A Blessing on the Moon (2 page)

I recite the morning prayers outside in the town square, then sit on a bench and throw bread crumbs to the Rebbe.

“Hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz,” he squawks out the blessing before pouncing on the little I have been able to find for him. He hops onto my shoulder and cackles reassurances into my ear. He turns his head, squinting through a hard yellow eye, to judge the effect his words have on me.

I nod, I listen, but only from habit. I’m too numb to really hear.

“And will you migrate, Rebbe?” I finally ask. “Do crows migrate?”

The question has been burdening my heart.

“God willing,” he caws. “With God’s help. If it’s God’s will.”

And he flies up to perch on the ledge of a high roof, spitting a shrill cry from his throat.

The Rebbe is not his usual self, that much is clear. Before, you could always see him, dashing through our narrow streets, his black coat flapping behind him, a holy book clutched against his spindly chest. He was everywhere at once, counseling, joking, wheedling, pressing Talmudic points into our children’s stubborn skulls. Now, I crane my neck to look at him hopping about the roof of the Hotel Krakowski, his bone-like feet curling and uncurling around its rusted gutter pipe. How distracted he looks, how ruffled and how weary. He doesn’t understand our new condition, I fear, or its dangers. Were it not for a small collection of pebbles I’ve taken to flinging at them, for instance, the Rebbe might easily have been devoured by any number of neighborhood cats. “Shoo! Go away! Scat!” I cry. “Are you crazy?” I shout at them. “Do you want to
eat
the Rebbe!” And they slink off, chastened, licking their wounded paws.

The soldiers seem to like our town, with its sleepy squares and the many bridges crossing its rivers. The worst of their work is over and they can finally relax and enjoy their stay. I stroll among them with my cane, searching for the ones who shot us, but their faces are unrecognizable. Gone are the tight grimaces, the tensed piano wires that stood up in their necks when they barked out their commands. Now they are all sunniness and light, and even when they catch someone hiding in a garret or a cellar, they are able to beat and kick the poor wretch happily
and shoot at him as though it were all a trifling canard, without unpleasant yelling.

This is how it was with Lipski the butcher. The woman he had traded his house to for a hiding place reported him at once. And who can blame her? With Lipski curled into a circle below her staircase, she was in danger and her family as well. But the soldiers danced him out in that jolly way of theirs, flushing him so merrily from his hutch and into the bright streets that even Lipski had to laugh, as they beat his head into the curb.

In the late afternoon, a thin man in a homburg stands upon a hastily erected platform to give a ringing speech. He congratulates our town on its spirit of heroic cooperation.

“Never before …” he pounds his delicate fist against the podium.

“So often in …” he cries.

“Young men giving …” he thunders.

I try to listen, but the words are lost on me. The crowd pushes forward eagerly. Men from the region’s newspapers jot down notes in little books, to print in their papers the following day. So busy is everyone listening to the speech that no one notices a large black bird swooping down, like a shadow, from the trees to peck at the speech-maker’s eyes. A purplish iridescent whirl descends about the poor man’s hat and he raises two bloodied fists to protect his shredded cheeks. Those near to him laugh, once, as people will, before realizing the true extent of his distress. Recovering their somberness, they
move in from all sides, offering their help. The mayor, various townspeople, more than a dozen soldiers swat at the Rebbe, but no one is able to stop him as he tears the man’s finger from his hand and flies towards the forests, a golden wedding band glinting in his beak.

“Rebbe! Rebbe!” I run through the crowd after him, the guns shooting over my head. Away he flies, deep into the forests, far from our little town. That I am able to run so fast, a man of my age, it’s difficult to believe, even with the aid of my stick. The trees, black against the darkening sky, scratch at my collar and tear at my neck. I keep tripping over roots and stones, the forest is tangled and so dense.

“Rebbe,” I shout up at him. “You have stolen something that doesn’t belong to you, something that must be returned! This isn’t proper!”

But on he sails, high above the treetops, ignoring my every word.

I follow him into a small clearing, where he begins gliding in circles, his wings long and stiff. He lands unsteadily near a small pond and struts on his wiry legs to the water’s edge. A twitch of his head and the ring is tossed in with a gentle liquid
plink!

“Rebbe,” I say, laughing. “What a terrible thief you are! If you had wanted to conceal your crimes, you should have dropped it from the air above the middle of the pond. But now, let me see what have you stolen.”

