Snow in August

36

When they reached Garibaldi Street, they faced a border. Behind them was a blizzard. Across the street, there was no snow. Before leaving the safety of the storm, the Golem once again placed his hands on Michael’s head. They walked without being seen by sweating men who were emptying the bars to look at the snow falling a few blocks away. Kids poured out of houses. Women called them home. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. Snow that fell on six square blocks and nowhere else? Snow in August?

In the lobby of the hospital, interns talked about freak meteorological conditions and how hailstones often fell before thunderstorms, and then one of the nurses said that nothing had been the same anywhere since they dropped that damned atom bomb and all of them laughed. They did not see the white boy with the slight limp. And they did not see the huge black man who was with him.

Michael led the way up the back stairs to the seventh floor. He cracked open the stairwell door and looked down the corridor. The nurses were crowded at a picture window at the far end, trying to see the storm, chattering and giggling in an amazed way. Michael and the Golem stepped into the bright white hall and walked away from the nurses to the room of Rabbi Hirsch.

He was asleep. His battered face was bloated and raw. Tubes were still dripping into his good arm.

The Golem looked down at the rabbi and his eyes filled with pity and tears. Michael wished that the clock could be rolled back, the rabbi healed. The Golem gestured to Michael to close the door. Then he leaned down and kissed the rabbi on the forehead. He placed his giant hands to the stricken man’s temples. He touched the word for Truth on his own brow and then touched the rabbi’s lips.

The swelling instantly receded. The flushed raw color evaporated. The Golem gripped the bottom of the plaster cast and gently tore it apart and then dropped it on the floor. The rabbi’s eyelids fluttered, his mouth tried to form words, to decode alphabets in the dark.

The Golem motioned to Michael to find the rabbi’s clothes, pinching the boy’s shirt to explain, as the boy had explained to him. Michael opened the closet beside the sink. The clothes were on a hanger. He lifted them out.

Rabbi Hirsch opened his eyes.

He fixed the Golem in a steady gaze, without wonder or astonishment; his eyes seemed almost surgical in their objectivity. Then he turned to Michael.

“God exists,” he whispered, and his eyes widened in wonder. “Not just sin.”

The Golem carried him home in his arms. The snow was now gone without a trace. They could hear sirens in the night. Michael opened the synagogue door on Kelly Street, glancing down the block at the turning dome lights of the police cars and the blinkers of the ambulances, all clustered around the poolroom. The Golem carried the rabbi into his cramped room and sat him in a chair.

“A glass tea I need,” the rabbi said, and Michael saw that his teeth were intact again. “Put the water, then tell me everything.”

The Golem went to the sink. Michael tried to run the tap, but the Golem gave him an offended look and assumed the task.

“Let him be,” the rabbi said. And ignoring the huge creature, he listened as Michael told him what the Golem had done. He nodded, he shook his head gravely, he chewed on a cuticle, he raised his black eyebrows in astonishment. He never once said “Good.” Then Michael was finished, the kettle whistled, and at last he smiled.

“So what is Jackie doing?” he said.

“He went two-for-four yesterday.”

“Home he has stolen again, like on June twenty-fourth?” the rabbi asked.

“Not yet. He will.”

“I hope we are at the game,” he said. His voice was weak and strained. “I hope he does it to the Philadelphias. That would be something. We’d be sitting in the catbird’s seat.”

He looked at the Golem’s broad back and then glanced at Leah’s photograph. For the first time, his eyes were troubled.

“Why now?” the rabbi said, more to himself than to Michael. “Why not then?”

Michael understood, remembering the cord on the ancient box. “Did you try then?”

“Yes.”

“In the attic of the Old-New Synagogue?”

“Yes.” His eyes glazed over. “I failed.”

The night was warm again, August again, sweaty and hot. The Golem poured water over tea leaves.

“Why I failed, I think now I know,” the rabbi said. “I was not pure enough.” He paused. “I did not believe enough. Maybe, God I did not love enough.”

His mouth started to form other words, but they would not come. The Golem handed him his glass of tea.

“A dank,” he said.

The Golem passed another glass to Michael, who accepted it and added his thanks. The boy looked at the rabbi, who smiled in a sweet, sad way. He stood up, refreshed by the tea.

“You are safe now, no? And your mother too. Di tsayt ken alts ihermakhn. Time, it changes everything.”

“Der beste royfeh,” Michael said. The best healer.

“And now we have to deal with… him.”

He looked at the Golem, who was squatting beside the sink and gazing at them.

“What do you mean?”

“Him we have to send back,” the rabbi said. “With men, he can’t live.”

Michael felt a stab of regret. To send him back was unfair; they hardly knew him. But the Golem understood; there was a fatalistic look in his eyes as he sat on the floor. He held up his huge hand and then pointed upstairs. Rabbi Hirsch nodded, Yes. Upstairs. The box was there, like a small coffin. The Golem waited until they finished their tea. Then he stood up, bowed under the low ceiling, and picked up the shofar. They climbed the stairs together. The rabbi, the boy, and the Golem. On Shabbos.

At the top step, the Golem smiled as Rabbi Hirsch pushed open the door to the sanctuary.

And halted in astonishment.

The sanctuary was again what it had been long ago. A thousand candles burned in holders along the walls and beside the Ark. The Torah was unrolled. The carved oaken pillars gleamed with fresh oil. The copper flutings on the bimah were burnished. The chandeliers were constellations of light. The stained-glass windows were healed and the dust was gone and the plaster whole. And the rows were filled with men holding prayer books, young and bearded and vital and proud, safe in America, their tall sons beside them, together on Shabbos. Among them, Michael saw Mister G, with a full head of hair, and three young boys, holding their prayer books. But there were so many others. There seemed to be thousands of them, millions, all the dead, all those who had vanished, Jews from Poland and Romania and Austria and Prague. The loft above them was full of women, and as Rabbi Hirsch walked out to face them, tentative and hopeful, hearing the old prayers in the old lost language, he gazed up through the dazzle of lights.

And then he saw her.

“Leah,” he whispered.

She was among the women, her face pale and beatific, and Rabbi Hirsch walked quickly, almost running, to the rear of the crowded sanctuary, his jaw loose, his eyes wide, and scrambled up the stairs, with Michael and the Golem behind him. In the loft, the women were jammed together like a wall, and then Leah Yaretzky shouldered her way through, her face dissolving in happiness. Rabbi Hirsch embraced her, holding her fiercely, almost desperately, whispering into her dark hair, and then they stepped out through the open door to the small roof, where the spires of Manhattan blazed magically in the distance.

Michael could not hear the words Rabbi Hirsch was saying to Leah. He could not hear because now the Golem raised the shofar to his lips and aimed it at the stars.

He blew a melancholy tune, full of love and sorrow and joy. The rabbi knew it by heart. The notes were addressed to the angels.

And then the rabbi bowed gracefully to Leah and took her hand.

Michael knew there would be time to send the Golem back to the place from which he had come, to stand above him and recite the letters and alphabets in reverse and invoke again the secret name of God. He knew there would be time to return him to dust. There would be time to fold his tasseled cloak and his button that was for someone named Jackie. There would be time to lay the silver spoon on top of this earthly mound and tie the cords around the shem and close the door and return the bimah to what it was. There would be time. There would be time.

For now, Michael stood quietly in the hot Brooklyn night while clouds tried to become angels and birds talked and stones became roses and white horses galloped over rooftops, and the rabbi, at last, danced with his wife.