DIKDUK

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

n the unspoken competition among the children at Temple B'nai Israel as to who was the most frum‑-ceremonially observant‑-Ishky Menken won hands down.  His ancient father, Shmuel, was not only the synagogue's sexton but a cabalist to boot.

It was Shmuel who led the old men in their mystical studies down in the temple's musty basement, with its moldering books and mildew, covered over by the smell of Lysol.  It was Shmuel who blew the shofar‑-the ram's horn‑-on the Day of Atonement, to seal the Book of Life.  It was Shmuel who mended the Rabbi's tzitzit and the coverlet for the Holy of Holies, the sacred scrolls in the Ark of the Covenant.  And Zelafet Safim, the Chachem of Istanbul, was Shmuel Menken's house guest.

In all this, Ishky helped.

Who could match such piety?  Certainly not me!  What was my example?  My father, Harry Suss, was a short order cook at Mendel's Kosher Deli.  Actually, he made book.  Half the men who came to Mendel's for breakfast were really attracted more by the trifecta than by the salami and eggs.

You think that was all?  I wish!  In fact, my father was one of the men who conducted "auction" on the High Holy Days.  "Auction" was our orthodox Jewish equivalent of passing the plate.  Since it was ritually forbidden to touch money or to write on the Holy Days, my father and his cronies took pledges from the faithful, and, selecting one of the prepared cards with a number corresponding to each member's pledge amount, attached it with a rubber band to the member's name card, and put them together in a little box, for future redemption.

In practice, however, depending on the schedule at the race tracks and how it happened to synchronize with our Jewish, lunar year, there were often two extra cards.  These were prepared in a sort of pigeon Aramaic code which meant, on one card, "WIN," PLACE," or "SHOW," and, on the other, the name of a horse.

The avowed purpose of "auction" (which, up until the time I was twelve, I believed was strictly a Yiddish word, and doesn't it sound it?) was the awarding of ceremonial honors‑-such as opening the Ark, reading the holy text, or closing the Ark‑-to members who showed generosity in supporting our synagogue.  When my mother found out about Papa's scheme and reproached him for it, he showed her in his books how half of his take from the operation went back into the synagogue as a contribution‑-and he never even got to hold the Torah!  What a mensh!  All this I heard through the furnace grate from my room, where I was supposed to be asleep, but what I had really been doing was studying the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses with a flashlight under my blanket.  Papa and Mama's fights were just a sideshow.

But I was telling you about Ishky, the champion tsaddik, the righteous one, about how head-and-shoulders above us all he was when it came to heavenly matters.  I played at his family's apartment sometimes, so I know.  In those crowded four rooms, teeming with chotchkes, with shmattes, with zachen, with stuff, where his father, Shmuel the Cabalist, squinted and labored over the sewing machine‑-and this was America in the 1950s, not Czarist Russia‑-his father in the black yarmulke, with the fringes of his tzitzit peeking out over his belt, where nobody answered the phone on Saturday or touched a light switch, lifted a pencil, cut paper, or cooked, and where everything stopped three times a day for the recitation of the Amidah, Ishky and his baby sister played with me.

I liked the smell of that place: bubbling soup with chicken bones.  Later, I learned, it's the fenugreek.  I liked his mother's legs, thick as Samson's pillars, with frilly skirts that always showed when she brought us in something to eat‑-a cracker with chopped liver, a cookie, or sometimes even bone marrow, a delicacy we called markh.

Also, usually, though not lately, the Menkens' home was a haven of orderliness and calm.  Lately, it was nearly as messy as my house.  "Papa lost something," Ishky told me, and his mother added, "He won't say what."  So Shmuel was constantly excavating for the lost article.

"Maybe it's under the planter," I'd say, or " . . . the red chair? . . . the umbrella stand? . . . What about the roll-top desk?"  But as likely as not, the named object would itself be gone.  The Menkens were spring cleaning, it seemed; Shmuel Menken was selling off superfluous items of furniture.  And still the lost treasure, whatever it was, did not appear.

