Steve Stern
It was the summer we spent on the roof, spying on our neighbors across the street. There was Ivan Salky, Harold Panitz, the late Nathan Siripkin, and me. We would kneel on the sticky tarpaper, our chins propped on top of a low parapet encrusted with bird droppings. In this way we watched the clumsy progress of the courtship of Billy Rubin and the shoemaker’s daughter. We saw, like a puppet play in silhouette, Old Man Crow beating his wife behind drawn shades. Through their open windows we saw the noisy family Pinkus gesticulating over their hysterical evening meal. We saw Eddie Kid Katz sparring with shadows and the amply endowed Widow Taubenblatt in her bath, but even with her we got bored.
“What if Billy Rubin went for her tush? What if Kid Katz got decked by his own shadow?” Nathan would needle us in a constant catechism. It was his never-ending campaign to infect us with his cockeyed fantasies.
But we had already begun to grow out of them. Didn’t we know better than anyone that our neighborhood held no particular secrets? What people did in the privacy of their apartments at night was not so different from their antics in the street by day. Old Man Crow abused his wife outside their haberdashery; the Pinkuses, behind their lunch counter, were hysterical. The Widow Tubenblatt, although not naked, struck distinctly suggestive poses at her cash register. So when, at the close of the day, they entered their rooms and the windows above North Main Street shed light on their private lives, there were no surprises. And even Nathan Siripkin’s more modest speculations couldn’t lead us to expect them.
“What if Moishe Purim was a lamed vovnik?” asked Nathan one sweltering evening toward the end of June. By then the novelty of our espionage had nearly worn off. Ivan and Harold and I were hardly paying attention to the predictable performances of our neighbors. Instead we worried about the future; we sniffed the breeze that blew in off the river. Like a whiff of what was coming, it smelled fishy.
But Nathan still had the gift of recalling us from our distraction and suckering us into his own. Despite ourselves we were curious—as Nathan must have calculated—to find out exactly what a lamed vovnik was.
“You know,” said Nathan offhandedly, as if we only needed reminding, “like a saint. There’s always thirty-six of them living secretly in different places. They’re the excuse God gives himself not to blow us the hell out of the universe.”
We were a little slow to take his meaning. Cheder boys all, we were nevertheless reluctant learners, content with no more than a nodding acquaintance with our exotic heritage. What interested us in those lean years was free enterprise. At the risk of a rap from the ruler of Rabbi Fishbein, we stole glances out the dirty windows of the Talmud Torah class. We worried that other kids were staking claim to the corners we sold papers on; they were peddling our bottles to the bootleggers down on Beale Street.
Among us only Nathan Siripkin still had time for the old superstitions, which he was not above exploiting for his own ends. That night, for instance, by way of recalling our errant attention, he went so far as to propose that the lowly Moishe was one of God’s elect.
“Name me one person in the Pinch that’s holier,” he challenged, his eyeglasses glinting moonlight, head nodding like an overripe melon on the scrawny stalk of his neck. And we had to admit that if destitution and monotonous ritual observance were the measure, Moishe was certainly holy.
Of all the neighbors that we spied on, his activities were the most forgettable. Each dusk, with a homecoming kiss to the doorpost, he climbed six flights of stairs to his junk-cluttered room. He switched on an unshaded bulb and, shedding the bulk of his person, unpeeled himself of two of three overcoats. Anointing his hands at a grimy sink, he sat down to his packing crate and praised the Lord for a mostly imaginary repast of kosher leavings. Then, with his party cap of a yarmulke perched precariously atop his mottled head, he swayed for hours over an open scripture. Repeatedly he buried the hatchet of his face in its crumb-strewn pages, so that it looked as if he were bobbing for wisdom. Though Nathan had made cruder suggestions as to what he might be about.
But now he was taking another track.
