“Oh, current events,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers dismissively. “The Four famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Mr. War, Mr. Famine, Messieurs Pestilence and Death. I’ve never been much connected with novelty myself.”
Oh? I thought. Look me in the beard and say that. “But, Tzadik,” I said instead in the rabbi mode, “isn’t it important, particularly in these times of tribulation between ourselves and our Arab cousins in the Holy Land, in Eretz Yisro’el, for us to be informed and keep abreast of the developments? To search for peace? To seek, I mean, some equitable solution to our problems?”
He looked at me for a long while before he answered.
“You’re one of these ‘root causes of terrorism’ guys, ain’t you?” he said.
“Well …” I said.
“No,” he said, “I can see it. You are.”
To tell you the truth, I was a little troubled by some things the Israelis had been doing. The world was a complicated place. There were no open-and-shut cases. There was enough guilt to go around. Of course it was outrageous that the Syrians took pot shots at us from their vantage point on the Golan Heights, or that the PLO could lob shells into the kibbutzim along our northern borders wounding and killing our children, or that they planted bombs in buses and on supermarket shelves in boxes of detergent or mixed in with the oranges in the produce department. Certainly it was wrong to hijack airplanes and harm innocent civilians. But they had their grievances. There was no denying it. The Israelis were on the West Bank now, laying foundations, making it over, turning it into the new Miami. And the camps! For generations now the Palestinians had been crammed into rat-infested quarters open to the sky, forced to live out in the weather like a city for Lears. How different were these “camps” with their running sewers from the favellas of the hopelessly impoverished or even from the ghettos of our own people?
“Yes,” he said. “I can see it all over you. You want to be fair.”
“Well, it’s their homeland, too. And, strictly speaking, they were there first, you know.”
“Fuck them,” he said.
“Please, Tzadik,” I said, “this is not an argument.”
“And finders/keepers is? Let me tell you something, kiddo. There are higher principles than finders and keepers.”
“Hey,” said Philip, “I think I’m getting a Fairbanks AM station.”
“Because you don’t kill someone over finders/keepers. A homeland? A homeland they want? What,” he said, “they’re imprinted to deserts, allergic to ice? Let them live on the glaciers. Let them have a go at making the icebergs bloom.”
This was some rebbe we had here. Suddenly I was telling him all about myself, what I did in New Jersey.
“A rabbi is not a thoracic surgeon,” I said. “He is not a proctologist or an ob-gyn man. He doesn’t set your bones or flush out your ears. But all I do is say prayers over dead strangers. Tell me, Khokhem, is it right for me to specialize like that?”
“No, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. It doesn’t make a difference if they’re strangers. Or that you don’t feel a genuine anguish for their loved ones. Grief is only a form, a kind of a courtesy. It’s something we have to do. It’s a sacrament. Not like sitting shiva or saying Kaddish or putting pennies on their eyes. Just grief. Grief itself. If you’re properly shocked when you hear bad news. If you’ve got”—he waved his arms about at the invisible mountains of ice beneath and all around us—“sand.”
And then, while Philip tapped his toes to the music coming in on his headphones from the Fairbanks radio station, Flowerface launched into the wisdoms. He told us how God did too create evil. “And you know something?” he said. “It’s a good thing He did.”
“It is?” I asked, surprised.
“Sure,” he said, “it shapes our taste.”
I lifted a headphone away from Philip’s head, bobbing to the rhythms of Fairbanks radio. “What?” he said.
“Cut out the dreaming and listen to him. This ain’t no sock hop. He’s telling us worthwhile stuff. Go on, please, Macher.”
He looked hurt, Philip. I regretted what I’d said and fumbled with his earpiece, trying to replace it, when Petalpuss stayed my hand and began to draw it toward his beard, guiding it into that luxuriant garden. “Be careful,” he whispered, “of the thorns and thistles.” I jerked my hand away as if it had been scalded. (Though I swear he let go first, his reflexes beating my reflexes.) Then he turned to Philip and apologized for me. “It’s not what you think. He’s a rabbi and has faith in lessons, the vicariousness of the heart’s bright ideas. Incidentally, what was that song you were listening to just now?” Philip told him and he nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “Sometimes, when the weather let up and it got warm enough to whistle, I’d whistle that one myself.”
“Really?” Philip said.
“Oh, yes,” said the man with the flowers in his beard. “It’s a very catchy tune. It perks a man up who’s been praying while the midnight sun goes down if there’s a cheery tune to turn to.”
“Really?”
“I just said so,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it doesn’t let you off the hook that we share the same taste in music. That’s coincidence, not character, and don’t redound to anyone’s credit. Jerry was right finally to pull the headphone off your head. I’m only sorry he didn’t catch your ear in his fist.”
“Oh,” I said, “no. I only meant …”
“You did your duty. It don’t make no difference what you meant.”
“He’s right,” said Philip.
“He is,” I agreed. I turned back to the man with the flowers in his beard. “What else?” I asked him. Because, though I still had no idea where we were — Philip, when he’d discovered our coordinates, had passed them on to us but they hadn’t meant anything — I didn’t care. It was all wisdom now — how he’d spoken to Philip, to me, what he’d been saying. I knew there was plenty more where that came from and never wanted the ride to be over. Why, I was like a kid, staring out the window of a Pullman car berth, lulled by the mysterious geography of the night, seduced by the steel percussion of tons.
He spoke to us, instructed us, taught us, even Philip into it now, rapt, engaged as someone counting. Old Posypuss (because I didn’t know his name, because he never said it, because I never asked) wising us up, even in English his voice cadenced as an uncle’s aliyahs, like broches lilted as lullabies. One time he paused to ask if either of us had a cigarette we could spare and it seemed so out of character I questioned whether I’d heard him correctly.
“You smoke, Khokhem?”
“I butter my bread.”
“Beg pardon, Tzadik?”
“What, I’m going to be killed by an omelet? French toast? A Carlton, a Vantage, a Lucky, a Now? They want me that bad, let the pikers come get me.”
“Beautiful,” I told him.
“Ah,” said Philip.
“Sure,” said the man with the flower-strewn beard, “a parable in every box. Philip, please,” he said. “Watch the road. Look where you’re going.”
We landed at Prospect Creek camp by the Jim River, thirty or so miles north of the Arctic Circle. It was full daylight and Philip took me over to Personnel, where I was photographed and issued an identification tag while he filled out Emergency Landing and Distress forms required by the company if he was to claim Distress and Hazard reimbursement, and which I, as his passenger, had to witness and sign.