the construction and demolition sites that interrupted the tenements, delighted at how readily available were the scraps of aluminum, copper wire, and iron nails he required for his bricolage construction. Back in the apartment he blew on his stiffened fingers, then removed from his carpet bag the electromagnet complete with alkali battery he’d brought with him from across the sea. That and his Book of Wonders were the only vestiges of his shameful old life he’d permitted himself to take along on his journey.
In truth, it was not a complicated operation; he’d undertaken more ambitious procedures back in Shpinsk, and his uncle’s tool chest was more replete with precision instruments than any he’d previously had access to. But by the time he’d assembled the mechanism and fastened it to the curlicued struts of a sewer’s treadle, looping the elastic belt around the flywheel, Shmerl was too fatigued to see his experiment through. It was still dark out and there was time for a catnap to restore himself before testing the success or failure of his motorized Singer; dawn, he assumed, was still hours away. He crawled onto his piecework pallet lulled by a sweet suspense, ignoring the window shades turning from gray to a pale lemon hue. Nodding off, he saw a swarm of raggedy wage slaves pedaling their machines across the face of the moon on their way to celestial ports of call. He awoke to screaming, and only later, after the Oyzers had sent him packing, was he able to piece together what had happened.
“JEWS, GIVE TZEDAKAH,” crooned an old man with a flowing beard and helical sidelocks stationed beneath an awning on Christie Street. “For the righteous of Palestine, give halukkah, your pennies for the destitute of Jerusalem…” His voice a touch too mellifluous for his wasted face, he rattled the soup tin that served for a pushke in the failing light of day. The tin rattled from the buttons and pins that citizens lacking spare change had dropped in, believing no doubt that something was better than nothing. Did they think that because he was ancient he was also blind? (Though blindness had sometimes figured in his arsenal of afflictions.) Finally someone deposited an actual coin, and the old man muttered a blessing barely distinguishable from a curse before retiring to a drafty cellar nearby to count up the day’s take. There he removed the false beard and earlocks, peeled the crusted putty from his cheeks and nose, and hung up the mud-daubed caftan and the shtreimel that resembled an ermine babka. He sat down at a table covered in an oilskin on which puddles of wax had congealed, spilled the coins and other items from the tin can, and with slender fingers protruding from ragged mittens totted up the negligible amount he’d collected. Max Feinshmeker, née Jocheved Frostbissen, was growing tired of this particular ruse and would soon feel compelled to adopt another, a transformation he had repeated several times throughout that frigid winter.
He could see his breath in the cellar storeroom beneath Tzotz’s Dairy Restaurant on Delancey, where he kept company with barrels of pickled sturgeon and tubs of sour cream. Tzotz the proprietor, for charity’s sake, had agreed to let the mendicant kip there awhile before he returned (this was his story) to the Holy Land. Over the long winter months he’d slept in an assortment of cellars, three-cent lodgings, and detention cells, assuming a variety of disguises in his effort to remain elusive. Uneasy with each new incarnation, however, Max had tried on and discarded a dozen impostures, employing them a week or so before rejecting them for good. It was a sound enough strategy, he reasoned: Before his enemies had time to unmask him in one guise, he would already have taken another—though Jocheved sometimes insinuated that, in donning and doffing these serial personae, altering his character with each new subterfuge, he was looking in vain to find his own true self. She needled him that way persistently, urging him to continue the search for Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr in his zinc-lined casket, which quest was all that seemed to matter to her.
“We’re alone here without a pot to pish in,” was Max’s routine complaint, which he was sometimes observed by passers-by to mutter aloud. “We’re hungry and dirty and even if I had the pittance for a shvitz, I couldn’t use it for fear they might discover you—and all you can think of is a corpse on ice?”