For years Nathan Siripkin had appointed himself the task of keeping us amused. It was his compulsion. Spunky for such a nebbish, he could ferret out whatever squalor and romance our neighborhood had to offer. He’d introduced us, always with his air of a proprietor, to the disreputable goings-on upstairs at the Green Owl Café. He’d led us into the sewers (catacombs, he called them) beneath North Main Street, which were given over to a refuge for forgotten men. And whenever it looked like the neighborhood might be depleted of spectacle, Nathan replenished it from his own fanciful reserves.
At his instigation we’d been trespassers, truants, and now peeping-toms. But lately, waking up to the fact that there was life outside the Pinch, we had begun to develop an immunity to his big ideas.
To salvage what was left of his influence, Nathan made an effort to outdo himself. He provided us with the cross-sectioned lives of our neighbors, taking it personally when our interests flagged. Given the extremes he went to to hold our attention, you’d have thought that their lives depended on our watching to give them significance. But none of Nathan’s embroideries was making much of an impression anymore.
Then he presented the theory the Moishe Purim was one of those for whose sake God neglected to destroy the world, and suddenly we were all ears.
Not exactly a luftmensch—like so many that wandered North Main Street in those days—old Moishe had barely visible means of support. His own dilapidated beast of burden, he pulled a rattling wooden cart with rubber tires around the Pinch. In it he collected scrap metal, which he sold to Blockman’s junkyard; he took in castoff garments, kitchen utensils, broken clocks and gramophones, which he hocked for peanuts over at Kaplan’s loans. With his perpetually bemused expressions, his rheumy eyes rolled up under his heavy lids, he was oblivious to traffic and streetcars and barking dogs. He never solicited, though our parents, when they heard his jingling approach, took him the unwanted bits of their past. These he dutifully hauled away.
“It’s like,” Nathan once commented (he was big on pestilence and disasters), “the way people in the plague used to bring out their dead.” But that was before he was committed to the idea that old Moishe was a saint.
I don’t know why we were so susceptible. After all, we were practical kids whose first allegiance was to the power of the almighty buck. Maybe it was the times, which, besides being tough, were also a little scary. The news from abroad—our parents never tired of telling us—was bleak. Relations were beginning to get lost. And if momzers like Father Coughlin were any indication, what was happening there might happen here. So maybe we were primed for giving our cagey suspicions a rest. In any case, at Nathan Siripkin’s invitation, we began to follow Moishe around the Pinch.
At first we told ourselves that we were only humoring Nathan—but then we were taken in by the old contagion. School was out and we were working in our families’ shops; we were hawking papers, delivering piecework, selling policy. But we stole time to meet in the afternoons. It was then that Nathan attempted to bear out in broad daylight what he’d concluded during our evenings on the roof.
“Have a look,” he charged us, waving in the direction of the old man like he was shaking him out of his unbuttoned sleeve. “He’s got one foot in this world and one foot in the other.”
“Looks to me like he’s got both feet in the gutter,” said Ivan Salky. That was the cue to elbow each other and hoot at Nathan’s expense—which we did. But playing it safe, we kept our hilarity to a minimum.
“So why don’t we ask him if he’s a lamed whatsit already?” Harold Panitz, whose flair for the obvious could always be counted on, wanted to know.
Nathan did his famous slow burn. He spent a moment in suffering our boorishness bravely, then took the opportunity to reveal to us the paradoxical nature of the just man.
“Because, putz, if a lamed vovnik suspects that he’s holy, he ain’t holy anymore. It’s a secret. . .”
“Between us and the Lord,” I threw in irreverently, trying to one-up Nathan’s presumptions. Because I was smart (I read books), Nathan sometimes treated me like I was his protégé. This of course made me stick even closer to the others. Now he gave me one of his meaningful glances, as if we both understood what a mouthful I’d said.
