A DYBBUK

IN

NORTH TONAWANDA

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

aybe you heard the story of Laia, daughter of Hannah, who was betrothed in her heart and in the eyes of God to Chonnon, a poor rabbinical student.  Her father made her marry a rich man instead.  Poor Chonnon died of grief.

On Laia's wedding day Chonnon's soul entered her body and would not leave.  She raved and shrieked in Chonnon's voice.  Even the great and famous Reb Azrielkeh of Miropolye could not exorcise the dybbuk Chonnon.  All night long the dybbuk defied the great rabbi, weeping Laia's tears and arguing with Laia's tongue.  "We are one flesh!  We will nevermore part!"  By sunrise the poor girl was dead.  She had joined Chonnon in the place where dybbuks, dead souls, gather, halfway between earth and heaven.

Of course, there is no such place.  Everyone knows that nowadays.  Nor is there such a thing as a dybbuk.  Probably Laia had a fever.  She was delirious.  Probably the rabbi had a touch of it himself: something in the water or a fungus on the wheat that makes people lose their hold for a while.  Mass hysteria is what it was, probably, and the next day they all felt very sad and silly.

But pity us poor storytellers.  On a diet of facts the likes of us will starve.  Give us a maybe to nibble on, can't you?  A draught of suppose?  A sip of what-if?  Without that, I, impecunious spinner of yarns, Fintushel, son of Izzy, will have to go out and work for a living, chas vesholem, God forbid.

I sit before the word processor (God bless modern living!) in my blue room with the myrtle lamp and the green window shade, scratching my head between paragraphs.  Come, a maybe, a suppose, a what-if--honestly, would it kill you?

What if there were such a place as the realm of the dybbuks, a shadowy sphere halfway between earth and heaven?  Can't you see it teeming with souls of the dead?  (So squint a little!)  How they snuggle and squeal, a million in a bunch, flank to flank and snout to tail like puppies in a basket.  Only, they haven't any flanks or snouts or tails; they are dybbuks, bodiless souls.  That is the point after all: they want bodies.  Maybe mine.  Maybe yours.  Look out.

Suppose there were such creatures as dybbuks.  Through the thatch of your succah you could almost see them ghosting past the autumn moon, vaporous and swift.  Ordinary people think they are merely clouds, but you and I know better.  Back in the house, you close all your windows and lock them tight.  You leave a nightlight burning.  Beneath three blankets, a quilt, and a sheet, you can't stop shivering.  You cannot turn or tuck enough to feel really safe.  In your heart you say a prayer, "Protect us, oh Lord . . . "  But is it your own voice deep down inside you‑-or a dybbuk's?

 

ruth to tell--albeit a storyteller's truth--there once dwelled in the realm of the dybbuks a certain soul called Ishky.  Ishky was dead now, of course, but did he like it?  Not at all.  He would not lie still in d'rerd, in the earth, as dead individuals ought to do.  Nor would he suffer his neshoma, his essence, to be reunited with his Maker.

No, Ishky--maybe, don't forget my maybe--was only happy when he was wriggling into a live human soul.  He was like a hookworm or a tick, was Ishky.  A dybbuk.  Why?  Don't ask.  It's an embarrassment, a befuddlement, a shame.  Was he tormented like the terrible dybbuk of Minsk who roamed the earth in search of his beloved?  No.  Was he greedy like the dybbuk of Pinsk--Spit three times to be free of the curse and the taint of even mentioning him!--who infested the souls of rich men only?  No.

Children: that was Ishky's specialty, and the more mischievous the better.  Nothing attracted him like laughter.  (Careful, now!)  Maybe one day, as you squeezed down a narrow crowded street, a baby in a carriage trundled past you in front of its weary mama, and in the warm dark of that carriage you saw such a leer and heard such a yell as no infant ever made.  "What are you looking at, fool?" the dybbuk shrieked with the poor baby's tonsils.  Then--gone.  You looked back.  The mother looked back too, at you, and in her face you saw despair.

Inside that baby was Ishky.

