have debilitating side effects, such as temporary blindness.
In the meantime Shmerl persisted in his experiments, whose results remained unsatisfactory. While he would have preferred to work in solitude, now that his labors were popular gossip, he was often surrounded by inquisitive siblings eager to offer themselves as guinea pigs. Though he tried to discourage them, his little brothers made a game of snatching up his decoctions fresh from the still and swilling them neat. One of them, the web-toed Mushy, was confined to the outhouse for hours during which he lost his baby fat and the ability to laugh; whereas the eight year-old Gronim was seized with a steely erection that kept his little petsl stiff for a day and a night. Then came the explosion that formally concluded the alchemical phase of Shmerl’s investigations. He had been hoping to recreate the esh m’saref, the refiner’s fire that transmuted base elements into a liquid philosopher’s stone, which insured strength, health, and eternal youth and postponed death indefinitely. (It was a process also said to render common metals into gold, though Shmerl had no interest in that particular consequence.) He was cooking sulphur together with charcoal and saltpeter in the brick furnace, and had a pulverized rind of ethrog on hand to feed the growing flames, when a blast occurred that blew out the flimsy wall of Todrus’s storeroom. Burning debris sprayed a salvo of torches over the swayback roofs of the Jewish quarter, causing the shingles to catch fire. The whole shtetl might have been consumed in a single conflagration had not the Water-Carriers Guild been summoned to form a bucket brigade from the town pump. Shmerl himself emerged from the rubble uninjured but black as pitch, his hair and eyebrows in patches where they hadn’t been singed away; his clothes were in shreds, his modesty protected only by the remnant of his knitted tallit koton. Appearing like some cacodemon hatched from one of his own makeshift retorts, he frightened the children and reinforced the general opinion that he had become a dabbler in the black arts, one to be shunned for looking into things he should not.
Around that time a maskil, a self-appointed representative of the Jewish Enlightenment, appeared in Shpinsk. He drove into town in an awning-covered caravan, a rattletrap conveyance run by a windy mechanism trailing fumes, which he parked on the market platz beside a vendor of cracked eggs. Then climbing onto the caravan in his frock coat and natty beard, he rolled back the awning to reveal a gallery of modern marvels as yet unseen in the Jewish Pale. He introduced to a skeptical crowd, among whom the young Shmerl Karpinski stood riveted, a gas turbine engine which he jerked into motion by revolving a dogleg crank. The resulting din caused babies to squawl and a draft horse to bolt in its traces. He exhibited neon gas in vacuum tubes linked together like glowing wurst, and an electromagnet entwined in a copper helix that pulled cutlery from a knife-sharpener’s sack several yards away. For a pièce de résistance he used his own ramrod body to conduct a direct current between a live wire in his left hand and a glass bulb in his right, thus challenging the light of the sun in an overcast sky. The crowd of mostly peasants, tradesmen, and truant children watched in rapt fascination, while the local Chasidim spat “Kaynehoreh!” against the evil eye. But for all the maskil’s disclaimers to the effect that the items he demonstrated had exclusively practical purposes, Shmerl—never keen on the distinction between science and magic—thought the power in these contrivances might be harnessed for more spiritual ends.
Banished from what was left of the storehouse and forced to keep out of his ill-tempered father’s sight, Shmerl had since reestablished his base of operations in the vine-tangled ambience of Yakov Chilblain’s abandoned flour mill. This was a spongy structure, nearly reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation, that the Shpinskers generally regarded as haunted; imps, it was said, rode the windmill’s ragged sails, and vampire bats flew out of the sack loft at night. But Shmerl was undeterred. A rationalist, he knew that imps and demons, though real enough, were merely pests that could be vaporized with the proper apparatus—such as a coil heated by electricity generated from a Voltaic pile composed of a stack of magnetized coins. (The coil also generated a hearthlike warmth, which was incidental.) He read about this phenomenon in The Book of Wonders that