Shmuel's work table was still there, piled high with swatches and spindles and bobbins and shears, and other notions of the trade.  One afternoon, Ishky and I were pitching baseball cards under it‑-our favorite stadium when Shmuel was at shul for his cabala group.  "Sigalofski really klopped you one, didn't he, Michael?" Ishky asked me.  He was getting back at me for winning his New York Yankees Team card.

"It wasn't so bad," I said.  Actually, it was.  Sigalofski, our Hebrew School teacher, a frustrated Yiddish author (and what Yiddish author isn't?) had the nasty habit of throwing books at children  like me, who didn't pay attention.  I had to go to Hebrew School because Sigalofski owed my father a hundred dollars, and this was the only way it could be paid off, quid pro quo.  Things had gotten so bad for me there that I had developed this unconscious tick: I rocked back and forth at my desk as if I were praying at shul, a defensive maneuver against incoming biblioprojectiles.  Sigalofski eyed me warily for it, but didn't object‑-the semblance of piety silenced him.

"Don't give me that!" Ishky said.  "I heard you grunt.  So, what was inside your lesson book‑-a dirty picture?"

I was taking Ishky to the cleaners.  I had his Roger Maris.  I had his Yogi Berra.  I had his New York Yankees Team card.  There was this special way I had of snapping my middle finger against my thumb and spinning the cards toward the wall; even a tsaddik couldn't beat me.  Exactly when Ishky was about to release his coveted Mickey Mantle rookie card, I said, "If you promise not to tell anybody, I'll show you what I was looking at," and his card landed a foot away from the wall.  "But it's not a picture, Ishky."

Ishky didn't really care about the cards anyway.  He nodded.  I made sure to throw my pot-sweeping Red Sox Team card‑-it ended up leaning against the mopboard‑-and then to gather my winnings into my book bag and throw it over my shoulder.  Then we ran outside‑-"Nowhere, Mama!  We'll be right back!  Michael wants to show me something!"‑-and Ishky followed me two blocks to the alley behind the RKO Palace Theatre, a defunct Vaudeville venue that was now a movie house.  I showed him how to climb up the fire escape and scramble across the gravel-covered roof to the top of the elevator shaft, where I kept my secret throne: a ragged lawn chair folded just out of sight in a narrow recess.

"Watch your step," I warned him.  "The wood's no good over there."  The boards covering the shaft were split and rotting.  Most of the nails had popped out; some littered the tar paper underneath.

I pulled out my lawn chair and a cigar box that was hidden under it.  Then I sat Ishky down in the lawn chair.  "You're the first person I ever let sit there," I told him.  "This is the throne that I rule the sun and the stars from, Ishky."

"Michael, you're meshugge!" he said.  "When are you going to show me the picture?"

"It's not a picture," I said.  "It's a book."  I zipped open the book bag and, pushing aside my gum card boodle, pulled out the thin, green volume, handsomely grooved along the binding, that had been sharing my bed for several weeks, flashlit, and creeping into my notebooks at school.  This, however, was my favored place to study and to experiment with the beloved book‑-the rooftop of the RKO, above the city and its horses, alone with my God.

"There are only five, you shlemiel!" Ishky laughed.  "Pentacle, pentagram, Pentateuch!  There aren't any sixth and seventh books of Moses.  Where did you get that farkakte thing?"

"Don't laugh, Ishky," I said.  "I found it in a used book store.  I was looking for Supermans and stuff when I saw it in a cardboard box with a bunch of other books and some Looks and Lifes.  It just came in, see?  They didn't even price it yet.  I got a deal.  They don't know what a deal I got, Ishky!  And I got the Supermans too!"

"What a deal!"  He couldn't stop laughing.  "You got more deals in the cigar box, Mickey?"

So I showed him the virgin parchment I'd bought, ten square inches for a dollar fifty, mail order.  Actually, it was a vegetable parchment imitation of the virgin parchment called for in the incantations and spells described in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.  I figured that would be good enough, if the other stuff was fairly authentic.  I also showed him my peewee jackknife‑-it came from a plastic egg inside a bubble gum machine‑-and the empty Heinz mustard jar I kept inside the cigar box along with the parchment, the knife, and some stale bread.

"The bread is for bait," I explained.

"Bait for what?" he asked me.  Interested by my neat little knife, Ishky had stopped laughing for a moment.

