For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (6 page)

“After Günter heard, he forgot all about Druckenmüller and his doves and became obsessed with what Leine had told him. He would sit at the bar and attempt the same thing with rabbits, turning his ratty bunnies into colored bursts of smoke, some pink, some purple, occasionally plain gray. He swore he wouldn’t give up until he had perfected his magic. Though he knew, you could tell, that it would never match the magnitude of a trainload of Jews. I told him myself when he asked my opinion. Günter, I said, it takes more than nimble fingers to achieve the extraordinary.” With that Mendel felt a hand on his knee.

Pausing only to finish his drink, Mendel ran back to the car full of Mahmirim and relayed to the Rebbe the tales of horror he had heard. Mendel was the Rebbe’s favorite. Maybe not always so strict in his service of the Lord, Mendel was full of His spirit; this the Rebbe could see. For that reason he ignored the prohibition against gossip and took into consideration his student’s most unbelievable report.

“It can’t be, Mendele!” said the Rebbe.

“Their cruelty knows no bounds,” cried Raizel the widow.

The Rebbe sat in silence for some minutes, considering the
events of the last years and the mystery of all those who had disappeared before them. He decided that what Mendel told them must be so.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that the gossip Mendel repeats is true. Due to its importance, in this instance there can be no sin in repeating such idle talk.” The Rebbe glanced at the passing scenery and pulled at the air where once had been his beard. “No other choice,” he said. “A solitary option. Only one thing for us to do …” The followers of the Mahmir Rebbe hung on his words.

“We must tumble.”

Mendel had been to the circus as a boy. During the three-day engagement, Mendel had sneaked into the tent for every performance, hiding under the bowed pine benches and peering out through the space beneath all the legs too short to reach the hay-strewn ground.

Though he did not remember a single routine or feat of daring, he did recall, in addition to the sparkling of some scandalously placed sequins, the secret to convincing the other performers that they were indeed acrobats. The secret was nothing more than an exclamation. It was, simply, a “Hup!” Knowing this, the Mahmirim lined the corridor and began to practice.

“You must clap your hands once in a while as well,” Mendel told them. The Rebbe was already nearing old age and therefore clapped and hupped far more than he jumped.

Who knew that Raizel the widow had double-jointed arms, or that Shmuel Berel could scurry about upside down on hands and feet mocking the movements of a crab. Falling from a luggage rack from which he had tried to suspend himself, Mendel, on his back, began to laugh. The others shared the release and laughed along with him. In their car near the end
of the train, there was real and heartfelt delight. They were giddy with the chance God had granted them. They laughed as the uncondemned might, as free people in free countries do.

The Rebbe interrupted this laughter. “Even in the most foreign situation we must adhere to the laws,” he said. Therefore, as in the laws of singing, no woman was to tumble unless accompanied by another woman, and no man was to catch a woman—though husbands were given a dispensation to catch their airborne wives.

Not even an hour had gone by before it was obvious what state they were in: weak with hunger and sickness, never having asked of their bodies such rigors before—all this on top of their near-total ignorance of acrobatics and the shaking of the train. At the least, they would need further direction. A tip or two on which to build.

Pained by the sight of it, the Rebbe called a stop to their futile flailing about.

“Mendel,” he said, “back to your drunks and gossips. Bring us the secrets to this act. As is, not even a blind man would be tricked by the sounds of such graceless footfalls.”

“Me!” Mendel said, with the mock surprise of Moses, as if there were some other among them fit to do the job.

“Yes, you,” the Rebbe said, shooing him away. “Hurry off.”

Mendel did not move.

He looked at the Mahmirim as he thought the others might. He saw that it was only by God’s will that they had gotten that far. A ward of the insane or of consumptives would have been a far better misperception in which to entangle this group of uniformly clad souls. Their acceptance as acrobats was a stretch, a first-glance guess, a benefit of the doubt granted by circumstance and only as valuable as their debut would prove. It was an absurd undertaking. But then again, Mendel thought, no more unbelievable than the reality from which they’d escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic
of disappearing Jews. If the good people of Chelm could believe that water was sour cream, if the peasant who woke up that first morning in Mendel’s bed and put on Mendel’s slippers and padded over to the window could believe, upon throwing back the shutters, that the view he saw had always been his own, then why not pass as acrobats and tumble across the earth until they found a place where they were welcome?

