A Blessing on the Moon (11 page)

“Because the ground is frozen.”

I am tired and cross after so many exertions on the head’s behalf and so I refuse.

“You at least have clothes,” it persists, whining. “How can I spend all night up to my neck in the snow!”

“You should have thought of that before you joined the army! Before you attacked me!” I turn my back on him.

“Heartless,” it mutters. “All of you.”

“What was that!” I snap, standing. I point a warning finger at the uneven part in its hair.

It apologizes quickly.

“You apologize,” I say. “Of course, you apologize! But only when it’s in your advantage to do so! Everything you say is corrupt! I can’t stand listening to you any longer.” And I move as far away from him as I can.

“Don’t leave me here, Herr Jude!” The head rolls after me, knocking into my feet. I nearly trip over him in the fading light.

“I’m frightened!” he shouts these words up at me, spitting snow from his mouth. His hair is wet, from perspiration or from his travels in the frost, it’s impossible to tell. He bites into my shoe leather to keep me near, and I am forced to shake him off with a few sharp kicks. He bounces a short distance across the field once or twice before knocking into a rough spruce.

“Was that necessary?” it shrieks.

“You, I’ll see in the morning,” I say and turn away from him to make my bed against a sheltered oak, but the little sounds of his weeping are more than I can bear.

Standing, I rip the woolen scarf from my neck.

“Such nonsense!” I exclaim.

He sniffs, “Thank you, Herr Jude,” as I wrap the scarf in loops around the puckered circle of his neck. “I only hope my body has found someone equally as kind.”

“At least you can be certain it hasn’t hanged itself from a tree in despair!”

The head is silent for a moment.

“There’s no reason to be so cruel.”

“Please.” I finish tucking it in. “I have no idea why I am helping you. Don’t make it worse for me by constantly speaking!”

I’m about to drift off to sleep, when I feel the head nudging against my arm.

“Herr Jude,” it whispers, snuggling against me.

“What
now?
” I manage to say through a drowsy veil.

“Are you sleeping, Herr Jude?”

Annoyed, I turn over to peer at it through the darkness. It has rolled next to me, pulling my scarf along in its teeth. Because my head is also on the ground, we are, once again, face to face.

“I couldn’t sleep,” it says.

“No?” I say.

“I can’t get comfortable.”

“I’m sorry,” I say

“I generally sleep on my stomach,” it says.

The stars shine through our canopy of bare trees. The head sighs, rolling back, so that its eyes may search the Heavens.

“As a boy, when I couldn’t sleep, my grandfather would take me in his lap,” this the head confides to me. “He worked making Mercedes Benzes. I’d sit in his lap, he’d bring me hot cocoa. The smells of the oil and the grease from his work would mingle with the chocolate and the honey.” The head sighs. “Ah, what I wouldn’t do right now for a cup of hot cocoa!”

“It would run out the bottom of your neck and spill all over the ground,” I say, sitting up stiffly and yawning.

“Herr Jude,” the head whispers to me. Without my realizing it, it has inched its way into my lap, as though it were a child. “I have a story to tell you.”

Where, I wonder, are my fellow Jews? Where are they lodging for the night? And what sins have I committed that I am parted from them and must sleep instead with this sentimental murderer, forced to hear tales of its boyhood and its youth?

“Once upon a time,” it begins.

And there’s no dissuading him.

“We were chasing two Jews through the woods. Not like you, Herr Jude, but the other kind, the funny-looking ones.”

I ask him to clarify.

“With the long coats and the funny hats and the corkscrew sideburns sticking out from in front of their ears. It was comical just to see them run, they look so much like penguins.”

How painful it is to listen to this head.

“What do you call them?”

How little he knows!

“We had rounded up a whole pack of them, but these two … Hasids …” he tries the word out for himself, “… had somehow managed to escape. That they thought they could flee from us was pure folly, of course. We had our dogs. We had our torches. They made for quite a spooky effect, the light rippling through the trees, the dogs sniffing and pawing. We fanned out, some of the fellows and myself, to surround them, but after a bit, I seemed to be the only one still on their trail. I have no idea to this day what happened to the others. Again and again, I found and lost them, my two penguins, the woods were so knotted, so thick. Finally, I caught them. They were right in front of me, not more than a stone’s throw away. They had reached a river and it was impossible to cross.”

