A Blessing on the Moon (21 page)

Enough, Chaimka! Enough!
Oh, how they’d shout at me!

And now, instead, I’m forced to listen to these Hasids noisily pounding the table with their soft and delicate fists. So much noise from such soft hands!

I can’t help longing for my solitude and my forests, for my bed of nettles and twigs.

Immediately following Havdalah, before Kalman has had time to resign himself to the new week and its work, and as I, myself, clear my throat in order to tender my perfunctory thanks and make my escape as quickly as possible, Zalman springs from the table and bounds ferociously over to the little bookcase with the speed of a man half his age.

Irritated by his brother-in-law’s abrupt dismissal of the Sabbath Queen, Kalman begins to protest. “But Zalman!” he shouts, still holding the braided Havdalah candle in his fist, smoke rising in curling lines from its many wicks.

I make a futile attempt to reiterate my gratitude and my farewells, but neither of them will listen to me.

Bending at the knee, Zalman finds the book he is searching for and
returns with it to the table. With a long finger, he points into an open page.

“Reb Chaim, here is something you must see!”

“Zalman!” snaps Kalman. “Why are you rushing him so! Let him sit, let him sit. I’ll bring the schnapps.”

“Reb Chaim, Reb Chaim!” Zalman taps his finger impatiently against the page.

Wearily, I move to him and look where he is pointing.

“Well?” His eyes burn, gauging my response.

Although the Hebrew characters are familiar, it is a book I have never seen. From the odd diagrams that litter its margins, I conjecture that we are gazing into the pages of some obscure and perhaps even dangerous tract. I lift my eyes, meeting Zalman’s. He raises an eyebrow. Its bristling hairs arc in the middle.

“You’ve assumed correctly, Reb Chaim. This is one of the most secret of our most secret books.”

I don’t know what to say. For whose benefit are they staging this ridiculous melodrama? Surely not for mine.

“Schnapps anyone?” Kalman enters from the back, a bottle in the crook of his arm, carrying three glasses between his splayed fingers.

Zalman ignores him and I look longingly towards the door.

“By dedicating myself exclusively to its study for the past fifty years,” Zalman says, demanding my attention, “I have been able to translate it into a system of coordinates, whereby I have produced … this map.”

With a flourish, he removes a large scroll from behind the bookcase. Placing the holy book to one side, he unrolls the heavy vellum and pins its corners to the tabletop.

Resisting the urge to run, quickly, through the doorway and back into the forests, I fold my arms behind my back, nod my head, and glance politely at his scroll.

It is a map like no other I have seen.

There are no sketched representations of topographical features. Instead, what I see, laid out cleanly before me, resembles an unwieldy mathematical equation. Long lines of numbers cross the sheet at random angles. Unsteady columns of numerical values lean precariously in every quadrant. Great curving wheels of words whirl and turn in compressed spirals. Two-headed arrows crisscross everything in waves. The phrase
patterned energy
is underscored with violent blue hatchings. Zalman seems to have constructed a code using different colors: black, purple, violet, yellow, orange, amber. At the center of its four edges, he has sketched, in lurid detail, the heads of horrible demons, stiff tongues thrust forward through mocking grimaces, their eyes ablaze, and below each, the legend:
Beware! Beyond this boundary—madness!

“I don’t understand,” I say, perplexed.

“Of course not,” says Zalman.

“Me neither,” Kalman chimes in politely.

“There are days I wake and have forgotten everything myself. On such days,” says Zalman, “I must purify myself through prayer and fasting and ritual immersion.”

“Sometimes ten a day,” Kalman interjects.

“Only then does my work again begin to make even the barest of sense to me.”

“He prays all day, all night. ‘Zalman,’ I say to him. ‘Eat a little something. You’ll grow faint. It isn’t healthy.’”

“Here,” Zalman points to a large X with his bony middle finger. Black hairs curl in a wiry riot around its knucklebone. “Beneath the portion of earth represented by this part of the equation lies the moon, buried, or so I estimate, some seven to twelve meters deep. It’s taken me fifty years, but I’ve found it, I’m sure.”

“With my help,” Kalman adds quietly, eyes brimming with pride.

“But why haven’t you set out to retrieve it?”

Zalman’s head drops. He folds his arms and stares glumly at the floor.

