Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Isn’t it frozen?” said the wandered Jew. “Maybe it’s frozen. I think it’s frozen.”

“What, are you kidding,” scoffed Philip, “in weather like this? Like Opening Day in the horse latitudes?”

“I’ll go check,” the flower-bedecked man said and, limber as someone a third his age, was past my knees, had the cabin door open, was out of the plane and onto its wooden perch and dancing down the thick jigsaw of logs as if they were stairs. The next we knew he was leaping up and down on the surface of the frozen lake. “It’s solid,” he called, jumping. “It’s frozen through. If it holds me it can hold the plane. I weigh thousands of pounds.”

“I hate a showoff,” Philip muttered.

“Shh,” I cautioned.

“Yeah, yeah,” Philip said, “nevertheless.”

And before we could accommodate to the queer disparity of temperature between where we were situated in the plane and where, not fifty yards off, the lake existed in a different climate altogether, he had come back, shrugged out of his heavy outerwear (more, I guessed, for our benefit than his own), had signaled us out of the cabin and, clever as a moving man, was directing us in the this-goes-here/that-goes-there displacements and arrangements, furiously pulling the timbers away as if they hid children covered in a cave-in.

Maybe because there were three of us now. Or that one was a man with flowers in his beard. At any rate, we finished just as the sun was going down and were rolling the airplane out onto the ice when Philip offered his objection. (And me silently pleading with him: No, Philip, please. Not, Don’t bother. Because that wasn’t the point. The bother, the wasted energy. But because I was a theologian, even if only of the offshore sort. Because I was a theologian and knew that when you’re sitting in the wilderness rubbing on a Torah’s wooden handles and hocus pocus, lo and behold, who should appear but some stranger that he’s got something as out of the ordinary as chin whiskers on him that look as if they might have been cultivated by the very folks who brought you the Garden of Eden, let alone trimmed at and mowed on by magic Jap floral arrangers, and the newcomer mentions he weighs thousands of pounds though he’s light enough on his feet to jump up and down on water, you don’t whimper and whine at him or make nag-nag at your human condition.) But the last thing this Phil is is shy. Something’s on his mind, he lets you know. “I suppose,” Phil says, “you have some special way of starting up a dead, battered-up engine that’s seen its last days.”

“Turn the key in the ignition.”

“Right,” Philip said, and we got in the plane. Before you could say abracadabra it was full dark, the engine coughed and turned over, and we were roaring down the ice to a blind, treacherous liftoff, Philip not knowing if he could risk pulling her nose up now or whether he still had some room left to muscle her a bit and maybe gain a little more speed and momentum before crashing into the razor pines on the opposite shore of the little lake, when at the last minute the northern lights came on like the bombs bursting in air and it was suddenly bright enough for him to see what to do.

“So,” Flowerbeard says once we’re at cruising speed and Philip’s established radio contact again, “be it ever so humble there’s no place like home. Even the sky seems familiar. It’s good to be back. You know?”

And I’m thinking: Sure, if you live in the sky. If you live in the sky and your house is on fire. Because that old aurora borealis was blazing away in front of our eyes like a forest fire. The primary colors at kindling point. At green’s ground zero, at yellow’s, blue’s, red’s. (It was like being in the center of the midway at a state fair among the garish, glaring, glancing illuminations and kindled neon of the rides, the blazing calliopedic centripetals and centrifugals of light, in altered gravity’s dizzied sphere, hard by the game booths bright as stages. Or like hobnobbing among all the invoked wraiths of light and color like some Periodic Table of the Sun, the conjured avatars and possibilities of its bright erogenous zones and all the heightened decibels of heat, silent banging bursts of fireworks exploding like bouquets of semiprecious stone, amethyst, sapphire, topaz, garnet — the gem boutonnieres. Commanding the spicy savories of hot solstice and, oddly, remembering wicker, recalling bamboo, mindful of, of all things, summer’s swaying, loose and ropy hammock style, the interlocking lanyard of the deck chair and chaise like a furniture woven by sailors, recollecting — most queer at this altitude — the littered life outdoors, stepping on candy wrappers, condoms, the sports pages like a dry flora and everywhere setting off the sounds of localized fire like a kindled shmutz, or the explosion of all our oils and fats and greasy glitter like stored fuel.)

Or, like flying directly into his beard.

“Well,” I said, “bright enough for you?” And winced, frightened by my pointless nerve.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “you start to look forward, you really do. Gone so long, in all that cold and dark, wearing the same mittens and snowshoes weeks on end, you forget what it’s like. Civilization. The comforts and mod cons. And begin to believe God’s all there is, and that all He ever made was weather, conditions to test your mettle, ice to suffer by and humiliate your character. But now spring’s come and I remember all I’ve been missing — the amenities that make all the difference. Sterno, for example, simmering beneath good old-fashioned home cooking.”

Philip confessed he was a news junkie himself, and told us that in his position, Bloombeard’s, it was current events he’d have missed most, and that though he hadn’t mentioned it while we were still technically crash victims, when 10:00 P.M. rolled around and the Eyewitness News came on TV, he couldn’t help but wonder who had been raped, who had been murdered, whose house had burned down, who had been lost in natural disasters. He took some comfort, he said, from the fact that when we were out of radio contact with civilization, and he couldn’t get the engine to turn over, we were something of a current event ourselves.

“Oh, current events,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers dismissively. “The Four famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Mr. War, Mr. Famine, Messieurs Pestilence and Death. I’ve never been much connected with novelty myself.”

Oh? I thought. Look me in the beard and say that. “But, Tzadik,” I said instead in the rabbi mode, “isn’t it important, particularly in these times of tribulation between ourselves and our Arab cousins in the Holy Land, in Eretz Yisro’el, for us to be informed and keep abreast of the developments? To search for peace? To seek, I mean, some equitable solution to our problems?”

He looked at me for a long while before he answered.

“You’re one of these ‘root causes of terrorism’ guys, ain’t you?” he said.

“Well …” I said.

“No,” he said, “I can see it. You are.”

To tell you the truth, I was a little troubled by some things the Israelis had been doing. The world was a complicated place. There were no open-and-shut cases. There was enough guilt to go around. Of course it was outrageous that the Syrians took pot shots at us from their vantage point on the Golan Heights, or that the PLO could lob shells into the kibbutzim along our northern borders wounding and killing our children, or that they planted bombs in buses and on supermarket shelves in boxes of detergent or mixed in with the oranges in the produce department. Certainly it was wrong to hijack airplanes and harm innocent civilians. But they had their grievances. There was no denying it. The Israelis were on the West Bank now, laying foundations, making it over, turning it into the new Miami. And the camps! For generations now the Palestinians had been crammed into rat-infested quarters open to the sky, forced to live out in the weather like a city for Lears. How different were these “camps” with their running sewers from the favellas of the hopelessly impoverished or even from the ghettos of our own people?