The Pacific and Other Stories (20 page)

When the current that lifts them subsides, they will have seen all that is around them, they will have judged their moment and chosen their destination. And then in air both buoyant and invisible they will find their support, and, as the sunset cools the world, will begin their great glide toward the pure color of night. The last that they see other than the stars will be a distant band of violet and blue, a target of perfection they will never reach, but toward which they will have been aimed like arrows.

E
ARLY IN
J
UNE OF
1956, the summer in New York burst forth temperate and bright, the colors deep, the wind promising. This was the beginning of the summer that was to see the culmination of a chain of events that had begun, like everything else, at the beginning of the world, but had started in a practical sense in March of the previous year, when the Saromsker Rebbe opened the wrong drawer.

A heavy wet snow had snapped some telephone lines in Brooklyn, many of which at that time were carried on poles above the ground. When these went down, the magnetic effect coursed its way through the webs of copper and steel in the telephone exchanges and made oceans of static that flowed like backwash into every telephone in Brooklyn. The Saromsker Rebbe had intended to use the telephone to propose a meeting with Rabbi Moritz of Breel, who lived on Ocean Parkway with his followers, who trimmed their hats in mink, whereas the Saromskers lived in Williamsburg and trimmed theirs with sable. The Saromsker Rebbe wanted to discuss a theological difference that now appeared reconcilable.

The Saromskers had taken in many survivors of the Holocaust, mostly children who had been babies when their parents had been murdered. Their devotion to mothers and fathers they had never known was fiercer and more
concentrated than anyone might have dreamed, except perhaps for the parents themselves in the very moment they were parted from their children. Their prayers for the union of souls, and their silent and intense petitioning of God had the strength of all the winds of the world, of its invisible magnetism, of oceans and seas. But they were petitions that, for all their power and urgency, and though perhaps answered in time or beyond the limits of time, were not answered then.

A few of these children had been old enough to remember, some even to have begun serious study before their world was destroyed, and to these the Saromsker Rebbe would listen when, on a point of division, they held that things had changed, that movement was possible, especially in the New World and in the eyes of the young. Thus, soon after the war, the Saromsker Rebbe had swallowed his pride and begun to speak to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, who had also taken in a number of mysteriously intense young refugees. Theological reconciliation moves at a pace that makes the advance and recession of glaciers seem like the oscillation of a gnat in the golden light of a summer evening. Braced for a lifetime of cautious exchanges, the two rabbis had discovered that the telephone, more urgent even than the telegraph, was the most complimentary way for one to get the full attention of the other.

But because of the snowstorm the telephone was not working, and the only thing audible within it was something much like the experimental music then in vogue, of which neither rabbi had even the slightest inkling. The Saromsker Rebbe held the handset and tapped at the little button on the left side of the base, first three times, and then five. “Hello? Hello?” he said to the static. He repeated this six times over the space of an hour and a half, after which he gave up. Instead of talking on the telephone, he would do what came naturally and what was holy: he would write.

He wanted to write a short note, but with fountain pen in hand the Saromsker Rebbe was a dervish. Possessed of undying momentum and driven not by his own hand but by the ancient operation just of picking up the pen, he filled it, applied it to paper, and began moving it about. It then began to drag him after it like a plowman who had attached himself by a strong harness to a gigantic young plow horse
before
hitching it up to the plow, which horse was then stung by a big and very angry bee, and had run
until he had crossed all of Bessarabia—through rivers, over fields packed with wildflowers so that the plowman emerged looking like a huge bush in full bloom with windmill legs, in long flights off cliffs, through startled towns, breaking fences that exploded like wheat on a threshing floor, through houses, skipping across the decks of boats, following the sun so that its light fueled him and he pulled the plowman without exhaustion. The plowman as he ran shouted prayers, and the horse, having long forgotten the sting, raced the sun as if to overtake it. Horses cannot be expected not to have such notions, or rabbis not to write all night.

