Tremble (35 page)

“And if it does?”

“
Then
we worry.”

“What about going to a mashpia?” Miriam ventured. A mashpia was a wise counsel—either a rabbi or simply a wise person.

“We would have to go to one we really trust. It would have to be Mordecai Bergerman. He is like family; besides, I have one over him—a little indiscretion that is only about fifty years old but he still sweats it.” Myra grinned cheekily, her false teeth slipping a bit.

And so it was that on the third night of the haunting Miriam and Myra sat up and recorded three unadulterated hours of Aaron’s snore. The next morning they both went trudging through the snow to Rabbi Bergerman’s house, Miriam laden with the antiquated tape recorder hidden in a backpack.

Rabbi Bergerman had been Myra’s husband’s best friend. At ninety-one
he was a year older than Myra but, if Abraham had been alive, ten years younger than him, therefore Myra still patronizingly referred to him as “the kid.”

“The kid is no schmuck, he’ll know what to do, but the last thing we want is this getting out to the community. They think I’m a little meshuga anyways; next thing we know we’ll be executed for being communist spies, just like the Rosenbergs,” Myra whispered dramatically. She’d been talking the whole way from Union Street to Montgomery Street and Miriam guessed that she was nervous. But she also wondered for the first time what her mother-in-law’s politics actually were, and whether Aaron’s sudden death and now the haunting weren’t actually sending Myra a little crazy.

They arrive at the ugly apartment block. Gray and oppressively rectangular it had been built at the height of the 1930s’ depression. Rabbi Bergerman lived with his son, his son’s wife, their twelve children, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. The family owned practically the whole building but the rabbi lived in the top-floor apartment with three of his unmarried grandchildren. The place was chaotic, a living hell of screaming kids and indignant shouting women, but it was a hell in which Mordecai reigned supreme.

Mordacei Bergerman was already waiting for them at the door of his apartment, leaning heavily on his walker. He ushered them in, then, after looking quickly for spies along the corridor, he slammed the door shut.

“Looking as beautiful as ever, Myra,” he croaked hoarsely.

The old woman smiled flirtatiously back. “Considering my loss.”

“My sorrow goes out to you, may God rest his soul.”

The old woman settled herself into a large leather armchair and rested her walking stick across her legs. She studied the rabbi.

“That’s the tough thing, kid. God hasn’t…”

“God hasn’t what?”

Myra sighed. “God
hasn’t
rested his soul. Miriam,” she barked, “play the kid the tape. Let’s see what an authorized member of the rabbinical council has to say about this.”

Half an hour later Rabbi Bergerman gave a low moan. “This is serious.”

“I know, kid, I know,” Myra replied, secretly pleased that Mordecai had listened so carefully.

“Do you think we have done something wrong, Rabbi? Do you think my husband’s soul is unhappy somehow?” Miriam piped up anxiously, worried by the dark look that clouded the cleric’s brow.

“His soul? Don’t be stupid, I’m worried about
your
souls!” he thundered, slamming his gnarled fist on the desk. “Myra, how could you come up with such nonsense? A ghostly snore! Such a thing does not exist! What are you trying to do—make an idiot out of me?”

Myra sat still for a moment in disbelief, then leaped up furiously, sending her walking stick flying. Miriam, worried that her mother-in-law might have a sudden heart attack like her son, rushed to her side.

“Mordecai Bergerman, who do you think I am to waste my precious time on such a schmuck as yourself? This is the ghost of my dead son!” she announced, tears welling up. Placing her veined hand ceremoniously on the ancient reel-to-reel she added, “And this is his snore. Either you believe or you don’t. Once…you would have.”

The two geriatrics gazed steadily into each other’s eyes for so long that Miriam began to fear that perhaps they had both slipped into some kind of empathetic coma. Then Rabbi Bergerman finally hauled himself up by his walker and moved painfully into the center of the room.

“Oi, what I do for a beautiful woman. Okay, this is what I suggest. Tonight, very secretly, I make a visit to your house. I will spend the night in the bedroom of your dead son witnessing this…this shemozzle! Then I will know if it is real or not.”

And so it came to pass that Rabbi Bergerman, aka the kid, secretly spent the night at the Glucksteins’, having insisted on hobbling there alone at the unnatural hour of one a.m. so frightened was he of gossip.

Miriam welcomed the freezing rabbi into the house, defrosted him in front of the stove with a mug of hot chocolate, then guided the fragile cleric up to the first-floor landing and into the matrimonial bedroom. The two women made him comfortable behind the screen—some tent poles and a sheet—they had erected for the sake of religious decency down the center of the bed.

The snore was already audible by now and working up to full throttle. It was twice as loud as it had been the first night of its manifestation,
and, frightened the neighbors might hear, Miriam had placed pillows and cushions over the windows.

Rabbi Bergerman sat on the other side of the thin sheet rocking himself in prayer; in one pocket he secretly fingered an amulet he’d bought from a kabbalist to protect himself against evil on such occasions. He was…well, frankly, terrified.

