It was during one of these woolgathering episodes that Pinchas tapped him on the temple and wondered if he might be so bold as to intrude upon his nephew’s meditations. “They need from us, the screwballs, a sack chickpeas.” Muni obligingly shouldered a forty-pound bag of the beans that Pinchas ordered specially for the Shpinkers and toted it round to their shtibl on Commerce Avenue above Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed. He trudged up the long flight of rickety stairs to the sanctuary of Eliakum ben Yahya and his disciples, which Muni had never entered before. He was greeted at the head of the stairs by a fish-faced young Hasid, who took the sack without offering any gratuity and told the delivery boy to put it on their tab. Muni might have turned abruptly and departed had he not been a little spellbound by what he beheld. The large room with its warped floorboards and potbelly stove, the grimy windows admitting shafts of light viscous as honey, bore a marked resemblance — notwithstanding the extreme behavior of its occupants — to the study houses of his tender years. But as those years were mainly shrouded in shadows, the scene before him captivated him afresh.
The skullcapped fanatics yammered and swayed over a raft of open texts heaped atop a trestle table, at the head of which their portly rebbe appeared to be sleeping. Some of the disciples were seated, some standing, and among the standing were those involved in various acts of penance. They flagellated themselves and each other with the leather straps of their phylacteries, one beating his head against a wall until plaster fell. Here and there were materials bespeaking necromantic activities: the armless trunk of a lay figure fashioned out of clay in the process of being molded or abandoned, foundering in the wallow of a galvanized washtub. There were improvised ritual furnishings: a standing wardrobe that functioned as an ark of the Torah, a hearing trumpet that doubled for a ram’s horn, a tricolored map tacked to the wall that, on closer inspection, laid claim to revealing the geography of the World to Come.
A disputation was in progress under their slumbering rebbe’s nose over how many parasitic cherubim might colonize the nest of his beard. Quotations were cited from Yakov Yosef of Medziboz and The Kumquat of Sfat, assertions made and contradictions submitted until the room was in an even greater uproar. Then Rabbi ben Yahya’s goggle eyes snapped open. Rising slowly to his feet with a melancholy sigh, he began to pace around the table, bonking with a closed fist the head of the odd disciple until that disciple sat back down. He bonked those who rose to replace them, themselves replaced when they sat by some of the formerly seated who stood again. It was a bizarre exercise that cast the rebbe in the role of a diabolical musician pounding the keyboard of a human carillon, though no music beyond the hosannas of the faithful was available to Muni’s ears.
Who were these cranks that lived largely on air supplemented by a diet of chickpeas? They ate them boiled, fried, tossed them uncooked into their yawning mouths and chewed them to a pithy puree. The chickpeas no doubt accounted for the Hasids’ chronic flatulence, which vitiated the atmosphere of their shtibl. But their flatus was also deemed conducive to a useful upthrust during prayer, and the beans themselves provided the nourishment essential for pursuing their occult experiments. Experiments that played havoc with the commonplace reality of North Main Street. The mystery for Muni was why they had chosen the Pinch for their laboratory, when there were so many other places where Jews of their feather were much thicker on the ground.
“Because,” Pinchas had explained, though the notion clearly offended his sense of propriety, “they have calculated that will be dead center, the city of Memphis, of the coming apocalypse.”
The rebbe was back in his cushioned chair, his beard obscuring his ritual garment like the bib of a hair shirt. Serenely he began holding forth on a subject that rang a distant bell in Muni’s brain.
“From the Angel of Forgetfulness we know that under the nose he tweaks you when you were born, so the soul don’t remember what once it knew in Paradise. But comes the real tweaking when you forget what since you were born you think you remembered. Then you will stop looking within yourself for HaShem. Also will you stop looking for Him without or above or behind or beside yourself either. So where you should look?” The disciples shifted their eyes, lifted and let fall their shoulders in unison. “Nowhere is where! When you are in your body nowhere, you are everywhere in your soul. Let go already from everywhere, you should exchange it for nowhere and nothing.”
His followers wagged their heads as if they understood what he was talking about. One with a fluttering eyelid, flush with exaltation, exclaimed, “So sublime is nothing that no thinking about it can do it justice!”
But Rabbi ben Yahya was quick to put him in his place: “Look at who thinks he’s nothing.” The retort was greeted with wholesale sniggering.
Muni thought he had heard enough, but just as he turned to leave, the rebbe, indifferent to his lingering presence, began discoursing on multiple worlds. “Like dreidls on twin axes they spin, heaven and earth,” he proclaimed, “and when the letters from the dreidls that they make a match, the two worlds kiss and Messiah comes.”
Again a distant bell tolled.
Muni was still sleeping fitfully, rising from his cot during the night to look out his window. But there was never anything on the wire between its fixed pulleys except perhaps Mrs. Rosen’s bellying bloomers or a pair of her husband’s dropseat longjohns that she’d forgotten to take in. Sometimes there were slighter garments that Muni tried to ignore, just as he did the silhouettes he saw behind the drawn shades of the apartment above the delicatessen. Was it his fault that La Funambula might never perform again? Somehow he couldn’t help but think that yes, it was. But he’d sidestepped her for so long now that the distance across the alley had become for him as great as the distance from, say, the mines of Nerchinsk to America. So much time had elapsed since their shared tumble that it was too late to change his tack; it was impossible that he should ever speak to her again.
At the same time he knew an encounter was unavoidable. There had been so many near misses on the street and in Market Square Park; and when the electric lights came back on after the maiden screening of Calamity Anne’s Inheritance at the new Idle Hour Theater, there she was. Jenny walked with a cane since the plaster cast had been removed from her leg, limping with a dignity she’d never evidenced in her former knock-kneed stride. The cane was one of those serpent-headed walking sticks from their nest in the umbrella stand at Pin’s. (She’d also acquired one for the schwartze Asbestos, who was seen to twirl it with surprising dexterity.) No longer attempting to hide from Jenny Bashrig’s approach, neither could Muni meet her eye, though stealing a peek he might detect the trace of a smile playing upon her primrose lips. Then it seemed to him as if the girl were actually enjoying his consternation. Once, as he watched her making her way past Plesofsky’s dentistry on Overton Avenue, she suddenly clenched the cane between her teeth and kicked into a handstand. With her petticoats hiding her head and her ribbed lisle knickers fully exposed, she rounded the corner inverted into North Main Street.
Several days later, on a raw and windblown February afternoon, Mose Dlugach, looking suspiciously droll in his oilskin slicker, asked Pinchas if he could borrow his nephew for a while to beat some rugs. His own worthless sons were over at the Neighborhood House learning the turkey trot and he couldn’t afford to leave his shop any longer. The rugs were oriental carpets that had been gathering dust for years alongside the assemblage of curios in the attic-like environment of Dlugach’s Secondhand; they could do with a good airing out. Though he couldn’t see what was so urgent about the job that it demanded his immediate attention, Muni nevertheless appreciated the diversion. One at a time he lugged the columnar carpets down the back stairs and into the drab little yard behind the shop. There he unrolled them, draped them over a drooping clothesline, and walloped them with a two-by-four. It was a more strenuous task than he’d anticipated, but Muni, exorcising unrealized frustrations, took pleasure in mercilessly swatting the stiff fabric, raising thunderheads of dust from the pile. Even more than lambasting the rugs, however, he enjoyed watching their intricate patterns unfolding as he spread them over that bald scrap of ground. Then it was as if he were transforming the backyard, with its board fence, rusted wash boiler, and outhouse, into a particolor caravansary.