Snow in August

34

Early Thursday morning, Michael went to the park carrying a small, rusting spade in an old canvas Brooklyn Eagle bag. He’d found both in the cellar, beside the hot-water furnace. His mother was still asleep in the smothering August heat, and he left her a note saying that he was going to church. A small lie, he thought, but the less she knew, the better.

It was almost eight o’clock and already the heat was clamped upon the city. On Pearse Street, a water wagon from the Sanitation Department lumbered uphill, and as the water sprayed the soft asphalt, steam rose into the sullen air. At the entrance to the park, a gray-haired man in khaki shorts sat on a park bench, listening to a portable radio and drinking beer from a quart bottle. His eyes were glassy. His skin was blistered with sweat. He didn’t seem to hear the news announcer say that the day’s temperatures were expected in the high 90s and there was no end in sight. The man was very still, as if comforted by the rich dirt smell drifting from the dozing park.

Michael moved quickly across the moist meadows toward the dark smudge of the hill that was crowned by the Quaker cemetery. A few lone men slept on the meadow grass in a litter of beer containers. A woman walked a small dog. The ball fields were empty. Above them, clouds moved slowly but took no shape.

Michael hurried along, the canvas bag hanging from its shoulder strap. He crossed the deserted bridle path where men and women galloped on rented horses across summer afternoons. He saw two boys walking to the Big Lake with fishing poles. He paused to drink from a stone water fountain until the boys vanished past a shoulder of the hill.

Then he plunged into the woods. It was cooler here and the trees were taller, their dense foliage blocking the sun. He climbed and climbed, inhaling the deep odors of earth and rotting leaves, and then looked back. Nobody could see him here. No cops. No Falcons. Nobody. Few kids came this way either, afraid of the old graves and silent tombstones beyond the high iron fence. His mother had explained once that the cemetery had been there since before the Revolution, and when the land was laid out for the park the Quakers were allowed to keep their cemetery forever. Sometimes on foggy nights, boys traveled here and dared each other to climb the fence and walk among the dead. Michael had never joined them.

Now he turned his back on the graves and found an open spot beneath a giant elm. He cleared away a thin carpet of dead leaves. Then he began to dig. The dirt was heavy and black. As he shoveled it into the canvas bag he followed Rabbi Hirsch’s instructions and cleaned out the twigs and stones and leaves. The dirt must be pure. When the bag was full, he stopped to gasp for breath in the sticky air. Then he placed the spade on top of the dirt and swung the bag onto his shoulder. His bad leg buckled under the weight, but he felt no pain. He adjusted the bag and bent forward, and he knew he could carry it. He started back down the hill.

He took a different route across the meadow, stopping every fifty yards to shift the bag from one shoulder to the other, and went out through the Pritchard Street entrance. There were more people on the street now. A man with a squeegee and bucket cleaned the show windows of the Sanders theater. More kids entered the park with fishing poles. Nobody looked at him.

Michael walked down Kelly Street. His shoulders were sore now from the weight of the dirt. At the armory, he waited until he was certain nobody was watching. From his pocket he removed a key, taken from the rabbi’s clothes at the hospital, and hurried to the side door of the synagogue. He quickly opened the door, entered, and closed it behind him.

He waited in the dark vestibule for a long moment and decided not to switch on the lights. The police knew that Rabbi Hirsch was in the hospital; if they saw lights burning, they might come in and find him. I don’t want to see the cops, he thought. It’s too late for them. It’s too late for all of them.

He went up the three vestibule steps and unlocked the second door and entered Rabbi Hirsch’s small apartment. He set the bag down and in the dim light moved books on the top shelf of the bookcase, behind the radio and the photograph of Leah. There he found the second key. It was about four inches long, made of iron, and heavy. It was attached to a painted wooden stick.

Michael used the key to open the tall oak door in the corner. The door that had never once been opened by Rabbi Hirsch in Michael’s presence. At first the unlocked door would not open. He had to pull it hard, using all of his weight, until it squeaked on rusted hinges. Before him, a dusty stairway rose into darkness. His heart beating quickly, Michael went up the stairs, feeling his way near the top, thinking for just a moment that he should turn back, until he grasped the handle of another door. He turned it and shoved hard. The door made a scraping sound on the stone floor.

There before him was a great, vast, high-ceilinged room, illuminated by colored shafts of light from stained-glass windows and slashing bright beams where sections of glass had been punched out. He was in the abandoned main sanctuary at last, and the sight filled him with awe. The downstairs prayer room was like the downstairs church at Sacred Heart: low-ceilinged, plain, dusty, the pews full of prayer books. But this was like entering a secret room in a lost city.

He walked carefully along the wall, stepping over broken plaster and shards of smashed stained glass and stones that must have been hurled at the windows. He counted twenty-one rows of benches. There were prayer books at odd angles on every bench, some of them gnawed by rats. Thick cobwebs draped from the benches to the floor. The words KHAL ADAS JESHURUN were carved into the marble above the shuttered double doors that had once been the main entrance. Above the entrance was a balcony, like a small version of the choir loft at Sacred Heart.