“We were given strict orders to wait.”

“Whatever for?”

“Why, for you, Reb Chaim.”

For me?

“It was the Rebbe’s final instruction to us.”

“‘Do not leave this hut until after Chaim Skibelski has arrived.’”

“He was very strict, very clear.”

“‘Do not leave this hut until after Chaim Skibelski has arrived.’”

“Thank you, Kalman, I think that is sufficient.”

My anger rises. “But he could have told me to come here in the first place. My house is not five versts away!”

“You can be sure,” says Kalman, unsuccessfully hiding a grin beneath his mustache, “if the Rebbe said to wait, it was with a purpose.”

“Don’t be angry, Reb Chaim.”

“You think we didn’t wonder for fifty years why we were required to stay in this hut?”

“But how did you eat, how did you gather food, if you were forbidden to leave?”

“Baskets of food were left on our doorstep.”

“Wine and other drinks, we found at the well.”

“And besides,” says Zalman, “we have no exact idea where we are. Without a compass, this map is utterly useless.”

They have lived together in solitude for more than fifty years. Is it so unusual, after such time, that neither has to speak to make his thoughts known to the other? Still, the private look they share when I tell them, “I have a compass,” is alive and brimming with relief. And although I sense that they are not surprised at this turn of events, the pleasure they take in it has caught them, to some degree, unaware.

“Zalman!” Kalman strokes his red-grey beard, pleased as a cat. “Imagine that! Reb Chaim has a compass.”

Zalman’s hands hug one another with anticipatory glee. He pulls at his vest and coat, as though preparing to face a dignitary.

“I’m afraid it’s a mere child’s toy,” I say, searching the hut for my bag and finding it tucked away in the corner by the bookshelf. “One of my daughters shared it with a friend. But it works. Or at least I think it does.”

I pour the contents of the bag onto the table in search of the little toy. The pile of rocks glows like a small mountain of tarnished silver.

The compass and its companion, the telescope, I find at the bottom of the sack. Wiping the gleaming dust from its glass face with my sleeve, I offer it to my hosts.

“Here,” I say. “You may keep it.”

“These stones,” says Zalman, but his speech fails. He stares at the rocks in silence, ignoring the compass I hold out to him.

“Where did you find them?” Kalman finishes their sentence.

“They seemed to lead here from my old house. I followed them to your hut. As though they were a trail.”

Zalman has to sit. Pensively, he pinches his nose between his thumb and the middle knuckle of his index finger.

“All these years …” he says. “All my work … and I never imagined this day would come …”

“Exactly as the Rebbe has foretold!” Kalman addresses this comment to no one in particular, raising his hands in a gesture of helpless amazement.

“You see, Reb Chaim,” Zalman’s eyes swim in tears. “Oh, but you have no idea.”

“They’re moon rocks,” Kalman is barely able to whisper these words.

Zalman slaps his knee and stands. “We must begin tonight!” He rolls his map into a long cylinder and binds it with a blue silk ribbon. Kalman removes a silver key from a chain around his neck and, with it, opens the lock on a moldy wooden chest. From here, he extracts several long shovels and pickaxes.

“As for food,” says Zalman, “we will have to do with what God provides for us along the way.”

They help each other out of their long Sabbath coats and into short traveling jackets, exchanging their round streimels for black fedoras, which hang on pegs near the door. Each places the other’s hat first upon his own head, before realizing his mistake.

When they turn to me, their faces are alive with anticipation and adventure.

“Gather your things, Reb Chaim,” Zalman gestures to the pile on the table.

“What’s this?” Kalman holds up the collapsible telescope.

“A child’s toy as well. Unfortunately, it’s cracked.”

“Bring it, bring it all the same,” calls Zalman, already out the door. “You never know what might come in handy.”

“But I’m not going,” I say.

I sit at the table. Zalman must come back through the door, his brow in a knot. “He’s not what?”

“You’re not what?” Kalman asks, smiling as though at a joke he does not understand.

“I’m not going.”

“He says he’s not going.”

“Kalman,” Zalman glowers at me from the threshold. “Explain to him that he must!”

Kalman brings his soft fist to his lips. He coughs to clear his throat. He rubs his hands together and searches the ceiling as if looking there for his words. “Reb Chaim,” he scratches his head. “But how may I put this?”

