Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“They seem a little faded, Khokem,” I said. I think it was the first time I ever referred to his beard to his face.

“Yeah, well,” he said, stroking it lightly, “you know. October. The last leaf, same old story.”

“It’s good to see you.”

“Next time it should be a better occasion.”

“Well, of course,” I said, shamed and chastened as I always am whenever anyone pulls this line on me. “It’s awful about Philip. Just awful.”

“Terrible.”

“I felt I had to come,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Though we were hardly friends and, to be perfectly frank, sometimes I thought he was a bit of a jerk, we went through a lot together.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I understand.”

“That plane crash. All the time we spent living in that airplane. Remember that nest that we hacked out of pine trees?”

“I do.”

“We lived out of survival tins and broke hardtack together. We shared dried jerky.”

“I had some myself.”

“That’s right,” I said, “you did.”

“Sure.”

“We learned each other’s weights and measures. I bit my nails, he spit out the window. He tutored me in the intricate Alaskan economy. My God,” I said, “we were besieged by bears!”

“I remember that.”

“I shouldn’t come to his funeral? I shouldn’t come? He was like a brother to me.”

“To me too,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “I know, Tzadik,” and wiped my nose with my handkerchief. “ ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . Any man’s death diminishes me, I am involved in mankind.’ ”

“No, no,” said Flowerface, “you miss my meaning. He was my brother.”

“Phil was your brother?”

“We were identical twins. Here,” he said, “look,” and removing an old black-and-white photograph from his wallet, he pushed the snapshot toward me. In the photo a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth, who bore a substantial but, considering the face I’d seen in the open casket, fallen-away resemblance to the Phil he had become, stood next to someone who might have been his mirror image. Both boys were beardless and, near their left temples, where, back in the plane in March, their heads had been covered by parka hoods, each had a tiny birthmark like a corporal’s chevrons. I saw the tzadik’s where he tapped at his temple. “Hmn,” he said, “hah? Hmn?”

“He was your brother? Phil?”

The falling away had occurred on both their parts, as if Phil had come to resemble a distant, younger cousin who would always look youthful, while old Posypuss, tricked out in his now fading flowers, was an actor, well cast but unrelated, carefully prepared by Hollywood makeup artists, to look like a relative, an uncle, say, even a grandfather, of the kids in the photograph.

“We were Tinnehs,” he said. “It’s the way with Tinnehs.”

“Beg pardon, Khokem?”

“Tinnehs. Tinneh Indians? I told you. In the plane? How the Tinnehs are tribeless, clanless. How they — we — break away from each other. Generation after generation. Highest divorce rate in Alaska. Alaska? The world. How the children are placed in orphan asylums when the parents run off? That picture was taken in the orphanage. Don’t you remember? Why don’t you listen? You think I talk for my health? Identical twins, I told you how even identical twins drift apart.”

He had mentioned identical twins. Phrases came back to me. They would, he’d said, “dissipate affinity, annihilate connection.” They moved, “down some chain of relation from sibling to friend, friend to neighbor, neighbor to acquaintance, and acquaintance to stranger.” And remembered his saying how once the Tinnehs outnumbered all the other tribes put together but were now “rare in the Alaskan population as Frenchmen.”

Now I recalled how interested I’d been, and the moment when the sun came up and he couldn’t finish his story because we had to take off.

We were back in Fairbanks, parked in front of the hotel where he was staying. I had to drop off my rental car at the airport before my flight, I told him.

“Well,” he said, “it was good seeing you.”

“Next time,” I said carefully, “on a better occasion.”

“Yeah,” he said, and put his hand out to open the door. For the first time I noticed the mourner’s band on the right sleeve of his coat.

“Listen,” I said, and touched him on the shoulder, “I’m sorry about Phil. I can’t tell you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But you know something?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sloughing off my condolence, “we like drifted apart.”

Then he opened the door and got out. I started to turn the key in the ignition, but the man with the flowers in his beard was rapping on the window for my attention. I leaned across to roll the window down on his side and he pushed his big head into the car.

Up close, straight on, the beard seemed lopsided, lifeless. I caught the pinched, stale scent of mold. “Ain’t no murracles,” old Posypuss said, “I dud wished dey would was, but dey ain’t.”

As Petch had predicted, McBride let me play out my contract. As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t let me resign and made me play it out. I guess he thought I was pretty well seasoned by the time of those Rosh Hashanah services and didn’t figure even Alyeska could afford another greenhorn rabbi until the fiscal year ran out on the one they already had.

He never mentioned the Torahs. McBride, like the Eskimos, was a gentleman too.

Which isn’t to say I could ever stop thinking of Flowerface out there in the dark. Out on that iceberg, in that proper, heroic blackness he rubbed against like braille, yogi-ing his bloodstream and rearranging his metabolics and contemplating not the ways of God or even Man, but figuring red tape, the long odds of Corporate Life, how the Feds would probably require affirmative action, Prots and Mackerel — snappers and even Jews demanding rabbis, Torahs, the works, and what all this could mean to him at Alaskan prices, till he saw what it felt like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few fast feet a day with the wind in his face.

WHERE,” I asked, “could we go?”

“Shh,” Shelley said afterward as we lay in each other’s arms in the dark. “Shh.”

“You told Connie we’d leave Lud. And do what? Where? How?”

“Shh. Shah. Ay le lu lu.”

“Where, Shelley? What would I do?”

“Later-le.”

“Later-le’s too late. Right-e-le now.”

“Leave-e-le now?”

“Talk-e-le now, ask-e-le questions afterward.”

Because it’s one thing to calm your kid down with easy promises, but I’m not talking about eat your greens, sweetheart, we’ll go get 31 flavors. Connie’s no fool. She had real problems, even — I say it — legitimate gripes. Not all that death prattle, of course, ghosts in the drinking water, phantoms in her pants. Not even my failure with God in the Stanley Bloom affair, nothing metaphysical. She had flawed birthrights, I think. A misser-out on the gemütlich circumstance, the curled and comfy lap-robe life. I don’t know, maybe it would have been better for her if she’d had an aversion to the four food groups, better if we could have done business, traded and bribed her, appetite for appetite, taken her to the mall more, kept her up past her bedtime, made nests for her in the back of the car and driven her home in the dark. Maybe we should have turned the radio low and shifted from texture to texture for her on the highways, playing the percussives and hypnotics of different road surfaces like some long, cozy organ, the dash’s soft glow and the averted headlamps of oncoming cars like light skimming along the walls and ceilings of dark bedrooms. But still her stinted birthright. She was an only child. She had no grandparents, no cousins, no uncles, no aunts. Was this mild orphan of relation. (“I’m the last of your line,” she told us once. “When I marry there’ll be no more Goldkorns,” she’d said, and burst into tears. “Please don’t cry,” Shelley said, “I’m the same as you are.” “Me too,” I said, “the fall of the House of Usherkorn.”) But another thing altogether to offer to change their life.