Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Yes,” he said. “I can see it all over you. You want to be fair.”

“Well, it’s their homeland, too. And, strictly speaking, they were there first, you know.”

“Fuck them,” he said.

“Please, Tzadik,” I said, “this is not an argument.”

“And finders/keepers is? Let me tell you something, kiddo. There are higher principles than finders and keepers.”

“Hey,” said Philip, “I think I’m getting a Fairbanks AM station.”

“Because you don’t kill someone over finders/keepers. A homeland? A homeland they want? What,” he said, “they’re imprinted to deserts, allergic to ice? Let them live on the glaciers. Let them have a go at making the icebergs bloom.”

This was some rebbe we had here. Suddenly I was telling him all about myself, what I did in New Jersey.

“A rabbi is not a thoracic surgeon,” I said. “He is not a proctologist or an ob-gyn man. He doesn’t set your bones or flush out your ears. But all I do is say prayers over dead strangers. Tell me, Khokhem, is it right for me to specialize like that?”

“No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. It doesn’t make a difference if they’re strangers. Or that you don’t feel a genuine anguish for their loved ones. Grief is only a form, a kind of a courtesy. It’s something we have to do. It’s a sacrament. Not like sitting shiva or saying Kaddish or putting pennies on their eyes. Just grief. Grief itself. If you’re properly shocked when you hear bad news. If you’ve got”—he waved his arms about at the invisible mountains of ice beneath and all around us—“sand.”

And then, while Philip tapped his toes to the music coming in on his headphones from the Fairbanks radio station, Flowerface launched into the wisdoms. He told us how God did too create evil. “And you know something?” he said. “It’s a good thing He did.”

“It is?” I asked, surprised.

“Sure,” he said, “it shapes our taste.”

I lifted a headphone away from Philip’s head, bobbing to the rhythms of Fairbanks radio. “What?” he said.

“Cut out the dreaming and listen to him. This ain’t no sock hop. He’s telling us worthwhile stuff. Go on, please, Macher.”

He looked hurt, Philip. I regretted what I’d said and fumbled with his earpiece, trying to replace it, when Petalpuss stayed my hand and began to draw it toward his beard, guiding it into that luxuriant garden. “Be careful,” he whispered, “of the thorns and thistles.” I jerked my hand away as if it had been scalded. (Though I swear he let go first, his reflexes beating my reflexes.) Then he turned to Philip and apologized for me. “It’s not what you think. He’s a rabbi and has faith in lessons, the vicariousness of the heart’s bright ideas. Incidentally, what was that song you were listening to just now?” Philip told him and he nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “Sometimes, when the weather let up and it got warm enough to whistle, I’d whistle that one myself.”

“Really?” Philip said.

“Oh, yes,” said the man with the flowers in his beard. “It’s a very catchy tune. It perks a man up who’s been praying while the midnight sun goes down if there’s a cheery tune to turn to.”

“Really?”

“I just said so,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it doesn’t let you off the hook that we share the same taste in music. That’s coincidence, not character, and don’t redound to anyone’s credit. Jerry was right finally to pull the headphone off your head. I’m only sorry he didn’t catch your ear in his fist.”

“Oh,” I said, “no. I only meant …”

“You did your duty. It don’t make no difference what you meant.”

“He’s right,” said Philip.

“He is,” I agreed. I turned back to the man with the flowers in his beard. “What else?” I asked him. Because, though I still had no idea where we were — Philip, when he’d discovered our coordinates, had passed them on to us but they hadn’t meant anything — I didn’t care. It was all wisdom now — how he’d spoken to Philip, to me, what he’d been saying. I knew there was plenty more where that came from and never wanted the ride to be over. Why, I was like a kid, staring out the window of a Pullman car berth, lulled by the mysterious geography of the night, seduced by the steel percussion of tons.

He spoke to us, instructed us, taught us, even Philip into it now, rapt, engaged as someone counting. Old Posypuss (because I didn’t know his name, because he never said it, because I never asked) wising us up, even in English his voice cadenced as an uncle’s aliyahs, like broches lilted as lullabies. One time he paused to ask if either of us had a cigarette we could spare and it seemed so out of character I questioned whether I’d heard him correctly.

“You smoke, Khokhem?”

“I butter my bread.”

“Beg pardon, Tzadik?”

“What, I’m going to be killed by an omelet? French toast? A Carlton, a Vantage, a Lucky, a Now? They want me that bad, let the pikers come get me.”

“Beautiful,” I told him.

“Ah,” said Philip.

“Sure,” said the man with the flower-strewn beard, “a parable in every box. Philip, please,” he said. “Watch the road. Look where you’re going.”

We landed at Prospect Creek camp by the Jim River, thirty or so miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was full daylight and Philip took me over to Personnel, where I was photographed and issued an identification tag while he filled out Emergency Landing and Distress forms required by the company if he was to claim Distress and Hazard reimbursement, and which I, as his passenger, had to witness and sign.

“Hey,” the clerk explained, “it’s red tape but we have to have it. Otherwise these clowns would crash-land in just any old snowbank and loll around in the midnight sun building the old D-and-H to the tune of five bucks a day till their rations was gone and they had to lift off again.”

“Five dollars a day? Why would anyone do something like that for just five dollars a day?”

“Hey,” said the clerk, “you kidding me, Padre? Because it’s an angle. Because it’s another angle, and life up here is lived as if it was ge-fucking-ometry.”

The clerk turned out to be right in a way, but missed the real point, I think. (This isn’t my rabbi mode now — I had, when I was in Alaska, little occasion, as you will see, to fall back upon my rabbi mode — so much as my apocalyptic one. — Ice. The world will not end in fire — you can see fire; darkness was the mode here — but in ice.) Which wasn’t angles, not entirely angles anyway, so much as a sense the men — we — shared of being stuck along some infinite loop, embraced in the stifling bear hug of a closed system. What that clerk called angles were only the sharpish edges with which they meant to nick the system, to let a little light bleed through. If they often seemed frantic as children, on liquor, on pot, if they engaged, on days off or at times when it was impossible to work, in endless tournaments of round-robin poker, gambling for table stakes higher than any ever seen in Vegas or my beloved New Jersey, it was because they — we — were so caught up in our terrible doomsday cynicism. The impressions I’d had in Anchorage, of wartime, of gridlock, of the sky’s-the-limit life, and which Philip had explained to me up in our little wooden nest egg while we waited for the weather to warm up so the lake could freeze over, as the general Alaskan scam, were not only reinforced from the moment we touched down on the Prospect Creek landing strip (and had to sit in the plane while the gas tank was refilled, at a dozen bucks a gallon), they were raised from impressions to rules, the forced, improbable etiquette of the North.