He was such a pisher, Nathan Siripkin, with his outsized head of copper curls boiling out of his overheated brain. Behind his back we took great pleasure in mocking him: we supposed that he was from Mars, that his swollen brain would one day burst through the walls of his skull. Then all hell would break loose; a carnival of demented creatures would run amok through the streets of the Pinch. But for all of our mutinous jokes, we remained more or less his grudging disciples. We were intrigued that, in the face of so much pressing reality, Nathan continued to treat his fabrications with such a high seriousness.
Despite all the commotion of North Main Street, he put a finger to his lips whenever we were shadowing Moishe. This was doubly irrelevant since Moishe was so obviously indifferent to his surroundings. Streetcars would clank, hook-and-ladders peel out of the Number 4 station, and the old man would appear in their dust, serenely trudging. Elevators bearing piano crates and porters would rise up out of the pavement as Moishe passed over. Children might stampede, pigeons pelt the rim of his hat, paint buckets graze his shoulders as they toppled off of scaffolds. And demons, as Nathan assured us, might pull his beard and tug at the wisps of his hair. But nothing could distract the junk collector from his self-appointed rounds.
“That’s what they’re like,” Nathan had whispered, beckoning us into a doorway for the confidence. “They walk around in a trance all day while God looks out for them.”
We had to admit that the old kocker turned out to be more interesting than we’d bargained for. For the hour or so that we tailed him in the afternoons, we were fascinated. We were under the impression, unspoken of course, that so long as we were riding the junk collector’s coattails, we were also preserved from harm. What with the world going to hell in a handbag, it was nice to think that our neighborhood was still, so to speak, safe for democracy. Nothing threatened us anymore: not Rabbi Fishbein’s ruler or the bullying Mackerel Gang, not the butcher’s rotten temper or the promise of high water or the voices from the radio prophesying war. Whatever perils lurked along the length of North Main Street parted like the Red Sea for Moishe, and for us as we crept stealthily behind him.
Naturally Nathan assumed full credit for the sense of well-being that Moishe had lulled us into.
“You have to understand,” he explained in his most aggravating tone of condescension, “he’s in direct communication with the Lord. Break that connection and he’s just like you and me.”
Then we chafed a little at the implication that we were like Nathan. It made us prickly and uncomfortable. Ivan Salky, lowering the bill of his cap, was the first among us to utter a word of dissent.
“All right,” he said, swallowing hard to get it out, “so the old geek don’t know how to get out of the rain. He’s too feeble-minded to understand he’s a bum. So nu?”
And as Ivan remained unstruck by lightning, the spell was lifted. Harold Panitz and I were encouraged to second and third our discontent. So Moishe ignored traffic signals, walked on freshly poured cement, lived on crumbs and Hebrew characters. He was a strange one, there was no denying it; but a saint? Show us some solid evidence.
There was a satisfaction we always took in turning on Nathan, even if it meant we were the victims of our own rebellion. Sure, we’d gotten a kick out of following Moishe, and yes, there was something about him that made us feel at peace with the world. But we were ready to forfeit it all in an instant for the sake of putting Nathan on the spot.
“Okay, okay,” he protested, “I get your drift.” Making his martyr’s face, he pressed the palms of his hands to his temples as if to still the metronome of his head, which continued its nodding. Apparently for his own benefit he recited an axiom—this by way of gathering his wits.
“You don’t judge a holy man by what he does so much as by what he don’t do. Now what don’t he do?” There was a pause during which we looked at one another while Nathan’s brain went into labor. Eventually, releasing his temples, he gave birth to this assumption:
“He don’t get led into temptation, that’s what!”
Then it became a question of what temptation to place before Moishe, by virtue of his resistance to which he would prove he was holy.
Impatient as he was with our insubordination, Nathan Siripkin could never pass up a chance to be devious. Quickly forgetting to feel persecuted, he got down to business. He summarily ruled out the lesser vices, deeming it unlikely that, say, a barbecued spare rib dangled in front of Moishe’s nose would offer him any genuine allure. By the same token, it was hard to image him being drawn into a crap game or a policy scam. How could he be seduced by what he probably couldn’t even identify? And as for placing some item of value in his path, the lifting of which would make him a thief, what would he notice that wasn’t dropped directly into his cart? No, what was called for was a kind of temptation that even Moishe could not ignore.
