The Pacific and Other Stories (42 page)

“What’s wrong with having a telephone? What harm would it do?” Jacob Bayer asked.

“You, too? What’s wrong with not having a telephone?”

“Nothing. I don’t have a telephone. Who cares?”

“I used to ask that very question,” said Rabbi Blarma. “When you do, they tell you what’s wrong with not having a telephone, and then they tell you why you must have one. It lasts for as long as you sit there, and then they pick up and follow you down the street. They would talk about it until the end of time. They speak like the possessed.”

After some thought, Jacob Bayer said, “In his introduction to
The Book of Evenings
, Rabbi Baruch of Minsk says that suffering is an entangling vine that grows outward with a green embrace.”

Rabbi Blarma nodded knowingly. “Would you like a tomato?”

“Please.” As Rabbi Blarma got up, Jacob Bayer asked, “Why is it that the road to the town is empty, and yet the town is so full of goods? Where do they come from? Is there another road?”

“No.” Rabbi Blarma looked down as he walked to the table, sadly it seemed, but probably so as not to make the tomato roll off the plate.

“And what does the town give in trade for all these wonderful things? I saw no one in the fields. They lie fallow. The sound of iron striking iron is absent, or of saws working through wood. Even the mill wheels are chained.”

“The telephone,” said Rabbi Blarma.

“What do you mean, ‘The telephone’? How?”

“I don’t know. That’s what they say. Who am I to argue with shops full of Italian leather and British furniture?”

“But wait,” Jacob Bayer said, suddenly realizing something. “You hired me.”

“Yes.”

“For a chicken every three days, tea …” His voice trailed off.

The rabbi nodded.

Jacob Bayer looked at him quizzically. “There are no students.”

“There are no students,” the rabbi confirmed.

“Then what is my job?”

“To go before the commission. I was going to do it, but I’m too old.”

“You didn’t say anything about a commission.”

“I didn’t, no.”

“What commission?”

H
ASKELL
S
AMOA
, the chief rabbi of Koidanyev, claimed that he had been a disciple of Rabbi Smilksteen of Pokoik. When, in ’03, he arrived in Koidanyev, unlike most rabbis he had no valises full of decrepit books. He traveled light and wore the clothes of a rich man. When asked where his books were, he laughed. “I have none,” he said, “but I have this.” He removed from his only piece of luggage, so that all who were gathered could see, two dry cells, two brass and rosewood telephone sets, and an immense spool of gold-plated copper wire.

He made great show of unraveling the wire and running it along branches and walls from one end of Koidanyev to the other. Then he hooked up his sets and batteries, and had the puzzled assistant rabbi man one of them. He called for the fastest boy in town, a
yeshiva bokher
who was
as tall as a giraffe and as skinny as a willow, and had once taken a message from Koidanyev to Slutsk—nineteen versts—in fifty minutes. In his special silk shoes, this boy could run the two versts from one end of Koidanyev to the other in less than six minutes. Only a horse could go faster, but that was too dangerous in a crowded town.

Haskell Samoa wrote out a message on a piece of paper. It read, “What hath G–d wrought?” Then he asked for the crowd to supply random numbers, which he added to the message: 12127212232. When the clock struck eleven, he gave the message to the runner, who vanished like a satin-winged bat. Six minutes later, when the bat arrived at the other end of the line, the assistant rabbi said triumphantly, “Before the clock had finished striking eleven, we had the message,
What hath G–d wrought: twelve billion, one hundred and twenty-seven million, two hundred and twelve thousand, two hundred and thirty-two.
How do you like that!”

As soon as the impact of this had been assimilated (some found it hard to comprehend), and after many people had had the opportunity to converse with others two versts away, Haskell Samoa was called a
tzaddik, gaon
, and miracle worker. Then he established the commission. The power and gravity of Koidanyev’s institutions migrated to it with great rapidity, leaving them to wither and die. As fast as customs could originate from within the commission, they replaced old customs that no longer seemed necessary.

At first there was only one golden wire, then another appeared, and another. People used to stand beneath them happily looking upward. Then they grew used to them and hardly noticed how fast they multiplied. Gradually, on poles that looked like the Cross of Lorraine, on racks projecting from buildings, on great structures that handled their airy crossings like a loom, keeping each independent of the others, they ran through the town like a golden cloth, connecting everything to everything else. When the sun set, Koidanyev looked from a distance like the prisoner of golden spiders in a glowing unearthly dream.