In the morning, when the snow had fallen off the wires because of strong winds from the Ramapos, the Saromsker Rebbe found himself with forty densely imprinted pages that left him vibrating like a piano wire and that had to be delivered as soon as possible to Rabbi Moritz of Breel. Shaking not from fatigue but from having followed his pen all night, the rebbe rang his nickel-plated bell, and one of his students, who had just started the day shift outside the study door, instantly appeared.

“I have written a little letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel,” the Saromsker Rebbe said, holding the forty pages up to the light. “It must be delivered to Ocean Parkway as soon as possible. Who is the fastest and most nimble of our students? Who is smart but not so immersed in his studies that he would be crushed by a truck? Who knows the map, and will be able to come back? Who speaks English well? And who will make a good impression on Rabbi Moritz of Breel?”

The student said, “It’s simple.”

The Saromsker Rebbe knew that nothing is simple. “Really?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Roger.”

“That’s a name?”

“That’s his American name—Roger Reveshze.” Stepping forward, the student said, “Rabbi, he’s so fast he bounces off the walls. He speaks English perfectly, and he will impress Rabbi Moritz of Breel. He’s one of the ones from Majdanek.”

The children of Majdanek were the cause of many problems. Like other
children of other camps they had their terrors and incurable sadnesses, but, for whatever reason, they even more so. For whatever reason, Majdanek was worse.

“He spends a great deal of time praying for his parents. He was just old enough to know them. He might study more, it’s true. He could be a better scholar. …”

“Who are we to say?” the Saromsker Rebbe asked. “When he prays, is it recitation?”

“No,” said the student. “When he prays, white light bathes the walls. You can see it through the cracks.”

“Why did no one tell me this?”

“It just started. He’s only fourteen. We wanted to let him calm down before we told you. He’s a kind of wild man.”

“And you want me to send him to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, a man of ninety-six?”

“Rabbi Moritz will know if he’s a
baal shem tov.
”

“Maybe.”

“Shall I send for him?”

“How is he at maneuvering through traffic?”

“Nothing can touch him. He could be a snake fighter.”

R
OGER
Reveshze had run through the halls and up the stairs, his robes and fringes trailing him like battle flags in a strong breeze, and when he presented himself to the Saromsker Rebbe so excellent was his blood oxygen that he did not breathe hard. Many people can do physical feats and afterward suppress the need to take deep breaths, but Roger, who did not need to suppress an urge he did not have, stood quietly before the rebbe, his eyes semiskeptical.

Like many fourteen-year-old boys in Hasidic costume, he had the sweetness of a lamb and the mischievous air of an owl. At the same time, though possessed of a slight and awkward body that had not yet solidified as it would in time, he seemed to have extraordinary gravity, or perhaps, the Saromsker Rebbe thought, I am just imagining it.

He was not imagining. In Roger’s wild eyes, big ears, and big teeth, was a face, framed by blond
payess
, that led with instant speed to the Pale of Settlement the Saromsker Rebbe had known in his childhood. He merely had to look in the eyes of this boy to see the heart of eastern Europe, and there, rising against a field of black and gray, came a fume of gold in which, like smoke, souls in transport spiraled upward.

Roger had something about him forever sad but forever indomitable. The rebbe decided to ask a question or two. He allowed them to spring whence he knew not, like an egg coming from the mouth of a magician.

“What is your Hebrew name?”

“Elchanan ben Moshe ben Arieh.”

“What do you see, Elchanan ben Moshe?”

“You.”

“When you close your eyes.”

This was for Roger an emotional subject, but one with which he was familiar on a daily basis, so he closed his eyes, raised his arms in a gesture of surprise, for what he saw was different every time, and said, “I see a courtyard in falling snow, people wrapped in blankets and shawls, wood that is broken and steps that are worn, a man standing in a square. He is dressed in black silk robes, his
shtreimel
almost covered with snow, his beard white. My heart cannot convey his expression. And I see houses that are lit weakly but brightly, their windows glowing yellow.”

“Do you imagine this?”

“I don’t imagine it, it exists.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“Do you pray?”

“Of course.”

“Who generates the prayers? Do you?”

The boy smiled.