Had we offered any assistance, Nathan would have received it as interfering with the intricate workings of his mind. Which was fine with us. It wasn’t so much that we lacked imagination, though why should we tax our own when we could rely upon his? And anyway, we didn’t like to lose an opportunity of watching him warm to inspiration—the way he would wad up his face, yank his corkscrewing hair like he was trying to unstopper ideas. In a while his features would resolve themselves into an insipid grin; a forefinger would shoot up eureka-wise. Then he would reveal some half-baked prescription, just as now he announced what might have been a watchword:
“Anastasia!”
Ivan Salky, Harold Panitz, and I exchanged glances to the effect that we were not in the slightest surprised. Anastasia Tomashefsky, with her greasy hair and her thick body as shapeless as a laundry bag, was most of what we knew about the charms of the opposite sex. Where the widow Taubenblatt was our tantalizing but unattainable ideal, Anastasia could be had for the price of a potato knish. True, we had not had much of her, but the odd glimpse of raw pink nipple, the casually exposed dirty underwear, had been enough to frighten us out of wanting more. Although she was a discovery of Nathan’s even he became squeamish when it came to taking advantage of what she offered. Though we fortified ourselves with boasts of our wicked intentions, we blenched at the critical moments, remembering rumors of the disfiguring diseases that might ensue.
But on Moishe’s account we took heart. We were disinterested parties engaging her services for the sake of a bold experiment. It cost us three danishes, a pound of chopped liver, and considerable time lost in persuasion.
“You want me to what? In front of who?” Anastasia kept asking, not so much shocked as bewildered by what we proposed. We snickered into our sleeves as Nathan, juggling invisible grapefruits mimed a demonstration of what we had in mind. In the end Anastasia, who was nothing if not a good sport, joined in the general hilarity.
“The old fart’ll have a heart attack!” she squealed in unwholesome abandon—giving some of us cause for second thoughts. But we knew that Nathan had already been goaded beyond the point of no return.
After dinner we convened as usual on the roof. Through a collapsible spyglass that Nathan had managed to get out of hock for the occasion, we took turns in sighting old Moishe bent over his book. He was one floor above us and a street width away, but seeing him like that—tobacco-colored in the weathered telescope lens—was like putting an eye to his keyhole. But where on the one hand he seemed so close, on the other he seemed even farther away, in a remoter place and time. It was a sensation that kept us interested for a while, then began to tire us out. But just when we’d practically given up believing that the appointment would be kept, Moishe got up to answer the door.
Who knows what we expected to happen? For all our predictions about his jumping into her arms and worse, I don’t think we really imagined that Moishe would ever succumb to temptation. But what we weren’t prepared for was the offhand regard with which he greeted Anastasia at the door.
She stood there in her hoisted brassiere, her blouse held professionally open, like a gonif might open his coat to display his wares. Though we couldn’t see Moishe’s expression, it couldn’t have been so different from the blinking complacency he wore when he turned around. Then he crept away from her as if she might have been walking in her sleep and he was taking pains not to wake her up. (While for her part Anastasia stole a peek at her drooping boobies, like she had to make sure that they were still there.) From his cot the old man removed a mouse-gray blanket and padded back to the doorway. He draped the blanket over Anastasia’s nakedness the way you put a shade over a lamp that’s too bright. Then, ever so gently, he closed the door in her face.
It was the proper way for a saint to behave; of that we were all agreed. Like Nathan had said: You know them by what they don’t do. But who couldn’t help feeling disappointed that nothing unspeakable had taken place? Already we were grousing, what a wet blanket was Moishe, what a shnook—when Nathan, in a theatrically maritime stance, spectacles on his forehead, spyglass to his eye, told us, “Shah! Pipe down.” We turned back toward his window in time to see the old man blowing dust from a plum-colored bottle of wine.