“What am I to bring back?” Mendel said.

“The secrets,” answered the Rebbe, an edge in his voice, no time left for hedging or making things clear. “There are secrets behind everything that God creates.”

“And a needle and thread,” said Raizel the widow. “And a pair of scissors. And anything, too.”

“Anything?” Mendel said.

“Yes, anything,” Raizel said. “Bits of paper or string. Anything that a needle can prick or thread can hold.”

Mendel raised his eyebrows at the request. The widow talked as if he were heading off to Cross-eyed Bilha’s general store.

“They will have,” she said. “They are entertainers—forever losing buttons and splitting seams.” She clucked her tongue at Mendel, who still had his eyebrows raised. “These costumes, as is, will surely never do.”

It was the horn gleaming on the table next to the slumped form of its player that first caught Mendel’s attention. He rushed over and sat down next to her. He stared out the window at the forest rushing by. He tried to make out secluded worlds cloaked by the trees. Little Yocheved’s farm must be out there somewhere, a lone homestead hidden like Eden in the woods. It would be on the other side of a broad and rushing river where the dogs would lose scent of a Jewish trail.

Mendel knocked on the table to rouse the musician and looked up to find gazes focused upon him from around the bar. The observers did not appear unfriendly, only curious, travel weary, interested—Mendel assumed—in a new face who already knew a woman so well.

“You?” she said, lifting her head and smiling. “My knight in bedclothes has returned.” The others went back to their drinks as she scanned the room in half consciousness. “Barman,” she called. “A drink for my knight.” She rested her head on the crook of her arm and slid the horn over so she could see Mendel with an uninterrupted view. “You were in my dream,” she said. “You and Günter. I mustn’t tell such stories anymore, they haunt me so.”

“I’ve torn my costume.” Mendel said, “the only one I have. And in a most embarrassing place.”

Shielded by the table, she walked her fingers up Mendel’s leg.

“I can’t imagine where,” she said, attempting a flutter of alcohol-deadened lids.

“Thread,” Mendel said, “and a needle. You wouldn’t happen to have—”

“Of course,” she said. She tried to push herself up. “In my compartment, come along. I’ll sew you up there.”

“No,” he said. “You go, I’ll stay here—and if you could, if you wouldn’t mind making an introduction, I’m in desperate need of advice.”

“After I sew you,” she said. She curled her lip into a pout, accentuating an odd mark left by years of playing. “It’s only two cars away.”

“You go,” Mendel said. “And then well talk. And maybe later tonight I’ll come by and you can reinforce the seams.” Mendel winked.

The horn player purred and went off, stumbling against the rhythm of the train so that she actually appeared balanced.
Mendel spied the open horn case under the table. Rummaging through it, he found a flowered cotton rag, damp with saliva. Looking about, nonchalant, he tucked it into his sleeve.

“It’s called a Full Twisting Voltas,” Mendel said, trying to approximate the move as he had understood it. Aware that, as much as had been lost during a half demonstration in a smoke-filled bar car, twice that was again lost in his return to the Mahmirim, and another twice that lost again in his body’s awkward translation of the move.

Shmuel Berel, intent and driven, attempted the move first, proving—as he would throughout the afternoon—to be almost completely useless when it came to anything where timing was involved. Under protest, for he wanted to do his share, Shmuel was told to scuttle about the stage continuously during the performance doing his upside-down backward walk. Coordination proved to be a problem for Raizel the widow and Shraga’s mother, and—not surprisingly—the Rebbe as well. For them Mendel returned again to the bar car in search of simpler, less challenging moves. For Shraga, a live wire and a natural performer, he inquired about some more complicated combinations on which to work.

Mendel paused between cars, pondering the rush of track and tie and the choices it raised. How would it be if he were to jump off and roll, in faulty acrobatic form, down an embankment and into a stretch of field? What if he were to start himself off on another tributary of the nightmare, to seek out a scheme as random and hopeless as the one of which he was a part; and what of the wheels and the possibility of lowering himself underneath, thrusting himself into some new hell that would at least guarantee a comfort in its permanence—how much easier to face an eternity without wonder? Over and
over again, Mendel chose neither, feeling the rush of wind and moving on into the next car, passing and excusing, smiling his way along, his senses sharpened like a nesting bird’s, eagle-eyed and watching for scraps of cotton or lost ribbon, anything to bring back to Raizel and her needle.

