A Blessing on the Moon (23 page)

I awaken to the pounding of hammers. The sky is black and distant, stained with a milky swirl of stars.

Have I slept the whole day through? It can’t be possible!

I sit up, feeling rested and refreshed, if a little sluggish. The moon, low in the field, is half-buried and glowing like a yellow shoe.

So it has neither waned nor freed itself and orbited away.

I rise and move cautiously towards it. Its light is splendid, dazzling. It is immense and I feel like an insignificant dwarf approaching a recumbent queen.

“Look who’s risen from the dead, so to speak,” Kalman cries out. He is perched atop a complicated scaffolding, near its apex.

Zalman calls down from the opposite side, “Greetings, Reb Chaim.” They have braced themselves to these beams with heavy belts. A series of long pipes stretch above the landlocked moon, connecting the scaffolding on either side. The construction must rise nearly sixty feet above the ground. I have to crane my neck to take it
in. A thick cable is thrown over the center pipe and a large circular weight dangles from it like a watch on a chain, as though a mesmerist were preparing to hypnotize a giant.

Beneath it, embedded at my feet, the moon glows like a golden beetle stranded on its back, an embroidery of dark veins woven across its belly.

Zalman and Kalman cease their hammering and shimmy down their poles, smiling the serene smiles of accomplishment.

“We tried to awaken you,” Zalman says, “but the task proved beyond our meager capabilities.”

I sit upon an overturned bucket at the crater’s edge. My right leg trembles from disuse. There’s nothing I can do to make it stop. I was worn out, it’s true.

“You built all this in a single day?” I say, when they are near enough to hear me. It’s impossible!

“With God’s help,” they say.

“And the piping?” Unsteadily, I approach the base of the structure for a closer look. “Where did it come from?” With a curled fist, I knock upon a section of the bluish pipe, sounding out a hollow ring.

Have they built this monstrous contraption out of bones?

Kalman catches up with me.

“As soon as evening came, Zalman released me from guarding the moon. I, too, had slept the entire day. Like yourself. Only I can’t tell you the sorts of dreams I had. Try resting sometime with the moon for a pillow. In these dreams, Reb Chaim, I was nothing like myself. There
were circular hoops, like bracelets, with beads on them, one black and one white. And they winked at me! And then each hoop jumped into a pair of shoes!”

“But what holds them together?” I say, pushing with my hand against the structure.

Kalman leans in towards me and grins. He removes a work glove with his teeth. “That, only Zalman knows.” He raises his head and scratches his beard, looking up at their construction. “But I suspect it’s a higher physics of some kind.”

According to Kalman, Zalman worked tirelessly through the day, carrying heavy tools and machinery, sleeping less than ten minutes every six hours. Although his hair is quite grey, he appears younger than when I first met him, and muscular beneath loose-fitting clothes. Even with the thick belt of tools hanging from his trim middle, he shimmies easily up and down the scaffolding, pulling himself along its narrow beams with a giant fish hook in the crook of his arm.

We stand beneath him on a pier of wooden planks, which the two Hasids constructed while I slept. I can’t believe I have missed so much! The pier extends over the pit, so that we may now reach the moon without stepping on anybody’s bones. Only the upper surfaces of the planet and its two horns have been disinterred, the bulk remains hidden
as deeply as before. Its buried light shines through the bony sticks surrounding it, illuminating them, seemingly, from within.

From Zalman’s height, the whole thing must look like a melon rind tossed upon a garbage heap.

Kalman hands me a section of chain, and, at Zalman’s signal, we carry the stiff coils, unwinding them from a giant spindle, beneath the arches of the scaffolding and to the end of the wooden pier.

“Careful, Reb Chaim,” he says. “It can be a little slippery at first.”

He plants one foot on the moon’s glassy belly and offers me his hand.

Perhaps he sees my hesitation.

“Someone must stay on the pier,” he says, “while the other binds the moon in chains. I have not only already walked upon it, but have slept roped to its horn as well.”

“All right, all right,” I say glumly, wondering why I ever agreed to help in this lunatic adventure? Of what concern is their moon to me? Even were we to return it to the skies, still my nights would be as black as a printer’s apron! Nothing will take from me my grief. And yet, I have to admit, the prospect of walking across its lustrous surfaces is alluring. As a boy, I used to dream of it.
An excellent hiding place,
I childishly thought,
if only I could reach it.