What did he look like, this evil dybbuk?  Don't ask.  His face: ashes collapsing in a dead fire.  His smirk: threads of flame and plumes of smoke.  His laughter: exploding cinders, flying sparks, flaming hair.  Even the other dybbuks kept their distance.

Maybe, don't forget.  Maybe there was such a one.  Let's hope not, but maybe . . .

Suppose there was a human child--a live one, I mean, like yourself.  Call him Yossel.  One Passover, say, he fell asleep after the second cup of wine, and the prophet Elijah (Ayleeyahoo Hanavee in Hebrew--how melodious!) spied him slumped over the table.  Yosseleh's face was in the chopped nuts.  His yarmulke half-covered his eyes.  While he snoozed the grownups shmoozed--which is to say: they gossiped--and the children hunted for the afikomon, the hidden matzo.  They just let Yossel be, suppose, because they knew he was that way, his own way--sleep when he would, wake when he would, eat, jape, study, jump, et cetera, when he, Yossel, would, und fartik, which is to say: period.  Nobody, old or young, would risk Yossel's growl.

Not a soul sees Elijah float in through the open door with a sack slung over his shoulder, not a soul besides you and me, even though it's been left open for just this purpose.  They think it's an empty ritual.  Nobody sees him stroke his forked beard, white as hoarfrost, and cluck his tongue over Yossel.  Nobody sees Elijah scoop our boychik into the sack--plunk!--like onions and potatoes.

Besides myself, you are the only witness.

Watch Elijah walk straight out the open door looking neither left nor right.  How does he step so lightly with all those onions and potatoes?  His feet barely touch the floor: they seem to float above.  Just as he reaches the threshold, Elijah, sack, and onions and potatoes bubble like ginger-ale.  Then they become translucent, like the gel that gefilteh fish comes packed in.  You can see the street lamps shine through them.  The shimmering blob of them slithers across the porch and fades into the night--gone!

Gone to where?  Don't ask.

All right, you've twisted my arm.

Where Elijah ended, I can't say, but he passed through a certain place, suppose, halfway between earth and heaven.  There, as the gefilteh fish gel of Elijah the Prophet shimmied twixt the waters below and the waters above, as the first book of Moses describes them, right there, where dybbuks tickle and itch, what if our Yossel, dreaming in the sack, tickling and itching his own tickle and itch, poked a little hole?

We know how it goes with little holes, don't we?  They grow bigger.  As Elijah ascended from sphere to sphere, stars in his hair now, satellites in his beard‑-here a Sputnik, there a Hubbell--ozone in and out of his ears, Yosseleh, still sleeping, worried that hole bigger and bigger.  At last, as you expected, he onioned and potatoed himself out of the sack and--plunk!--among the teeming dark souls of the dybbuks.

He was half-shod now: one shoe stayed in Elijah's sack, an brown loafer.  It's there to this day, and if you don't believe me just pretend to fall asleep next seder so you can catch a glimpse of old Elijah.  Make sure to place yourself where the hoary old prophet will have to pass between you and a lamp.  In that sack of his you'll see the shadow of Yossel's shoe, or I'm no storyteller.

Yossel's yarmulke stayed on his head.  His Paisley necktie stayed around his neck, his stiff white shirt stayed on his shoulders, and his itchy wool pants stayed on his legs.  Thank goodness he had shed his good sports jacket, and it was hanging on the back of his chair at the seder table way down on earth, so at least that item was spared the wear and tear of the upper stratosphere.

You'll excuse me, but I forgot: have we supposed anything further about Yossel yet, about what sort of a mensch he might be?  Aside from being willful and mean, of course.  No?  Let's do that now, while his Paisley tie remains around his neck--it won't for long.  How about a little story to illustrate his character?

What if Yossel was the scourge of cats, the terror of pigeons, the tormentor of dogs?  What if he liked to swing one by the ears, clip the wings of another, and tie cans to the tail of a third?  Did he pick his father's pocket, steal his best friend's bicycle, short-sheet his own mother, and paint his schoolteacher's seat with contact cement?

Actually, no.

But give me a break.  I'm a storyteller.