“And what happens when you pray, physically?”

“I twirl.”

“You don’t daven?”

“I begin to daven, and then I twirl.”

“Like a dancer, spinning?”

Roger shook his head in the negative. “No, head over heels.”

“Head over heels,” the rebbe repeated, “no gravity.”

“I’m blinded,” Roger reported matter-of-factly.

“By darkness?”

“By light: white phosphorus, pinwheels, stars on a field of fire. It’s an illusion. An ophthalmologist could tell you why. Nerve endings.”

The rebbe was not convinced. Vision and skepticism are man and wife, bride and groom. “How do you know it’s an illusion?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I prayed for the life of a bird that had flown against the window and was dying on the sill, and though I was swept up beyond the world, so was he. It’s an illusion.”

“Maybe it was supposed to die.”

“I didn’t want it to die.”

“Since when is what you want central to the scheme of things?”

The boy nodded in acceptance. These matters would have to be deferred, and the rebbe decided to return to the business at hand. “Roger, please take this letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, on Ocean Parkway. Do you know how to get there?”

“Yes, we went there two times.”

The Saromsker Rebbe put the forty pages in a Manila envelope. Then he opened the top right-hand drawer in his desk and took out a box of matches and a thick candle. He lit the candle. In his left hand he held his seal and in the right the end of a little stick of saffron-colored wax. But, as the wax melted, he burned his fingers, and he withdrew the flame. “I lost my tongs,” he said.

“Tongs,” Roger repeated, fascinated by the word.

The rebbe went to get a fresh stick of wax from lower down, but he opened the wrong drawer. As soon as he saw what was in this drawer, he slammed it shut. Flushed as red as if he had just climbed a sixty-foot rope, he found the saffron-colored wax elsewhere and nervously started to soften it in the flame.

“What was that?” Roger asked.

“What was what?”

“What was that in the drawer?”

“Wax for sealing envelopes.”

“In the other drawer.”

“What drawer?”

“The one you opened before you opened the one with the wax.”

“Nothing.”

“I saw it.”

“Saw what?” The rebbe’s eyes were now beady.

“The box.”

“What box?”

“In the drawer.”

“What drawer?”

“What is
Lindt
?” Roger asked.

“What is Lindt? What is Lindt?” the rebbe repeated.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” the rebbe said, now looking at Roger with panic.

“Oh.”

Roger successfully delivered the Saromsker Rebbe’s letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, whom he did not see, and who could, therefore, make no judgment as to whether Roger was a
baal shem tov.
Everything settled down and returned to normal, except for one thing.

W
HAT WAS
L
INDT
? Roger’s teachers, all
unter rabbis
and
nachmollers
, didn’t know, and his classmates didn’t know, either. He went to Rabbi Eisvogel, who was second to the Saromsker Rebbe, and his designated successor.

“Rabbi Eisvogel,” Roger said, captivated by birds perching on icicles hanging from the eaves of the rabbi’s study, “What is Lindt?”

“Lint?” Rabbi Eisvogel asked back. “Lint is cloth shavings or other material, little fibers that collect and combine. Why?”

“No, not that. It was written on the box—L-i-n-d-t.”

“What box?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you saw a box?”

“I don’t know.”

Rabbi Eisvogel asked, “Did you see a box in a dream?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you all right, Roger?”

“I’m all right.”

“Good. Lindt, whatever it is, I’ll think about it,” the rabbi said.

Roger thought that he would never find out what it was. The world was full of mysteries, and he had much else to think about, having been immersed in moral questions day after day, like metal annealed, since he was three years old. He returned to his studies and forgot about what he had seen in the Saromsker Rebbe’s drawer. But, then, when the next Sabbath was over, a lighthearted Rabbi Eisvogel, in the presence of students and disciples, asked the Saromsker Rebbe point-blank, “Hayim, tell me, what is Lindt?”

The Saromsker Rebbe’s face turned as red as the flag of the Soviet Union. “I don’t know,” he said, with a Cheshire Cat smile, “but it may be a kind of Swiss chocolate.”