Uncorking the bottle between his bony knees, he raised it hastily, plugging his lips like he was staunching a wound. We held our breaths watching him drink but had to breathe again before he stopped; and Nathan assured us that the bottle was nearly empty when he put it down. Then, as the spirits began to move him, he commenced what, for want of another word, must be called a dance. He danced with his knees bent stiffly, his fleshless arms stretching out of his ragged sleeves. His fingers snapped, whiskers furled, while his head lolled from side to side, as if he were being electrocuted in slow motion.
“He’s nuts!” blurted Harold Panitz, but this time we echoed Nathan in saying shut up. Then we astonished ourselves a little, since what was there to be quiet for? Unless we were listening for the same music that Moishe must have thought he heard.
In a window beneath him Billy Rubin was tentatively putting an arm around his sweetheart, who promptly removed it, and in another window the Pinkuses were slinging food. Behind a butter-yellow shade Old Man Crow was lifting a vase to brain his wife. Kid Katz was cranking out deep-knee bends, and the widow, in her unfastened dressing gown, was gazing into a mirror. They were doing what they always did, though it all took place tonight—or so you might have concluded—by the grace of Moishe’s doddering dance. He could have been their puppeteer.
We remained transfixed until the old goat’s unending contortions began eventually to wear us down. Enough was enough, we complained; such monkeyshines were unnatural in a man of his age. And one by one we left the roof, all but Nathan, who kept his spyglass trained exclusively on Moishe.
The next night, in the absence of any further drama (Moishe fell typically asleep over his book), we were full of contentiousness again. So he hadn’t tried to shtup Anastasia, we said—so what? With a body like hers, it didn’t take a saint to resist. And anyway, what had his lunatic dance been about? Was it right that a just man—one of the thirty-six pillars of the civilized world, as Nathan was fond of saying—should get drunk and hop about all alone in his room?
Unprepared for our attack, Nathan Siripkin fell uncharacteristically into sulking, which antagonized us all the more. At one point, his spectacles fogging, head nodding woodpeckerishly, he seemed actually to be in pain.
“You guys got no faith!” he accused, prompting us to look at one another in consternation. What was this foreign currency that we were suddenly supposed to possess? Where could you spend it around here? It was unlike Nathan to stoop to such tactics by way of shirking the burden of proof.
After a while, however, he began to come around. “All right, okay”—he dismissed the problem with a wave—“so we’ll tempt him again. We’ll swipe some muggles from Nutty Iskowitz or we’ll . . .” We could see he was clutching at straws.
Then it was Ivan Salky who brought Nathan up short.
“Enough temptation,” he stated flatly, leading with his lantern jaw. “What we want is a miracle.” He turned to Harold Panitz and me for confirmation, and we uniformly wagged our heads. Though we hadn’t known it until that moment when Ivan became our spokesman, nothing short of a miracle would ever convince us of Moishe’s sanctity.
Nathan eyed us in acute exasperation. “Schmucks.”
“If he’s really what you say, he can do a miracle,” said I, feeling my oats, ignoring the glance I got from Nathan of utter betrayal.
“Of course he can do a miracle,” sighed Nathan, as if it went without saying. “Only he just don’t know that he can.”
“Oh, neat, oh, very convenient.” We mugged and rolled our eyes. We were back to the business of knowing the holy man by what he didn’t do.
Then popeyed Harold Panitz tugged at Nathan’s sleeve and asked an inspired question.
“Can he die?”
Ivan Salky and I lit up at the astuteness of this; we slapped Harold’s back in hearty congratulation. Death was surely the thing by which, if it turned out he wasn’t prey to it in the ordinary sense, Moishe could be proven a saint.
