The pages of his narrative lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the folding cot. They included, along with tales of the pharmacist Blen, the blacksmith Tarnopol, and the Widow Teitelbaum, the tale of the young Muni Pinsker — who once (Muni read from a random page scooped from the helter-skelter pile) sat in a latrine in Siberia where a frozen coprolite tickled his bony behind. This was the same Muni whose father (on pages yet undredged) had carried him as a tot wrapped in a lint-white tallis to the cheder run by Yozifel Glans, whom the students called Reb Death’s Head. It was a horror, that little school, where the Death’s Head wielded his quirt indiscriminately, as likely to punish the boys for their pride of accomplishment as their inattention. He flogged them doubly on Passover that they might know how the Israelites suffered under Pharaoh’s lash. But against all odds Muni flourished there, conceiving a deep-felt affection for his alef-bais and proving himself a precocious scholar.
Shortly after his bar mitzvah he was sent to a more reputable cheder in the nearby market town of Tzachnovka — where he slept on the hard study house benches — and thence, after some years, to the far-famed yeshiva in Minsk. The yeshiva was located in the basement of the Water Carrier’s Synagogue, where Rabbi Yeshayahu, the renowned Chazon Ish, was in residence. He was a very old man who sat stock-still at his lectern, his blood-rimmed eyes closed in meditation or sleep; no one was ever sure which. (Indeed, days passed when he seemed to show no vital signs.) But while the Chazon Ish gave little actual instruction, Muni was undiscouraged; still girded in the sanctity of his studies, he was inspired by the saint’s venerable presence to delve ever deeper into the texts of the Law. It was also during this period that, half-starved and light-headed from his dependence on so-called eating days, the student was occasionally distracted from his exegesis of some halakhic perplexity. Then he would undertake to write sacred verses of his own, and sometimes, in the absence of a Death’s Head to scourge his vanity, fancied himself a youthful David composing a cycle of original psalms.
Muni might have thrived indefinitely in that austere environment had it not been for his study mate, Yoysef Tsentsifer. Yoysef was a spindly lad with a pronounced Adam’s apple and curly hair that lifted his skullcap as boiling water lifts a samovar lid, but his mole-gray eyes were fierce. He had a maddening habit of concealing socialist tracts behind a volume of the Bava Batra and, worst of all, making disparaging remarks about the Chazon Ish. While he knew it was probably pointless to attempt to engage the youth in the kind of rapid-fire dialectics that defined the Talmudic method, Muni nevertheless felt duty-bound to try.
“According to Rabbi ben Yona in Tractate Hagigah,” he might begin, “the chicken, since it does not chew its cud, ought to be considered unkosher. So why does Rava insist in Tractate Avot that the bird is pareve, neither meat nor dairy?” But Yoysef would merely counter with unanswerable questions of his own: “What is the status in a minyan of a man born with the head of a toad? Why may you not share your prunes with a victim of gonorrhea?”
At length, addressing him above the hermeneutical drone of the academy, Muni had asked his mate, “Yoysef, with all due respect, what are you doing here?”
Making as if to shuckel over a portion of scripture, Yoysef replied in a prayerful singsong, “I’m marking time till the revolution.” Then he indicated with his downy chin their neighbor Naftali Blinken, who he said was doing the same. “In the meantime he operates for the Jewish Workers’ Union an underground press. And Pesach Kvitko, him with his falling-down britches, he distributes pamphlets in the back alleys of the Bog when he’s not studying Russian at night. Wolf Kipnis over there is organizing already in the factories, and little Anshel Twersky, that’s tripping over his ritual fringes, belongs to the HaShomer Defense League and is preparing to make aliyah to Palestine …”
The litany continued until Muni was convinced that all his fellows were leading double lives; they merely used the yeshiva as a safe harbor while fomenting the overthrow of the established order. Muni Pinsker was perhaps the only authentic student in the school. Yoysef promised he would have his guts for tefillin if Muni breathed a word of what he’d been told.
The awareness of his solitary lot, however, only contributed to Muni’s sense of self-worth. It scarcely bothered him that, other than the exasperating dialogues with his study mate, he had such scant commerce with his own kind. Loneliness and even the chastity that stoked his pimples and an irritation below the belt — these were conditions that further dramatized the martyrdom to his studies, and could also be exploited to good advantage in fables and poems. (The current involved a wonder child who, following a recipe from Sefer Yetsirah, pours oil on water to consult with the sages of old.) Such was his hubris, in fact, that Muni believed his compositions had attained a level of accomplishment that demanded an audience. There were a number of Jewish presses in Minsk that published a variety of texts ranging from the fanatically religious to the outright blasphemous. But was his “work” really ready for a popular reception? After all, no eye but his own had ever viewed his productions. What he needed, Muni decided, was a reader he could trust, one who wouldn’t simply flatter his efforts. Presenting his poems to the implacable Chazon Ish would be like placing an offering before a waxwork; nor did any of the rabbi’s rigid assistants inspire confidence. Then Muni lit on the idea of showing his work to Yoysef Tsentsifer, who was as close to an intimate as he had in that dreary city. Yoysef would certainly have no qualms about giving him an honest appraisal.
Since Yoysef’s attendance at the yeshiva was intermittent at best, several days elapsed before Muni encountered him outside the synagogue’s recessed entrance. The Water Carriers’ shul, as if embarrassed by its hulking stone eminence, appeared to be sinking below the level of the streets. It squatted on the edge of the central market, whose square on that unusually sunny morning was rowdy with hucksters, brokers, and market wives. Pigeons warbled, geese honked in their cages; a Cossack in a crimson tunic, saber flashing at his hip, plied the crowds astride a velvet-flanked stallion.
“Pardon me,” Muni urbanely accosted his mate, “but would you mind taking a look at these?” He held out a nosegay of irregular pages.
Raising an inquisitive brow, Yoysef plucked a single leaf from the bunch, some of which fluttered free. Muni scrambled to retrieve them while assuring the other that he could read the work at his leisure, but Yoysef insisted on reading a few lines there and then. Having done so, he smiled a sidelong smile and returned the page to Muni. Then he took a stiff page of his own from inside his jerkin, unfolded it, and handed it to the poet. To himself Muni read:
She saw it all and she’s a living witness,
The old gray spider spinning in the garret.
She knows a lot of stories — bid her tell them!
A story of a belly stuffed with feathers,
Of nostrils and of nails, of heads and hammers,
Of men, who, after death, were hung head downward,
Like these, along the rafter.
A story of a suckling child asleep,
A dead and cloven breast between its lips,