"For doves," I said.  "They come to get the bread crumbs, see?  Then I sack them with my book bag."

"It'll make your bag stink," Ishky put in.

"No, it won't," I said.  "You don't know anything about it.  Then I'll cut their throats and bleed them into the mustard jar.  Then I'm ready, boy."

"Ready for what?"

"Aciel, Mephistopheles, you name it!  You make a circle of blood, you write some stuff on the paper, and you shout some stuff in Hebrew with all your heart and all your mind, and that's all there is to it, Ishky.  The sky opens up and everything."

Ishky said, "You haven't got a pen.  You need a dip pen, and you haven't got one."

"I'm going to use my finger," I told him.

"You'll get a disease," Ishky said.  "My father has an old dip pen somewhere.  I'll get it for you, Mickey."

Everything was going along perfectly.  I needed Ishky the Tsaddik to make everything work.  I didn't know my Hebrew well enough, and my heart and mind weren't pure enough to raise even spirits of ammonia.  "You can stand in the magic circle with me when I do it," I said.  "It's all in here, Ishky."  I tapped the book.  I opened it to the diagram of the circle to draw for summoning Spirits of the Air.  "You have to stand inside the circle or the spirits get you.  As long as you stay inside and keep your mind pure, you're okay."

Ishky looked at the curious diagram with its mishmash of alchemical symbols, astrological signs, and Hebrew lettering in an archaic script.  "This isn't the real thing," he announced.

"It is too," I said.  "They didn't know what they were selling me!"

"I'll do it with you, though," Ishky said, "because if I don't, you'll get in some awful trouble for sure.  You're a shlimazl, Mickey."

I'm not a shlimazl.  I had most of Ishky's baseball cards in my book bag.  I still had the New York Yankees Team picture, which a lot of people today would kill for.  I had The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, and a throne from which I ruled the sun and the stars without adult intervention, including biblioprojectiles from Sigalofski.  In addition, after Ishky, the genuine shlimazl, went home to supper, I stayed there on the roof of the RKO, and, that very evening, an autumn twilight so magically crimson that I felt as if I were being inhaled by God, along with the whole warm world, right up there into the Holy Presence, not ten yards from my lawn chair I found a pigeon that had brained itself against the skylight and was lying dead in a little pool of blood.

Between a pigeon and a dove, as far as I could see, nobody but a Talmudic scholar could quibble a difference, especially as concerns the blood, which, once out of the body, makes the same ink, I bet.  This particular spill was viscous and red-brown.  I scooped it into my Heinz jar and shook it up with some water standing in the gutter, lest it turn to pudding or powder before I could draw my circle.  Then I tucked everything away and hightailed it home, where my mother was waiting for me, fuming.

"Where have you been?"

"On top of the RKO Palace, Mom, getting ready to invoke Mephistopheles."‑-No!  I didn't say that!  I said, of course, "Out," and I wolfed down my cold lamb chop and mashed potato while Papa handicapped his horses.

"Guess what?  Menken placed a bet," he said.  "Can you believe it?"

"Impossible!" my mother said.  "The man's a tsaddik!"

"The tsaddik blew two hundred and forty dollars," Papa told her.  "He hung around Mendel's all afternoon, noshing, kibitzing, getting up the courage to place his bet‑-a very stupid one, if you want to know.  Him and his new cabalist sidekick, the Turk with sidecurls, the one who snores on his sofa, Zelafet Safim."

I swallowed my last mouthful of cold potatoes and said, "He wasn't at Mendel's.  He was at shul.  Mrs. Menken said so."  All of a sudden, it was bedtime.

But under the covers: Mephistopheles!

 

hat a dope I am!  Did I tell you about dikduk yet?  Of course not!  It's halfway through already, and the Spirits of the Earth and Air are clamoring between the floorboards, itching to explode into view, and you don't yet understand the main thing of all‑-
                 dikduk!

Dikduk was Shmuel Menken's specialty.  Oldtimers used to come from all over and sleep on a pallet next to Ishky and his sister just so they could visit and confer with Shmuel on some deep question of dikduk.  I would see them walk round and round the block in their ratty immigrant coats, waving their arms and talking an impenetrable mixture of Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, or German, and Hebrew, unraveling the secrets of the universe.  Tears would flow, like drunken poets', or like lovers'.  And Ishky and I would have to pitch cards at my house.

