“Okay, Herman,” he said. “Take Whiting out and show him what to do.”
I was introduced to several men in the snow
“This is Whiting Tatoon,” Herman said. “Our new fire rider.”
“Pleased to meet you, Whiting,” declared one of the men.
“Hello, Tatoon,” said another.
I was very proud. In the blink of an eye, I had become Whiting Tatoon, fire rider (whatever that was). If only my family had been alive, and I could have written to them. I pictured myself returning to Ellis Island and being announced to the Commissioner: “Whiting Tatoon, fire rider, is here.” I was then led to a stupendous machine, the function of which I could not discern.
A steel ring roughly ten feet across formed a base for three graceful legs supporting a tall cylindrical tank about twenty-five feet high. Projecting from the bottom of the tank were six evenly spaced nozzles. I climbed an attached ladder to a platform facing a maze of dials, levers, and valve handles. Herman took about an hour to teach me how to operate this machine. Its function was to melt the frozen roads so that the crews could dig them up. I was told that when everything went right the machine could do several miles a day. I had only to make sure that I made the road hot enough, but that I did not boil it, for then the mud and macadam would run right off the shovels. “How does it move?” I asked.
“You drive it,” said Herman. “That’s why you have to be light. It won’t go with a heavy man.”
As I was about to start it up and begin work, I saw Herman running away. I called out to him and asked where he was going.
He turned and yelled, “Just don’t let it explode.”
It looked dependable enough. The pressure was up. The gas/fluid mixture was balanced. The valves were clear. I sparked the primer flame and fired each of the six jets. At first they came on gently and burned comfortably orange. Before moving the main throttle, I strapped myself to the platform and leaned out like a window-cleaner. Then I moved the main lever, and the fire swelled into plumes several feet long. The lever was only on two, but it could have been pushed to ten. Even at two, I had to take off my jacket and my shirt. The heat rose past me as if I were standing upside down in a waterfall of flame. I moved the lever to five. The fire roared. Almost as tall as a man, the plumes were white and silver inside, yellow on the outside. They sounded like a storm at sea, and the pavement below them was boiling.
When the lever reached seven, the steel ring left the ground and the entire machine became as light and delicate as a feather on the wind. With slight shifts of my weight, I could make it go this way or that. If I touched the lever lightly, the plumes roared up and the machine would rise. I wondered what would happen at ten, but contented myself with swaying back and forth over the road in even sweeps, applying a bath of heat so that the men behind me (who seemed intent upon keeping a good space between themselves and the machine) could do their work. After three hours of this, I realized that I had been airborne all the time, that I directed the thing as if by second nature, and that, as long as I was alert to my own movements, there was no danger of tipping over.
We had lunch in the tarpaper shed. The workers were freezing cold, and held their hands around their tea mugs for the warmth. I, on the other hand, sat comfortably by the door, shirt off, drinking ice water. What a job! I wondered why no one else did it, and was grateful for my luck. I couldn’t think of anything more exciting or pleasurable than to fly about all day on six plumes of flame, turning, and swaying, and singing in the snow, while I followed a path that I had laid down in my imagination. Why, I asked myself, was this not the most sought-after job in the world? In the shed, the workers looked sullen and mean, and made me feel as if I were a king interrogating the lowliest of his subjects, saying, “Why won’t you be a king? I’m a king, and I love it. Why aren’t you a king?” They didn’t want to talk about it because, indeed, they were afraid to be fire riders.
Of what were they afraid? Did they fear that the machine might explode? That it would tip and crash? That they might be tempted to move the lever to ten and soar into the sky? In questioning them, and by intuition, I discovered that although they feared all these things, they were most afraid of the fire itself.
