A Blessing on the Moon (8 page)

I douse the cloth in the water and bring it to my face, rubbing the cakes of clotted blood from my chin and the crevices of my cheeks.

I stand and the water plashes from the holes in my body like streams
from a fountain. The Rebbe wraps me in an enormous towel that is toasty and warm. It smells like Sabbath bread and soon I am dried.

“Gather your things, Chaimka,” the Rebbe announces in his piercing squawk. He fluffs up the feathers around his neck. “We leave immediately.”

The sun finally rises, staining the drifts of snow a salmon pink, the color of poison berries. The Rebbe circles overhead. I grab my winter coat and my rustic traveling sack, and off we go, out the courtyard and onto Noniewicza Street, deserted now in the early hours of this freezing winter day. The houses blindly witness our leavetaking through windows layered in icy sheets, their sills and eaves frosted with pale drifts. I clap my hands together for warmth and search through my pockets for my woolen gloves and a thick woolen scarf.
Gifts from my Ester, she knitted them one summer when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed. Which child she was carrying, I can’t recall, but it was a difficult, an impossible confinement.

High above, the Rebbe turns in a great wheel, leaving Noniewicza Street to soar above a crooked alleyway. I hesitate to follow him, glancing one last time towards the facade of my court, my shoes sinking into the snow. How small it appears from this distance, a flat rectangular box, no larger than a coffin. I walked through it, not an hour ago, but surely for the final time, its hallways creaking, its walls breathing softly, seeing it not as it is now, filled to the rafters with drowsing Poles, stacked high in their beds like cords of wood, but as it was then, years and years and years ago, when I first stepped foot into it. A bright and clear morning, that was. The builders had only just completed their work. I had commissioned the entire court, with its apartments and its storefronts to rent, saving the largest apartment for ourselves. I snuck in early to hang mezuzahs on the doorposts, to secure a blessing for the house. Every room was empty and expectant.
Here
, I thought,
we will live.

Not more than an hour ago, before the sun was up, I removed the leather traveling sack from the closet near the front entryway and strapped it across my chest, like a rustic. I hesitated, not knowing what to carry with me. A thought occurs and I step, first in one direction, then in the next, until remembering the photos hidden in my jacket. These, I secure in a pocket of the bag. I worried that the blood might have ruined them, but they dried out quite nicely. Wrinkled,
yes, a little frayed about the edges, but no worse, really, for the wear.

In Ola’s room, I kneel against the bed, careful not to awaken her cousins who have claimed it. They sleep, the three of them, embedded in the mattress as deeply as the lice. Running my hand across the floor, I find in the valise beneath her bed, the toy compass and the broken spyglass, which she had so prized. I place them also into the sack. In the kitchen, I steal a loaf of raisin bread, left over from the mourners’ feast, to make a surprise banquet for the Rebbe. Fending for himself, he has surely grown weary of the seeds and worms and other staples of an avian diet. I wrap the bread in paper and, tucking it into the traveling sack, I remember the ledger book hidden in my office across the courtyard. So out the door and into the brisk dark morning, past the timberyard and bare gardens, to the big warehouse. Following its ramp into my office, I dig with my hand into the cushions of the daybed, finding nothing. I ransack the drawers of my desk, scattering their contents, tossing them wildly about, but the ledger isn’t there. A feeling of panic floods my nerves. I kick myself. I should have known better than to leave important documents lying about! I’m forgetting everything!

Utterly dejected, I sit at the desk and notice how unpleasant the cushions feel. Of course! I had hidden the ledger inside the cushion of my chair. At the time, I recall, it seemed the only place. Why? I no longer have any idea.

The Rebbe squawks and I must hurry to catch up with him. I have
been daydreaming. We are already outside the Jewish quarter. I’m trailing a thin line of blood in the snow, but otherwise, I feel up to the journey, if a little creaky and stiff in the joints.

The town disappears behind us.
You’ll never be back,
a voice whispers in my ear. I march beneath a thick mesh of trees.
Never, never, never
. I sing a little traveling song, to cheer myself. The Rebbe sails overhead on a nearly silent wind.

A thatch of snow grows too heavy for the tree branch supporting it. It breaks and falls with a loud and wooden crack.

Our first stop is the pit of buried Jews. How different the place appears in winter, so quiet and so still. It’s difficult even to find the raised mound beneath its many thick quilts of snow.

