In truth, the vision had a certain consolatory appeal, and there were moments when Max, in his loneliness, might have succumbed to the dybbuk’s urging, were it not for the aged Chasid encased in a block of ice atop three quarters of a pood of beluga sturgeon roe.
For the sake of the contract with his patron Zalman Pisgat, Max was obliged to keep himself in one piece. He was sworn to deliver the goods safely into the hands of the agent of an American financier, who despite his fabulous wealth enjoyed a bargain, especially if it involved a little risk. (Although, to the novice smuggler’s mind, the risk was entirely his own.) Upon receipt of the caviar the agent would hand over an agreed-upon sum that Max would then wire in its entirety back to Lodz. He was to take no percentage for himself, his compensation having been the investment that the ice mensch had already made in his journey, an investment for which old Pisgat expected a tenfold return. And if that sum were not remitted by a certain date, Zalman Pisgat would then be forced to inform parties less magnanimous than himself, whose operatives would track Max down and tear out his spleen. Max appreciated the forthright simplicity of the arrangement and admired how the humble icehouse proprietor was connected to a criminal network whose reach dissolved the distance between Europe and America. Such was the nature of Max’s motivation; while Jocheved, when she wasn’t feeling suicidal, had her own reasons for making the trip, which involved an allegiance to her frozen inheritance that remained largely inscrutable to the smuggler. Not that he didn’t try to fathom her attitude, as he sat beside the reinforced casket under hanging flanks of beef in a railroad reefer car, or later on in the steamship’s refrigerated hold. But Max preferred his own practical incentive: that he was enlisted in a mutually beneficial business covenant, which footed the bill for the journey across what was left of Poland into Prussia and farther on.
Without Zalman’s endowment the trip would have been out of the question, an unimaginable hardship given the added burden of the cedar box and its outlaw freight. As it was, Max had traveled in relative comfort, looking out of boxcars and wagon-lit windows at a countryside whose beauty his consciousness, bred in the ghetto, was ill prepared to take in. There were purple meadows spattered with crimson poppies from which clouds of finches started up at the sound of the train, fields of sunflowers, cherry orchards, linden groves that were the remnant of a primeval forest cleared for pastures. Peasant cottages like overturned longboats bordered the rivers and canals; thatched hermitages protruded from grottoes, and onion domes sprouted like toadstools amid the rolling plains. The roads meandered like the unraveling threads of the old regimes, from whose frayed fabric a million poor Jews had tumbled. They clogged the highways and station platforms, the Jews, trudged the gauntlets of inhospitable villages, lugging their chattels and scrolls and trailing goosedown like surf. Periodically their ranks were swelled by the youthful fusgeyers tramping with their tents on their backs and singing hymns: “Go, yidelekh, into the wide world…”; then the tattered company would march in step with them, expanding their chests until the young people had passed them by, after which their weary feet would drag again.
It was the continuation of a trek that had started in Egypt, then passed through Jerusalem and Sefarad into Eastern Europe, where it took a breather for a brief millennium—a long slog during which many fell, and even those who could afford to ride were not immune from humiliation: like the boy Max had witnessed in the crowded rail car mocked by soldiers who clipped off his sidelocks. How resigned he had been, as if the abuse were an initiation he had to endure in order to enter America—for they were all (with only marginal Zionist exceptions) on their way to America.
All this Max observed with a certain detachment, buffered as he was by Zalman’s stipend, which is not to say that the excursion was without peril. The rail leg of a journey that should have taken only a matter of days took instead a fortnight, and there were constant interruptions when officers carrying weapons came aboard to inspect documents and passports. (Forged by Pisgat’s associates, his papers consolidated an identity to which the smuggler still had only a tenuous connection.) Sometimes they were accompanied by physicians