“You’re covered with dirt,” she said.
He held out the paper cup again and she refilled it.
“Do you want me to get you anything to eat?”
“No. I’m not hungry. Did you bring the flask?”
“Darling. Oh, Darling.”
Noah noticed that Nat and Itzik were quarrelling. Itzik, pink-faced, was pointing at them. Noah lit a cigarette. She handed him the flask and he slipped it into his pocket. “Would you wait around the corner?” he asked. “Part of the desk has been uncovered. It won’t be long now.”
“There’s no place to park.”
“I know. We could charge half a buck a head. But they don’t mean bad. They … Go to the Bar Vendôme. I’ll be around later.”
“I think you should eat. I …”
“I’m going to phone my mother.”
She watched him walk away. Itzik started towards her and Miriam, who wanted to avoid a scene, put the car into gear quickly.
Voices were lowered when Noah entered the grocery store. There was a dark, damp smell to the place. Noah stared at a sweating hunk of cottage cheese. The sign over the cash said: “MEXICAN MONEY IS ACCEPTED IN MEXICO. HERE, CASH WILL DO FINE.” The phone was on the counter.
“Hello, Maw?” A pause. “No. Not yet.” Another pause. “I know. Yes. I know. But …” Noah put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to the crowd. “You tell me if I’m not talking loud enough for the people in the back.” Several men turned away, embarrassed. Noah turned away too. Also embarrassed. “This is a public place,” a woman said. Noah uncovered the mouthpiece. “Quiet for once in your life,” a man said. “He’s the son.” “No,” Noah said. “No. You stay home. I’ll phone as soon as I have news.”
Outside, Panofsky stood in the sun. He gripped Noah’s hand firmly. “It’s terrible,” he said. “I just got here and I ain’t staying. I …”
“I understand.”
“If you need anything. If there’s anything I …”
“The women are with my mother. They must be driving her crazy. Why don’t you go up there and talk to her?”
“I’ll take a taxi.”
Paquette climbed back into the cab. The boom creaked.
“Art! HEY, ART! They’re starting again.”
Nat and Lou resumed their positions. Nat pulled a framed picture of Weizmann out of the heap. The glass had been shattered.
Noah walked over to the cab and motioned for Paquette to stop the motor. He handed Paquette the flask of rye and Paquette slipped it into his pocket surreptitiously. “Itzik is watching,” he said.
Noah nodded. “When I wave,” he said, “please stop digging. That means I’ve seen him. I don’t want the shovel – the teeth to …”
“Sure. I understand. Your father and me were good friends. Remember? I used to come to make the fire in your house on Saturday mornings. You were so high then.…”
“I remember.”
“That Itzik, he was always full of … If you like I’ll bash him in the teeth.”
“I would like. You don’t know how much. But you need your job.”
Noah climbed back on to the rim of the rubbish heap. Paquette waved and started up the motor again. The shovel moved towards the pile.
Itzik yanked at Noah’s trouser leg. “What did you say to him?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing! Listen, be reasonable, you must have said something.”
“He told me that he used to light the fire for us on shabus.”
“You handed him something.”
Suddenly Noah realized that Itzik’s jaw was level with his foot. That was tempting, but he turned away. Itzik tugged at his trouser leg again. Noah ignored him.
Around two in the afternoon the weather turned again and the sun was reduced to a widening yellow stain in a swirl of grey cloud; but the heat, if anything, got worse. Everything you touched was burning or wet or blistering. Noah tasted the salt on his lips. He kept staring down into that pit that was getting bigger and bigger, but from time to time things started to spin and he had to look away and walk around for a bit. All his nerves sparked like exposed wires. Max’s plane had been delayed. The crowd slimmed out. The kids started up a game of kick-the-can down the street, but kept a spotter watching the crane. Several rumours made the rounds. One said that they had caught the man who had set fire to the office, and another that Wolf had not plunged into the fire but had walked away from it, obviously suffering from amnesia. But Moore, who had seen Wolf rush into the flames, had already been questioned by the police, and as far as Noah knew there was still no proof that the fire had not been an accident.