“Rebbe,” I call up. “If I’m not mistaken, here is where they killed us.”

Although it’s difficult to tell.

The day is gleaming with the sun reflected everywhere in the bright clean snow.

The Rebbe stretches his wings and glides easily to the ground. He lands with such grace, you’d think he’d been a crow his entire life. Because he is light, he doesn’t sink in, like me, but skates across the ivory surface of the drifts, leaving two lines of arrow-shaped clawprints as a trail. His small head bobs rhythmically forward and back, forward and
back, in a black blur, and he hunts and pecks through the drifts, searching out our hidden grave.

I watch quietly. I know better than to interrupt him when his concentration is so fierce.

Often, at shul, when his prayers grew especially fervent, those of us near to him had to move away. Otherwise, we might have burned up, God forbid, in the holy fires that surrounded him.

He leaps into the air.

Flying low to the ground, the Rebbe circles the perimeter of the grave seven times, wheeling to the right, then wheeling three times to the left. He screeches out odd phrases of Hebrew and Aramaic, phrases I have never heard uttered in this fashion, nor in this order, and never in a voice so metallic and strange.

I sense a slight trembling beneath my shoes, and soon the earth is shaking madly below my feet. Blocks of shining snowdrifts rise up, as if pushed, and crumble all about. I grab onto a branch to steady myself and accidentally bite my tongue.

“Rebbe!” I shout, spitting out lines of bloody saliva. “The ground is churning!”

But I have lost sight of him.

The air erupts with an agonized groan. I have to cover my ears with my hands, so terrible are its cries. I cower, on one knee, behind a birch tree. Above me, I can hear the Rebbe’s squawking among the mad chatterings of birds as they depart from their nests in frantic numbers.

With a great ripping, the ground splits open like an old pair of trousers.

Inside the circle described by the Rebbe’s flight, first the snow and then the frozen dirt sinks in and falls upon itself, like white and brown sugar being sifted in an enormous baker’s bowl. Puffs of silt rise into the cold air, as though someone had dropped an open sack of flour. The entire world disappears.

“Rebbe?” I say, coughing. “I can’t see anything!”

From nowhere, the Rebbe lands upon my shoulder with such force, he nearly knocks me on my face.

I clutch at my troubled back, trying to straighten up. “Be careful, Rebbe, can’t you!” I say, surprised, and alarming myself with my pique.

He crows, “Well, Chaimka?” puffing up his little chest and seems to arch an eyebrow, although I know that cannot be. He has none. Still, he gestures me forward with his wing.

I hoist myself up on my cane and, not without qualms, hobble nearer to the lip of the opened grave. Through the grey and white marblings of clouds, the sky lets down dusty shafts of light. I wave a handkerchief in front of us, attempting to see through the thickened, grainy air. Moving my feet without lifting them, I probe the ground with the rubber tip of my stick, searching for the drop.

By degrees, the dust settles, and small faces begin to appear behind its thinning veils. The Rebbe and I stand above them at the edge of the decline. Arms raised to block the day’s brightness, they bend their necks to look at us, thousands of ragged men and women, their dark
circled eyes blinking against the too-dazzling light. What a curious sight we must make, a tall, heavy man in a dark suit with a black crow perched upon his shoulder. But no less curious are they! Although the harsh winter seems to have slowed their decay, their milk-white bodies show evidence not only of rot, but also of mutilation. I recognize a face or two. It isn’t easy. The soldiers’ lime has eaten into their skins, gnawing deep rouged gashes into their chins, into their cheeks. Their arms, raised, leave black shadows slanting across their pale, disastrous features.

But certainly there’s Reb Yudel the candlemaker. We nod to each other, a silent greeting, and I see that he’s missing an arm.

With a dirty hand, Basha Rosenthal wipes a tear from a lost eye. Her child plays at her broken feet, without its jaw.

Rivke Siedenberg, my old seductress, bravely holds her disemboweled viscera in with two unsteady arms.

A man I can no longer identify uses two pincer-like fingers to delicately extract a worm from the cavity in his blackened cheek. He pulls and pulls at its slithering tail, curling it in loops around his little finger.

“Reb Chaim!” he waves an arm at me. “Greetings!”

