mother at their vigil, seated on tea crates at either side of the corpse, Shmerl experienced a sadness beyond words. Slumped in his threadbare tallis, Todrus Shlockmonger snored fitfully, while his mobcapped wife, even as she suckled the newborn at her breast, also nodded in sedentary slumber. The dead boy, cocooned to the chin in his miniature shroud, was laid out on a mat on the floor between them, a flickering havdalah candle at his head.
The Karpinskis had mourned a number of children in their time, and wasn’t Chana Bindl already nursing the dead boy’s replacement? (Though this one was a daughter, which hardly counted as a replacement at all.) But despite the repeated incidence of expiring offspring, Shmerl detected a unique oppression in the atmosphere, a pall of centuries that was his duty to dispel. Kneeling, his joints creaking from the weight he carried, the inventor inserted the electrodes into the florets of the dead boy’s ears, then stood again to turn the rotary handle attached to the handmade dynamo. No sooner did the whirring begin than a visible reverberation of dancing sparks traced an outline around the entire corpse, which sat abruptly upright, jiggling as if to shake off the torpor of rigor mortis. Then either the whir of the machine or the delirious knocking of Shmerl’s heart at the walls of his chest—or perhaps it was the clattering of the coins ejected from the corpse’s eyes—frightened the baby, which began to bawl, rousing in their turn the junkmonger and his wife. Chana Bindl looked, shrieked, and passed out again, while Todrus sat gazing with eyes on stems at his dead son, who jerked like a monkey to the tuneless instrument played by the demonic organ-grinder standing over him.
Though he and his wife had enjoyed the chance benefits of Shmerl’s inventions, this time the outraged junk dealer could see nothing at all redemptive in the boy’s experiment, nor was he inclined to forgive him his monstrous crime. Neither, when the word got out (as it always did) of Shmerl’s iniquitous tampering with God’s decree, were the Jews of Shpinsk, their tolerance exhausted, willing to indulge him further. “For whoever doeth such things,” they quoted Deuteronomy on the subject of sorcerers, “is an abhorrence unto the Lord,” and not a week after his sacrilege the inventor received notice of his imminent induction into the army of the czar. The timing suggested some meddling on the part of the community, especially since, when Todrus protested that his son was a hunchback, the townspeople assured him that the government was willing to make an exception in Shmerl’s case. The junkman railed that the boy had dug his own grave, but in the end there was nothing for it—short of giving him up to a military that would purge him of Jewishness and separate him forever from his tribe—but to appeal to the services of the smuggler Firpo Fruchthandler. Thus, with the sale of Shmerl’s soul sucker and celestial elevator to Ben Tzion Pinkas, the local shylock who’d grown rich from a spate of recently pawned nuggets and gems, the Karpinski family raised the money to hire Firpo. The bibulous smuggler then spirited Shmerl in the back of a donkey cart, rolled up in a rug under cages of fantail pigeons, across the border into Poland, whence he could make for the coast and from there book passage to America.
AS THE KAISER WILHELM steamed into New York harbor, Max Feinshmeker, standing amid the throng of immigrants at the bow, twisted his neck toward the stern. He looked back toward the titanic green lady and the broad bay’s narrows into the open sea, to make sure that the past was keeping its distance. There had been several occasions during the month-long journey from Lodz when he felt that the past had not only overtaken him but had invaded his very being in the form of the whore Jocheved, who sometimes wanted to die. She constantly reminded Max that he had no family, no home, that his soul was so ravaged it could no longer cushion him from the insults of a hostile world. “This is news?” Max would reply, but Jocheved was a malevolent dybbuk, and there were times when she had encouraged the young man to throw himself overboard. Then he would imagine himself bobbing in the steamship’s wake, watching its great bulk diminishing as it churned toward a blood orange horizon, while he sank into a dark and distinctly un-Jewish element.