But the shretelekh are finally not a confrontational race. The present kerfuffle notwithstanding, they much preferred flitting stealthily among mortals, creating discord then becoming scarce. So rather than make a stand against such wholesale insurgency, they scattered. Some slipped back behind the sequined curtain; others dove through skylights and bulkheads in varying stages of anatomical evaporation. They took with them their stolen child in his crushed stovepipe, who for all his talents remained perfectly discernible: a royally spoiled and squawling brat.
Indifferent to their own scrapes and abrasions, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer made to soothe their little goblin, Mama Rose straightening his sailor collar as Morris smoothed the part in his few remaining hairs. Benjy fairly purred at their petting. On the walk back from the Peabody Mrs. Padauer began to hum one of the jaunty minstrel airs (was it “Under the Matzoh Tree”?) while her husband asked her teasingly, “Mama, did we have tonight enough fun?” Then he stopped at a newsstand to purchase, for the first time in his life, a Havana cigar. They strolled home slowly in the cool of the evening, since Benjy’s short legs were especially bowed from the weight of the coins he’d swallowed. But after he’d used the WC — the loot having proved a much-needed laxative — he winnowed and washed the coins from his movement and presented his mama with a bulging piggy bank.
While Pinchas Pin was otherwise occupied, the czar was overthrown and the revolution that the merchant had waited for for so long finally happened. The so-called Sodomites of South Memphis, sworn enemies of the Pinch, released a sheet of raw ooze and filth from Carr’s tannery into the bayous around North Memphis; but that was before Pinchas’s time. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat on a flagpole above the Commercial Appeal building on Second Street as a crowd watched from Court Square then grew bored; but that came much later. Meanwhile, on the night he and his improbable companion Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya set out in pursuit of Katie’s absconded spirit, Pinchas was less concerned with this world than the next.
When he and the rabbi arrived by dinghy at the shore of Market Square Park, the inverted tree at its center was illuminated by a jumble of lantern-lit shacks. They were small, jerry-built shacks nestled amid the network of gnarled roots that had reared up in place of the great oak’s undulant branches. The shacks were made of the kinds of odds and ends from which the Jews constructed their sukkah booths, though to Pinchas’s knowledge it wasn’t Sukkot. Or rather, it was Sukkot, Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah rolled into one. For just as on holidays the Jews acknowledged themselves to be living contemporaneously with their biblical forebears, so in this new dispensation did all the holidays occur at once. And through the fabric walls of the booths, some of which dangled like lockets from ropes and chains, Pinchas could see the silhouettes of North Main Streeters at their tables observing simultaneous celebrations. The sight halted him a moment in his tracks, though it only took a tug at his sleeve from Rabbi ben Yahya to bring him back to the mission at hand.
“Did you think I forget!” fumed Pinchas, who needed no prompting.
“Touchy touchy.”
Pinchas sighed, sparing a worry for the frail old man who’d offered himself as his safe passage to the underworld. He’d always judged the tzaddik and his followers to be frankly insane, and now, when the old dotard should have been on his deathbed dispensing holy madness to his disciples, here he was leaning on his cane at the edge of an abyss. He was meshuggeh all right, as must be the dry goods merchant who had agreed to follow his lead.
Always Pinchas had regarded himself as a forward-thinking man, who, had he lived in the age of Spinoza, would also have been declared a heretic. But his wife’s untimely end had reduced him to a fool like the rest of his demented neighbors. The rebbe had explained it all so plainly in the boat on the way to the park: how, thanks to the interference of himself and his fanatics, below was now above, and vice versa; existence was turned on its head. This afforded the individual a rare opportunity, since one could now enter the afterlife (which in this instance came before) without having to die. By the same token, those who expired during this erratic interlude were not officially defunct. Katie had perished at an opportune moment …
At which point Pinchas had shouted, “Shvayg!” and held his ears; for his yearning after his departed wife finally wanted no explanation. It wanted only her foggy green eyes and washed-out terra-cotta hair, the swan’s-neck curve of her spine in her taffeta waist; it wanted her flashes of temper, her terrible jokes (“They say Saint Paddy chased the snakes out of Ireland, but he was the only one who saw the snakes”), her roast potatoes like kidney stones. In the absence of Katie’s animate presence, Pinchas’s desire for her had overwhelmed his grief and stunned him with the force of an apoplexy. Then it had set him in motion.
Throwing away his cane, the rebbe leaped with a single bound from the lip of the crevasse into the roots of the tree. With an agility that seemed to Pinchas indecent in one of his dropsical and dilapidated years, he lowered himself as far as the base of the sunken trunk; then crab-like he began to scramble down its incline until he was swallowed up by darkness. Leaning over the edge of that obscurity, Pinchas froze. How pointless it would be — he reasoned — if in the course of chasing after his lost wife, he should lose himself. But frightened as he was of the descent, he found he was even more frightened at the prospect of losing sight of Rabbi ben Yahya. So the merchant, no young man himself, overcame once again the rational turn of mind he’d set such store by and, exhaling a prayer, made the thrilling leap into the roots.
He caught hold, absorbing the bruising impact with his chest and chin, and astonished at finding himself still in one piece, hugged the tree for all he was worth. Then, with extreme caution, he began the treacherous downward climb. Steep as was its declivity, the thick trunk was studded with hollows and knobs, so there were no end of ridges and footholds to hang on to, and the cool loamy scent of the earth was somehow beckoning. Even now Pinchas was skeptical that the tree, in its inversion, could serve as an artery between two worlds, but once he’d begun his descent he seemed to have left (along with his logic) his fears largely aboveground. He gave himself up entirely to this penumbral element, which presumably had a logic of its own — one he hoped to discover as he inched his way down the long incline. It was an endless descent that provided him plenty of time to contemplate his objective: for Katie’s runaway soul, in its corporeal aspect, was — he believed — inextricable from his own. He had the sense that, sinking farther into the earth, he was sounding the depth of his devotion, which ought not — if he were worthy — to have a bottom.
He was deep enough now that the hole above his head had shrunk to the size of a penny embossed with a silver sliver of moon. Though the coin had no capacity to shed light into the fissure, the spores and slick mosses that Pinchas encountered appeared to give off a phosphorescence of their own. An orchid-like flower sprouting from a knothole shone like a gas burner. There was sufficient light to give the merchant fair warning that he should halt and let pass the fiddler Asbestos, who was tapping his way out of the mouth of a broken sewer tunnel. The fiddler was followed, as he groped his way round the tree trunk and into a similar segment of sewer pipe on the other side, by a raggedy column of Negro men. Each had an arm on the shoulder of the one in front of him so as not to be left behind in the dark, as they disappeared into the far conduit. Farther down, there was more traffic and Pinchas had to make way for a party of elemental creatures (some still in costume) with a pouting human child in tow. Back from their theatrical exile, they skirted the tree’s broad diameter and burrowed into an oval grotto on their way to reclaim their native haunts.