My stomach heaves into my throat. I whistle through my teeth, sickened by the stench. I bring a handkerchief to my nose and attempt to nod in reply.

The Rebbe leaves my shoulder and lands upon the arm of a thin man whose greenish skin shows through the tatters in his suit.

“Rebbe?” the man squints through the thick rheum covering his eyes. “Is it really you?”

Joy splits his cracked lips. His teeth are yellow and broken. Those near to him crowd in to be closer to the Rebbe. The greenish man raises the Rebbe, in two hands, for all to see.

“Ah,” he happily drools. “What a wonderful world indeed!”

I reach down, bending on my knees, and offer my hand to Reb Elimelech. He scrambles up the side, clinging to my lowered arm. On his feet now, he brushes a colorless hand through the tangles of his long and silvery beard, combing crumbly balls of dirt and frantic insects from inside it. We look into each other’s unbelieving faces, our hands clamping onto each other’s arms, and soon we are hugging and weeping and laughing all at once, although, pressed in against his chest, I can’t help noticing how rotten and decomposed he smells!

I struggle to escape his grip, but it’s useless. He’s too excited to see me.

“Will you look at you, old friend!” he shouts, his arms around me like a vise. “Chaimka!” Mercifully, he holds me now at arm’s length for a better look, grunting. “So they shot you in the back of the head, did they?”

I choke out the words, “Yes, and through my belly and chest as well.” I slip away from him and stand at a distance, as if to demonstrate
my wounds. But even at this remove, his stench is overpowering. “Later,” I say, “in private, I’ll show you the holes.”

He nods, grimly.

“And you, Reb Elimelech?”

“Through the heart, I think,” he probes a nervous hand into his sunken breast. “I’m not certain. It’s been so dark, I couldn’t check.”

All about us, the prisoners have shaken off their lethargy. Prayers are whispered, thanks is loudly offered up. Their confusing freedom overtakes them in its rush. Everyone tries to climb out of the grave at once. Children scramble up its uneven slopes, against their parents’ wishes. A rope is fashioned out of shirts and pants, and various ones fight to be the first to climb it.

“One at a time!” “Out of my way!” “Stop pushing, you!”

Holding on to Reb Elimelech’s sleeve, I search the crowd, looking past unfamiliar faces for more familiar ones.

“So Chaim,” Reb Zundel slaps me on the back, “where have you been hiding?”

“How are Ester and the children?”

“Did you look into those trolley fares?”

Fruma Leibe asks the first question, brushing mud from the knees of her long skirt, Reb Elchonon and Reb Mendele the second, standing before me, arm in arm.

Hopping mad, Reb Zev Wolf gives chase to a young boy who has run off with his severed foot. Reb Elimelech’s eyes crinkle. He can’t help laughing, and neither can the rest of our little group.

“Ah, what a morning,” he says, and we all sigh with sadness and relief.

But soon the dead Jews begin to shiver. Their ragged, infested garments offer little warmth against the cold. Many are barefoot and must leap from foot to foot to keep their toes from freezing.

“I told you to keep track of your socks, Yankel, but do you listen?” a mother berates her child, who runs from her in tears.

Despite these discomforts, we gibber-jabber happily, everybody catching up on everybody else’s tale. The sun sows its light, like seeds, into the snow. The day feels like Tashlich, when, at the new year, we’d walk, the entire town, to the river to cast our sins into its accepting waters. Of course, today, we’d only find it frozen.

I sigh and look about.

Did they really have to kill us all?

A sharp whistle pierces the din, and we are silenced. Raising my eyes, I locate the Rebbe high on the branch of a frosted larch. He swoops through the air, circling and descending, landing finally on my shoulder, again with surprising force.

“Time to leave, Chaimka,” he pipes into my ear.

Digging his claws into my coat, he springs up and is aloft, turning south in a wheeling arc.

“Landsmen!” I shout, cupping my hands about my mouth. “We are heading south! Stay together, be of good cheer, assist one another, and with the help of God, we will all see each other there in a few short days.”

I tie a blood-soaked handkerchief to the end of my walking stick, holding it up like a flag for everyone to follow. We trudge off, Reb Elimelech and myself in the lead, the little town of Jews behind us, each one trailing his own thin trickle of blood. If you were the Rebbe, floating high above us, what you would see would be a great river of blood cutting a swath through the frozen winter hills.