Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Why are you saying these things to me?” I asked Tober. “I don’t know why you’re saying these things to me,” I told Shull.

“Listen,” Tober said, “we’re not the type to go behind your back.”

“Of course not,” Shull agreed. “Believe me, Rabbi, if we had a beef we’d be in touch.”

“We perfectly understand your position,” Tober said.

“We comprehend totally your point of view.”

“It isn’t as if we could reasonably ask you to fix up your eulogies.”

“Good Christ, man, you never even knew these people!”

“By the time you see them they’re already dead!”

“All you got to go on is what their loved ones tell you about it,” Shull said.

“You going to trust loved ones at a time like that?”

“With all their special stresses and vulnerabilities?”

“Though you have to, of course.”

“Even they tell you their daddies could fly.”

“Stand around in the air like a guy on a staircase.”

“It’s the age-old story.”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Tober said.

“We won’t stand on ceremonies. What it comes down to is what it came down to the last time,” Shull said.

“Arthur Klein and Johnny Charney have been asking about you again,” Tober said.

“What with death moving further and further out on the Island and up to the bedroom communities in Connecticut, well,” Shull said, “we don’t honestly see how we can continue to protect you.”

“I’m a rabbi,” I protested.

“Of course you are. I’d come to you myself for spiritual guidance. Wouldn’t you, Shull?”

“In a minute, Tober.”

“I studied Talmud. What do I know about real estate?”

“Plots,” Tober said, laughing lightly. “Not real estate. Burial plots. Real estate is something else altogether.”

“They tax real estate.”

“We believe in the separation of church and real estate.”

“Posolutely,” Shull agreed.

“It’s Klein’s opinion you wouldn’t even need a realtor’s license.”

“Charney’s too.”

“Please,” I said, rising to go, “I’m not your man.”

“It isn’t as if you’d be knocking on doors.”

“Is that what he thought, Tober, he’d be knocking on doors?”

“Leads,” Tober said, “you’d be following leads. Charney said to say.”

“All you’d have to do is close.”

“And collect the commission Klein says you’re entitled to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee.” Again I raised my imaginary cap. “Reb Tober. Reb Shull.”

It was always astonishing to me to see them work in tandem, zip through routines I knew had to have been rehearsed, the letter-perfect meeting of their minds, their rhymed intentions. Though of course this wasn’t the first time they’d introduced the subject. For years they’d been after me to work part time at Lud Realty with Klein and Charney. Indeed, though they professed to be passing along Klein’s and Charney’s views — the business about the realtor’s license, the commission, the leads — the idea of my selling cemetery lots had been theirs. They thought a rabbi would have extra authority with the customers.

Shull and Tober knew they were dealing in a depletable resource — not the dead; the dead, like the poor, we would have always with us, but the land, parcels of ground no bigger than the doorway to your room — and they were terrified. Always they were turning new ideas over and over in their heads. They entertained (and dismissed) a plan for a new, ecumenical cemetery, and offered at discount burial plot, casket, funeral and tombstone combinations that could only be purchased in advance. They worked out all sorts of schemes and drew up models of landscaping (like Simplicity dress patterns) that the men and women who would one day be buried there could not only preselect but were encouraged to tend themselves, like people working on their gardens. They would even sell you the seeds and rent you the tools.

So their overture to me in the coffee shop was not new. Even my guarded outrage reflected old positions, and each time they introduced the idea it seemed a little less outlandish.

“Goldkorn,” said Tober, “think about this, please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting for the door and stepping out into the street. “I really don’t see what there is to think about.”

“Goldkorn,” Shull called, rushing to the door and shouting after me. “Hear me, Goldkorn! There are worse parishes than Lud! If this cemetery goes belly up you could finish your career in some condo on the Palisades! You could be The Bingo Rabbi, The Theater Party Rabbi! The Rabbi of Wheelchairs and Walkers! Is that what you want? Is it? Is it, Goldkorn?”

So they were terrified. It was those indivisible cubic feet of earth they knew they were stuck with, saddled with, the seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet — just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet. Because they figured that all they really had to sell was the topsoil. Never mind that it had dimension, that it bottomed out at China. For these two, everything after those first twenty-eight-or-so initial square dirt feet was throwaway, pure loss leader, the mineral rights to which they could neither retain, sell nor give away. Hence the advance purchase plans, collaborative eulogies, all the layaway obsequies; hence the seeds and garden tools and elaborate landscaping arrangements. Hence their tandem, bicycle-built-for-two hearts.

But however alike Tober and Shull appeared to be in business, privately they were as different as day and night.

Emile Tober was the night.

Tober was a big, troubled, crafty and, on his own, secretive, taciturn and probably insane old man who was driven by a single goal — putting together enough money to guarantee that his son, Edward, once Tober was out of the picture — that’s how he put it — would be provided for for life, a life, Tober was convinced, that would not only outlast his own and that of Tober’s wife but the lives, too, of Emile’s and Sonia’s three other children, Edward’s brother and two sisters, as well as their kids’, Ed’s unborn nieces and nephews, should they ever be born, which, frankly, might never happen since they, the siblings, were not married yet and, so early were they enlisted into the service of their daddy’s obsession, that they not only believed in it and shared in it but were actually given over to it as much as the father, and who (not even counting Edward), the funeral parlor guy’s grown kids — ninety-six years old collectively, which was the only score Tober ever kept, and the only way he ever kept it, growing three additional collective years per annum which, should all of them live, would make them ninety-nine years the following year and one hundred and two the year after that one, only Edward getting the benefit of an individuated, customized, bespoke birthday — thirty-eight, according to his father, of the darkest, dizziest years in the recorded, concentrated history of man — therefore actively contributed to it, that hard-earned fund, store, reserve, hoarded, hope-chest and war-chest, nest-egg kitty, call it what you will, which, or so ran his dad’s mad theory, would, if only it were allowed to grow big enough (if, that is, only God saw fit to allow all of them to live longer, if only He found them better jobs, kept inflation down, improved interest rates and guided them into safe, terrific investment opportunities), might finally permit — twenty-nine, thirty-two, thirty-five, sixty-one and sixty-four were their actual ages — one of them to die, so long, that is, as the rest of them didn’t slack off and continued to chip in with their fair share, until, if God saw fit, they would perhaps have saved enough to permit another of them to breathe his or her last and thereby leave off putting by, so long, that is, as it was the surviving, least good wage-earner He took, and so on and so forth until the time, or so old Tober figured, that the nut was at last large enough to cover just about whatever might yet come up, leaving the by-that-time fatherless, motherless, brotherless-and-sisterless kid to all the devices in the armory of his protective attendants and retainers. Which had better be considerable.