For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (7 page)

“More than one kind of dedication is required if we are to survive this ordeal.” The Rebbe looked out the window as he spoke.

They separated the men from the women and began to say their morning prayers. It was not a matter of disregarding the true peril to which it exposed them but an instance in which the danger was not considered. They called out to the heavens in full voices. When they had finished there was a pause, a moment of silence. It was as if they were waiting for an answer from the Lord.

The train stopped.

Feitel was in the air when it did. He landed with a momentum greater than the train’s and rolled pell-mell into the hardness of a wall.

“I’ve broken my back,” he said. The others ignored him. There wasn’t the urgency of truth in his voice. And outside the windows there were tracks upon tracks and platform after platform and the first uncountable stories of a building, higher, surely, than the Tower of Babel was ever meant to be.

By the time Feitel got to his feet, the performers had already begun to pour out onto the platform, lugging trunks and valises, garment bags and makeup cases with rounded edges and silver clasps.

The door to the car slammed open and a head and shoulders popped in. On the face was a thin mustache that, like a rain gutter, diverted the sweat away from pale lips. And how the sweat ran; in that very first moment the face reddened noticeably and new beads of perspiration drove on the last.

“Who are you?” the man asked. “What might this ragtag bunch perform?”

Mendel stepped forward.

“We are the tumblers.”

“Have you tumbled off the garbage heap?”

Feitel felt the ridiculousness of his costume and put his hand over the five-pointed star of champagne corks fastened to his chest.

“No matter,” the man said. “How much prep time do you need?”

“Prep?” Mendel was at a loss.

“I’ve no patience for this. We’re three hours late already. They’ll have my head, not yours.” A hand plunged through the door. The man looked at the watch on the wrist and wiped the
sweat from his brow as best he could. The hand appeared an odd match, as if this intruder were constructed of loose parts. His face reddened further and he puffed out his cheeks. “Prep time,” he said. “Trampolines, pommel horses, trapezes. What needs be set up?”

“Nothing,” Mendel said.

“As plain as you look, eh? Fine. Then, good.” He appeared to calm slightly—ever so slightly. “Then you’re on first. Now get down there and help the others lug their chattel to the theater.”

The Mahmirim rushed out the door, Mendel’s mouth opening wide as he followed the rest of the building into the sky. He let out a whistle and then continued to gape. It was beautiful and menacing. The whole place was menacing, for every wonder was in some way marred, every thing of beauty stained gray with war. To try to escape from it, to schedule galas and dress for balls, was farcical even for the enemy. The gray mood was all pervading. The performers hurried along with their preshow expressions, looking dyspeptic. Impostors, one and all. Their stage smiles, Mendel knew, would sparkle.

Raizel the widow led a monkey on a leash. The monkey held a banana, the first any had seen in years. The widow would pick up her pace and then stop suddenly. The monkey did the same. Her crooked fingers were bunched into a single claw, ready to snatch the prize away at first chance. Mendel stood behind her, a trunk on his head, watching Raizel try to trick a banana from a monkey. He was surprised, as always, to witness a new degradation, to find another display of wretchedness original enough to bring tears to his eyes. He took a deep breath and ignored his sense of injustice, a rich man’s emotion, a feeling Mendel had given up the liberty of experiencing horrors and horrors before.

It was only a short time until they reached their destination, a building as wide as the train was long. The interior promised to be grand. But the Mahmirim didn’t get to see any of the trompe l’oeil or gold leaf that adorned the lobby. They were ushered backstage through double doors.

As the procession filed in, the mood of the entertainers transformed. There was a newfound energy, a heightened professionalism. Even the drinkers from the bar car and the tired smokers Mendel had shuffled past in the passageways moved with a sudden precision. Mendel took note of it as a juggler grabbed the monkey and began, with detached brutality, to force the animal into trousers. He noted it as the aging dancers hid their heads behind the lids of mirrored cases, only to look up again having created an illusion of youth that, from any seat in the house, would go unchallenged. Mendel went cold with terror, watching, trying to isolate what in these innocuous preparations was so disturbing.

As the stage manager hurried by, his shirt transparent with perspiration, his arms full of tin swords, and screaming “Schnell” at anyone whose idle gaze he caught, Mendel understood to what his great terror was due. It was the efficiency displayed by each and every one, the crack hop-to-it-ness, the discipline and order. He had seen it from the start, from the day the intruders marched into town and, finding the square empty, began kicking down doors, from the instant meticulousness demanded that a war of such massive scope make time to seek out a happily isolated dot-on-the-map hamlet-called-city where resided the fools of Chelm. It was this efficiency, Mendel knew, that would catch up with them.

“It’s like we are in the bowels of the earth,” Raizel said, motioning to the catwalk and the sandbags and the endless ropes and pegs.

“Which one to pull for rain?” Feitel said. “And which for a good harvest?”

“And which for redemption?” the Rebbe said—his tone forlorn and as close as he came to despair.

“You did a wonderful job,” Mendel said. He, against all they had been taught, put a hand to Raizel’s cheek. “The costumes are most imaginative.” He knocked his elbows together, and the spoons clinked like a dull chime.

“A wonder with a needle and thread. It’s true.” This from Zahava in a breastplate of cigarette boxes and with pipe cleaners sewn to her knees.

The widow slipped an arm around Zahava’s waist—always such a trim girl, even before—and pulled her close as she used to do Sabbath mornings on the way out of the shtibl. Raizel squeezed her as tightly as she could, and Zahava, more gently, squeezed back. Both held their eyes closed. It was obvious that they were together in another place, back outside the shtibl when the dogwoods were in bloom, both in new dresses, modest and lovely.

