Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“I’ve been meditating for almost an entire winter solstice now. From ice field to ice floe. From glacier to iceberg. I’m getting a little antsy — may Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He, take it in His Head to forgive me — waiting for spring to come on.” (So, I’m thinking, who is this guy? He seems to have ruled out Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He. Maybe he ain’t God either. And ha ha, I’m joking, relieved, because as I always say, I/Thou or no I/Thou, you don’t want to go one on one with Him.) “Too much darkness just isn’t good for you,” he said. “Let there be light. Know what I mean?”

“And what’s all this ‘almost human odor’ of our crap crap? He still hasn’t said.”

(“Philip,” I said, “please.”)

“No, no,” Philip said, “I mean it. I don’t have to take this kind of garbage from a hitchhiker. Boy,” he said, “you run into these guys every time you set your plane down in this country. I don’t know where they come from. You could be lost, you could be behind the beyond, wherever, and there they are. Waiting for you. Cadging rides. Oh,” he said, even more agitated now than when he’d lost control of the plane and we were about to crash, “always hair-trigger and up-front with their worth-your-while’s and willing-to-pay’s. But drop the fare off on his turf and you find out quick enough just what their worth-your-while is worth.”

(“Philip, please, did you see his beard?”)

“A fad.”

(“Philip, his whiskers are flowers!”)

“So? A passing fancy. Once crew cuts were in, then it was sideburns down to your lips.”

“No,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers, speaking as if he hadn’t heard a word of Philip’s pouted rant, my own whispered admonitions. As if they’d never happened. “So much dark … After a while you forget why you’re out there. On the ice, on the glaciers, ice fields, ice floes and icebergs. Why you came in the first place. Exercising the fancy-shmancies, holy adaptations and dreamy propitiaries that it takes to live. The kill-only-what-you-eat commandments, practicing, I mean, all the waste-not/want-nots and wearing your food for fur and leather too. Doing the live-off-the-land economies — feathering your nest with the rare sea-bird’s jewelry, the ptarmigan’s, the jaeger’s, the eider’s cushy down. At one with the seal and musk ox, with otter and bear and whale modalities, recycling very calcium itself to scratch a scrimshaw into teeth, into shell and bone. Habituating yourself to all the conservationist’s far-fetched recommended daily allowances, the cosmetics of environment, giving yourself over, I mean, to the elements — the flavors of air and temperature, the shading of salmon and the bushel-per-acre yield of the tundra.”

“These are among my favorite things,” Philip said.

(Philip!)

“But it wears you out,” he said. “Concentration breaks down, breaks up in the dark. (The dark ! Not some proper, heroic blackness you could rub yourself against like braille.) You can’t remember color. You’re too busy yogi-ing over your bloodstream and rearranging your metabolics so you can see what it feels like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few inches a day with the wind in your face. Isn’t this so, Rabbi?”

“Well, I …”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s so. I stake my reputation it’s so. So, when I caught that first, unmistakable whiff of what was almost certainly ka-ka and quite possibly human ka-ka, I perked up pretty quick, I’m here to tell you.”

“Yeah, well,” Philip said uncomfortably, making the first shuffled, awkward cues of leave-taking, the preliminary gutturals and throat-clearings of departure, though clearly there was nowhere to go in that wilderness.

“I started out three days ago,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers.

“Three days ago. You’ve been tracking our scent for three days? That’s some discriminating whiffer you’ve got.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m anxious to get back to civilization.”

“Oh,” Philip said, “civilization. Sorry. We’re not headed in that direction.”

“Because,” he said, “I’d had enough of darkness now, and of found frozen shelters carved right out of the very bottom of wind and temperature. Of my fur and leather ways and deprivations and being perched in such high-up altitudes of the world like a stylite on a column. So naturally when I first smelled your feces, Rabbi Goldkorn”—he pointed to the side of the plane where I’d been relieving myself—“and yours, Philip”—he pointed to the pilot’s little mound—“I asked myself: ‘Human? Is it human? Could it be human? It smells human.’ Oh, there were trace elements of digested fish and game, of course, but you’d expect that up here. So I broke camp and started out. I followed your trail and, sure enough, the closer I came the stronger the spoor, until I thought I could make out the freeze-dried vegetables, cashew mix, dried, high-energy fruits, beef jerky and chocolate of your emergency, survivalist meals. And, what do you know?” he said. “Here we are!”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said, “Rabbi, you observe kashruth?”

“No,” I said, “why?”

“Nothing. The Checkerboard Square’s all right, but most other survival chow’s trayf.”

“We don’t keep kosher even in New Jersey.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re consistent. It’s a point in your favor.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It depends,” he said. “It’s also a point against you.”

“Are you,” I asked, “are you kosher?”

“Oh, me ,” he said, “I keep house on an iceberg. Well,” he said, “fellas, I’m looking forward to getting back. What’s with the airplane?”

“We crashed in the trees,” Philip said. “The engine won’t turn over.”

“Maybe the battery’s dead.”

Philip rolled his eyes.

“Give it a while. Maybe the engine’s flooded.”

“Sure,” said the pilot, “and maybe it got all bent out of shape when we crashed. Here,” he said, “look,” and raised the cowl to reveal the bashed, stricken metal underneath. “That lake ice isn’t firm enough to hold us anyway.”

“Well,” said the fellow in the flowers, “I won’t say I’m not disappointed, but now there’s three of us. When you’re looking forward to civilization again, three at least is a beginning.”

We were back in the plane. It was night and the man with the flowered beard was talking. Loading us up on Alaska, her legends and lore. (Without once alluding to the mystery right there on his jaw. That filled the cabin with fragrance, actual individual pulses of scent that flashed on and off like some code of the botanical. Freesia, rose, chrysanthemum, fern. Lilac, carnation, orchid and iris. Peony, jonquil, spearmint. How, I wondered, had he ever tracked us? Distinguished between the rival claims offered up beneath his nose?)

He told us of a night so cold fire froze. The flames, he said, were like icicles, you could break them off. And of a summer when the light was so intense that a little of it continued to brighten the night sky into the dead of winter. He related a story about a muskeg swamp he once came upon in the tundra country above the Arctic Circle where the moss was so thick whole herds of caribou and reindeer were drawn to it, entered it and remained there, unable to move in the deep, soft muskeg (now effectively a sort of quicksand), feeding in place until they died. And spoke of bonanzas you don’t hear about — the great salmon, king crab, fur, timber, musk ox (for its qiviut, its remarkable underfur, four times warmer than wool but a quarter wool’s weight), seal, scrimshaw, whale and totem-pole rushes. There were tales of the Indian tribes: the seafaring Tlingits who had amassed not only a fishing fleet but a navy as well, who had first smoked salmon and discovered lox, the Haida Indians of Prince of Wales Island, and of the Athapaskans, and of a tribe whose men speak one language and the women another. He spoke of the Aleut Eskimos and of their great bush pilots who, as a matter of pride, not only refuse to use the radios, radar equipment, and other navigational aids the FAA requires they carry in their planes, but won’t even refer to their compasses, or even to the stars, to guide them, relying, to find their way, on the simple fact that they are natives, that they were there first.