I reach into the water.

The blues and the pinks of twilight stain the surface of the pond, and through them I see, for the first time since I was shot, a reflection of my face. One side is entirely missing, except for an eye, which has turned completely white. Barely hanging in its socket, it stares at itself in an astonished wonder. My grey beard is matted thick with blood, and broken bits of bone protrude here and there through the raw patches of my flesh.

I look like a mangled dog carcass.

The Rebbe squawks.

“Why have you shown me this?”

“Chaim, Chaim, Chaim,” he shrills in a piping tone. “Never in my life have I behaved like such an animal! What has happened to me? And look at you! Look what they have done to your face!”

“Rebbe,” I say, “Rebbe,” comforting him.

He caws softly. I suppose he is unable to cry. I nuzzle the top of his black head against my partial cheek.

Inside the ring, I see, is a small inscription.
To Johannes From His Margarite, Undying Love
. I slip it onto my finger so that I will not lose or misplace it before it can be returned.

Shadows gather in from behind the trees, inking the forests, until everything is black. Wolves snicker somewhere not far off. Together, the Rebbe and I offer up our evening prayers. He sits upon my shoulder and we walk home beneath a bright canopy of stars.

That night and for many nights after, I am unable to sleep. I toss and turn in Sabina’s little bed, haunted by the queerest dreams. Not visions, as one might expect. Instead, I
feel
the approach of others near me, reaching out to me from all sides. My arm is tucked beneath my head, dangling off the bedside. Playfully, they grab onto my hand, curling their fingers around my own. This tickling awakens me. I sit up, laughing, barely understanding why. “There they are again,” I say. It’s a little frightening as well. The covers fall to my lap and I peer curiously into the room, searching every corner, but all I see are blue abstract blotches moving about in the moon-filled dark. My eyes adjust to the dimness and the shapes disappear altogether.

The Serafinskis sleep throughout the house. Relatives and family friends fill every bed, every sofa, every chair. From all corners, their monstrous breathing rises and falls, vibrating through throats so thickened with sleep, it sounds like a mass drowning.

I replace the blankets over the Rebbe’s fluttering chest and stand for a moment at the nursery door, wide awake, listening. My fingers fumble uselessly in the pockets of my nightclothes, worrying a small bead of lint. When I was alive, often on a night like this, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d make my way downstairs to the kitchen and grind up beans for coffee. Ester, beside me in our bed, would barely budge as I noiselessly extracted myself from her grip. A tall woman, she shrunk with age and grew stout. The lines in her face were deeply cut and, even in her
sleep, she scowled. Ten children had hidden themselves in her body and, over the years, at regular intervals, one by one, they crawled out. Sarah first, then Itzhak and the others, Edzia, Shlomo, Izekial, Miriam, Hadassah, then Laibl, Shmuel, and Eliahu. My first wife, Ida, could have no children, and died trying.

I navigate the passage to the kitchen easily in the dark. Despite all the furniture and crates carted through my foyer, the house is remarkably unchanged. I have no idea where they’ve stowed everything. I pass all their children’s bedrooms. Their bodies lie twisted, like shipwrecks, in the sheets, as though a great sea had tossed them there. Down the back stairway, to the bottom floor, I press lightly against the kitchen’s oaken door to muffle its notorious creaking. Foolish, I know, these precautions. Why take them? Who am I afraid of waking? It’s beyond their ability to harm me now. Still, what good would rousing them from their drunken slumbers do? Let them sleep, let them sleep. It’s enough, having the house to myself for a night. Soon, morning will pry its way through their windows, forcing its light into their bleary eyes, and soon enough, the harsher light of their own bad conscience will surely stir them with its sharper prick. After all, how long can they continue to live so gaily in another man’s house before one of them sobers up and convinces the others to draft a letter immediately to its rightful heirs?

In the kitchen now, grinding the coffee, it occurs to me to write this letter myself. With the Rebbe’s help, perhaps I can get a note to one of my sons. Sign it with one of the Pole’s names and include the
lease and the thick stack of legal papers. Who would ever know? Surely the Rebbe will aid me in posting it. He’s always finding bits of string here and there, useful odds and ends, and many things for tying up a parcel.