Somehow, perhaps through accident or ignorance, I was not. I loved to drive that machine, and I can still feel it roaring and swaying. I was the fire rider, the one who directed the flame, the man who flew. It was a good lesson, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I am glad that I enjoyed it immensely, for it did not last long. We got back to work after lunch. I repressurized the apparatus and started it up. Lifting slowly off the ground, I discovered that I felt extraordinarily at ease. I could maneuver it with the utmost precision. I could even make it dance. For an hour or two, I heated up the road just as I had done in the morning, but then we came to a crossroads of cobbles. The men would have to pry these up, and all I had to do was fly over them once or twice to melt the ice between the cracks. As soon as I had done this, I turned the corner onto a wide snow-covered street. I was alone, and had to wait twenty minutes for the others, so I flew down the road. How easy it was! I pushed the lever to eight, and sped along five feet above the ground, as fast as an express train. Tilted forward slightly, the machine was as steady as a stone pier. I moved the lever to ten.
The machine exploded with a crack and a roar. My head bent back from the acceleration. Wind and snow blinded me, and then I saw that I was flying above fields, trees, and houses. As I passed over a skating pond, the children fled in all directions. (What a pity that I frightened them.) I was sorry that I had ruined such a wonderful device, and sorrier still that my career as Whiting Tatoon, fire rider, was over. But perhaps it was for the best, as I next found myself in a place of such strange and yet familiar beauty that it was (in its way) a balance for having ridden fire.
I awoke in a snow-covered garden, among many gnarled and blackened fruit trees lined with ice and powder. This was so like a Baltic orchard, complete with walls to keep out the wind, that I was not sure that, after a long drinking bout, I had not dreamed my trip to America while lying half conscious among the fruit trees. And the fact that I do not drink only served to make me suspect that perhaps I had. Though my face was reddened from the explosion, I could see no evidence of America. As I tried to get up, two hands gently pushed me down, and someone said, “Don’t move. We’re calling the rabbi.”
“Oh God!” I said as I saw my rescuers. They were Hassidim in round hats and old-style coats. They had about them a certain animated quality which made me think that underneath their heavy black clothing they were made of engines, springs, and rubber. There were three of them, adolescents with ridiculous silken beards. Energy glowed from them as if they had fire-burned faces, and when they spoke in their squeaky voices it was like birds in the morning.
Undoubtedly, I was home again, and had only dreamed of America. “No!” I screamed, and closed my eyes with all the muscles of my face, trying to emulate sleep. “I want to go back!”
“Meshugah,” I heard one of them say.
“Meshugah,” said the second one.
“Meshugah,” confirmed the third. “I hope the rabbi comes fast. He’ll know what to do.”
“What rabbi?” I asked.
“The Saromsker Rabbi,” they said proudly. “Rabbi Figaro.”
I turned to the three boys. “First of all, ” I said, with tremendous authority, “I myself made up the Saromsker Rabbi, when I was on the Island. Secondly, no rabbi in his right mind could be named Figaro.”
“Who said,” boomed a strange and enormous voice, “that I am in my right mind?” (It was Rabbi Figaro, of Saromsk.) “God can use even a crooked stick, for nothing can make Him fall. I am Rabbi Figaro, of Saromsk. Whether I am in my right mind or not is an uncomfortable question that will have to be deferred. Our sages within the palace are now debating matters of far greater importance. For many weeks they have been considering the question, ‘What is laughter?’ ”
??
?What is laughter!” echoed the three boys.
“And in the weeks to come they will look into the allegation that children live in a different dimension.”
“A different dimension!”
“In the fall, they discovered why bread rises.”
“Why bread rises!”
“And, this summer, with the aid of a great glass bell, and an air-pump invented by Rabbi Pupkin, they will find out what fish do at night.”
“What fish do at night!”
He turned to the three young men. “Where did this meshugah come from?”
“From the sky,” answered one of them.
“Do tell!” boomed Rabbi Figaro, in derision.
“Truly, Rabbi, he came flying from clouds. Look. You see our three sets of footprints, then Moishe’s going back to get you, and then Moishe’s and yours coming here? Do you see any others?”
The Rabbi looked around. His neck was as thick as a bear’s, he was barrel-chested, and his eyebrows were like black rugs hanging over the edge of a cliff. “No. Are you sure you did not carry him here?”
“We didn’t! We didn’t!” they said.