Suffice it to say, old Yossel was a world-class meshuggener, which is to say: a pain.  Suppose.

Here, then, see Yossel, prince of meshuggeners, tumbling among dybbuks in a hazy between-world.  Up and down are scrambled.  Souls are as jumbled as bunjee jumpers in zero-g.  All around poor Yossel they heave and rumble like beans in the belly--and trumpet and stink the same way.  Yossel rolls to the right: something leaps, sprouts oily black wings, and flies away.  He rolls to the left: a thousand cockroaches grow tongues and chant the names of the dead.  Is he mortified?  Is he petrified?  Does he tremble and cower?

Not on your life.  The meshuggener laughs.  His laughter, a child's laughter, rings through the dybbuk realm, and who should prick up his blackened ear, brittle as matzo, touchy as a sunburn?  Of course, it would have been our Ishky.  Would have been.  This is all what-if, remember.  What-if, suppose, and maybe.

Don't forget.

Up rears Ishky.  Gas fumes to a match is Yossel's laughter to Ishky.  The dybbuk Ishky with an evil smirk zeroes in on Yossel.  Is it a tornado?  No, it's Ishky preparing to drill into Yossel's soul.

Only, Yossel does him one better.  The meshuggener hops, skips, and jumps from butt to back to horned head of twenty teeming dybbuks, straight into Ishky's bloody maw.  He slingshots around one monstrous eyetooth, ducks under an epiglottis as huge and horrible as Mammon's gut, and slides down the dybbuk Ishky's throat.  "Wheee!"

The dybbuk gulps.  The dybbuk shudders.  The dybbuk cocks his horseradish head and furrows his sausage brow.  "Huh?"

Imagine: through the murk and mist of the dybbuk realm the creatures gather.  Some slime like slugs, some arrow like bats, some trundle like garbage trucks on flat tires.

"Ishky, vos vaynstu?  What's your problem?"

"Ishky, how come the face?"

"Oy, Ishky!  You look like someone just danced on your grave."

Ishky opens his mouth to speak, but out comes Yossel's voice: "I'm not Ishky.  I'm Yossel.  Yossel!  And now this body belongs to me."  Such a tumult you never heard.  The dybbuks' mouths opened like volcanoes.  They slap their hands, their paws, their wings, their scabrous talons to their cadaverous cheeks and wail.  "Vay is mir!  Woe unto us!  Who has ever heard of such a horror?  Our Ishky is possessed by a human."

"That's right," Yossel pipes up, and it practically reams poor Ishky's throat.  "And you can bet I'm not leaving anytime soon.  It's cozy in here.  And that seder was so bo-ring!"

 

asn't Yossel having a wonderful time?  (Well, no.  It's a maybe, remember, a bobbe-myseh I'm concocting, which is to say: a yarn.  But cut us some slack, ey?)  He was like a baby with a brand new rattle: shake it this way, shake it that, see what the doodad can do.

The poor dybbuk cannonballed through heaven thumbing his nose at the Ancient of Days: it was Yossel's doing.  Ishky found himself winging over heaven and under hell, dropping everywhere little white gifts of the sort that pigeons like to distribute: all, all Yossel's doing!  Back among the dybbuk hordes, Yossel made Ishky curse and yowl.  He broke every friendship, such as it was, that Ishky had ever made, and he acquired dozens of new enemies.

Then, to top it all off, Yossel, like a wacky astronaut in the cockpit of Ishky's innards, zoomed down into his very own living room.  There were the children still poking under cushions and peeking into cupboards, and there the elders kibitzing.  Yossel maneuvered Ishky like a Stealth bomber.  He read the dybbuk's supernatural mind as if it were an instrument panel.  In two seconds he had the afikomen in his crosshairs, and--hooha!--he scooped it up and spirited it away like a doggie bone, lightly, between the dybbuk's teeth.

What did Yossel's family, see?  The curtains fluttered.  Lights flickered and candles smoked.  Of itself, Bubbe Sophie's sepia portrait in the gilt frame on the TV set--she with the prune face and the faint mustache--shot into the air, revealing behind it the sought-after matzo.  It whirled.  It levitated.  Bubbe crashed, and glass shattered.  The afikomen floated out the door, still open for Elijah--they didn't know he'd come and gone.