Poor mamzers, I think.

“I’m about to shout out to them, to order them to stop, to surrender, when what do we notice right there on the bank? All three of us. We saw it together, at the same time.

“Can you guess it, Herr Jude?

“Not a rock, no.

“Not a cave.

“Exactly. A boat. A small boat, but a boat nonetheless. Someone had tied it to a tree with a rope.

“So, Aha! I think, they’ve arranged to meet others, have they? Well, we’ll see about that!

“Fortunately I hadn’t shouted out or in any other way betrayed my presence, for now I could wait to arrest or shoot them all, whatever was necessary.”

Whatever was necessary.

“And I crouch down and wait for them, for these others, the ones who have left the boat, to reveal themselves, but they never do. As far as I can tell, there are no others and the boat is there purely by chance. And the two Hasids, Herr Jude, as you call them, what do you imagine they do?

“No, they don’t take the boat.

“You or I certainly would take the boat. But not this odd pair. Instead, our little penguins sit upon its edge and debate whether it is permissible,
permissible!
, according to the Laws of Moses, for them to take the boat.”

With these words, I am again a boy in cheder, learning the Law on
a cold winter’s day. All the hairsplitting arguments, such headaches they used to give me!

“One of them is inclined to take the boat,” this the head tells me. “But the other is not so sure. For one thing, they do not have the necessary texts. The one who is inclined to take the boat insists to the other that without the holy books to consult, the only way they can know for certain if they have the right to take the boat is if they
do
take the boat and survive, and then, having survived, consult the books to see if their actions were permissible.

“And if they discover that taking the boat was not permissible, he reasons, because they will have survived, they can at least make reparations to its rightful owner.

“The second one is not so sure. ‘What if we take the boat,’ he says, ‘survive for now, but perish further upriver? Reparations then would be impossible.’

“‘A good point,’ the first has to admit, one he had not, in his fear, allowed himself to see.

“‘Plus,’ says the second Hasid, ‘the boat may very well have holes in it.’

“‘From where do we derive such a supposition?’ says the first Hasid.

“‘Why else would someone have abandoned it?’

“‘True,’ the first must ruefully admit.

“‘Unless it were useless, it’s safe to assume they wouldn’t have left it here.’

“‘Aha!’ the first one exclaims. ‘But if it
is
useless, then it’s perfectly permissible to take.’

“‘But why would we take a useless boat?’

“I’m lying in the underbrush,” the head tells me, “utterly fascinated and entranced. I’m hanging on every word of this remarkable conversation.

“‘Look,’ the first one says, ‘if the Master of the Universe, Blessed be He, sees fit to place a perfectly good boat in our path in an hour of terrible need, surely it was not that we might perish without consulting the holy books regarding its permissibility!’

“‘Could be, could be,’ the second Hasid excitedly pulls on his beard.

“‘It’s an insult to the Law not to take this boat!’ the first Hasid says. ‘It’s an insult to God, God forbid, not to take this boat!’

“What rot! I think to myself, what specious reasoning! They’re back exactly where they started! And yet, to my utter amazement, this last argument prevails and the two eagerly help each other into the small boat.”

“And did it have holes in it?” I ask reluctantly.

The head laughs and I can feel its laughter on my thigh. “Did it have holes in it? Herr Jude, be sensible! Of course, it had holes in it! Why else would anyone abandon a boat during wartime?”

“And so it sank, then, I suppose.”

“It sank, yes,” the head chuckles, shaking itself. “Of course, it sank. Only not downward into the river, as you might expect, as I myself
expected, but upward, into the sky. The holes, it seems, lightened the craft, so that it was able to leave the river and sail into the night air, which I’m told is rather thick at certain high altitudes.”

“And then what happened?” I can’t help asking him.

“And then, so engrossed was I in the spectacle before me, two Jews sailing into the Heavens in a boat full of holes, that I didn’t see the thick partisan creeping up behind me with his axe and, as everyone knows, he chopped off my head, and that was that.”