Those who still remained on the scene around four o’clock began to grumble quite openly. Several of the windows that looked out on the yard were banged shut like a reproach. Would they continue to dig if they didn’t find the body before dark? Why couldn’t the crane work quicker? A few women brought chairs down from their kitchens and began to gossip and knit in the shade. Discussion groups formed. Louis Berger the bookie said that it was always ten degrees hotter in the ghetto than it was anywhere else in the city. “The weather observatory,” he said, “is on a ritzy lake ten miles out of Montreal. And the building – air-conditioned! Why? Because the Goy who runs the joint – a third cousin eighteen times removed of the Mayor – can’t stand the heat.”
Rimstein the rag pedlar, three soiled moth-eaten suits slung over his narrow shoulders, his sorry face worn from the heat and his beard protruding from his chin like a tangle of rusting cord, shook his head sadly. “In such a heat,” he said, “Our People wandered forty years over a desert.”
“And there was no shmaltz herring and wine waiting for them in the synagogue after, eh?”
Melech Adler stared inscrutably out of the window of the Cadillac. Itzik came up to him.
“If when you find him,” Melech said, “and there should be a box, I want it. Nobody should look in the box.”
“A box?”
“Listen what I tell you and no questions. Noah shouldn’t … I want the box. Nobody should see.”
A stillness prevailed. “Not even a leaf is moving,” an elderly woman said.
Rimstein turned to Louis. “We are short one man for the evening service,” he said. “So you come to the synagogue tonight. Maybe it’ll bring you luck with the horses.”
“What does God know about Daily Doubles?”
“It is written: ‘I would rather be called a fool all my days than sin one hour before God.’ ”
“Written! Everything’s gotta be written for us Jewboys! When Rabbi Herman comes around trying to scare up some gelt for his holy shakers everything’s gotta be signed in three million carbon copies. Still, he doesn’t do so bad for himself, the old goniff.”
A few minutes after four Noah saw his father’s feet protruding from under a slab of charred wood. The toes pointed inwards. He waved and Paquette stopped the shovel in mid-air. Noah scrambled down into the pit.
“Art! ART! Hey, guys! Quick!”
A roar went up from the crowd.
Windows banged open one after another like shots being fired into the heat. Black policemen made a circle around the heap of rubbish and held back the surging crowd with threats. Several men cursed. The two men who were dressed in white linen opened up the doors to the ambulance and got the stretcher out. About twenty people detached themselves from the crowd and assembled at the back of the ambulance. A few of them had cameras.
“Art! HEY, ART!”
Noah crouched in the pit and cleared slab after slab of charred wood off his father’s body. He looked up and saw Nat and Lou and Itzik standing on the rim of the pit. They spun around him like figures on a top. Noah stared at the body. Wolf was huddled up and held an iron box to his stomach. A charred wooden beam pressed against his back. His face was distorted. The eyes were opened, the mouth was slack. The clothes were burned but his body was intact. One hand was in the box. The other held on to it grimly. Noah swayed and bit
his lips and opened the box. There were several rolls of parchment. Hebrew letters had been meticulously drawn on all of them.
“Paw says you let that stuff alone,” Itzik yelled hoarsely.
Noah didn’t even look up. He found a yellow stack of letters that were written in Russian or Polish. There were also several faded snapshots of a plump girl that had been frayed by too much handling. One of the snapshots, probably taken at a village fair, showed a strong young man with his arms around the girl. Melech had had no beard then. Noah discovered other letters on fresher paper. He slipped the snapshots and several receipts and a bundle of letters into his pocket and examined one of the scrolls again.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of …”
Each letter had been laboriously formed. But the hand that had created them had been shaky. Itzik scrambled down into the pit. Behind him came the two men with the stretcher. Noah dumped the scrolls back into the box and climbed up the other side. His head was whirling. He had not yet grasped the significance of his find. Clearing the pit, he felt Itzik tugging at his trouser leg again. Noah pushed through the crowd and across the street to the Cadillac. He handed Melech the box. “That’s why he ran into the flames,” he said.
Melech looked at him – his mouth opened and his hand pressed to his throat suppressing a scream.