There are secret meanings to things.  These meanings are hidden in the seams of things, like money sewn into a miser's jacket.  God put them there for the tsaddikim, the saintly ones, and the chachamim, the wise ones, to figure out‑-guys like Shmuel Menken, for example.  Take the first few words of the Bible: "In the beginning God created . . . "  In the Hebrew, it's just three words.  You take the last letter of each of these words and arrange them a certain way, and guess what?  It spells the word for truth, emes, which means that everything in the Bible is true.  That's dikduk.

Or take the last three letters of the best cards I won from Ishky that day‑-Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, and New York Yankees Team.  The last letters spell out "Sam," which is what "Shmuel" is in English.  There are three capital Y's, meaning how wise Shmuel was, and the M and R in Roger Maris, for "Mr.," because he was my friend Ishky's father.  Like that.  The one capital letter I left out, which I should have paid attention to if I'd had any chachem in me, which I didn't, and it would have avoided a bloody catastrophe for the entire congregation of B'nai Israel, not to mention the RKO Palace Theatre, and my eyesight‑-which I don't regret‑-was the capital letter N in the "New" of "New York."  Meaning "NOT."

"Don't do it," the baseball cards were telling me, but I just couldn't hear them.

 

ed-eyed, with drooping lids and a hangdog look, Ishky collared me on the way to school.  "Did you get the dove's blood?" he asked me.

"Of course," I said.  "Everything on my end is ready.  So, have you got the dip pen?"

"Yeah," he said, "but Mickey, you don't know what it cost me."  And he started to cry.

That's when I taught Ishky the Tsaddik to play hooky.  "C'mere," I said, and I grabbed his elbow.  I turned him right around and took him back to my throne room, to the rooftop of the RKO, where we could have a moment of peace and sanity away from the world of grown-ups.  I sat him down in my lawn chair, I fed him the Baby Ruth I was saving for lunch, and I showed him my new Supermans, including my favorite, where he tricks MXYZPTLK back into the fifth dimension by getting him to say his name backwards.

"Hey!" says Ishky.  "I know this one.  I know all these!  These are mine, that my Papa sold to the Used man."

"That's luck for you, Ishky," I said.  "Now they're mine.  I bought them.  And you can read them again."  After a few comics, I got this little story out of him at last:

"Papa's not so good, Mickey.  He's all the time worrying.  Late at night, if I get up to pee, he's awake.  He keeps tearing the house apart looking for something he says he lost, and then he gets all quiet and sad to put it back together again.  And you know what Mr. Safim does?  He laughs at Papa!

"And Papa gets angry at Mama for nothing.  At me, too.  He never hits though, Mickey.  You shouldn't think he hits.

"Well, when I went to get the dip pen‑-It's in the top dresser drawer under the mirror.  He never uses it.‑-I saw some letters.  There was one from the German Embassy.  The Germans are giving him a hard time.  We thought he'd get a lot of money back, you know, because of all the things they took away during the war.  His family had a shop and everything, before the Nazis.  And now that they passed reparations . . . But they aren't gonna do it, the government I mean, the German one.

"Nobody gives you any money to sew the Rabbi's tzitzit or to teach them cabala or to blow shofar or to mend a suit when you can buy it cheaper off the rack at Sears Roebuck's.  And when you can't see to sew, do you think they pay you better?"

"What do you mean?" I said.  "Who can't see to sew?"

"Papa's going blind, that's what.  That's the other thing I saw in the drawer, along with the pen, along with three different sizes of magnifying glass and a bunch of old pictures embroidered all round like a Star of David for a frame‑-a letter from the insurance company, Mickey.  They don't want to pay nothing for a blind man, it says.  He isn't covered.  Can you believe it?  And he's going blind!"

"You're smart, Ishky," I told him.  "I couldn't make nothing of any letters like that.  They'd be paper airplanes for me, boy."

"You don't get it," he said.  He started crying again.