They heard the unmistakable sound of Yossel laughing, laughing the way a person might laugh who had a matzo between his teeth and who didn't want to drop it or get it wet.  Then they looked at Yossel's place at the seder table, at the empty chair where his jacket was draped.

To the stunned family Uncle Morris announced in a voice numinous and deep: "A dybbuk!"

"Oy-oy-oy," cried Yossel's mother, "my little son is possessed by a dybbuk."

"Not quite," said Morris, who had been a rabbinical student in Lithuania before becoming a Laundromat attendant in Detroit.  "The laughing, the throwing, the monkeyshines--the dybbuk is possessed by our Yossel."

"It's not fair," whined Yossel's kid sister Mollie.  She had been reaching to look behind Bubbe Sophie just when the bad wind blew in.  "He gets to have all the fun and the afikomen too."

"Sha, Mollie," said the mother (let's suppose.)  "Morris, what can we do?"

Said Morris: "There is only one thing poor mortals like ourselves can do when we are confronted with such a phenomenon.  There is only one way to save our Yossel, one person whom we can trust to mediate between the two worlds, ours and the dybbuk realm.  I speak of the descendent of the great line of rabbis issuing from Reb Azrielkeh of Miropolye, the tzaddik who stood face to face with a dybbuk in the body of Laia, daughter of Hannah, anciently, Brinnits.  I speak of the great Rabbi Max, son of Seymour."

"Max, son of Seymour, you say?  Must we fly to Brinnits, then?  To Miropolye?  Moscow?  Jerusalem?"

"North Tonawanda."

"North Tonawanda?  How could such a wise and holy man as Reb Max abide in a place like North Tonawanda?  They make juke boxes in North Tonawanda.  How North Tonawanda?"

"Sporting goods."

"Ah."

They only paused to sweep up the glass and to right Bubbe Sophie's picture on the mantelpiece, and off they sped, straight to North Tonawanda, a hundred miles on the New York State Thruway, one stop before Niagara Falls.  "It's life or death," said Morris, "or I'd never let you drive on a holiday."  From the back seat, between Rochester and Lockport, he rang up Reb Max on his cellular.  Morris rang and rang until, Passover or no, the good rabbi finally picked up.

"Voos?  A dybbuk?  And who's in who?   Oy-oy-oy!  Ashes and blood!  Of course I will help you.  Only, mind, I've had my fourth cup of wine.  You may have to prop me up."

 

, storyteller, Fintushel, son of Izzy, son of Mendel, tap on the letter keys and drum on the space bar while night falls and my green window shade darkens.  Here I sit with my dictionaries and my dog-eared papers and my coffee cups, one, two, three, because I'm in too much of a frenzy to wash one.  But for Yossel's family it was ten at night, huddled in a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling and a perforated muffler.

It was just before midnight, say, when the family found the great rabbi's residence.  Papa, Mama, Mollie, Morris, Aunt Sadie, who was Morris's wife, a hefty matron with three gold teeth and a heart condition, and also the cousins, two boys and a girl‑-or the other way round if you like--peered into the night, fogging the windows of the ancient rusting station wagon that dieseled for ten minutes after Papa turned it off. They saw the sign on the dry goods store a few blocks from the Wurlitzer organ and juke box factory: "Eppes Maximus."  Reb Max lived upstairs over the Maximus in a one-room apartment with a goldfish.

Papa, Mama, Mollie, Morris, Aunt Sadie, who was still Morris's wife, and the cousins, however many and whatever proportion of genders, marched up the narrow staircase and filed in through the rabbi's door: smack, smack, smack on the mezuzah, the little tin aslant the doorpost, which to kiss was a little prayer.  Morris wasted no time in explaining exactly what had transpired, while Mama punctuated with here an oy! and there an ai!  Aunt Sadie sobbed so constantly that you would have expected her heart to plotz on the spot, which means--well, untranslatable, but it wouldn't be tidy.  Papa groaned.  Mollie snickered.  The cousins watched the goldfish.

