The Rabbi of Lud (26 page)

We opened the ark and took out the Torah. We removed the silver crowns and stripped the mantle from the loosely bound parchments. We were unrolling, separating the scrolls.

It was a little like waiting for a strip of leader to play out on film or recording tape. And at first, not distracted by the thick, black Hebrew letters, which always look, with their diminished, left-leaning hooks and finials like the spiky flourish on custard, as if no one not right-handed could ever have made them, it was easy to imagine that the hundred-forty-five-thousand dollars Alyeska was said to have paid for it may in fact have been its actual price.

The story of Creation came up, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Miriam, the Tower of Babel, Moses and the Exodus, Joseph and his coat of many colors, the Ten Commandments. The Sh’ma, the Mi Hamocha with its apostrophe to God—“Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like Thee, Glorious and Holiness, awe-inspiring in renown, doing wonders?”

And then its gorgeous parchment, the true, smoothly shaven, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed skin of a sheep, abruptly ended, went the blank, vague, smudged and ancient ivory of a window shade.

“We missed it. Quick,” I told her, “roll it back, take it up. We missed it.” I fed her slack off my spool. Mi Hamocha went by, the Sh’ma. The Ten Commandments, Joseph, Moses, Babel. Miriam. Isaac and Abraham. Eve and Adam. Creation spun by and was furiously swept away back into blankness, the thick yellow light of the empty parchment. “It’s not here,” I told her, “it’s gone. Tish’a b’Av dropped out.” I looked at Deborah as if she might have taken it herself, like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Then we rolled it carefully in the opposite direction, the Torah bound on its wooden poles like newspapers in a European coffee shop. It was the same thing. The dietary laws were gone, the Korh Rebellion. It had all dropped out.

“Do you read Hebrew, Miss Grunwald?” McBride, some of the Indians leaned forward. I think they could hear me now, as if, with my question to Deborah, I had started the services up again, resumed the prayers. As, in a way, I had. “Do you know what we have here? Do you know what this is?” Deborah shook her head. So I gave them fragments from the story of Adam and Eve, selections from Exodus, a piece from the Tower of Babel, a bit from the Flood, throwing in all I could remember, whatever I had by heart, of the story of poor old God-bedeviled Job.

I assume the gentiles never noticed, nor the Indians. Maybe even some of the Jews.

Because what it was, what we had here on that authentic, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed, hundred-forty-five-K sheepskin I was so taken with, were the Old Testament’s Greatest Hits!

The next, the last time, it was blank.

It was Rosh Hashanah. Deborah was gone too now. Which I might have expected. Which I did expect. What I
hadn’t
expected was that Howard Ziegler, Karen Ackerman and Milton Abish, on whom I counted to be there, if only out of the same goodwill and curiosity they shared with Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink and the Jacobsons before
their
defections, didn’t show up either. I set up my own chairs, but I didn’t care about that. That was all right. I didn’t mind that part. What I minded was the other thing, the sense I had of having actually
lost
souls.

It doesn’t require much telling, this shouldn’t take long.

McBride was there again. I recognized Spike and recognized Ambest. I spotted Anderson, I spotted Jim Krezlow. And picked out others whom I’d first seen in Anchorage. Peachblow and Schindblist. Jeers, who had failed to qualify in the jackham-mer and been flown back to Alabama, had evidently come up to snuff and was being given a second chance. (Or perhaps not, maybe he was just there to see me.) There were Indians who looked familiar, and others from earlier fiascos. There were almost no Jews at all.

Rabbi Petch, with whom I had thought to trade jobs, was there. At the Jewish New Year’s solemn beginning—it was early October; we were at Crystal Creek camp; at this latitude the fierce fall had already begun to drain the light, suck at its sparkle and leach its golds and yellows, tamping it flat, white, thin and dull as skimmed milk—he sat dressed in the hot woolen suit he’d been wearing when I’d last seen him, at the dead center of the congregation, not its southwest corner, but in its actual bull’s-eyed nub and nucleus. I was certain he huddled there for protection, as though maybe there were two neutral corners in the natural world, one for indoors and another for out.

Well.