“Get on with it! Get on with it!” barks Zalman. “We haven’t the time for this nonsense!”

“You haven’t the time!” I shout at him. “You haven’t the time! You spend the war safe in the lunar atmosphere while the rest of us are dying! For that, but not for this, you had the time!”

Zalman crosses and uncrosses his arms. Kalman places his hands meekly in his pockets.

“Don’t act so pious,” I sneer. “It was thanks to your own greed that the moon was lost. Don’t think I haven’t heard the story!”

“Reb Chaim,” Kalman smiles sweetly, as though I were a village idiot who barely understood the intricacies of his shoelaces. “Fifty years ago, when he brought us to this hut, the Rebbe assured us that although we would eventually find you, we would have to wait a long, long time. We were young men when we came here. That was fifty years ago. The Rebbe took me aside, Reb Chaim, and this he said to
me: ‘When Reb Chaim arrives, he will hate you bitterly. He will pretend to enjoy the Shabbas, but all the time he will be longing to get away.’ He said, ‘He will give you the compass, but he will refuse to accompany you. However, you must insist upon it. You must tell him there is no choice, much is at stake, including the World to Come.’”

“The World to Come!” I sit thickly in my chair. I, too, cross my arms, not wanting to listen.

But Kalman persists. “The Rebbe authorized me to say on his behalf, ‘Do not despair, Chaimka. Soon everything that needs to will make sense.’”

He bends so I may look into his face.

“Reb Chaim,” he tells me, “the Rebbe said we should be happy.”

So what am I to do? Bury myself in their bed, hide beneath its straw? For how many days and to what end? If the Rebbe insists, who am I to argue?

I gather up the compass and the little telescope and leave the moon rocks shimmering in their pile upon the table. Looking around the tiny hut, I kiss its mezuzah and am again in the forest, following these two madmen to the moon’s hidden grave.

We march through the forest, our shovels and push brooms and pickaxes held high against our chests. A clanking toolbag dangles on a strap
from Zalman’s shoulder and he has tied two metal buckets to his waist with a rope. Kalman pulls a large vat of seawater on a wheeled pallet. The liquid rolls precariously from rim to rim, but so far has not spilled. He totes, as well, a long ladder on his shoulders, his head in the empty space between two rungs. Everything they need they seem to find along the way, hidden here and there, among the trees. They have made me responsible for a tan canvas bag stuffed with pulleys and winches. This I secure across my left shoulder and my rustic’s bag across my right. The thick rope, of which I am in charge, I keep in a coil around my waist.

Our progress is slow.

Periodically, Zalman unrolls and consults his map, comparing its numbers to the dial on our compass, adding figures to his equations with a short red pencil. At these times, Kalman and I unburden ourselves of our load and sit upon tree stumps, the silence broken only by Kalman’s explanations of Zalman’s activities. These he whispers into my ear, but because he keeps his voice so low, out of fear of disturbing his brother-in-law, I have no idea what he is saying. Rather than asking him to repeat himself and risking a disturbance, I nod, as though I have understood, and direct my attention, in an interested manner, towards Zalman’s back. This seems to please Kalman who will once again wrap himself in a snug and tight silence, leaving me in peace.

Zalman’s calculations may take hours to configure. At other times, he has only to scan the map, referring quickly to the compass, and we must rise almost as soon as we have settled in, gathering our heavy
gear and marching off, our buckets and shovels, our pulleys and winches clanking noisily. We must sound like a trio of overburdened knights to anyone who might hear us.

That my old and broken body is capable of carrying such a frightful load is an astonishment to me. I barely make use anymore of my cane. Still, I keep it, if only for balance and as a reminder of who I once was. Also it’s good for cracking open walnuts, which I do for Zalman and Kalman, when they are forced to eat.

Sleeping does not seem to have a place on our itinerary. Zalman’s concentration is furious, intimidating. Staring hawk-like through the gnarled trees, somehow he is able to discern in their shadowy groves our necessary path. Neither Kalman nor I have the nerve to approach him in this state with a request as self-serving as sleep.

And so we stumble on, through the forests, until our drowsiness, pulled down by its own weight, turns into an alert dreaming, in which our bodies seem to function on their own. My sense of time is, once again, unreliable. The night lasts forever and we march deeper and deeper into it.