It's true, or let's say so anyway, that Reb Max, son of Seymour, seemed a little tipsy.  His whiskers were so wild and tangled that a princess might find Moses in a basket between his chin and jowls.  Where you could glimpse the rabbi's face it was bright red.  His enormous gray eyes were half-closed.  His lips, inside that forest, that lowland marsh of a face, were as plump and round as if he were perpetually pronouncing the letter "o."  He wore a white shirt, a tunic really, very old-fashioned, with ruffled sleeves.  Black suspenders held up his trousers.  The fringe of his little prayer shawl showed above the empty belt loops where the shirt wasn't quite tucked in.

A real sight.

"Nu?"  The great rabbi was reclining, as is commanded on Passover.  The site of his reclination was a Lazyboy, with his feet up, his shoes off, and three toes wiggling through the holes in his socks.  Maybe four.  "So are we exorcising or are we exorcising?  Bring me my kittel, my good white robe.  Hang up a bed sheet across the bay window.  And could somebody wash the dishes, please?  Who can concentrate with all this chozzerai?"  Which is to say, a mess.

Imagine it done, the dishes clean and stacked, a bright white bed sheet tacked up like a tent flap across the window seat and strangely illumined by a street lamp, "aglow" you might almost say.  And there is Reb Max, stunning--and vertical!--in his ceremonial robe, which shines so silky white it would give a person a headache to even look at it.  Still, he wobbles, and Morris has to give him a shoulder to lean on.

"This is the great rabbi?"  Mollie joins the cousins at the goldfish bowl.  "Hoo-boy!  This doofus couldn't exorcise goo from a zits.  From now on, thank God, I'm an only child."

"Ghi diddy di!"  Tipsy or no, Reb Max raises his arms, as Moses did at the battle of Rephidim, and he chants a holy chant.  So impressive is the sound of that chant, suppose, so full of passion, that Papa, Mama, Uncle, and Aunt, pop-eyed and slack-jawed, are riveted.  The cousins stare.  The goldfish presses its nose to the glass.  Even Mollie inclines an ear.

"Oh ye dybbuks of the nether world, of the invisible realm between earth and heaven, ye wandering dead souls, hear me.  I, Rabbi Max, son of Seymour, son of Irving, son of Shmuel, son of Melvin, Max of North Tonawanda, Max of Eppes Maximus, 'where a penny's worth a nickel,' I summon you.  Come forth."

As nothing happens, the rabbi whispers in Mollie's ear to fetch from the kitchenette a jar of pickled herring and some Passover candies, colored half moons of gelid sugary stuff.  Lay them out on plates and slip them under the sheet onto the window ledge, he says, and quick.

Something funny.  By all appearances Reb Max has drunk not four cups of wine but four gallons, drunk it, gargled it, and bathed in it, but on the rabbi's breath does Mollie sniff a hint of wine?  She does not.  "Old faker, why do you pretend to be tipsy?"

"Sha!" he whispers.  "If the evil spirits believe I am sober, me with my pedigree from Brinnits, do you think they'll show themselves?  In a pig's eye!"  He hiccups loudly, then winks.  Mollie grins.  She collects the shmaltz and the sweets and slips them onto the window ledge.  Their shadows fall across the bed sheet.

The rabbi calls out, "I summon you, dybbuks!  Come already.  Have a little what-to-eat."  At these last words the bed sheet ripples as if in a cyclone.  Suddenly the room fills with unearthly whispers in exotic tongues and a ghastly buzzing sound.  The cousins cover their ears in fright.  At first it seems that the street lamp has gone out, because the entire bed sheet darkens, but by degrees the shadow dwindles and separates into a hundred smudges, then spots, then speckles jumping and teeming around the shadows of the shmaltz herring and the half-moon sweets.

"It's okay," a tiny voice says, "he's tipsy."

As the speckles swarm, the shadows of the food diminish.  "The food itself they can't touch," says the rabbi sotto voce, "since they are spirits.  But the shadows of the food, that they gobble--you'll excuse the expression--like pigs."