He stole a glimpse at the outline of Myra Gluckstein through the thin sheet. He’d been in love with her for decades, from the moment she’d arrived at Crown Heights seventy years before—then a tiny community of a few houses—a petite but voluptuous woman who seemed all black hair, lips, and eyes with an intellect that could wither a man in two sentences. And here she was, sitting a mere foot away in what appeared to be—and here Mordecai squinted very hard to make out more details of her blurred shape—a very alluring yellow dressing gown. A sudden snort from the snore jolted him out of his reverie.

“Rabbi!” Miriam whispered, “what do you think? Could it be a dybbuk?”

A dybbuk? Morecedei pondered the question. He was not a kabbalist—in fact he had always actively opposed such superstition—but here was undeniable proof of the supernatural, or at least some freak of nature, but a dybbuk…?

“How can it be a dybbuk, Miriam, when it has no body to possess?”

“Maybe it is looking for one,” Myra interjected, a sinister note in her voice. “And naturally, being a male snore, it would be looking for a male body….”

Horrified at such a notion the aged rabbi leaped up and ran from the room, forgetting his walker all together.

They caught up with him at the front door where he was fumbling with the ten locks Aaron had insisted on installing.

“Hey, kid, relax! I was only joking!” Myra pleaded.

Her daughter-in-law stepped forward. “Please, Rabbi, you’re the only one who knows. You must help us!”

Rabbi Bergerman turned slowly. The young widow was in tears and Myra glared at him as if he was the guilty party. There was no way he could abandon the two women. Resigned to his fate he reached out for his walker, which Miriam had brought from the bedroom.

“Okay, okay, I hear you. Enough with the tears already.”

They held council around the kitchen table while upstairs the snore continued to whistle around the room, poking at the cushions taped across the windows, seeping under the pillows on the bed and around the legs of the dead man’s desk, as if it were looking for something. Which indeed it was.

In the kitchen Mordecai took the opportunity to lean closer to Myra. He could smell the face cream she had used for the past fifty years, the scent bringing back instant memories. Glancing down he noticed her ankles below the hem of the tantalizing dressing gown—they were still good.

“Mordecai, concentrate!” Myra reprimanded him, thinking he was dozing off. “We have a crisis at hand!”

The rabbi focused his attention. “So, this is what I think. There are two ways to go here. One: I bring in a zaddik—a holy man—and a minyan—maybe I could find ten men who would keep their mouths shut, maybe not—and the zaddik could read Psalm 91, then order the snore out. That is the traditional way of dealing with a dybbuk. But as this is not a dybbuk, and the snore does not appear to be looking for a body to invade, this might not be the way to go.”

The rabbi paused and downed the glass of kosher wine Miriam had placed in front of him. “Therefore, two: I suggest that you consult a kabbalist. Naturally it would have to be a Sephardic, as we have none in Crown Heights,” he concluded, avoiding Myra’s piercing gaze, his hands now folded self-righteously in front of him.

“Is there anyone you know who we can trust?” Miriam asked anxiously.

Rabbi Bergerman looked around the kitchen, then lowered his voice as if there were spies. “It just so happens that I know a guy in Queens,” he whispered, his hand reaching into his pocket for the amulet and the business card he kept with it, just in case. “You can page him now, he’s on twenty-four-hour call. He’s no schmuck, a very successful businessman.” Mordecai placed the elegant card with its raised gold lettering firmly on the table.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the bedroom, the file slipped a little farther out from the back of the filing cabinet.

The next day at school Miriam received a phone call from the principal. The woman’s voice sounded nervous and strangely tense as she asked Miriam to come immediately to her office. She had an unexpected visitor. Miriam put down the phone already imagining bad news from her family in Chicago, or some disaster she hadn’t calculated on.

When the widow entered the office, the stranger had his back to her. He was tall, dressed immaculately in a suit that even Miriam could tell would have cost more than her entire wardrobe, and he was carrying a briefcase. He spoke before turning around to her; a gesture that Miriam found profoundly insulting.

“Mrs. Gluckstein, you are very young to be a widow.”

He swung around and Miriam knew instantly that he wasn’t Jewish and somehow (she couldn’t tell how) that he was threatening. Oozing with insincerity he held out a hand gloved in expensive leather. Miriam realized that he was handsome and a good deal older than herself.

“Michael O’Brien. I was a colleague of your husband’s.”

Miriam nodded, remembering Aaron’s description of his superior—a TV Nazi, he’d called him. Originally it had been a joke between them—his complaints about the man’s officious manner, his insistence on absolute order within the department—but recently, a few months before Aaron’s death, Aaron’s tone had changed when he mentioned O’Brien’s name. A note of tentativeness had entered his voice, as if somewhere he’d realized that he’d underestimated the man’s power and, perhaps, his malice. Miriam now looked upon the man himself, and determined to be neither intimidated nor seduced. Ignoring his outstretched hand, she smiled slightly; to shake it would be a breach of religious law. Mr. O’Brien stared down for a second, then, realizing, laughed awkwardly.

“Sorry, I forgot. Solomon explained a few things, but it’s so complicated—it’s difficult to remember all the etiquette.”