This story sounds vaguely familiar. I wrack my brain, trying to recall where I may have heard it. Then it comes to me. Did I not tell Ola a similar tale concerning two Hasids who sail to the moon and who end up pulling it from the skies? But that was a bedtime story, one which I myself made up!

“Where did you hear this story?” I ask searchingly, pulling the head to me.

Misunderstanding the fervor of my interest, he is pleased to have it nonetheless.

“I saw these things,” he insists. “It happened exactly as I have related it.” His eyes shine with eagerness, reflecting back my questioning gaze. “But why are you so interested?”

“A coincidence is all,” I say, and I drop him on my lap. I’m not about
to confide the private details of my personal life to a severed head. “It’s only a coincidence.”

“It’s nearing daybreak, isn’t it, Herr Jude?” he says, squinting into the sky.

By degrees, the sky has begun to lighten. Above the tree line and through the braided weave of branches, you can discern a growing halo of blue inside the black, but it’s deceptive. If you blink, it disappears.

“Herr Jude,” the head repeats, persisting so, that I must fold my arms against my chest. Already, even from our short travels together, I can recognize that tone in his voice, when it loses its edge. He is after something and has left my lap in order to address me more directly.

“What now, little head?” I sigh.

The head clears its throat or at least the upper reaches of it.

“Should I die, Herr Jude,” he says, “I mean really die—not this intermediate state of wandering—will you bury me?”

Bury him?

“No,” I say, “I can’t promise you that.”

“I understand,” and he looks away.

“The ground is frozen. It will be ages until the spring. I have no tools or shovels.”

“Of course.”

“It would be unfair of me to promise.”

He licks his lips.

“Perhaps you have wondered why I kidnapped you.”

I am grateful to him for this change of subjects.

“Ah yes! This preposterous kidnapping!” I say with a false heartiness. A lot of good it has done him. “To tell you the truth, I assumed it was merely something your people did by rote, like calisthenic exercises.”

The head grimaces. In the increasing light, I can make out the expression as it distorts his face.

“I have done things, Herr Jude, during the last days of my life, that I never dreamed possible, things which, as a child or even as a young man, I would not have believed myself capable. I don’t need to detail them to you. You are only too familiar with the kind of thing I mean. Although I am dead, I fear I haven’t much time. After all, how long can I sustain myself without a body? I can’t see anything, although I’m used to that. I’m nearsighted, as you know, but this is worse. I’ve tried to convince myself that it is only a matter of finding my glasses, but I can’t lie to myself any longer. My sight is dimming. Is it possible that I am really, finally, going to die? Oh, Herr Jude, it seems like ages since the peasant chopped off my head. My body is lost. We’ll never find it, although it was kind of you to humor me. You must believe me when I tell you I kidnapped you for a reason. Not for glory or for country, nor from habit, as you suggest. I assume you are being facetious, although you are right, you are right to chastise me. Only hear me out! I had been watching you for days. For days! It’s true. Perhaps because you were less rotted than the others, I was able to persuade myself that I recognized you from that morning. I needn’t explain, I’m sure, which
morning I mean. Perhaps it is foolish of me, Herr Jude, to believe that I killed you. But I do. There. It’s been said. And is it really so unreasonable an assumption? You look familiar to me. And when I noticed you yesterday, alone, on the edge of your camp, I seized the moment. A ridiculous enterprise, considering my state! And yet, and yet …”

“What do you want from me?” I say.

“I need to be forgiven, Herr Jude. Forgive me. Won’t you?”

So this is the face of my killer.

“I sicken myself when I think of the things I have done!”

Taking him by the ears, I return him to my lap. He is shivering and perhaps also weeping. It’s hard to tell. Apparently, his tear ducts have been severed from the source of their waters in his body, and so if it can be called a weeping, it is a dry weeping. His eyes are cloudy and vague. He is nearly blind and he squints past my face with a tentative, imploring, slightly embarrassed smile on his long and moving lips.

I wrap the scarf tighter around his neck for warmth.

“Little head,” I say, “when you killed me, you took everything. My home, my wife, my children. Must you have my forgiveness as well?”