Feathers

Chapter Two

Chapter Two 1. My father and Riklin were sitting in the living room, drinking tea, sucking rock candy, and conjuring the dead. My mother stopped to give them a sideways look as we passed the door in the hallway. Their two heads were bent over an oaktag sheet spread out before them and divided into tiny squares like a crossword puzzle. Books, rolled-up maps, and thick pads of paper whose colored tips made patterns like the wings of exotic birds were scattered over the table. My father and Riklin continued to whisper without paying us any attention. My mother’s lips curled contentiously. From the bedroom door she snapped that she did not understand how a diabetic of Riklin’s age was unable to control his base appetites and went on gobbling candy like a boy. Riklin pushed his eyeglasses up from his nose to his forehead and dismissed her rebuke with a wave of his hand and a smile on his beet-red, clean-shaven face. The slam of the door drowned out my father’s reply. My mother did not stop talking to me as she began to fold the pile of clean laundry on the bed. She was fed up with the friendship between my father and the old undertaker. In her opinion, Reb Elya was a humbug. “Every day he gets a tray of fresh eggs from the dairy,” she hissed between her teeth. “But instead of washing the heads of the dead with them as he’s supposed to, he gives them to his grandchildren for breakfast and dinner, while other children are eating powdered eggs and mashed potatoes.” My father had already warned her not to be foolish, since it was only abroad that Jews washed the deceased with eggs, whereas the custom in the Land of Israel was to use plain soap. He advised her to pay heed to her brother, who rubbed shoulders every day with advocates and judges in the course of his work as a court clerk and was certainly nobody’s fool. Indeed, the previous Sabbath, when the subject of Riklin came up, Uncle Tsodek had told us how once Reb Elya had stopped the sun in its tracks. Glancing at a picture on the wall of my grandmother holding me in her arms, my mother’s brother declared that this had happened years before I was born, when Rabbi Hannales, the old kabbalist from Minsk, had been found dead one day in a field on the outskirts of the neighborhood of Bet-Yisra’el. Since it was a Friday, and the Sabbath was soon due to begin, the funeral had to be performed quickly. Ten men, led by Reb Elya, who was still a young lad at the time, hurried with the stretcher to the Mount of Olives. Yet the sun went down before the Arab laborers could finish digging the grave in the hard, stony soil, and it seemed that they, gentiles though they were, would have to inter the old Jew by themselves. Just then Reb Elya came to life. Pulling out of his jacket a heavy packet of brown wrapping paper that was covered on both sides with crowded script, he waved it menacingly at the heavens and shouted, “Is it the reward of this holy man, who wrote his books, as Moses did his commandments, in black fire on white fire, to be buried in the end by Ishmaelites?” At that exact moment, the sun rose in the west and began to shine again. My mother scoffed that Reb Elya was not another Isaiah, who had turned back the shadow on the sundial in the days of King Hezekiah. How was it possible, she went on, her voice growing sharper, that her own brother, who gathered pearls of wisdom at the feet of Judges Heshin and Frumkin and even read secular books, did not understand that the sun had simply come out from behind the clouds that had temporarily hidden it? Every day at about one o’clock, soon after my father had shut the grocery store and come home to rest, Riklin would arrive and join him at the table where he sat eating by himself. As soon as my father said the grace after meals, Reb Elya would rise and urge him to clear the dishes quickly so that they might get down to work. Riklin’s first visit to our home took place about a month after the raid by...