“Maybe a bird dropped him.”
“Wait a minute,” I protested.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Rabbi Figaro. “I was thinking of a great big bird, as big as the palace, that might have picked you up—just as the fish swallowed Yonah, and just as Rabbi Mocha was carried away by an elephant.” (I had heard those stories, of course.)
“What palace?” I asked, since he had mentioned it twice already.
“You’re facing the wrong direction.”
I turned from the fruit trees and saw a great palace—well, let us say, a small palace—all of brown stone, with leaded windows and slate roofs. Sweet smoke issued from twenty chimneys; lights blazed from within; children in Hassidic dress dashed across catwalks spanning the gaps between high-windowed cupolas; and music drifted down—as Rabbi Figaro pronounced his judgment: “Take this meshugah inside. The least we can do is to give him some dinner, since tonight is Erev Yom haDvorah. It is an opportune time for him to have fallen from clouds. Who knows? Maybe even a bee brought him.”
They took me inside, but not before I had asked what country we were in. Fully expecting to hear a Baltic sound, a waterfall of skinny Cyrillics, I was much relieved to listen to the perfectly balanced vowels and consonants that smoothly make “America.” “And where are we?” I inquired.
“In Brooklyn,” they answered. “At the palace of the Saromsker Rabbi. Where else?”
As I entered the great hall of the Saromsker palace, every eye was upon me. Although I did not realize it until much later, I was almost completely covered with soot, my hair was bronzed and curled like the hair of a goat, and my eyes glowed from my face like egg whites.
“Who is that!” someone gasped.
“Sh-h-h! That’s the meshugah from clouds,” was the answer.
I had been Guido da Montefeltro, Hershey Moshelies, and Whiting Tatoon. Now I was just plain Meshugah, or, at best, The Meshugah—the “the” being in my case a title of honor similar to Doctor, Rabbi, or Sire.
Since everyone expected me to be insane (the children grew silent in my presence, and regarded me with shifting eyes), it was hard not to satisfy expectations. Perhaps there is that in me very deep which is slightly lunatic. In fact, it may be why I had to leave Plotsadika-Chotchki in the first place: I disputed the rabbis’ claim that madness is the same as nudity, and was then accused of both. Only in Plotsadika-Chotchki, whose inhabitants are blessed and cursed with a strange motility of mind, could someone stand fully clothed and be accused of nudity. I had on long underwear, a heavy winter suit, my warm topcoat, fur boots, gloves, a scarf that nearly obscured my face, and a hat past which I could hardly see. “We have concluded that you are nude,” pronounced the representative of the Rabbinical Court, as my two eyes peered out of a mass of wool in which I was practically entombed. But that is a different story.
In the palace of the Saromskers, all I had to do to confirm their suspicions was to clear my throat when asked a question, laugh at an inappropriate time, move awkwardly, roll my eyes, or say something disconnected. For example, a kindly matron with two front teeth that pointed in opposite directions, like the legs of a briskly walking man, asked me how long I had been in America.
“I am knee-deep in the intense light of blazing fruit,” was my answer.
“I don’t understand,” she said meekly.
“Of course not. You know nothing of the strange rhythm of blue adults.”
“Oh,” she said, moving away, “please excuse me, I must tend the gefilte fish.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Do go to him. They are such delicate creatures, and they give you everything they’ve got. It’s a mitzvah, you know, to rub them all over with salad oil.”
This was a good game—the price of my dinner in that excellent place.
How joyful it is to discover a really enormous room. They are, certainly, a mark of civilization—their widening proportions quietly draw out the soul, and the dark and gentle borders which agitate and swirl beyond one’s sight allow a scrupulous, shielded, infinite perspective. No wonder cathedrals and great churches are built to be silent and airy. For us, the Jews, the great rooms were mainly of the imagination, of longing, though some actually did exist—examination halls, libraries, and houses of assembly. They were comparatively small, but the borders of darkness within them were able to strike up conversations with infinity. So with the great hall of the Saromsker Rabbi. Everyone was there, in an architect’s dream, a Renaissance canvas through which glances shot in a hundred directions and random motion balanced out in satisfying symmetries.