This was the little reconditioned one, the short-handled, twenty-four-inch, ninety-thousand-dollar Sephardic. Or which would have been Sephardic if it hadn’t been blank. Which could be—who knew?—Sephardic yet, if all we needed was to get some specialist, someone checked out in the Sephardic hand the way old Jeers was checked out in jackhammer to go to work on it and copy down Pentateuch (which, considering the losses so far sustained, and providing the new guy was willing to work for nothing, would still come to something just over a hundred thousand bucks a teuch). Or could be if we didn’t have to fly in some extra-holy type first (the flower-bearded fellow, say) to re-deconsecrate the hoaxed-up sheepskin, reconsecrate it again and just set the scribe loose.

But that was something that would have to wait.

First I had to get through Rosh Hashanah.

I began by asking the Four Questions.

“Wherefore,” I chanted on this brisk Alaskan autumn morning six or so months after the Passover in the only Hebrew, with the exception of my haphtarah passage, a handful of broches and poems, and a few prayers for the dead, I had ever memorized, “is this night different from all other nights?

“On all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread; on this night why only unleavened bread?

“On all other nights we eat any species of herbs; on this night why only bitter herbs?

“On all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once; on this night why do we dip them twice?

“On all other nights we eat our meals in any manner; on this night why do we sit around the table together in a reclining position?”

When I finished I looked up from the empty parchment, looked down again quickly, and hurriedly started to recite my haphtarah passage before the remaining Jews, McBride, the other gentiles, the redskins, and the Anchorage Seven.

I might have gotten through it, too, the first Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline ever publicly to re-bar mitzvah himself, when I felt someone beside me. It was Petch.

He took over for me, going through the service without a single mistake. Though why anyone should take
my
word for this I can’t say. He even had a shofar with him and sounded it, the dark, mottled, polished ram’s horn, glazed as tortoiseshell, summoning the New Year through its harsh, amplified winds like a sort of spittled Jewish weather, brusque, gruff as phlegm. He finished the morning part of the Rosh Hashanah services and started up again in the afternoon. Then again at sundown. From the Torah that never was. I stood beside him on the platform and, properly cued, even participated by chanting the broches, reading them off the blank parchment by following the silver yad that Rabbi Petch moved along the missing Hebrew.

Through the long, prayer-filled day we carried on one of those mysterious conversations inaudible to the congregation.

“I heard about you,” he said.

“I guess everyone has.”

“Is that what you want? To be famous?”

“No. Of course not.”

“ ‘Thou, O Lord, art mighty for ever. Thou quickenest the dead. Thou art mighty to save.’ ”

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said.

“You should be. This is the first time I’ve ever been so far from Anchorage.”

“What do you think?”

“Barbarous. Worse than I thought. Will you look at that raging river? I think it’s going to bust its banks and take the bridge out.”

“That’s Crystal Creek,” I said.

“I’m taking my life in my hands. How are the Eskimos around here?”

“Very tame. Gentlemen, in fact.”

“A lot you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, “there you have me. I’m a bumpkin.” I wanted to make him understand. “Because I never took it seriously. The proposition that roughnecks could ever get into any of this. Or that God would take their disengagement seriously either. On my side in this, though why I should assume so I don’t know.”

“God’s opinions?”

“That’s right.”

“ ‘Now, therefore, O Lord our God, impose Thine awe upon all Thy works, and Thy dread upon all that Thou hast created, that all works may fear Thee and all creatures prostrate themselves before Thee.’ ”

“Since,” I said, “there was going to be an Alaskan pipeline anyway, and all the red tape and Title Nines and Tens and whatever were already in place, I thought it was a good time to get out of Jersey, put a stake together, and, if things worked out, maybe trade congregations with you.”

“Out of the question,” Petch said. “No deal. Deal’s off. You aren’t serious. You were never terrified enough. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for your stake,” he said suddenly. Then, softly, “Someone must stand between us and the Eskimos.”

Though it was humiliating to me, I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little relieved. Here was Petch with his phantom Eskimos and chimerical natural disasters ready to throw himself into the breach, to intercede on man’s behalf for God, or God’s for man’s, whichever came first, like a limited warranty.

“Maybe,” I told him, “I
wasn’t
terrified enough. Though by any normally terrified guy’s standards I’m pretty terrified.”

“ ‘Let all the inhabitants of the world perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue must swear. Before Thee, O Lord our God, let them bow and fall.’ That’s why … What’s his name, McBride?”

“McBride, yes.”

“That’s why McBride don’t fire you. You ain’t scared enough yet to blow in a whistle, you’re not quite afraid to make a wave. That’s why he’ll probably let you play out your contract.