I sit against the kitchen window, contemplating my plan and gazing up into the night sky. My coffee is long cold. Apparently, I cannot drink it. One more of the disadvantages of being dead. I had spiked the cup with whiskey, hidden years ago in a cupboard, which not even the villagers with their drinker’s noses had managed to sniff out. If only I were drunk, then I would dance around the parlor in my nightshirt, circling around the villagers as they lie, snoring, with their legs and arms sprawled across the sofas and the chairs. Ah, what a fright I could give them! If only they would see me. Whirling around and around, I accidentally knock over a lamp from a side table with the bottle in my hand. “Hunh? Wah?” one of them mutters. He looks about him in the dark, his face lanky with sleep. But he only shrugs and closes his eyes. He clacks a heavy tongue against the roof of his mouth and is snoring once again.

I ascend the stairs and make my way to the nursery and crawl into bed, hoping that the Rebbe might be awake, so that I may tell him of my plans for the letter to my sons. But he isn’t there. The little bed is empty and a small, warm depression is all that remains. Because he complains that I move around too much in my sleep, he has been building a nest for himself behind the old rocking horse, where it is unlikely anyone will find it. I move the horse and a tin ball and a small mechanical
monkey to see if he is there, but his unfinished nest is empty as well. There is a note written in a scrawl I cannot decipher. A sharp cry pierces the night outside the open window. The curtains move. With my hands on the casement, I lean far into the purple darkness, but can see nothing. I stare up at the full moon and, to my astonishment, it falls from the sky! The orange ball simply sinks and disappears behind the trees.

In my office, I have found a ledger book beneath a number of things in the back of an old desk drawer. Now that the Rebbe is gone and I have no one else to talk to, I have taken to crossing the courtyard and spending my nights here alone. The office is exactly as I left it. Or so it appears to me. If someone has changed it in the meantime, it’s impossible to say how. As always, the maps of the river routes, along which we sent our lumber, are still in place, still in their frames along the walls. My wooden humidor still rests upon my large oak desk, although, of course, without breath, smoking is a bitter and a useless frustration.

Here, no one intrudes and I can sit with my feet on the desk and lean back. I can stare out over the Niemen and the Bobre and watch the dawn begin above their moving waters. Or I can sleep on the daybed, undisturbed.

Even if I oversleep, the new owners, of course, do not see me. Usually, I’m up and out well before their workday commences. But once or twice, I shuffled out of my office as many of my old employees were shuffling in. For a moment, so vivid is the impression of being alive and among them in my old place, that I very nearly greet them.

“So you survived, did you?” I can almost hear them say. Mendel the office clerk takes my walking stick, and the staff manager my hat. “Welcome back, welcome back! Everything is as you left it. Grab the boss a cup of coffee, would you, Felice? Hurry up! Hurry up!” and my life resumes, exactly where it left off, as though I had not died, but only journeyed to see my daughters in Warsaw or in Lodz.

“So you survived then, did you?” the staff manager asks ironically, taking my hat and handing my stick to the clerk. He follows me to my office, inadvertently stepping on my heels. “I have daughters, too, as you know, as you well know,” he says. “And grandchildren, grandchildren! How they can devour you! But you survived, and thank God for that. Visits to one’s relatives can be treacherous, treacherous.”

I imagine myself joking with him, not impatiently as usual, my mind already half on work, but warmly, even sentimentally, as though the tiring familiarity of his worn jests could somehow knit my broken body and return me to my former life.

But, no. On those mornings when I have slept too long on the daybed and have arisen to find the office staff settling in for another day, I pass among them unnoticed, unfelt, possibly unremembered, not unlike all their colleagues who disappeared that day into the pit. To
them, it is no different than if I had sold the business and taken half the workers with me. We are gone. Simply. No one cares where.

I try to put these thoughts in the ledger book on the nights when I can’t sleep. I sit at my desk, threading through its pages, my right hand caressing each sheet slowly, each line with a methodical and even stroke. Its first few pages are dotted with numbers, we had only begun the new year, and many of the pages towards the back have children’s drawings on them, left, I’m certain, by my grandchildren. When my own children were small, I allowed them to draw and paint in the unused portions of these books. Round lemony suns. Blue rhomboidal houses. Winged horses grazing in fields of red wheat. It became a family tradition. It did no harm as far as I could see but, for some reason, it distressed my accountants, Shumski and Matulski.