"Look, Ishky," I said, "don't get like that.  Everything's gonna be okay.  I'm telling you, Mephistopheles is gonna fix it, or one of those other guys.  I got the book and the blood and the paper.  You got the pen, and you're practically a Messiah anyway, goshdamn you . . . "  He laughed.  " . . . So we're all set, see?  Here.  I'll even give you the book and all the stuff.  You can copy it better.  Don't let anybody see it though, or I'll kill you dead, tsaddik or not."

I gave him the book and the stuff in the cigar box, everything except the little knife, which I kept, and the crumbs, which I threw away, because we already had the dove's blood, more or less.   "I'm no Messiah," Ishky said.  "I'm no tsaddik, Mickey."  I knew better.

"I'll meet you here at midnight," I said.  "Don't worry about getting caught.  Once we've got those spirits doing our bidding, they'll fix everything.  Okay?"

"Okay."

But when I handed Ishky the book, I felt like I was giving my heart and stomach away.  I didn't like not having it under the covers that night.  That meant that my parents' argument occupied Ring Number One.

"I want you to get a regular, honest job, Harry.  Is that too much to ask?"

"So I should be a tailor like Shmuel the Tsaddik?"

"So what would be so bad?"

"And a shnorrer and a shikker too?"

"Harry, please!  He doesn't beg.  He doesn't drink."

"Hah!  If you don't know any better, I won't tell you."

 

Sigalofski's Malediction

 

t this point in my story, before anything really terrible has occurred, I would like to insert a little something for the record.  This is the curse that Hershel Sigalofski laid upon me in a voice so nasal and shrill that it gave three children their first taste of migraine and caused fifteen bottles of Slivovitz in the liquor store below to spontaneously shatter, littering the shelves with broken glass and momentarily rendering the air itself forty proof.  The occasion for this harangue, punctuated by the usual biblioprojectiles in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic, was my referring, in answer to a question on the Book of Genesis, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as "guys":

 

     "Michael Suss, you have the brains of a strangled

chicken and a heart made of chopped liver and goose

fat!  Who ever told you that you were a Jew?  Was it

for you that God made the rainbow and parted the Red

Sea and brought water up out of a stone?

     "May the Spirits of the Earth, Air, Water, and

Fire, the Seraphim and Cherubim and Heavenly Hosts

strike me and hurtle me down into the bottomless pit if

I, Hershel Sigalofski, son of Seymour, son of Ruben,

ever mistake you for a thinking, feeling human being, a

descendant of the family of Adam and Moses and David

the King, made in the image of God Almighty, with a

capacity for holiness, justice, righteousness, or mercy.

     "Get out of my classroom and out of my sight, and

don't come back until Monday, with a note from your

Mother!"

 

I ran out crying.

 

ust before midnight, sleepier than I had ever been in my entire life, I snuck out of my room and was on my way out the door when Papa snagged me.  "Shh!" he said.  "Don't wake your mama.  You going out somewhere?"

"Yeah."

"Here's a little something.  Stay out of trouble, huh?"

I took the little foil package he handed me, thanked him, and skidaddled to the RKO.  Ripping the edge of the foil as I ran, I was disappointed to discover that "Rameses" was not a brand of chocolate after all; it was some kind of rubber thing, the use of which I would not learn for another year or so.

He was crazy like that, my father.  That was his idea of being a good parent.  I stuffed the condom in my pocket for my mother to find in the laundry a week later.  (Lucky I was an invalid by then!)

Ishky hadn't arrived at the RKO yet.  Alone on the roof, by the light of the gibbous moon and the spill from the floodlights, which were mounted like gargoyles on the edge of the gutter, I unfolded my throne and waited.  Pigeons circled over the roof, cooing, even at night, casting moon shadows against the elevator shaft and on the walls of adjoining buildings.

Just a little ill at ease, I drew a circle in the gravel around my lawn chair, using a broken piece of electrical conduit.  It was just a groove in the stones, but it comforted me a little.  I recited one of the protecting phrases from the Sixth and Seventh: "Lo al yidai vahalayim rayim!"  That is, "Not through severe bodily sufferings and malignant diseases!"  It was all I could remember.  Then I sat down, and at once fell asleep.