And so I put my hand into Kalman’s rough glove and bind a coil of chain around my shoulder. We count together and he yanks me forward, gripping my arm as I pass. Bracing my back, he pushes me along, my feet slipping and sliding, my arms flailing in great wheels.

“Well?” he cries, dropping his hands to his knees.

I am unprepared for how giddy the experience makes me. I can’t help laughing. The moon’s buttery slopes are icy, slick. “It’s like walking on a frozen pond!” I call to him over my shoulder. My legs shake and tremble, my shoes can find nothing solid to cling to.

Zalman calls encouragements from his high perch on the narrow beam, but to raise my head to search for him, I’m sure, would throw my balance off entirely and send me sliding over the edge into a tumult of exploding shards. So with both arms out on either side for balance, little by little, I adjust my movements, until I’m walking with mincing steps and a straightened spine. The secret, I’m delighted to learn, is skating. Soon I am zooming beneath the scaffolding and across the lunar terrain. How extraordinarily light I’ve become! My body isn’t as bulky here as it is on the earth. Even the heavy chain, once it enters the moon’s atmosphere, loses much of its weight. For the sheer sweet joy of it, I drop its heavy coils and gambol and caper like a frisky skater, leaping and spinning around the craters in clumsy figure eights.

“You see, you see!” Kalman calls from the pier. “Now imagine dreaming through that feeling!”

Zalman says, “Because I have absolutely no idea how long you can stay on the moon before freezing into ice yourself, I suggest you stop cavorting, Reb Chaim, and immediately get to work!”

Chastened, I skid back to where I left the chain. Already, it has begun to stick and freeze to the crescent’s icy skin.

Kalman skates over with a pair of gloves so that I may pull at the
metal without causing pain to my hands. He brings as well my long woolen scarf, which I drape about my neck. He is panting from the exertion and his breath clouds up in steamy puffs.

Zalman lowers a bucket on the end of the dangling cable. Heads raised, Kalman and I watch it inch its way down like a mischievous spider. Inside we find an assortment of little clips and bars and a harness as well.

“With these,” says Zalman, “you will be able to support yourself against the underside.”

“You must secure the chain,” Kalman adds, “wrapping it across the two horns, so that we may hoist it up.”

I look from one to the other. Surely they are jesting.

“This, you want
me
to do?” What do they take me for, a muscle man? “I’m old,” I say, “and even as a youngster, I never went in for gymnastics of any kind.”

Zalman sits upon the narrow beam as though upon a mighty horse, his legs dangling on either side. “Reb Chaim,” he barks, “everyone must do his part!”

He is not standing on the lunar surface with its loony disequilibrium, and so the situation does not strike him as hilariously improbable as it does me. “Because you are dead,” he says, “you will be able to last longer in the dark underparts. Kalman and I would freeze there in an instant.”

Kalman nods sympathetically. “Have you never climbed a mountain perhaps?”

“Never,” I say.

“It’s not unlike mountain climbing.”

“Which I have never done,” I reiterate, shouting disagreeably so that Zalman may hear.

From Zalman’s dangling bucket, Kalman removes the harness, which he straps through my legs and around my waist. With a metal clip, he buckles me to the long chain.

“This will free your hands, for the climbing.”

He tucks two additional clips, one into each of my coat pockets, and gives them both a little pat.

I feel as though I’m being diapered by a disapproving nanny.

The bucket offers other treasures: a pair of pointed hammers, two railroad ties, boots with rows of spiked teeth across the toes and heels.

According to Kalman, I am to curl like a worm along the upper and lower surfaces of the moon’s great horns, digging in with my feet, hoisting myself along with my arms, and pulling the chain behind me like a thread.

“The difficult part,” Kalman says, “will be pushing through the bones.”

He leads me to the edge.

“We suggest you proceed feet first,” calls Zalman.

“With your belly flat against the moon.”

Zalman assures me, “This is the most efficient procedure.” He is growing impatient with my delays, I can tell.

Kalman returns to the pier and to the large spindle on which the lengths of chain are coiled.

“I’ll be here at the spindle, letting out the chain. Should anything untoward happen—”

“Which it will not!” interjects Zalman, from above.