“The bee!” screamed the Saromsker Rabbi, Rabbi Figaro, a genuine meshugah himself, perched halfway up the wall upon a little platform draped with gold-embroidered red velvet. “God bless the bee! I will tell you why, and then we shall feast and dance in his honor.
“The bee hardly ever rests; but when he does it is with a humble, puzzled look which seems to say, ‘I was almost sure I had more to do.’ The bee is a peaceful, efficient machine, a carrier of great heavy buckets on hanging airborne legs.
“Rabbi Texeira, who was very holy, was a beekeeper. He spent five years digging deep into the ground. Of course, everyone thought he was crazy, especially when he passed four hundred feet, but he kept on digging until, at six hundred feet, he struck a source of endless steam. This he took two years to tame and pipe to the surface. ‘So?’ the people said. ‘What can you do with a hot pipe?’ That was in the summer that Rabbi Texeira began to build his much deplored and seldom understood glass house. It took five more years to complete, nearly bankrupted everyone, and, in the end, it covered several large fields. Long before that, however, they had lost hope for Rabbi Texeira of the red beard. After all, his glass house had no floor, and the rainwater flowed in because it was built on a slope. Then Rabbi Texeira planted acres of flowers within it, and, to everyone’s amazement, they grew in winter because he heated the house with the steam he had dug. Rabbi Texeira’s bees were able to work year round, producing three times as much honey as they had done before. Because bees love work, they were grateful and never stung him, so that he didn’t have to dress as a beekeeper. The village sold vast amounts of honey and grew wealthy, and then became even wealthier by selling fresh flowers in the middle of winter. Invalids quickly recovered in the sweet summer air of the glass house, and young men and young women were married there—after falling in love while working together amid the wildflowers as snow fell and blizzards raged outside. So prosperous did the village become, that the Cossacks decided to seize it. One cold day in March, two hundred of them on wet black horses charged from the north, silver swords drawn, icicles on their mustaches. The Jews gathered at the synagogue that they had built in the glass house, held up the Torah, and prepared to die. As they watched the horsemen roll like thunder down the last hill, they said, ‘Shma Yisrael, Adonai elohein
u, Adonai echad,’ because they had no weapons and did not know how to fight. Then their hearts raced, the hair on their necks stood as straight as thistles, and they cried and trembled in awe. Five hundred thousand bees rose in a yellow-and-black cloud from hundreds of hives, dipped under the walls, and assembled in a solid mass outside. They rolled toward the horsemen, with the sound of ten thousand engines. Two hundred bees would easily have been enough to drive them back. But half a million! Half a million bees were a match for all the armies of Europe assembled together. The Cossacks fled in terror. When word of what had happened reached the Czar, he realized that this small village had become the military center of the world, and from then on they were allowed to live in perfect peace and tranquillity. The village grew as Jews fleeing pogroms came for shelter, and soon it became a small autonomous republic. Rabbi Texeira, instead of being a king, simply tended his bees, picked flowers, and made sure that the children were acquainted with the early history of the place.
“Rabbi Nachman, on the other hand, was afraid of bees, and used to hide in a butter churn from May to September. It didn’t take very long for him to lose his mind: the churn was small, dark, and hot, and it smelled of old butter. One August, as Rabbi Nachman was suffering intensely and looking forward to emerging in September (when the air was relatively bee free), he had a dream. He had many strange dreams—as a man might if his knees touched his shoulders from May to September—but this one was a revelation. In it he was taken to Heaven in his butter churn and rolled up to the feet of God. God was very angry, and, like a turtle, Rabbi Nachman hid deep inside the butter churn. ‘Do you think that I couldn’t get you out of there if I wanted to?’ asked God, terribly irritated. Rabbi Nachman was afraid to answer. ‘It would be so easy. I wouldn’t even have to break it open. All I’d have to do would be to put a thousand bees in it, just like that.’
“Rabbi Nachman shuddered.