Princess of Passyunk (4 page)

Baba Irina sat back in her chair and slipped her bright red and gold silk scarf from her head to settle over her shoulders, where it clashed wantonly with her purple-flowered sabes dress. She gave Esther Isaacson a long, thorough look through the steam rising from her tea.

At just that moment, with those piercing dark eyes framed in curling mist, Ganady's grandmother looked just about as he had pictured Baba Yaga might, peering at an intended victim through the vapors off her witches' brew.

Irina took a sip of her tea, opened her mouth and said, “There was this man our family knew once, many years ago now. He was a rich one—you should have what every day he threw out. Anyway, this man, he had two sons—Lemuel and Samuel, I think they were. Well, when Samuel—the youngest—got to be a man, he says to his father, ‘Father, I'm never going to have the family business or the house. That's for Lem. So, give me my inheritance and let me go make my way in the world.'”

Ganady had drifted, by this time, a bit closer to the table, and pulled out a chair so as to sit next to Yevgeny, who was still standing there, dumb as a post. Both boys stayed clear of Esther.

“So, Sam took his money and goods and said goodbye to his Mama and Papa and big brother and went out into the world. Well, let me tell you, he didn't make his way anywhere but into trouble and sin and poverty. Things got so bad for poor Samuel that he was forced to sell everything he had and live off the synagogue from the
pishke
—the poor box—and scraps of clothing the rabbi's wife gave him after she'd clothed the Rabbi and their children. Things got
so
bad for poor Samuel that he was living, I tell you, in a
barn
.”

Baba's veined fist glanced across the top of the table. “With
pigs
,” she announced for emphasis, and Esther snorted. Baba ignored her. “If there was ever a soul living in fear of That Day, it was Samuel. Well, one night, when he was cold as cold could get—cold as a witch's heart—Sam thought of his family and how good life had been in his father's house. So!” She slapped her knee. “What do you think he did, Yevgeny?” she asked, courting complicity.

Yevgeny's huge, pale eyes blinked slowly (as if, Ganady thought, he were an enchanted frog) and he said, “Why...he went home.”

“Exactly. And what did his wealthy father do?”

“Threw him out, is what,” said Esther. “The boy's a
putz
.”

Baba feigned surprise at this answer, her lips forming a soundless O, her eyes going wide. “What do you boys say?”

Ganady and Yevgeny eyed each other, then Ganady said, “Took him back?” It didn't, after all, take a genius to see where Baba was going with this one.

“Took him back,” Baba announced firmly. “And threw him such a party.”

“
Putz
,” muttered Esther.

“Now, that oldest son of his, eh...”

“Lemuel,” said Ganady.

“Lemuel. Well, I tell you he was mad—
mad
. ‘Papa,' he says, ‘why are you giving this boy a party? A hit in the head, he should have.' And what do you think his Papa told him?”

Yevgeny, still entranced, said, “He said, ‘Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.'”

Baba blinked her dark eyes at him. “Such nice language.”

Yevgeny smiled fleetingly, then yanked at Ganady's sleeve. “C'mon.” He headed out to the sidewalk.

Ganady followed. The two of them sat side-by-side on the curbing, sipping their sodas and shivering.

“How'd you know that story Baba was telling so well?” Ganady asked at length.

“It's in the Bible,” said Yevgeny.

“Oh...Oh, yeah.”

“In the New Testament.”

The import of this was almost lost on Ganady, who was introspectively swishing bubbles about in his mouth. Almost lost, but not quite. He stopped swishing, swallowed, burped and said, “You mean the
Gospels
?”

Somehow he had managed to burp ‘Gospels,' too, and was sure Yevgeny would give him the wrath of God and the angelic host for it, but the other boy seemed not to notice.

“It's the story of the Prodigal Son, and it's in the Gospel according to Luke.”

“You sure?” Ganady asked, and felt immediately stupid. Of course, he was sure. Yevgeny was the darling of every priest and nun at Saint Casimir's for his knowledge of all things Biblical.

“Of
course
I'm sure.” He was silent for a moment in a way that suggested many wheels turning, then asked, or rather, demanded, “Why would Baba read the Gospels?”