In a moment, the bottom of the sheet curls up, and out come the plates with the food still on them.  Mollie's little forehead wrinkles.  "But, Rabbi, they haven't touched it."

"No?  Look."  In truth (but remember, please, what these words mean on a storyteller's tongue) the shmaltz and the sweets are untouched, but their shadows are completely gone.  Mollie lifts the plates and turns them in the light, but however she holds them, they cast no shadow.

"Dybbuks, hear me!"  In his fervor the rabbi clutches Morris's shoulder.  The big man winces.  In the morning there will be marks from the rabbi's fingernails.  "Dybbuks, have you among you one who is possessed by a living child?"

From behind the sheet, an infernal chorus intones, "Funny you should mention it.  Our Ishky has got himself quite a bundle.  He was a devil before, and now he's worse.  Even we dybbuks cower before him.  Can you help us--and do you have any more of that herring?"

The rabbi nods to Mollie, and she runs into the kitchenette.  She has just returned with fresh plates when, from behind the sheet, a familiar voice booms: "You doofuses, you think you can budge me?  Me, Yossel, son of Milton?  I know what you're up to, and I'm not going anywhere.  It's comfy in here.  I'm king of the place.  And what's more, I've got the afikomen.  Nyaah, nyaah!"

The cousins burst into tears.  Aunt Sadie embraces them.  Yossel's mother too tries to embrace her boychik, through the sheet of course, like a hot pot through an oven mitt, but Reb Max waves her off.  "This sheet of mine divides the worlds above and the worlds below the firmament.  No soul may violate this boundary and live."

Just then the dybbuk Ishky gets hold of his own tonsils long enough to screech, like a chicken in a sack: "Save me, Rabbi.  I can't take it anymore.  Deliver me from this vicious creature, and I promise never to possess another living soul.  I'm through with the whole business, believe me."

Yossel's mother notices her husband sampling a morsal of de-shadowed herring and casts a menacing look in his direction.  Reader, shame to tell, Milty has been smiling, thinking about life without the meshuggener.  No more cans tied to the dog's tail.  No more thumbtacks on his easy chair.  Time to relax and read the paper, maybe . . . but at his wife's glance he blanches.  He looks down.

"Nu?  Nu?"  Yossel's mother gives the great rabbi's kittel a tug.  So will you get my Yossel back already?"

What if the rabbi nods gravely?  What if he takes a deep breath, gathering his strength?  Suppose the air darkens, thickens, curdles.  Sparks fly from the rabbi's forehead.  Morris is thrown back as by a fallen power line.

And what if the rabbi should thunder, "Yossel, son of Milton?"  Suppose he clasps both hands before him in a holy secret sign known only to himself and to Rabbi Loew of Prague, long dead, who with this same sign brought to life a golem, a man made of clay--let's say.  "Yossel, son of Milton, by the light and by the dark and by Him Who made them both, by the power of lightning, by the power of floods, by the power of the Wurlitzer plant a mere block away, which produces organs and juke boxes that can't be beat . . . "

"Reb Max?" ventures Milton.

"Sorry, Milton, it's the lateness of the hour and that fourth cup of wine--where was I?"

"Lightning and floods."

"Ah.  By lightning, by floods, by hurricane and hisicane and Novocain and Abel-and-Cain, by the bumps in the matzo and the bones in the chicken, I, Max, son of Seymour, son of Irving, son of Shmuel, son of Melvin, the chosen representative of the congregation here gathered including especially Yossel's own dear mama, I, Max, a genuine bonafide rabbi, command you, Yossel, son of Milton, to fly out from the poor dybbuk Ishky's gut and come before us now, on our side of the bed sheet, never to leave us more."

The bed sheet flutters.  The bed sheet roils.  The bed sheet flaps and snaps like a whip.  The shadows of all the terrified dybbuks swarm to one corner where they huddle and quake.  For a moment--dreadful silence.

Then, from behind the bed sheet: "Fooey!"

