in the distance like spikes on a dragon’s tail. The entire dispossessed staff of Karp’s Castle, come to pay their respects, filed past the unvarnished pine casket after the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. Each man released a handful of earth in passing, which thudded hollowly atop the sealed casket containing the only identifiable remains of their putative boss: the charred violin scroll of a vertebra, an eggshell chip from his skull. The relict Mrs. Karp, whose natural pallor had retreated to a near transparency, was supported on the arm of her sister-in-law, Shinde Esther, both of whose parents had passed away the previous year and were buried in an adjacent plot. Flanking Jocheved and Esther were Jocheved’s twin brothers, who had arrived from Palestine in time for the wholesale incineration of their sister’s life. Ruben Karp, his vacant expression at variance with his rakish head dressing and natty suit, stood apart from the others in the shadow of a stranger’s stone.
Jocheved’s brothers had come to America to help raise funds for the settlement movement in Palestine, which advertised itself as the advance guard in the establishment of a Jewish national homeland. Longtime veterans of the struggle to colonize Eretz Israel, Yachneh and Yoyneh, since become Yehezkel and Yigdal, had been elected to accompany the Zionist spokesman Zerubavel ben Blish on his tour of the Eastern states. Soldiers as well as pioneers, the twins served in a dual capacity, functioning as bodyguards if needed while applying, by virtue of their brawn, a little pressure toward encouraging contributions to the Yishuv. As it happened, the very first speaking engagement on Comrade ben Blish’s calendar was at the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue on the Upper West Side of New York, where Mrs. Shmerl Karp, deserted that Shabbos eve by her nocturnal husband, was also in attendance. A young man with the formal manner of an elder statesman, the bespectacled Comrade ben Blish took the stage after the service and the rabbi’s brief introduction, while posted on either side of him, like a pair of mamelukes with their folded arms and buffed heads, stood the imposing Frostbissen brothers.
As Comrade ben Blish launched into his standard recital of miracles performed in the desert, cataloguing fruits that had not been grown there since the time of the prophets, Yigdal and Yehezkel surveyed the congregation. It was their habit even in the friendliest environments to stay alert to the possibility of trouble; to the enemies of Zion no place was sacred. They scanned the faces of the prosperous men in their velvet skull caps and their caparisoned wives in the gallery, focusing on one whose disturbing beauty struck a chord. They turned briefly to each other as the chord thrummed musically in their barrel chests, increasing in volume; then, though it was unseemly to leer for any length at the weaker sex, they turned back toward the handsome woman. Jocheved, from her own angle of vision, felt a similar tug of attraction, the tremor building to a quake that opened a fissure between the moment and a long-buried past. As the speaker began to wind down his talk, he looked ceremonially left and right, which was the signal for his assistants to step from the altar and begin circulating the blue tin collection pushkes. But the twins had already fled the altar, having made a beeline for the stairs to the women’s gallery, where the ladies were astir over the impetuous exit of the decorative Mrs. Karp from their midst. From the staircase beyond the high-domed sanctuary the assembled could overhear peals of laughter signifying a joyful reunion.
She invited them back to the apartment to meet her absentee family, apologizing that her son Ruben was seldom around and her husband Shmerl often worked late on projects at his plant. She tried phoning him but as usual got no answer, since it was after hours and, on nights when he planned to stay over, the inventor would send the watchman home. She busied herself with serving tea and homemade schnecken; there was also—as despite Prohibition Jews were allowed a portion of wine for ritual purposes—some sugary muscatel. She wouldn’t cease her bustling about until the brothers forcibly sat her down in a wing chair, urging her not to be nervous, it had after all been no more than twenty-two years since they’d said good-bye. “Look on you,” exclaimed Jocheved when she’d collected herself enough to take in their brute demeanors, “like overgrown Boy Scouts.” The twins grinned with damp