“Oh,” he said, “by the way, is it true? Were the others like this?” He touched the yad to the godforsaken parchment.

“One contained highlights. One was written out in English.”

“No swastikas but? I heard swastikas.”

The scrolls were covered and placed back in the ark.

“No,” I said, “of course not. You think I would have sat still for swastikas?”

“A bold, stand-up guy like you? Why not?”

We finished the services. Then we shook hands and each heartily wished the other might be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. Everyone did. McBride and the Indians. Jeers and the gentiles.

I walked Petch to the airstrip where his bush pilot was topping off the fuel in the gas tank and listening to music coming in over the plane’s radio on an Anchorage AM frequency.

Next week was Yom Kippur. Petch offered to come up, but I told him there was no need, I’d use the transliterated version.

“Ballsy,” he said.

“Why do you have to go? You don’t have to go. Stay over, go back in the morning.”

He looked up at the calm, perfectly cloudless sky. “Better get out,” he said darkly, “while the getting’s good.”

“Don’t you think you’re imposing a skosh too much awe upon His works? Is it necessary to dread
all
He created?”

“Sure,” he said, “everything.”

“Safe trip,” I told him.

“Wise guy,” he said and turned to the pilot. “Excuse me, you’re not afraid you’ll wear out the batteries?” He pointed to the plane’s radio, turned high, pushing its tinny music through the headset on the pilot’s seat. Philip also liked to use his radio for purposes for which it was never intended. I recalled how upset I’d been when we were airborne again and he’d tuned in to listen to a Fairbanks station, perhaps the very one that was playing now. Only now I understood what was happening. It was the same instinct that drove them to six-pack the house, that same sporty waste and recklessness lifted to a kind of code. You started with the realization that you only lived once. Then you modified your behavior to spite the bad news. (I had a sudden hunch about the stake all of us were supposed to be putting together up there, that it was a myth, more chimerical and dreamy than any of Petch’s disasters.) Maybe that was what was so unamiable and cynical about the idea of the potlatch. Maybe it was what Petch objected to in me. Life was
so
difficult, being good, respecting God. Dread and awe, I was thinking, were hard in such an awesome, dreadful world, and I began to pray that Rabbi Petch and his pilot be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, then that Shelley and my daughter Constance were, Spike and Ambest and Krezlow and Anderson and Peachblow and Schindblist and Jeers, and all the names of all the people I could remember meeting up there—the Jacobsons, Dave Piepenbrink, Arn Sternberg, McBride, Deb Grunwald, Howard Ziegler and Milt Abish and Karen Ackerman and Philip, the bush pilot who’d almost gotten both of us killed. Which is just exactly when the song ended and they broke for the news and the announcer came on to say that there’d been a plane crash on a small island in Cook Inlet. His two passengers had survived, but the pilot, Philip Kutchik, a Fairbanks resident and Tinneh Indian who flew for the Alyeska Corporation, had been killed instantly.

I went to Phil’s funeral. A busman’s holiday, you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I hadn’t been to the funeral of anyone close in years. Not since my mother’s, not since my father’s. Living in New Jersey, in that queer, Jewless, almost unpeopled town, there’d been no occasion. Shelley and I had only a few friends, and none of them, knock wood, had died. So I went to Philip’s funeral. Though we were hardly friends and I thought him a bit of a jerk, we’d certainly been through a lot together. We’d hacked out a nest together. We’d broken hardtack, shared the last of our jerky, displaced each other’s weight—I’d bite a fingernail, he’d spit out a window. I
shouldn’t
go to his funeral? My God, we were besieged by bears, found out by the wind-wafted tang of our mutual excrement. We weren’t close. That was only proximity in the plane, but I
shouldn’t
go to his funeral?

And a good thing, I thought at the laying out. Because except for one or two pilot chums (there, it turned out, as official Alyeskan delegates), and the crash’s two survivors (who stood by the casket—which, to my surprise, was open, Philip’s face having escaped injury, its only wound being in the suddenly paid attention of his expression—and told everyone who came near, myself, representatives of the funeral parlor, who they were and that, but for the grace of God, it could have been them there in that coffin instead of the poor dumb, jargon-spouting son of a bitch with his attitudes and minimums, civil evening twilights, eminences, DF steers, pan pans and A-OKs who lay there now), no one showed up.