“Zeyda, I …”
That swarthy man with the dense eyes grabbed the box and yanked out one of the scrolls. A crowd gathered around him. The swarthy man plucked his nose and held up the scroll and yelled: “Wolf Adler died for the Torah.”
Melech seized the box.
Noah stared stupidly and began to sway.
“WOLF ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH.”
A woman fainted. She was seated on a kitchen chair and a man was fanning her with a newspaper.
A face swam out of the sun to Noah. Itzik’s finger shook under his eyes. “You’re a tramp,” he said. Then, for he must have caught a whiff of Noah’s breath, “and a drunkard too.” Noah tried to break away but Itzik held on to him. “Your father died for God but you’re a …”
“Itzik, please.…”
An incensed crowd pressed around them.
“You may come to the funeral but after that don’t you dare …”
Noah turned away but his path was blocked by the stretcher-bearers. His father’s body was covered with a blanket. Noah let them pass. Itzik grabbed him again. “God will …”
“I should hit you,” Noah said. “I’m angry and I should hit you. But that would be my short temper against your short mind.”
“ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH. WOLF ADLER …”
The swarthy man held the scroll aloft before a throng of admirers.
“Go ahead,” Itzik said. “Hit me. You’re rotten!”
“EVERYBODY LISTEN, WOLF …”
Noah stared at the swarthy man. “Please tell him to stop, Lou. I know he died for the scrolls but …”
“… ADLER DIED FOR THE TORAH. LISTEN!”
The doors banged shut and Noah saw the ambulance pull away just before Itzik – holding him very tight – began to shake him and shake him.
Somebody took a picture.
Lou separated them. He pressed Noah’s arm and shrugged his shoulders. His eyes were moist.
4
Summer 1953
THAT WAS A BRIGHT MORNING – THE MORNING OF Wolf Adler’s funeral. The shrill blue sky was without clouds or depth. Those birds that had anticipated the oncoming winter filled and fluttered in the blue blackly; lots of twittering, swooping arrows, bound south. Trees postured limply, their leaves yellowing, on both sides of the street. An angering, ubiquitous sun ricocheted off black sedans and sweltering faces and mushy asphalt. Many a frazzled flower yearned for the shade of red-brick walls or balconies in the occasional parched garden of City Hall Street. The crowd of mourners gathered there that morning was estimated at “more than a thousand” in the afternoon edition of the Star. The Gazette, however, claimed 1,500 mourners several hours later, and the Herald, appearing the following morning, began its story with “Nearly two thousand Jews …” Anyway, there was quite a crowd. Lots of the hoi-polloi but a few important people too. Take – for instance – Buddy Gross of 20th Century Promotions, who had been responsible for the splash of full-page memorial advertisements in all the newspapers. A black-boarded picture of Wolf and a poem. (Max had objected to the ads at first. But Buddy had told him: one, the reporters would get the story anyway; two, Max had a bastard of a campaign coming up; and three, it was an honour to the community.) Now David Lerner, who was also there, was a horse of a different colour. Formerly a communist and still a poet, Lerner was famous for his lyrics throughout Outremont. Possessor of a real rhetorical gift, he wrote speeches that were read by philanthropic millionaires at Zionist banquets. He had gotten two hundred dollars for his ode celebrating Wolf Adler. That, and a total readership reckoned at 800,000 by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. (A considerable jump over the three dollars and less than two hundred readers his Ode to Sacco and Vanzetti had earned him some years back.) Take Rimstein the rag pedlar. He had ruptured himself long ago and in an even colder country to keep out of the Czar’s army, and had come not to mourn a friend but to size up the coffin and to keep in the sun and with the crowd. The swarthy man with dense eyes, Yosel Wiserman, hoped to see another family squabble. Also present: Louis Berger the Bookie and Hoppie Drazen. Twersky, landlord. Yidel Stein. Pinky’s Squealer. Many elderly women with wizened faces and yellow shawls wept copiously. Professionals, they seldom missed a wedding and never a funeral. Simcha Rabinovitch – now there’s a better Jewish joke than most. Born in a tailor shop on a dark tenement street, Simcha had walked across Latvia and through Russia and down into China – where another tailor had forged papers for him – and across to Japan and