Though he must have been by now many fathoms beneath North Main Street, Pinchas had yet to arrive at the spreading branches that had tipped foremost into the crevasse when the oak was toppled. The nubbly trunk itself seemed interminable, and where, by the way, was the old rabbi who’d volunteered to be his guide? For some reason Pinchas refrained from shouting after him, afraid perhaps that his raised voice might cause a cave-in. Or was it that in the quiet of his descent he rather cherished the solitude?
Then he’d reached a depth where the darkness was absolute. The tree bark had become less coarse, more slippery with bubbling sap; there were whole stretches where, still hugging the trunk, the merchant was unable to find a purchase. In addition, exhaustion had begun to overtake him in every limb, and he wondered again how such precipitous folly could result in the recovery of his bride. He was slipping more often, barely hanging on until his gumsoles could snag on a protuberance or his fingers grab hold of another indentation. Still Pinchas had no thought of turning back; the climbing up would in any case be more arduous than the climbing down, and the oblivion that awaited him if he fell was no more menacing than the oblivion he’d already penetrated. Then his foot struck what seemed to be a solid bough projecting from the trunk and, completely spent, Pinchas folded onto his haunches, sitting down at long last and dangling his legs. But before he could draw a breath in relief, his stomach lurched into his throat and his brain was swamped by a wave of total disorientation; bereft of his internal compass, he found himself hanging by the crook of his knees whose strength was close to giving out. In a moment he would drop into the abyss and God (whose authority the merchant disdained) help him.
At that juncture a hand grasped his arm and hauled him upright, where he was seated on the bottommost limb of the patriarch oak. “Aliyah tzerichah yeridah,” came the singsong voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who, perched on a neighboring branch, appeared to have aged a decade or so in reverse. “To ascend you got first to descend,” he chirped. “What took you so long, Reb Pin?”
His heart kettle-drumming in his ears, Pinchas looked out over the park and the street beyond, and had no idea where he was. Then gradually it dawned on him that this was the Pinch, though this particular incarnation looked to have awakened from the sublime dream of itself to a threadbare reality. The houses and buildings from his elevated vantage were smoke gray against the heliotrope sky, the park itself appearing neglected, the neighborhood deserted though unaltered by natural disaster. With a groan the dry goods merchant began creakily to lower himself from the stout branch. The rebbe dropped neatly to the ground beside him, his billowing caftan covering his head as he landed. When he swept it back, Pinchas saw there was color in the tzaddik’s pursy cheeks, his wispy beard become robust and full. Even his previously deflated skullcap rode his head like a proud cupola.
“Nu?” said the rejuvenated old man.
“It’s a ghost town,” asserted Pinchas, but the rebbe begged to differ.
“We are here the ghosts. Is waiting, this place, for the world to get tired from magic.”
Pinchas squinted at him. “You don’t make no more sense down here than you did up there.”
“What makes you think this ain’t ‘up there’?”
Then Pinchas felt again the hot pain of his loss boiling up from his chest into his throat. “Katie!” he cried, and heard his voice echoing through the empty streets and alleyways surrounding the park.
The rabbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “Go home already,” he said.
The merchant let go of one last sob, pushed his eyeglasses back over the hump of his nose, and was calm. Though he hadn’t run since who could remember, Pinchas began to lope down the gravel path past the dry fountain, out into Second Street and over to North Main, gaining momentum. He ran beneath unflapping awnings past vacant shopfronts whose dirty windows showed his reflection with its lanky legs pumping like pistons. Arrived at the grimy portals of Pin’s General Merchandise, he burst through the front door and bolted up the stairs through the parlor and into the kitchen, where he found his wife seated at the table, singing a cradle song (“Oh hush thee my lapwing …”) as she peeled the skins from a bowl of spuds.
Looking up at him with her emerald eyes clear of clouds, she said, “Sometimes I think my whole life was about potatoes.”
In his head he’d already rushed forward to take her in his arms, so what held him stalled and still hesitating in the doorway? Winded from his sprint, Pinchas swallowed the heart that had heaved into his throat again. “Katie,” he replied, “I don’t believe you are all-the-way dead.”
She was nowhere as pale as the blue marble woman he’d left in their marriage bed, though her complexion was still a bit tallowy, the bones still prominent beneath the flesh. Here and there about her fingertips and split ends were signs of a transparency that might, if uncared for, spread to the rest of her anatomy. Ignoring his remark, Katie reflected aloud that the illness that had taken her was perhaps a reprise of the one that took half the town in the early days of their romance. “Sure all our years together were borrowed from the distemper that returned to take back the years.”
But Katie’s symptoms were not those of the yellow jack; Pinchas rejected her theory out of hand, and in so doing summoned the courage to dismiss it with an emphatic “Feh!” “Speakink of which,” inching a gingerly step closer to the enameled table, “to take you back is why I came here.”
“Back to where?” asked Katie, tilting her head quizzically.
It irked Pinchas that the question should deserve consideration. But the quiet of this abandoned North Main Street did have a seductive quality, peaceful compared to the carnival aberration that the postdiluvian neighborhood had become. In truth, this alternative version was more faithful to the original, homelier and less rigorously demanding of one’s energies. In its recent manifestation everything in the Pinch was so hugely important, whereas here only Katie mattered.
Just then a voice was heard at the open window, and husband and wife looked to see Rabbi ben Yahya standing outside on the fire escape, smiling in all his abnormal good health. “Excuse me my lack from discretion,” he said, “but I wanted to see with my own eyes you are safe.”
Jerked from his brooding by the interruption, Pinchas wondered that the rebbe, who with his minions had turned the whole cosmos inside out, should worry about being discreet. Apparently satisfied that things were in order, the old Hasid said a bit flightily, “So good-bye and good luck,” and turned to leave. But Pinchas, realizing to his chagrin that he had no earthly notion of how to get back to the world, lunged for the window. “Rabbi,” he asked in a panic, “where are you going?”
“Where else?” replied the blooming ben Yahya. “To pray. Should be nice and quiet, my shtibl, without all those tochesleckers hangink around. Oh,” pivoting his head to whisper by way of an afterthought, “you should know by your Katie that her days are still numbered.”
“What are you saying?” gasped Pinchas. This was cruel and unreasonable.
“Once it gets the habit from wandering, the soul,” the rebbe shrugged, “nishtu gedacht, it’s a hard habit to kick.”
Pinchas shuddered as if the earth’s tremors had started up again. “Rabbi,” he blurted in desperation, “I will need still from you a guide.”