the cumulative, downhill-rolling snowball accretion of value in Alaska, wondering what an arrangement like that must have set the old boy back; speculating on the worth of such a nosegay of out-of-season, greenhouse-and-hothouse-grown posies which not only had have had to be shipped in from wherever in the lower forty-eight they’d been originally nurtured and then reshipped in Alaska to whatever lost latitude this odd old Jew had given them as an address, but had have had to have been packed and repacked each time in special protective, insulated, crushproof safety papers, and then carefully fitted by hand to his cheeks and chin by maybe the specially trained Japanese flower arranger and face-dresser who probably came with them. Adding the cost, too, of the extra blossoms, the ones that had made the trip only as a safeguard, the fail-safe flowers of sudden freeze and contingency, to say nothing of the hidden costs: what it would take to keep a first-rate, top-drawer high-priced Japanese flower arranger and face-dresser like this one would have had to have been, out of commission for a few days, to pick up the tab for his hard-to-imagine, special breakfast, luncheon and dinner appetites, what you must have had to have paid to send the plane back empty, first from the lost latitude, then from the found one, but quickly, no time lost, not at his prices, because at
his
prices you could go broke just forcing a plane to hang around an airport waiting on Nature for the fog to lift. So rounding it off at—what? we’ll be conservative here—thirty or forty thousand dollars for him to do his devoirs, make his morning toilette. And I still hadn’t really seen it yet.)

“Can’t you hurry?”
I hissed at Philip.

“Can’t
you?”
he hissed back. “Grandma was slow, but she was
ninety!”

Because we were both busy trying to cram the menorah, Torahs and silver yads back into Philip’s big duffel before the wandered old Jew guy noticed something amiss. Noticed, I mean, that we were in possession of such things. So we locked once more into our old choreographed cooperation, bobbing and weaving, pecking like pigeons, doing our close-order-drill physics and valences, those practiced displacements and compensations and overcompensations.

“What are you birds up to in there?”

“Just catching up on our housekeeping,” Philip said.

“Just tidying up is all. There,” I said, “that’s got her,” and opened my door, swung my legs around and dropped down. Philip, on his side, did the same. Once I was out of the plane again I leaned over to rub my thighs and work out the kinks. “Boy,” I said, “thank God you showed up. Hey, Philip,” I said, “we’re saved.”

Philip, walking unsteadily over the loosely piled timber, came round to my side of the airplane. He looked down skeptically at the man in the pricey FTD beard. “You know a lot about the engines in these things, do you, old-timer?” he asked.

“No no,” he said, “nothing.”

“But you’re not lost,” I said, offering the punch line of the old joke.

“No,” he said. “I’m not lost.”

And looked up at me. Which is when I saw that they weren’t really flowers, blooms, nothing vegetable at all in fact, no lush, tight-strung festoon, no garland like some actual hat or chaplet at a girl’s head, but something deep and indigenous in his whiskers and hung across his chin like a fragrant tattoo.

“Did you see any bears?” asked Philip.

“Yes,” he said mildly, “two great grizzlies, wide as passenger cars. They passed by me in the woods.”

“He has,” I insisted, “he’s come to save us.”

“They passed by you?” Philip said. “They let you alone?”

“Why not?” he said. “Why would they want to hurt me?”

“He’s right,” I whispered to Philip, “why would they? They need him for honey. We’re saved. We’re saved. We’re money in the bank.”

“I was drawn,” he said, the wandered Jew guy, “by the almost human odor of your bowels.”

“What kind of a crack is that?” Philip said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I looked at the pilot and thought to myself, Boy, some people: Here’s this Philip, a fellow who claims a certain standing for himself in the mystical community, who professes a belief in God’s servants’ services, in their mumbo jumbo and the smoke from their campfires, who doesn’t recognize a spiritual power player, and maybe even the downright wandering Jewish miracle rabbi himself, when he not only runs right smack dab into one in what, since he didn’t know where he was, he couldn’t even call the middle of the wilderness, but has to crash-land a plane safely in the branches of evergreens and work out the most delicate, mysterious rapport with his total-stranger passenger, when it came down to gravity, wind shear, force vectors and the like, that they could almost have, the two of them, taken their act on the road, provided they were lucky enough ever to get even close to a road again, and not only that, but had had to withstand a siege by wild bears, wide, by the wandering Jewish miracle rabbi’s own dispassionate testimony, who without incident had passed by them in woods and thus had had no need to lie, as passenger cars, sedans or maybe even limousines perhaps, he didn’t specify, and who, at least momentarily, would have had to have stood right there before them with the produce and proceeds of what might well have been a to-scale, ordinary English garden, right down to the odd bit of crabgrass, wrapped around his chin and cheeks!

Only what made me so sure he was even Jewish? Not his accent. He might have been a disk jockey on some easy-listening FM station. And the fact of the matter was, I
still
hadn’t had a really good look at him. What I’ve said here, all I’ve put down, I’ve said and put down as a kind of eyewitness. The details are there but are only impressions, the sort of things I might have told to an interested police artist. I will stand by them. Later, indeed, I confirmed them. I even have a Polaroid, although it was snapped months later, in October’s weak light, when the season in Alaska was lowering like a shade, and the bouquet (which tended, he said, to fade in the late months, to shine in the early, seemed dead as flowers pressed in a book), frankly, looks blurred in the picture, all the remaining dull, calico colors run together, compromising the sharp, discrete blooms of my first bright impression. (But I, a rabbi, was never such a hot photographer anyway.)

All right. Not only hadn’t (had a really good look at him), wouldn’t!

Wouldn’t look at his beard, avoiding it not as if it were some blight or handicap, a port wine stain along his face, say, or something not there at all, the missing tip of a finger or an absent limb; not finical, fastidious, or out of any ordinary, gracious civil deference, not
shy
I mean, unless we mean God-shy, or the way a kid primed to address his Santa Claus, to climb right up there onto his lap and tell him right to his face in the middle of the department store’s toy department, with all the other kids waiting right there in line behind him and possibly flanked too by his, the jolly old man’s, elves and helpers, will turn shy, either forget what he has to say or rather die than say it, let the cat get his tongue, humiliate himself, break down, cry. That’s why I hadn’t had my really good look yet.