Yossel/Ishky's shadow grows until it fills the entire sheet, imagine.  Maybe he is moving back toward the window, toward the light--why?  Then, swiftly, the shadow shrinks again.  He is rushing the barrier.  It swells like a topsail in a typhoon and gives the rabbi such a smack that he lands flat on his bottom, with Morris behind him in a similar condition.

The sheet hangs straight again, except for the ripples of Yossel's laughter.  "You pipsqueaks can't do a thing to me.  I'm king of the place, I tell you."

As the live humans, aghast, huddle round him, Reb Max sits on the floor and shakes his head.  "It seems we are helpless.  I don't understand how such a thing could have happened.  In the six thousand Biblical years since Adam and Eve, was such a thing ever heard of?  That a living soul should possess a dybbuk instead of the other way around?  I confess I don't know what to do."

"So you're a boozehound after all."  Mollie leans over Reb Max and shakes her fist.  "I suppose you'll let my brother just stay there and make everybody more miserable than ever.  I suppose you're going to sit on your bottom while the meshuggener laughs.  I suppose we have to just stand here and put up with it."

The rabbi raises one eyebrow and looks up at her.  "That's a lot of supposing for one little girl."

"Maybe he'll turn heaven itself upside-down--you don't know Yossel like I do.  Maybe he'll whip the dybbuks into an army and take over the whole wide world.  Maybe he'll make himself out to be God Almighty.  What do you care, am I right?"

"Such a lot of maybes!  Where do you get them?"  The rabbi cocks his head.

"And what if he pinches me?"

"And now a what-if!"  All at once Reb Max's eyes widen.  "Suppose!  Maybe!  What if!"  He smacks his forehead with the heel of his hand.  "It sounds like a story!"

"A story?" says Mollie.

"A story?" says Morris.

"A story?" say Mama, Papa, and Aunt Sadie.

(The cousins are back to the goldfish.)

"A story?" say the dybbuks all in a chorus, infernally discordant, as befits them, all but Ishky, whom Yossel makes say,

"Fooey!"

"Of course!"  Rabbi Max rises to his feet like a mountain rising from the primeval earth.  "A story.  A myseh.  A bobbe-myseh.  How could I have missed it?  Suppose!  Maybe!  What if!  I should have smelled a rat--I mean a storyteller--the instant Morris gave me his dizzy account.  A child inside a dybbuk, indeed!"

Before Morris can restrain him, Rabbi Max, son of Seymour, of the line of the estimable Azrielkeh of Miropolye, has mounted the seder table.  With one foot on the seder plate and one foot next to a bottle of Manischewitz, he raises his hands so high and bellows so loudly that dybbuks and humans alike shut their eyes and cover their ears.

In fact--such as facts are, remember, for an old storyteller--Reb Max raises his hands so high that they burst through the ceiling of his little apartment over Eppes Maximus, through plaster and laths and floorboards and tile and across seven universe and twenty-six impossibles straight up into my own blue room, mine, Fintushel-son-of-Izzy's room.  Reb Max's hands crash out next to the end table with the myrtle lamp, which tumbles over, leaving me in darkness.

Quickly, I grope for a candle and a match.  No maybes in that, reader.  I have to see what's going on, what monkeyshines is this.  Everywhere, there's sawdust and splinters and the sound of an old man roaring: "You, storyteller, by the power and authority of my ancestor rabbis, the ancient great ones, as well as by the dictum of Hillel himself, who declared that no one should do to somebody what he wouldn't want done to himself, I command you . . . "

"You command me?" I say.  Old Max chins up through my shattered floorboards.  Now he's standing on Morris's shoulders.  "I created you, you ingrate, you gornisht: you nothing."  I pull a manuscript from my desktop--this page, in fact--and brandish it in Reb Max's face as if it were an eviction notice.

The rabbi is unimpressed.  "According to our sacred law, even God Most High has certain obligations to His creatures.  How much more so a mere pencil wagger like yourself!  I demand that you undo the shameful and ridiculous situation that you have created.  I demand that you free the dybbuk Ishky from possession by the human child Yossel.  I demand that you cause this Yossel to be returned unto the bosom of his family.  For crying out loud, it's Passover--let our Yossel go!"