Michael stood there, facing the sanctuary, trying to imagine what it had been like during the Holy Days when every seat was filled and there was a rustle of anticipation and wonder. He could see faces. He could see clothes. They had come here, assembled, embraced, and then left, some of them never to return. There must be places like this, he thought, all over Europe. In the feeble light, he could see on the far wall the carved wooden Ark where the Torah once was stored. It was huge, four or five times larger than the Ark in the basement sanctuary. Past the glass chandeliers, he could pick out the ner tamid, the eternal light, hanging from the ceiling, its candle no longer lit. And in the center, just as Rabbi Hirsch had told him, was the bimah, the speaker’s platform.

Standing there in this desolate emptiness, from which even God seemed to have fled, Michael began to weep without control.

He wept for Rabbi Hirsch with his broken face and his losses and journeys and endless grief. He wept for Leah Yaretzky. He wept for Sonny and Jimmy. He wept for Mister G. He wept for all those bony people he’d seen in the newsreels, staring with dead eyes past the barbed wire. He wept for his mother, who had crossed an ocean to escape hatred and found that it followed her like a wolf. He wept for Father Heaney and Charlie Senator, who had gone to their own diasporas. He wept for those people who long ago had come here to this holy place to celebrate their survival and good fortune and then had moved on once again. And then he wept for his father. Who was taken from the balcony of a movie house to the snows of Belgium, carrying with him the memory of a waltz on the polished floors of the Webster Hall. Carrying a picture of his wife. Maybe even carrying a picture of me. Oh, Daddy. Oh, Dad. Please help me now.

He lost all power in his legs and slid down the side of one of the benches and sat weeping on the dirty floor.

He wept until he had no more tears to weep.

And then he stood up and gathered himself. After all, he had work to do. Work that he now believed only he could do. And Shabbos began the next day at sundown. So did Frankie McCarthy’s party.

He went to the bimah. The raised platform was covered by a dark purple cloth that was speckled with plaster and water stains. He pulled the cloth aside and saw the wooden platform that Rabbi Hirsch had described to him from his hospital bed. Sunk into the wood was an iron handle. He pried it up with his fingers and then lifted. A door opened in the top of the platform. Below him in the darkness was a long, deep, tiled structure that resembled a sink, complete with a water tap and drain. On the floor of the sink was a gleaming wooden box, shaped like a coffin. About two feet long. Tied with rough twine. Michael felt his skin pebbling in awe and fear. “It’s true,” he said out loud. “True.” The box once handled by Rabbi Loew had survived the centuries and then had been taken by runners and couriers from Prague to Palestine and finally to this building in this parish in Brooklyn. And here it was before him. He held the railing of the bimah to steady himself and then he reached down for the box. For such a small object, it was heavy, as if many things had been compacted inside its burnished wood. He placed it on the edge of the bimah.

Then he realized that the cords that tied it shut were almost new. The box had lain in its dusty attic for centuries, but someone had opened it in recent years. There were holes spaced three inches apart around the lid, and indentations in the wood, as if a claw hammer had been used to remove nails. Below the lid, the smooth sides of the box were rough in five or six places, perhaps from prying by a screwdriver or flat chisel. And in his mind, Michael saw him: saw Rabbi Hirsch, while the Nazis were marching through Prague, watched him opening it, and, yes, witnessed him falling to his knees in despair as he failed to do what he wanted to do. He thought: I must pray, so I don’t fail. He untied the knots. He slipped the cord off the box and then gazed at it for a long moment. He lifted the lid. He was certain then that he could smell the mists of Prague.

Lying on top of a piece of crumbling purple brocade was the silver spoon. It was dull and tarnished in places, but Michael could see the Hebrew lettering on the handle, and felt the same eerie chill that Rabbi Loew must have felt when it was handed to him by Emperor Rudolf. Beside the spoon, in a small ceramic box, was the curled parchment. The shem. They’re here, Michael thought, just as Rabbi Hirsch whispered they would be. After their long journey, they came to rest here. In this abandoned room. Waiting until they were needed. Waiting for me.

Michael picked up the long-handled spoon, feeling weightless and formless, as if the bones had vanished from his body. The thick silver spoon must have weighed three pounds. His hand trembled in wonder. He rubbed his thumb over the Hebrew letters, and he felt suddenly connected to the distant past. I am as old as the world, he thought. I have seen many things. He wanted to pray, to speak in a thousand languages at once, to express some nameless feeling of connection to the nameless man who had cut those letters in some nameless place across the seas. He tried to conjure a face. He tried to invent a name. Neither would come to him, as the silver spoon shook in his hand. And he thought: No man carved these letters. These letters were carved by God.

He gripped the spoon in both hands to stop the trembling and then held it up, like an offering, to the empty Ark and its unlit eternal light.