“Which it will not,” repeats Kalman, “but if, God forbid, it does, I have only to reel you in and you’ll be perfectly safe again on the pier.”

There is no gentlemanly way out, and so I kneel on the far side and look over the moon’s glossy edge. It is cold against my knees, and the sensation makes me laugh. However, under Zalman’s scrutiny, I suppress my hilarity. I turn, so that I’m facing Kalman, and lower my abdomen against the moon’s slick hide. It burns with a sharp sting and I very nearly lose consciousness.

“Easy,” Zalman cautions. “Take it slowly. Allow your body to adjust.”

Kalman makes the chain taut, until it pulls over my head and against my back. I take the railroad spikes, one in each hand, and force them into the crunchy soil. My body is now pressing entirely against the moon. What little blood I have rushes to my head. A tickling from someplace beneath the surface caresses my belly in waves. I can feel it through my coat and my vest. It’s as though a thousand tiny fish were
puckering my skin, their tingling kisses bringing with them a pervasive warmth. I cry out involuntarily.

“What?” shouts a concerned Zalman.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” I shout back.

I descend an arm’s length, crunching knee-deep into the sea of bones.

Narrowing my eyes, I lower my head in, chin first, my mouth tightly shut, my own skull disappearing beneath the others. The skeletal mass is not as dense as I had feared, and I am able to sink into it, scrambling down and clinging to the moon’s glistening side with my spikes.

“It’s only me,” I whisper. “You needn’t be afraid.”

Her gentle light, through the weave of dry bones, is not without its beauty. Skulls stare at me with darkened sockets, grimacing through gnashed or broken teeth. With each of my blind steps, bones rattle and crunch, shifting to make room, their sounds reaching my ears as though through water.

“You cannot stay here,” I tell her. “You mustn’t punish yourself. What good does it do, hiding in such a desolate place?”

Down, down, down I go, and it isn’t long before I’m dangling beneath her jagged spine. I release the spikes from one side, attaching them to the other. My arms and my elbows ache. “Don’t drop me,” I
plead. Hanging by one arm to her chine, I reach into my pockets for the pointed hammers. Arching my back, I struggle, biting in with my spiked boots, throwing hammers wildly above my head.

The first revolution around the thickest part of her girth is, of course, the longest. Girdling her in chains, I am up and out finally, crawling along on my hands and knees, collapsing upon her bosom.

Kalman and Zalman cheer. Kalman steps near to assist me.

“Should he take a break?”

“Do you need a break, Reb Chaim?”

“How does he feel?”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine, fine,” I cry, rotating my arms and sitting up, while Kalman dusts bone fragments from my clothing.

With Kalman’s aid, I tighten the first loop of chain around the hooked tip and fasten it with clips. Kneeling again, I climb around again, and then again, three revolutions, with Kalman easing the chain carefully from his spindle. I repeat the process on the other side, inching myself along the underbelly with my spikes and my hammer tongs, until the moon is laced in six strong loops of chain.

“And now how do you feel, Reb Chaim?” Zalman shouts down.

“Very cold,” I say. “But, curiously, also warm. There’s a quality of warmth underneath, from inside.”

“From the source of its light, I imagine,” he says.

Kalman unlocks the chain from my waist, he removes the harness, and I’m invited to sit on the pier with my feet in a bucket of steaming
water, wrapped in five heavy blankets. Kalman slides agilely to the center of the moon’s curving surface. There, he stands on a stepladder and raises the chain high above his head, linking it to Zalman’s suspended hook.

Zalman descends from the narrow bar. Kalman skates back to his place on the pier, carrying the stepladder with him. Hastily, I dry my feet and return them to my shoes. I don’t want to miss anything. Except for a soreness in my upper back and forearms, I’m feeling quite myself again.

The two brothers-in-law practically run to the edge of the forest where, with a pair of needle-nose pliers, Kalman makes the final adjustments on a grimy motorized winch. Where all this machinery comes from, I have no idea. I cross my arms and wait for further instructions. Zalman murmurs a blessing and then, bracing his foot against the machine, pulls the ripcord with all his might. The motor starts up with a barking cough, before shuddering back into cold silence. Zalman yanks the cord once more, but the machine only splutters reluctantly. On the third pull, some essential thing ignites within it and the motor roars like an impatient bull.