Mendel and the Rebbe and Feitel, all the Mahmirim who could not join in the embrace or the escape to better times, looked away. It was too much to bear unopaqued by any of the usual defenses. They raised their eyes as Zahava planted a kiss on the old woman’s head, a kiss so sincere that Mendel tried to cut the gravity by half:

“You know,” he said, “never has so much been made of the accidental boarding of a second-class train.”

His observation, a poor joke, did not get a single smile. It only set the Mahmirim to looking about once again, desperate for a place on which to rest their gazes.

It may have come from a leaky pipe, a hole in the roof, or off the chin of the stage manager darting about, but most likely it was a tear abandoned by an anonymous eye. It hit the floor, a single drop, immediately to the right of the Rebbe.

“What is this?” the Rebbe said. “I won’t have it. Not for a minute!”

Mendel and the others put on expressions as if they did not
know to what he referred, as if they did not sense the somberness and the defeat rising up around them.

“Come, come,” said the Rebbe. “We are on first, and Shraga has not yet perfected his Full Twisting Voltas.” He tapped out a four beat with his foot. “Hup,” he said. “From the top,” he said, exhausting all of the vocabulary that he had learned.

They made a space for themselves and ran through the routine, the Rebbe not letting them rest for a moment and Mendel loving him with all his heart.

The manager came for them at five minutes to curtain. It was then, from the wings, that they got to see it all. The red carpets and festooned gold braids, the chandelier and frescoed ceiling—full of heroes and maidens and celestial rays—hemmed in by elaborate moldings. And the moldings themselves were bedecked with rosy-cheeked cherubim carved from wood. There was also the audience—the women in gowns and hair piled high, the men in their uniforms, pinned heavy with medals for efficiency and bravery and strength. An important audience, just the kind to make a nervous man sweat. There was also a box up and off to the left; in it sat a leader and his escort, a man of great power on whom, Mendel could tell, a part of everyone was focused. The chandelier was turned down and the stage lights came up and the manager whispered “Go” so that Shraga stepped out onto the stage. The others followed. It was as plain as that. They followed because there was nothing else to do.

For a moment, then two, then three, they all stood at the back of the stage, blinded. Raizel put a hand up to her eyes. There was a cough and then a chuckle. The echo had not yet come to rest when the Rebbe called out:

“To your marks!”

Lifting their heads, straightening their postures, they spread out across the hard floor.

“Hup,” cried the Rebbe, and the routine commenced.
Shraga cartwheeled and flipped. The widow Raizel jumped once and then stood off to the side with her double-jointed arms turned inside out. Mendel, glorious Mendel, actually executed a springing Half-Hanlon and, with Shmuel Berel’s assistance (his only real task), ended in a Soaring Angel. Feitel, off his mark, missed his wife as she came toward him in a leap. Zahava landed on her ankle, which let out a crisp, clear crack. She did not whimper, quickly standing up. Though it was obvious even from the balcony that her foot was not on right. There was, after a gasp from the audience, silence. Then from above, from off to the left, a voice was heard. Mendel knew from which box it came. He knew it was the most polished, the most straight and tall, a maker of magic, to be sure. Of course, this is conjecture, for how could he see?

“Look,” said the voice. “They are as clumsy as Jews.” There was a pause and then singular and boisterous laughter. The laughter echoed and was picked up by the audience, who laughed back with lesser glee—not wanting to overstep their bounds. Mendel looked back to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe shrugged. Young Shraga, a natural survivor, took a hop-step as if to continue. Zahava moved toward the widow Raizel and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“More,” called the voice. “The farce can’t have already come to its end. More!” it said. Another voice, that of a woman, came from the same place and barely carried to the stage.

“Yes, keep on,” it said. “More of the Jewish ballet.” The fatuous laugh that followed, as with the other, was picked up by the audience and the cavernous echo so that it seemed even the wooden cherubim laughed from above.

The Rebbe took a deep breath and began to tap with his foot.

Mendel waved him off and stepped forward, moving downstage, the spotlight harsh and unforgiving against his skin. He reached out past the footlights into the dark, his hands cracked and bloodless, gnarled and intrusive.

Mendel turned his palms upward, benighted.

But there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out of the ghettos; no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks in boxcar floors; no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach out from chimneys into ash-clouded skies.

Reunion

T
he house has an odd smell to it, an odor. The rabbi’s got thirteen kids and that’s the smell. The constant cycling of daily needs. Someone always eating or shitting, putting on socks or taking them off. But it’s not white like on the ward. Not sterile and faked. It’s real life over there with the smells that go with it.

Marty is saying this himself, explaining it to another patient in the dayroom as he grinds out a cigarette and picks a bit of tobacco from his tongue.

Marty feels at home on the ward. Both his children had been born there when it was maternity, before they changed it all around and put in the steel doors. You can’t wipe away that kind of feeling, though, the joy of births and new lives, of daughters and sons. Maybe that’s why they keep the mentals there now, to give the place a metaphysical boost—let them recuperate on a ward with hope-soaked, life-affirming walls.

He treats the place as if it were a country club, dressing in expensive, casual slacks and loafers, pressed shirts and V-neck sweaters that give off more of a feeling of money than would jackets and ties. He plays the part as well. Acts as if, as long as he can’t get back to his golf game, he might as well make the best of it, smiling at the other patients, shaking hands, quipping and winking, and laughing through his nose whenever the chance arises.

The staff favors Marty and encourages the new friendship he’s made.

A John Doe is picked up off the street of a neighboring suburb in the midst of a violent rage; he is rolled onto the ward strapped to a gurney, fighting to free his wrists from the canvas bands or tear his hands off trying.