He lost all power in his legs and slid down the side of one of the benches and sat weeping on the dirty floor.
He wept until he had no more tears to weep.
And then he stood up and gathered himself. After all, he had work to do. Work that he now believed only he could do. And Shabbos began the next day at sundown. So did Frankie McCarthy’s party.
He went to the bimah. The raised platform was covered by a dark purple cloth that was speckled with plaster and water stains. He pulled the cloth aside and saw the wooden platform that Rabbi Hirsch had described to him from his hospital bed. Sunk into the wood was an iron handle. He pried it up with his fingers and then lifted. A door opened in the top of the platform. Below him in the darkness was a long, deep, tiled structure that resembled a sink, complete with a water tap and drain. On the floor of the sink was a gleaming wooden box, shaped like a coffin. About two feet long. Tied with rough twine. Michael felt his skin pebbling in awe and fear. “It’s true,” he said out loud. “True.” The box once handled by Rabbi Loew had survived the centuries and then had been taken by runners and couriers from Prague to Palestine and finally to this building in this parish in Brooklyn. And here it was before him. He held the railing of the bimah to steady himself and then he reached down for the box. For such a small object, it was heavy, as if many things had been compacted inside its burnished wood. He placed it on the edge of the bimah.
Then he realized that the cords that tied it shut were almost new. The box had lain in its dusty attic for centuries, but someone had opened it in recent years. There were holes spaced three inches apart around the lid, and indentations in the wood, as if a claw hammer had been used to remove nails. Below the lid, the smooth sides of the box were rough in five or six places, perhaps from prying by a screwdriver or flat chisel. And in his mind, Michael saw him: saw Rabbi Hirsch, while the Nazis were marching through Prague, watched him opening it, and, yes, witnessed him falling to his knees in despair as he failed to do what he wanted to do. He thought: I must pray, so I don’t fail. He untied the knots. He slipped the cord off the box and then gazed at it for a long moment. He lifted the lid. He was certain then that he could smell the mists of Prague.
Lying on top of a piece of crumbling purple brocade was the silver spoon. It was dull and tarnished in places, but Michael could see the Hebrew lettering on the handle, and felt the same eerie chill that Rabbi Loew must have felt when it was handed to him by Emperor Rudolf. Beside the spoon, in a small ceramic box, was the curled parchment. The shem. They’re here, Michael thought, just as Rabbi Hirsch whispered they would be. After their long journey, they came to rest here. In this abandoned room. Waiting until they were needed. Waiting for me.
Michael picked up the long-handled spoon, feeling weightless and formless, as if the bones had vanished from his body. The thick silver spoon must have weighed three pounds. His hand trembled in wonder. He rubbed his thumb over the Hebrew letters, and he felt suddenly connected to the distant past. I am as old as the world, he thought. I have seen many things. He wanted to pray, to speak in a thousand languages at once, to express some nameless feeling of connection to the nameless man who had cut those letters in some nameless place across the seas. He tried to conjure a face. He tried to invent a name. Neither would come to him, as the silver spoon shook in his hand. And he thought: No man carved these letters. These letters were carved by God.
He gripped the spoon in both hands to stop the trembling and then held it up, like an offering, to the empty Ark and its unlit eternal light.
35
Across the long, broiling day, Michael made nine more trips to the hill beside the Quaker cemetery. Around two o’clock, he went home to assure his mother that he was all right. He had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and washed it down with iced tea. After she left to look once more at the garden apartment in Sunset Park before going on to work, Michael rushed to the park. It was after dark when he carried his last load of dirt into the synagogue on Kelly Street.
He poured each load of dirt into the long, flat sink, packing it loosely with his hands. After the last bagful was transferred into the sink, he sat down hard on a dusty pew. He was so drowsy that he felt as if he were underwater. I need a nap, he thought. Just an hour, stretched out on this empty bench. Just to rest. Just ten minutes. Five. But then he imagined waking in the gray dawn, and his mother panicking and the police searching the parish for him. He couldn’t let that happen. No. He stood up straight and slapped his cheeks to come fully alert, and thought of the great, ballooning shape of Rabbi Hirsch’s battered face. No: I have to sleep at home tonight. In my own bed. I need to be strong.
The upstairs sanctuary was now very dark, its spaces illuminated only by light from the moon. He looked at the shem, waiting in its ceramic box. The spoon lay hidden under a pew. Everything is ready, he thought, even me. But it was time to go home. After all, this was still only Thursday. He had one more day to do what must be done. One more day until the party for Frankie McCarthy. On Shabbos.
At home, he soaked in the bathtub and scrubbed away the traces of dirt under his fingernails. He went to bed before his mother came home, and in spite of the relentless, clammy heat, he fell swiftly into a dreamless sleep.
When he woke on Friday morning, the bed was marshy with sweat. He could hear the radio from the kitchen and his mother’s voice, singing happily along with the Ink Spots on a song called “The Gypsy.” He pulled on his white baseball pants, as instructed by Rabbi Hirsch, and his white socks and sneakers and a white T-shirt. But he felt strange and dreamy. His mother’s familiar voice made him think that maybe none of this had ever happened. She sounded as she always did in the mornings before Frankie McCarthy walked out of the snowstorm into Mister G’s. Everything else was the same: his chair, his bureau, the cabinet full of comics, the window that opened to the fire escape. Was he really dressing in white, for purity, to spend a day summoning a living creature from dirt? Was he to be like Dr. Frankenstein? He lived in the real world, not in a movie. Then he saw the piece of his plaster cast adorned with Rabbi Hirsch’s precise Hebrew letters. He picked it up and kissed it reverently. Everything had happened, all right; all of it.
“Good morning, young man,” Kate Devlin said cheerfully, poking a spatula into a frying pan on the stove. He mumbled a good morning and stepped into the bathroom to throw cold water on his face and comb his hair. He left the door open while he washed. Everything was familiar.
“You had yourself a sleep, didn’t you?” she said. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Slept like a rock.”
He closed the door and urinated and washed his hands, examining the bathtub for signs of dirt from the park. There were none. When he came out, Kate had laid three slices of French toast on a plate on the table. He sat down, slapped butter on the fried bread, and sprinkled sugar over the top. He ate greedily.
“Well, it’s done,” she said, explaining her cheerfulness. “I rented us a place. The one with the garden.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, we’ll be in by the middle of August, so we’ll have to start packing tomorrow.”