Cornered, Nathan had to confess it was so: a lamed vovnik never passed on until God himself decided it was time. “Then He takes them up to paradise alive.” But this was a phenomenon you might have to wait an eternity to see, and we didn’t have that kind of patience. We were confident that Nathan, calling upon his wily devices, could settle the matter more instantly.
“Prove it now!” we insisted, as proud of our ultimatum as we were frightened at having delivered it. Because we saw how Nathan Siripkin, stilling his head in the vise of his forefinger and thumb, had already begun to consider. Already he was plotting how to place the poor junk collector’s life in jeopardy.
It was a little chilling the way Nathan put himself through his paces. Traditionally, by the time he’d converted us to his current obsession, he was carried away by something new. We might just be getting the hang of finding the loose change beneath the bleachers at the Phoenix boxing arena when Nathan would talk us into, say, volunteering for the hypnotist at the Idle Hour talent night. In his fickleness he was always one step ahead of us.
So you’d have thought that we’d been contrary enough over Moishe for Nathan to take the hint. As a variety of entertainment—who should know better than him?—the old man had had his day. But this one Nathan refused to give up gracefully; he hung onto his fixed idea about the junk collector as if it were a matter of life and death.
At night on the roof, lounging against the dusty skylight, we listened to him presenting designs for what he’d begun to call his “saint trap.” But this wasn’t the old Nathan Siripkin, full of infectious mischief and crackpot illusions. Something about him had changed. Not only did he seem to have bought his own spiel, but he’d become fantastically single-minded in his scheming. In fact he might have been as determined to disprove the junkman’s authenticity as to prove it.
At first he invoked what he knew to be the classical fates of saints—goyishe saints, that is, since the Jewish ones were immortal. There was stoning, of course, immolation, crucifixion, and so on, though none of these were up-to-date enough for his purposes. Still he continued to lean toward the apocalyptic. He was sold for a while on the notion that the earth might be made to open up beneath Moishe. Bridges could collapse, freight elevators might plummet down bottomless shafts. And as the town was situated on a famous fault line, giant fissures might be caused to erupt along the surface of North Main Street.
When we reasoned that the technical know-how for such assassinations was beyond our modest means, Nathan shifted without ceremony to an alternate vision.
“How about we drop a live wire in his bathtub?” he submitted. His bones would be illumined through his ashen skin, and he would dance again at his own transfiguration.
Rather than do him the courtesy of egging him on, we pressed him to consider more conservative measures. It was how we attempted to call his bluff. Since when, we wondered, did Moishe ever take a bath? And who knew (in response to Nathan’s next proposal that we poison the old man’s wine) when he might be moved to drink again?
At one point Harold Panitz, aiming for the heart of the matter, said, “Why don’t we just hit the old buzzard over the head?” But Nathan only laughed him to scorn. It was just the kind of guileless suggestion you might expect from the unsophisticated Harold.
Then Nathan thought a little longer. He was stalling, of course, and he knew that we knew. Having failed to back us off with his loftier ideas, he was forced to come down to earth. He went through all the motions, bludgeoning his brow with the hell of his hand, and after a time his forefinger shot up like a perennial sprout.
“I got it!” he announced, davening from the neck up only. “We’ll drop some big weight on his head.”
Climbing up the fire escape outside of Moishe’s building, we were supposed to pass for a party of honest workmen. Though if called upon to do so, even Nathan would have been hard pressed to account for all our paraphernalia. There were the ropes, for instance, and the beltful of tools in which Nathan was festooned, so that he clanked like Marley’s ghost. Then came the armload of boards against which Harold Panitz appeared to be fighting a losing battle. Not to mention the anvil that Ivan Salky and I—stopping every few steps to gasp for breath and look over our shoulders—reluctantly lugged.
To spur us on, Nathan kept comparing us to an expedition up a mountain, but that only made the ascent seem more punishing.