Ganady felt sheepish and did not know why. “I think she likes the stories.”

“But
how
can she read the Gospels and...” Yevgeny's head dropped almost to his knees.

Ganady knew what he was asking, but he took a swig of soda and said, “I don't know.” The two boys sat in silence for a moment, then he added, “You could ask her, I suppose.”

Yevgeny nodded, but Ganady knew he never would ask, and that ten years from now it would still be eating him.

“I love Baba,” Yevgeny told his kneecaps.

Ganady nodded. “Me too.”

Baba did not steal material only from the Bible. Sometimes she stole from folk and fairytales. Ganady's personal favorites were stories in which fable and reality blended into an amorphous whole in which one was almost entirely lost in the other. Of course, so much of the history of the Slavic lands read like fairy tale anyway, it was difficult to differentiate between fact and fable.

Often, Ganady listened with only half an ear, which was the way he listened to everything but baseball games. He respected Baba and her stories, because he understood on some level of his pubescent soul that this was Baba's way of extracting magical moments from life. Perhaps it was because of this that Ganady Puzdrovsky was willing to indulge his grandmother in her more peculiar moments, which included the yearly pilgrimage to Armin the
Opshprekher
.

The visit occurred invariably the morning after Passover. The pilgrims were always Baba, Ganady, and his Great-Aunt Beyle, Baba Irina's sister. That is, until Great-Aunt Beyle's death the year before this, Ganady's sixteenth year.

Ganady wasn't completely certain why he was chosen for the pilgrimage. Nikolai said he was a proxy for the rest of the family and that he had been chosen quite simply because no one else would subject him or herself to such nonsense. Nikolai wasn't about to be a proxy for anything; no one else believed in the opshprekher—it simply wasn't
logical
to consult an oracle or wise man or whatever Baba believed the fellow to be, or to pay for his blessing on the family. This wasn't the old country, after all.

Ganady didn't much care about any of that. It was no real trouble to visit the opshprekher and Baba always bought him a nice breakfast before and an ice cream after, if the weather was pleasant.

There was a family ritual that went with this, too, though a briefer one than the one enacted every sabes dinner. Odd, since sabes came every week and the pilgrimage only once per year. Baba would announce her intention to go—as if anyone would, after so many years, need to be reminded—and then, in quick succession, Nikolai would roll his eyes, Da would bury his nose further in the newspaper and give it two good shakes and Mama would say, “Oh, Baba, why do you do this? How do you believe in this business?”

Baba would say archly, “How do I
not
believe, I'd like to know? I've
seen
.”

She would never say
what
she'd seen, but she would raise a finger to the heavens as if whatever it was, it had appeared in the sky.

Ganny's little sister Marija would, at this point, beg wide-eyed to go with, and Mama would shush her even as Baba said, “It's not your place to go, Marija, but Ganady's.”

Nikolai would give his younger brother a look that suggested he was a chump, and that would be that.

This pilgrimage to Armin the Opshprekher was much the same as in years past except for two things: One—Great-Aunt Beyle was not here and, two—Ganady paid more attention than he had on previous visits.

It wasn't so much that he
meant
to pay more attention, but what usually stretched into at least an hour of small talk and “catching up” moved with uncommon speed from condolences for Great-Aunt Beyle's passing to commiseration with Baba for having been the only one to sit
shiveh
for her the entire time (“though Ravke did say
yiskor
in the synagogue”).

At this point, a year's worth of distress broke to the surface and boiled out of Baba's soul. Beyle, she said, had been the only other Jew left in a family that had always been Jewish. Now that she was gone, there was no one but this Ganady, a Catholic, to say the prayers for their long dead. The whole family went to mass now, instead of shul, and the children attended the Catholic school and learned God-knew-what from priests and nuns, rather than the rabbis at Talmud Torah. Only Ganny, God bless him, had even set foot in Talmud Torah, and then only when Baba or one of his Jewish friends (who were sadly few) went for some weekend activity.