"That's all?" I say.

"Well, a little more shmaltz wouldn't hurt.  The dybbuks ate up all the shadows, and without the shadows, frankly, I find it a bit flat."

"I know what you mean."

"So you'll do it?"

"The herring?  Done.  A whole case of twelve-ounce jars, big ones, complete with shadows.  Now go."

"And Ishky?  And Yossel?"

"You'll forgive me, Rabbi, but you're making me a little bit nervous.  You belong on the page, not on the floor.  Please go."

"Not until you rewrite."

"I wrote you--I banish you!  You creature of ink, you what-if, you maybe, I exorcise you back into the ink cartridge, into the LCD screen."

"Nu?  So now I am the dybbuk?  No, Fintushel, son of Izzy, it is I who exorcise you."  He tears the manuscript page from my hand.  "Begone, teller of tales.  I'll take over from here."  He shoulders past me, stirring up sawdust with the hem of his kittel, and he plunks himself down at my desk.  Spurning my PC, he picks up a pencil and begins to write.

What can I do?  Haul him bodily into the paper shredder?  Rub him all over with an eraser?  I am not a violent man--well, only in my imagination.  I peer over Reb Max's shoulder.  Here is what he writes:

"Truth to tell, as the wise and holy rabbi, Max, son of Seymour, strove against Fintushel, son of Izzy, a terrible lamentation was heard.  Yossel, moved at last by his mama's tears wailed and wept.  He leapt out of the dybbuk's mouth and ducked under the bed sheet that separated the two worlds.

"'Yosseleh, beloved son!' cried his mama.

"'Mama, dear!' cried Yossel.

"They embraced.

"On the other side of Reb Max's bed sheet the dybbuks sighed.  'Rabbi,' they said, all in a chorus, 'because of your goodness and power, our Ishky had been freed of his burden, and we dybbuks are so happy that not a single one of us will ever enter a human soul again.  As a sign of this covenant we make with you this day, we will deliver unto you a dozen jars of the finest shmaltz herring complete with shadows every Sunday for the rest of your life--and this is in addition to anything that meshugge storyteller is giving you.'"

Reb Max stared at the green window shade for a minute and then continued to write: "'And we will arrange through our occult powers that Eppes Maximus does a brisk trade.'

"The dybbuks vanished.  The bed sheet fell into a perfectly folded pile, as clean as the day the rabbi had bought it.  Instantly, the washed dishes were put away, the floor was swept and mopped, the walls had a fresh coat of paint, and a dozen very large orders for expensive merchandise slipped themselves under the door . . . "

"Laying it on a bit thick, aren't we?" I say.

Reb Max growls and writes on: "And they all lived happily ever after."

"What about Mollie?" I say.

He writes: "Including Mollie."

"I was getting fond of her," I say.  "Couldn't you write a word more?"

He mutters something in Yiddish, and he writes: "Mollie in particular."  Then he says, "Here, I'll even give her the afikomen."  And he writes a little more.

"I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with that."

"Satisfied, nothing.  You're lucky you got off so easy.  What if I give you the punch in the nose you deserve?  I have half a mind to excommunicate you, as my ancestor Reb Azrielkeh did to the terrible dybbuk of Brinnits."

"No, no, Reb Rumpelstiltskins, Mr. Son of Seymour, Son of Shmuel, Son of Melvin, son of my own fevered imagination.  I beg you to forgive me my lies as I forgive you yours.  Now, back through the floor with you!  Go back into the place that never was, complete with folded bed sheet and freshly painted walls."

"Okay," says Reb Max, "but you're getting off easy."

He writes two more words, exactly two, then jumps down through the hole in the floor straight into Morris's arms.  I hear laughter and backslaps and sloppy kisses as the floor heals, the sawdust un-scatters, and the end table rights itself with the myrtle lamp on top glowing as before.

Around the edges of my green window shade sunlight is stealing in.  I look down at Reb Max's page, at the two words he wrote before jumping through the floor.  I read:

 

"THE END"

 

And who am I to say otherwise?