“And you, Rabbi Hirsch?” Kate Devlin said. “How did you get away?”
“Very simple,” he said, without pride. “I ran.” Then he shrugged. “Or better, I walked. I walked to the mountains and traded my clothes with a woodcutter. I shave the hair off my head, so that now I am bald and without a beard.” He turned to Michael. “Like Brother Thaddeus.” A small smile. “Everything black, I throwed away. My identity papers I burned. My father’s picture, this too. Anybody looking at him, he’s a Jew. All I have is in my little bag, a picture of Leah, a few shirts, a toothbrush. I walked and hid, like an animal that is lost.”
He walked through Romania. He walked through Yugoslavia. He walked all the way to Greece. In Piraeus, he eventually boarded a ship going to the Dominican Republic, where a dictator named Trujillo was accepting Jews, because he thought there were too many black people in his country. Rabbi Hirsch lived in the Jewish colony the Dominicans called Sosua. He was one of the rabbis. The sun was hot. The beaches were white. He stayed for the duration of the war.
“And that’s it, the story of my life,” Rabbi Hirsch said. He smiled in a tentative way and sipped his wine. “Or like they say in Sosua, la historia de mi vida. Some Spanish I learned there too. I built some houses. I fished in the sea. I read all the time, newspapers in Spanish and English, Time magazine. My books, most of them were sent from Palestine, and so I have them there too, have Prague in the books.” He tapped his forehead. “And here too.”
He ran his tongue over his lips as if cleaning the residue of the wine.
“The colony in Sosua? A failure. City people, we are not good farmers. When the war ends, most of the Jews leave. I stay a little longer, but last year I camed here, when from Brooklyn the synagogue put a notice in the paper for a rabbi.” He shook his head slowly. “How do you say? That’s all there is to it. The ball game is over. Nada más.”
Michael glanced at the clock over the stove. Almost midnight. He was exhausted, but he wanted the night of confession and disclosure to go on and on.
“Are you absolutely certain, Rabbi, that your wife is dead?” Kate Devlin said calmly.
The rabbi was slumping now, his face drawn.
“One guy, I met him in Ellis Island, right out there,” he said, motioning with his wine glass to the window and the distant harbor. “He tells me he is in the underground with Leah. And he says she shot three Nazis when they try to arrest her, and so they don’t kill her. Killing her is like mercy. They keep her alive, in the Gestapo building. And when they are finish with her, they send her to the camps. Maybe Treblinka. Maybe Auschwitz. Nobody knows.”
“But there must be some records,” Kate said.
“After the war, letters I wrote to the Americans, the British, even the Russians,” he said. “In German I wrote, in Czech, in my not good English.” His body slumped lower in the chair. “To nobody I wrote in Yiddish. Nobody is left alive to read it.” He took a deep breath, then let it go. “To Prague I wrote, to Vienna, to Warsaw, to the Jewish agencies in Tel Aviv. Everywhere, I wrote. All have her name on the same lists, just one name with millions of others. Dead, they say. No details. Just one word. Dead. In different languages. Same meaning.”
The rabbi looked at Michael’s face and touched his blackened skin and shook his head. Kate got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Michael stared at the older man.
“Rabbi?” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“When you went to the meeting in the Old-New Synagogue?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you make the Golem?”
The rabbi turned his head and gazed out the open window at the nighttime city and the distant skyline of Manhattan.
“This I think about all the time,” he said softly. “Maybe…”
He didn’t finish the sentence because Kate returned from the bathroom and sat down facing him. Her eyes were swollen and pink. The pint bottle of wine was almost empty. She shared the last inch with Rabbi Hirsch.
“Your wife was a hero, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said in a consoling way. Michael noticed a slight crack in her voice, a tremble.
“Yes. You said it. A hero.”
“And if you ask me, you are too,” she said.
“No.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Leah, yes. Your husband, yes. But me? A hero? Neyn. Keyn mol. No.”
She sipped the wine, her eyes full of concern and doubt, but in some way holding back. It was as if one question had been rising to her tongue across the long evening and she couldn’t let Rabbi Hirsch leave without asking it. Michael watched her, waiting for her to speak.
“Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?” she said at last.
His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side.
“I believe in sin,” he said, and finished his wine. “I believe in evil.”
28
At the door, before setting out on his return journey through the parish, Rabbi Hirsch suddenly stopped and searched through his pockets. “Vart a minut… wait a minute. Ah, here!” He waved a small envelope, smiled, then removed two tickets. To Ebbets Field.
“For us,” he said. “To see Jackie!” The rabbi’s face brightened as he remembered a song from the radio. “We will buy peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and I don’t care if we ever get back!”
Michael could only mumble his thanks, unable to speak up. The rabbi had told him that he’d never seen a baseball game, not even in the Dominican Republic. But Michael had never been to a professional game either; most kids in the parish saw their first game with their father. The boy had played ball. He had watched sandlot games at the Parade Grounds, on the far end of Prospect Park. But the great ballplayers of the Dodgers lived in newsreels, on the radio, on the other side of the gates of Ebbets Field. He had thought he would finally see the Dodgers with Sonny and Jimmy, once school was over. But things had gone wrong. He might never even see Sonny and Jimmy again. Now here comes Rabbi Hirsch. This wonderful man. With tickets to Ebbets Field. Together we’ll see the Dodgers. And Jackie Robinson. Oh, jeez. He turned his head, afraid the rabbi would see the tears in his eyes.
“What a grand thing to do, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, smiling in a beautiful way. Michael wondered if the rabbi saw her as beautiful too. She examined the date on the tickets and gave them back to the rabbi. Two weeks away. “But you know, he’ll still have the cast on his leg.”
“We’ll get there, Mom,” Michael insisted. “Don’t worry.”
Then he asked Rabbi Hirsch for one final favor: to sign his cast. The rabbi smiled and wrote on the smooth, hard plaster in chiseled Hebrew lettering. Michael thought: No ironworker has that on his cast. And they said good night.
“Please, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, “be careful.”
“Thank you.”
“Mom, he got away from the Gestapo. He should be able to get away from the Falcons.”
The rabbi smiled in a tired, knowing way and was gone.
“He’s a good man,” Kate said, as she locked the door behind him. “And very sad.”
In the morning, Michael began his own version of spring training. He went to the roof and packed two Campbell’s Soup cans with pebbles and taped the ends and started doing curls to build up his arms. He lay on his back and pedaled his legs in the air. The cast on his lower right leg was very heavy; he could only pedal it six times at first. Then eight. Then ten. After a few days, the weight of the cast lessened; he then tied the packed soup cans to his good left leg, to even out the weight. His foot sweated heavily inside the cast, and he had to scratch himself with a school ruler or a butter knife. But he was getting stronger. He could feel it.