The entire family, thanks to her love-struck daughter and that Vitaly Puzdrovsky, had lost its Jewishness, had forgotten, even, what it was to be Jewish. The house was full of Catholic icons and alien shrines; they dined on non-kosher food. Oh, and Armin could have no idea what it meant to try to be observant of the
kashris
in such a house. If it weren't for the fact that shrimp and pork disagreed with little Marija's delicate digestion, God knew what Baba might be forced to eat (or starve), especially on sabes when the Catholics eschewed meat.

Armin the Opshprekher, whose last name remained a mystery to Ganady even after all these years, hummed and thrummed and nodded in agreement, his eyes sad and empathetic. By the end of Baba's recitation, he was holding her hands and sighing in precise harmony.

“I want to understand, you know, Armin?” she said after one particularly harmonious sigh. “They're my family and, of course, I love them. And because I love them, I want to understand how they, eh, how they think, you know? How they
believe
. So, I read.”

She let that hang and gave Armin a glance from beneath her lashes that was almost coy. Ganady had never seen his grandmother be coy; he found it unsettling.

“You read?” prompted the opshprekher. “And what is it that you read?”

“This Bible of theirs. These Gospels.” She said it as if it were nothing at all, and Armin's lips parted and said, “Ah.”

“So what I wonder is, do I need protection from this?”

Armin the Opshprekher's lips pursed. “Do you think you need protection?”

“If I knew, would I be asking?”

Armin the Opshprekher's entire face pursed. “What do you think, when you read these Gospels? You don't think this Jesus was the Messiah!”

Baba glanced at Ganady, who meant to glance away, but could not. “I don't know about the Messiah. Maybe this is something only God knows for certain. But I'll tell you what I think. I think Jesus was a
mensch
—a real man. That's what I think.”

Armin was thoughtful for a moment, then he patted Baba's hands and got up to get his opshprekher things. As he put on his
talis
and gathered his phylacteries and candles and censers, he asked, “Have you spoken to Rabbi Andrukh about this?”

“And what would he tell me about the Gospels except not to read them?”

Armin adjusted his talis about his shoulders and lit a censer. “Perhaps you should not read them, Irina, if they make you weak.”

Now it was Baba's eyebrows that raised. “Weak?
Ikh zen Yiddish
, Armin. I'm a Jew—the last Jew in all my family. But I wonder, you see. Who is this fellow, Jesus, that he's so important to my family? I wonder, you know? Eh—if we are righteous, we Jews, then maybe one old Jew can save her Catholic family. And if
they're
the righteous, then surely all those Christians can save one old Jew between them.”

Armin gave Baba a long, solemn look then began her yearly treatment. There was incense and prayer and recitation in an ancient tongue.

As Armin the Opshprekher's voice droned on and the incense grew thicker, Ganady wondered what magic tumbled from the old man's lips along with the alien words and what spells oozed from his censer. And as he contemplated what it meant to be a proxy in the parlor of a Jewish cabalist, his hair stood on end.

Was the opshprekher trying to exorcise Ganady and his family of Christianity, so they would convert back to Judaism?
Could
he do that? And if he could, what magic had Ganady, a rank amateur, to counter the workings of a professional occultist?

He thought first of the Twenty-third Psalm, but realized that it was an Old Testament verse and might not work, and besides, he could only recall a few lines of it, most notably the ones about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

He considered the Lord's Prayer, but as Armin had his hand upon a Torah, and the Torah was the Book of Moses and the Prophets, he feared it might insult both Moses and Christ were he to call on it to protect him from a Jewish enchantment (if there were such a thing). Besides, he wasn't sure he remembered all of that, either.

He wished he had been more attentive in catechism, but he didn't recall any lessons that dealt with precisely this situation. He wished that he had his rosary, but he only carried that to mass.

What he had was a baseball, deep in the pocket of his jacket. Usually, at this point in the yearly exorcism, he would be sitting in the window casement, turning the ball meditatively in his hand.

The baseball had Eddie Waitkus's autograph on it. It had been fouled off the bat of the Giants' Bobby Thompson and fielded by Waitkus for the out. Waitkus himself had flipped it into the stands where it had found Ganady Puzdrovsky's glove. Mr. Ouspensky had proclaimed it a miracle.