He’d campaigned for a millstone, which was supposed to signify the weight of the world’s woe, or something of that order. But for the sake of expediency (and in lieu of a vault, his second choice), he’d conceded to the more available anvil, which we stole from Harold’s father’s tinsmithy. It was a scored and misshapen hunk of iron, about which Nathan wasn’t happy until he’d dignified it with a mythological status: “it’s like the one they pulled the sword out of in King Arthur.” Though he sounded a little less than convinced.
From his girdle of tools Nathan had drawn forth a crowbar with a mighty flourish. It proved unnecessary, however, as Moishe’s window, the corner one overlooking Auction Street, was already open. Then it seemed natural enough that we should be standing inside his room. Hadn’t it been for us like some kind of stage? So now we were a crew come to rearrange the props between acts. But after a few moments the atmosphere began to oppress us. We lowered our heads in the presence of our makeshift table, his fractured cot, the orphaned steam irons and mixers, the broken clocks with their arms in a semaphore of all hours. There was the fetor of fish and stale pee, odors dense as ghosts that were trying to crowd us out of the room.
“Right,” chirped Nathan, rubbing his hands, still refusing to take the hint, “let’s get to work.” But he was no less lumpish than the rest of us. For all of his big ideas, he hadn’t a clue about how to proceed with rigging his booby trap. It was up to Ivan Salky, the handyman’s son, to take the initiative.
Standing on a crate precariously balanced in the lap of a listing chair, he hammered a pair of pulleys into the ceiling. Cracks spread out in the plaster like fossilized lightning. Then Ivan threaded ropes through the pulleys, making a kind of cat’s cradle. He took the plank, into which I’d been busily boring a hole, and secured it among the ropes like the seat of a swing. He knotted some twine, passed it through the plank and over his network of ropes, then looped it around the dangling light cord. Climbing down, he began to test his contraption, switching the light off and on—which caused the swing to dip in a mechanical approximation of Nathan’s perpetual nod.
It only remained to mount the anvil in place. This we accomplished, after a couple of abortive efforts, through the offices of a tottering human totem pole. With the anvil in its cradle, the totem pole collapsed, and we picked ourselves up to admire our handiwork. Sinister device that it was, it hung in the center of that seedy room as conspicuously as a chandelier. No one but the heedless Moishe could have failed to see it immediately upon walking in.
Then Nathan Siripkin pronounced his verdict: “Rube Goldberg meets Edgar Allen Poe.” Apparently he was satisfied.
We’d been expecting him at any moment to relent. Having played along with him until now, we were ready for him to admit that the joke had gone far enough. But Nathan continued to make a good show of it. Diabolical architect of Moishe’s execution, he still professed a faith in miracles. And if he saw any contradiction, it wasn’t obvious; not unless you considered his grinding teeth, his feverish hopping about, as evidence.
He was orchestrating exactly how the saint trap ought to be sprung.
“He’ll pull the cord like this,” said Nathan, teasing us with a tug at thin air, “and the anvil will fall. But it’ll never touch a hair on his head.” And for a second you could almost see it: the anvil suspended and radiant, balanced on the pinnacle of the junkman’s paper yarmelke.
Then Harold Panitz, whose skepticism was sometimes in question, asked, “So, what if God decides it’s his time?”
Nathan shrugged it off with the cavalier assurance that trumpets would blow, angels would descend. He grinned skittishly in the face of our lack of conviction, taking us to task. “Don’t bother me with technicalities. Besides, in times as screwy as these, do you think that God can spare a single lamed vovnik?”
It was the only occasion in anyone’s recollection that Nathan Siripkin had stooped to acknowledge the times.
That night, around dusk, by prior arrangement, Ivan and Harold and I met on the roof before Nathan arrived. In the west the setting sun, like a broken yolk, was running an angry red all over the sky, spilling into the river. Somewhere in the east, beyond the ocean, a storm—as our parents liked to remind us—was brewing. And there we were on a roof above our crummy neighborhood, feeling particularly exposed to the elements, like we might be marooned. Ivan Salky pulled the bill of his cap down nearly to the bridge of his nose, and Harold Panitz kept looking like, Who knows, maybe Nathan could be right.