Two men, forever at the same window and smoking a ransom’s worth of cigars, had come to recognize Mendel and begun to make friendly jokes at his expense. The pair particularly relished the additions to his costume. “The Ragdoll Review,” one would say. And the other, rotating the cigar, puff, puff, puffing away at it like a locomotive himself, would yank it from his mouth and say, “How many of you are there, each adorned with one more scrap?”

As many as the ears, Mendel thought, and the trains, and the lengths of track. As many as have been taken and wait at the stations and right now move toward another place. As plentiful as the drops of rain that puddle the world over, except in Chelm, where they gather in the gutters into torrents of sour cream.

Each time Mendel returned to the Mahmirim, he found the car seemingly empty. At most he’d catch a rustling of curtains, or find Raizel smiling sheepishly—too slow to seal herself into a compartment before his entrance. It reminded him of the center of town when strangers stumbled through. All the townspeople would disappear, including Cross-eyed Bilha, who also ran the inn. (The inn was a brainchild of the Wise Men—for whether or not strangers were welcome, no one should be able to say that Chelm was so provincial as to lack accommodations.) Eventually, out of curiosity or terror, a resident who could stand the suspense no longer would venture a look outside. The circus, prepared for a three-day extravaganza, whip and chair already in the ring and tigers poised on overturned
tubs, had sat three times three days until one of the Wise Men first dared peer into the tent.

“Open up,” Mendel called, “it gets dark and there’s work to be done.” Compartment doors opened and Mendel told everyone to remain in their seats. “Just Shraga,” he said, “and Feitel and Zahava. We are going to break the routine down into sections, and each will learn his own part.”

“No,” the Rebbe said. “There isn’t time. What if we should arrive in an hour before all have learned what it is they are to do?”

“There is time,” Mendel said. “The train barely moves now. Up front they get off and walk alongside only to climb on a few lengths back. We will have the whole of tomorrow morning and up until noon. The horn player told me—we are headed to an evening performance.”

“It sounds like they are trying to make a fool of you,” Feitel said. “As if maybe they know.”

“Do they know?” Zahava asked.

“What is it they know?” Little Shraga came out of his compartment, frightened.

“No one knows,” Mendel said. “If they knew it would be over and done with—of that you can be sure. As for practicing, there is great wisdom in the sections. They will allow you to rest, Rebbe, and for Raizel to sew.” Mendel smiled at Raizel as she fastened a cork to Feitel’s chest. Feitel chewed on a bit of thread to keep away the Angel of Death, for only the dead wear their garments while they are sewn. “It is called choreography, Rebbe. It is the way such things are done.”

That understood, they worked on the choreography in the aisle that ran the length of the car. Those watching sat in their compartments with the doors slid open and tried to pick up the moves from the quick flicker of a body in motion passing before them. It was like learning how to dance by thumbing through a flip book, page by page.

While some worked on cartwheels and somersaults, rolling in a line first one way and then the other, Shraga, reckless and with more room in which to move his spindly body, actually showed a great deal of promise. So much that the Rebbe said, “In another world, my son, who knows what might have become of you.”

The Mahmirim worked until they could work no more. That night they rolled in their sleep while the engineer up front tugged his whistle in greeting to the engines pulling the doomed the other way.

Shraga was the first to rise, an hour before dawn. He woke each of the others with a gentle touch on the shoulder. Each one, snapping awake, looked around for a moment, agitated and confused.

They began to practice right off doing the best they could in the darkness. The Rebbe interrupted as the sky began to lighten. “Come up from there,” the Rebbe said to Raizel. She was on the floor tearing bits of upholstery from under the seats, from where the craftsmen had cinched the corners. These she would sew into a moon over Zahava’s heart. “Come along,” the Rebbe said. Mendel, who was fiddling with a spoon Raizel had fastened to a sleeve and advising Shraga on the length of his leap, came with the others to crowd around the Rebbe’s compartment.