Following on the multiplication of the golden wires, the sounds of metal upon metal ceased and smoke stopped curling from the few factory chimneys. No one wanted to buy the things they made in Koidanyev anyway, so it was no loss. Who needs a tea tray with the birth dates of five hundred famous
rabbis? Or kapok life preservers covered in bright green cloth with pictures printed on them of ostriches reading the encyclopedia?

As these things disappeared, new things took their places. They were just as useless, but they were consistent with the theme of the telephone and were accorded unquestioning respect and a great deal of capital. From all over the world things poured in of many excellent types and in many different forms, and it was all because of the telephone. At night, when the trade wagons came and went, wondrous items were exchanged, it was presumed, for telephones and what the telephone had wrought.

In ten years the town tripled in size and grew a hundred times—a thousand times—in wealth. Rotten roof tiles were replaced with those that glowed in the sun. Interiors were plastered, telephones installed, health improved, bodies firmed, faces beautified, rare objects collected. And everyone was grateful to the commission, for through the commission all plans flowed and from the commission came all authority, authenticity, and validation. Every Friday night, on what used to be the Sabbath—the Sabbath was now, as Haskell Samoa put it, shortened—the commission met in public, inviting comment from all who attended. In winter, it met in what had been the synagogue before its transformation into the commission’s magnificent central offices. In summer, it met in the main square, beyond the bell-like clatter of silver and crystal in the restaurants at one end, and near a flower-ringed fountain that the commission artfully moderated to half its normal flow so that during the meetings it was possible to hear the sound of distant telephones singing like birds in a dark forest.

H
ASKELL
S
AMOA
, who had brought the telephone to Koidanyev, had founded the commission, and had run everything for a decade, had not let unchallenged power dull his wits. From the dais, he observed the contented citizens taking their seats. Haim ben Ezra Lashkovo, who ran several of Koidanyev’s forty banks, had a new watch, a Patek Philippe. Mrs. Bloomberg, the wife of a telephone company official, was wearing a freshly minted silk dress that clung to her gravity-defying bosom like paint. Abba Bialik, the butcher, now had a thick golden watch chain. Most tellingly, the widow
Mallichevska, who until the commission granted her some shares in the telephone company had been so poor that she sewed waxy leaves on her clothing to cover the holes, showed up with a tiara.

More than the sight of any object, their bearing informed Haskell Samoa of their condition and thus, he was convinced, their opinions. People who worry and suffer do not flow into a room, or a piazza, as these people did, but arrive with the tense movements and careful breathing of someone stalked by a tiger. Koidanyev was doing well, and with concealed satisfaction Haskell Samoa noticed the entrance of Ezekiel Blarma, the last of the old-style rabbis who clung to superstition and rejected the new, and who now breathed anxiously as his eyes sought comfort in the most basic and familiar things—the curve of a rail, the trembling in the water column of the fountain, the arm of a chair. Clearly the things he stood for were not long for this world, and after they were gone the progress of Koidanyev would be untrammeled. At every meeting he had raised tiresome objections that made whole audiences exhale in exasperation. Rabbi Blarma heard those sighs, Haskell Samoa knew, and they weakened his heart. Without a single ally, his doubts would turn with less and less restraint against himself, and then he would die.

But when he showed up with Jacob Bayer, Haskell Samoa changed both his timetables and his target. The new man was physically a giant, perhaps some sort of bodyguard hired in the delusion that the commission was more impatient than it was. Haskell Samoa studied him. Without giving himself away, hardly turning his head, he harvested the telling details.

Jacob Bayer was poor. His clothes not only lacked luster, they were dirty and did not fit. He had no position and did not represent any institution or constituency that would have the power to challenge or intrude. Though he was large, and sometimes large people are natural leaders, he was afraid. He fidgeted, sweated in the cool of the evening, and took occasional very deep breaths. Haskell Samoa counted how many times Jacob Bayer blinked, cleared his throat, and ran his finger along his collar as if to undo a noose. By these measures Jacob Bayer was twice as nervous as a groom who is about to marry a woman whose mother looks like a blowfish. That meant that if Haskell Samoa stayed calm he could pick him off in two or three short exchanges.