San Francisco and over the American continent to Montreal, Canada, where his Uncle Herschel had given him another stool in another tailor shop on another dark tenement street. There he stooped, the marathoner arrived, robbed of the dream that had sustained him through all his hiking. There was no parking space available for blocks around and all the windows of City Hall Street were stuffed with howling, disputatious spectators. Estelle Geiger, who had been up in Ste. Agathe with the children – wasn’t it better to spend money on enjoyment than on doctor’s bills? – and who had been elected Queen Esther by a landslide at the YMHA Purim Ball of 1949, was there with six other wives. Seven ripe peaches with black hair. After the funeral they were going to see The Robe at the Palace and then Normie had promised to take them out to dinner at Ruby Foo’s. Black policemen in magnificent goggles patrolled the route between the house on City Hall Street and the synagogue on silver motor-cycles. One of them, Omer Desjardins, had used to be on the anti-Red squad and knew the constituency of Carrier intimately. When he had last raided Panofsky’s he had allowed him to keep Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder because he had known that it was a medical book. Art Gold turned up with the kids, Gloria Anne and Sheldon. President of the Committee for Better Relations Between Gentiles and Jews – “There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy’s. And the right side.” – he hoped to organize a Wolf Adler Memorial Fund. Youngsters shinned up lamp-posts whilst many of their elders, who had movie cameras, stood on the rooftops of cars. Benjy Tulch, whose father had been killed in a running gun-battle with the RCMP when his family had still been bootleggers, twisted in the seat of his M.G. Ah, it was a fine day. You can have your slap-dash of an autumn day with insanely bright leaves falling at your feet, you can have the dreams of your loose spring evenings that end up being just dreams, you can even have all the snows of winter, but give me a white day with a blue sky and a dazzling yellow sun. Rosy women and brown children and pink-faced men. Hey, remember that day Moishe the Idiot farted during the Kol Nidre service? Or that time they raided Chaim Shub’s shop for printing phony ra
ffles? Hell. Hey, remember Bloom? “MAKE BLOOM YOUR BROOM, CLEAN UP CARTIER.” The crowd surged to and fro before the door to the house. Moishe Garber, who was a recent arrival from Lodz, wanted to know if the house was for rent. He had a family of five, he said. Press photographers leaned against cars. Aaron Panofsky watched from his wheelchair. The Hook, and a few nimble-fingered others, moved stealthily among the crowd. Inside, prayers were being read:
The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are judgement: a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is he.
Brothers and sisters, father, mother, wife and son of Wolf Adler, who had died a hero, stood around the pinewood coffin like hesitant swimmers standing back from a deepening pool. Leah wept dryly and Melech glowered and Jenny squeezed a handkerchief to her swollen eyes. Noah had a tendency to stare blankly.
Gusts made up of hundreds of hot, festering voices banged like rain against the shut windows.
If a man live a year or a thousand years, what profiteth it him? He shall be as though he has not been … He awardeth unto man his reckoning and his sentence, and all must render acknowledgement unto him.
Goldie gulped and reached out and crumpled up on the mute coffin. Knocking fiercely on the pinewood, she yelled: “Wolf. Wolf. Forgive me! Have mercy on us, Wolf!” Max pulled her away gently. “Easy,” he whispered. She broke away and turned wildly on Noah. “He shouldn’t be here. He’s a …” Her voice trailed off. Leah began to moan softly and her brother, Harry, patted her shoulder. “There,” he said. “There, there.”
The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Max and Itzik and Nat, Karl Panofsky, Harry Goldenberg, and Noah were the pall-bearers. Leah whimpered incoherently, the other women watched with horror, as the men grappled with the coffin and finally heaved it onto their shoulders rockily. A dreadful moment followed when the pall-bearers got twisted in a swirl of relatives in the hall. The coffin, slipping treacherously, almost toppled to the floor. Ida dug her nails into Stanley’s arm. “I don’t want to look,” she said. “They open it at the cemetery and you’re supposed to. I can’t.…”