But we were wise to Nathan Siripkin; we understood how this had turned into a contest of wills. This whole elaborate plot was for our benefit; it was intended to scare us into subscribing to his latest, crowning mishegoss. No doubt Nathan assumed that any moment now we would lose our nerve, but we were one step ahead of him. We were resolved that come what may we would let him play his hand through to the bitter end.
Then the skylight slid open and Nathan emerged with his hands in his pockets, his head barely nodding, whistling a tune. Gone was his jumping-bean agitation of the afternoon. Not that we were fooled for a minute by his confidence—which was maybe the point. Maybe he wanted us to think he didn’t require our endorsement to believe that something was true.
Our hearts sank as he cautioned us not to do precisely what we’d sworn, despite him, not to do: “Nobody but nobody tries to warn him, see?”
Having put it to us so bluntly, he felt obliged to reiterate: If we tipped off Moishe to the danger, everything would have to come out. He would learn what the trap was for; he would know who he was, and as a consequence he wouldn’t be who he was anymore. It was the same old screwball logic that he had hooked us with in the first place. Only tonight it seemed like another kind of a trap, one in which Nathan himself was already caught. And he was crazy if he expected us to join him.
Still, we waited in our typical genuflection on the bubbling tarpaper, passing the spyglass back and forth. We chewed jawbreakers, mopped sweat from our foreheads, and avoided each other’s eyes.
Then (“Moishe ahoy”) we spotted him pushing his cart along North Main Street, weaving a path between the five-gloved streetlamps and the sparks from the trolley cars. He left his cart in an alley beside his building, then entered the vestibule, where he would climb the six flight of stairs up to his room. He would climb the stairs at a weary trudge, pausing perhaps on every landing, cautioning his heart to stop rattling the cage of his brittle ribs. Minutes would elapse before he reached the top. There was plenty of time, if we shook a leg, to divert him from what was in store.
Then the time had run out and we looked to Nathan as if he might forgodsakes turn back the clock. But Nathan wasn’t there.
He must have dived headlong through the skylight, ridden banisters down to the street, then shot up the fire escape on the other side. He must have bolted through the window just in time to intercept the junkman’s fate. In any case, when the light came on in Moishe’s room, I saw through the spyglass, which I’d wrestled out of Harold’s hands, the old man stumbling backward. I saw Nathan, who must have shoved him, crumpling under the fallen anvil, dropping out of the golden frame of the lens.
Lowering the glass, I saw how everything had spilled out through the crack in Nathan Siripkin’s size nine head: the old man with outstretched arms and upturned face, dancing his grief; the klutzy kid stealing a kiss and getting a slap from a skinny girl; a couple of families giving each other hell; a palooka delivering a Sunday punch to phantoms; a lonely woman in her bath.
At the inquest we held onto a hope against all odds, that old Moishe was deaf and dumb. But when it all came out, how we’d tried to prove that the junk collector was one of the holy thirty-six, he opened his mouth. Gesturing shame with a pair of crooked forefingers, he spoke in an accent thick as sour cream.
“Bed, bed boychikls. Somebody better potch dere tushies.”
When he saw that no one but himself was laughing, he suddenly appeared perplexed. His amused expression sagged like a sack whose bottom drops out in the rain. It was an expression that we were certain had echoes; it was repeated maybe thirty-five times, until every other lamed vovnik wherever he might be had lost his innocence too.
That was something that Nathan had neglected to tell us, a piece of the legend we figured out for ourselves. When you exposed one just man, you as good as exposed the lot. We understood this better after the storm finally broke in Europe. At the same time the swollen river overflowed the Pinch. North Main Street was under water, and the high ground was awash with homeless families and bedraggled animals. For those of us who were able to read the signs, we knew that it was the beginning of the end of the world.