But although he was nervous and not well, at that moment troops were forming on the fields of Jacob Bayer’s soul, horses were being mounted, and trumpets had begun to sound. He was afraid. He had no confidence. He had not even been able to become a rabbi, and at times of stress he had sometimes lost his ability to speak. One thing distinguished him, however, something that Haskell Samoa had missed. Jacob Bayer was constitutionally unable to shrink from a fight, and only in the center of a great battle did he shed the persistent anxiety that surrounded him as if it were aspic and he were an egg.

Bobbing over the heads of people sitting in front of Jacob Bayer were Haskell Samoa’s white beard and even features, his Eskimo-blue eyes as wet as drowning pools, and his waxen red skin. The slow breathing, the unalterable confidence, and the enthusiastic and chilling amorality of a lover of games were precisely the opposite of everything that was Jacob Bayer. “How am I going to do this?” Jacob Bayer asked himself. He despaired of his powers. His right foot jiggled back and forth so fast that his whole body vibrated until he resembled a man who was riding a motorcycle.

“T
HE PURPOSE
of the commission,” Haskell Samoa said after the
vortnig
had called it to order, “is to accept the telephone and reassess the illusions of the past. Today we have, from Minsk, the chief of the municipal telephone system, Avraham Spelchek; from Bialystok, the leading philosopher of the telephone, Zipsehr Tuchisheim; and, from the Frankfurter Technische Hochschule, Professor Katz Voolsamdrek.” The first of these betrayed little emotion at being introduced, the second less, and the third, an absolute stoneface, was calculating how to shatter and recast the proceedings with a belated burst of dominating brilliance.

Voolsamdrek was so certain of his views that a kind of maelstrom grew around him and glinted in his glassy, angry eyes as he sat with motionless false humility. Zipsehr Tuchisheim, a far less unpleasant character, appeared to Jacob Bayer to be half within this world and half without. Jacob Bayer had walked many versts and shared many dreadful habitations with this kind of wanderer, respected for the unsettling beauty of his bizarre and unfounded views. Spelchek, the least of the three, was a happy and grasping philistine.

When he considered that he was in the presence of a dictator, a fool, a madman, and a moray eel, Jacob Bayer felt his fear ebb, but how could he debate them, four at a time, before an audience of their adoring partisans? What strategy would he employ? He had never even used a telephone, and would not, therefore, have the ability to impeach its authenticity by the vulpine conversion of its most appealing attributes. What could he say when they alluded to the enrichment of those to whom he was presenting his case? If they were to be the judges, how could he prevail given that for a decade his opposition had been pouring gold into their pockets? No wonder Rabbi Blarma was despondent. Jacob Bayer turned to him as if to say, “I understand,” and Rabbi Blarma said, “You see, every meeting is the same. He has thousands of experts and each and every one is drunk on the telephone. The more I speak, the more the people hate me. It’s like a living death.”

“Rabbi,” said Jacob Bayer, “I have known defeat after defeat. I have no family. I will die in a ditch, and people will veer from what is left of me, making a new path a verst from where I lie, until nothing remains to offend them. And these people here, who will judge us, triumph day after day, and will be buried in a cloth of gold.”

“That’s good?” asked Rabbi Blarma.

“Well,” said Jacob Bayer, “perhaps it will be to my benefit in God’s eyes that I have built no walls in the dust between the portals where he stands.”

“They don’t believe in God,” Rabbi Blarma said, gesturing with his head toward the new authorities.

“But I do,” said Jacob Bayer.

U
P STOOD
A
VRAHAM
S
PELCHEK
, eyes soft with gratitude and delight as always, for even as he slept he grew more wealthy, and each morning was a surprise of big numbers. “Spectacular things have happened in Minsk,” he said. “And because what happens in Minsk tends to happen shortly thereafter elsewhere, I thought I would report to you some of the advances that you will soon enjoy. For example: When I go to sleep at night, I throw a switch on my telephone that silences the ringer and prevents me from being disturbed. The operator at the exchange solicits information from my
callers, and in the morning I have a list of messages from which I can pick and choose like a king.”