I dreamed of letters and numbers in geometric arrays, each one vividly alive, with its own fascinating story and its own unique sorrow.  The letter Z, for example, was mourning the loss of a serif; the poor thing had become involved with malevolent, deceitful numerals, and had been lured to its destruction in an unending series of periods.

I woke with a start.  When Ishky arrived, it wasn't Ishky‑-it was Zelafet Safim, the Menkens' boarder.  He stood over me, moonlit, grinning through his big, black, curly whiskers.  His fingernails were so long they were starting to curl.  That ratty black cloth coat of his stank of napthalene and match heads.  Did I mention that I was frightened?  Without thinking, I touched my thumbs and forefingers together, making a diamond shape between my hands and fanning out the other fingers in the mystic sign I'd read about under the covers.

Safim laughed.  "You're a Cohen?" he said.

"No," I said, "a Suss."

Safim laughed again.  "'Suss' means horse," he said.  "Why does the horse make the sign of the Cohens, of the Holy Priests?"

"I'm not doing anything wrong," I said.  "Where's Ishky?"

Safim ignored my question.  "You know, horsey," he said, "a man has to be forty years old and to have studied the Holy Books all his life before he can even open the cabala.  You've got a lot of nerve, little horsey."

"I never opened any cabala."

Safim started strolling around the throne just at the edge of my little dry moat, the one I'd scraped in the gravel.  I had to keep turning my head to follow him.  He said, "You know what I'm talking about.  The funny book.  The one you found in a cardboard box."

"Ishky told you!"

"Ishky told me!  Ishky the Tsaddik!  Ishky the Meshiach ben David!  You think he's the Messiah, horsey?  Ishky is no Messiah.  His father too, he's no Messiah."

"Leave me alone.  What are you telling me for?"

Zelafet Safim stepped back toward the outcropping of the elevator shaft where I had stashed my mystic goods.  "Come here, horsey, and I'll show you something interesting," he said.

"I want to go home," I said.

"Okay.  That's good, too.  Go home.  Get out.  Go to your gonif father.  Maybe he'll give you some more rubbers."

"How did you know about that?" I said.  I stayed right where I was, in the circle, in the throne.  I was beginning not to like this guy.

"Come on," he said.  "You like tricks?  I'll show you a trick."  Without taking his eyes off me, he thrust one hand straight up toward the moon, letting the threadbare coat sleeve fall to his elbow.  His ugly, pale fingers had long nails, like little scimitars; the exposed forearm was scrawny as a chicken bone.  In a sudden, savage sweep, Safim grabbed a pigeon right out of the air.  It was pure white.  I don't want to tell you exactly how he killed it, but when he was finished, he dropped it onto the gravel in two pieces.  "You need ink, horsey?  Here's ink.  Come get ink."

Down in the alley, someone was running, then clamoring up the fire escape.  "Mickey!  Mickey!"  It was my Ishky.  He was panting as he cried, climbing to the rooftop, "I'm sorry, Mickey.  Papa took the stuff.  He made the pentacles and the letters and signs.  He drew the circle right by the sewing table.  I think he's going nuts, Mickey!"

I saw Ishky's cherubic little head appear above the gutter, and then he stopped cold.  "Mr. Safim!" he said.

"It's the horsey's book." Safim said darkly.  "The horsey bought and paid for it.  It doesn't belong to your papa any more.  It belongs to the horsey, so I come to the horsey, no matter who mumbles and scribbles in blood."

"You!  Papa brought you here," Ishky said to Safim.  "Now I get it!  Papa brought you here.  Now he's trying to get rid of you."

"A chachem!" Safim snarled.  "Your papa wanted me to fix his eyes.  But then he didn't like the price."

"What price?" I said.  Ishky was climbing carefully onto the roof.

"His eyes," said Safim, and he pointed at Ishky.

"A transplant?" I said.

"A transplant!" laughed Safim.  "Call it a transplant, if you want.  But your papa didn't like the deal, Ishky Meshiach, so he tried to make money another way."

"The bets!" I said.  "My father said he placed one."

"Poor Shmuel doesn't know his horses," Safim said.

"My Papa is getting rid of you," Ishky told Safim.  Ishky came into the circle and stood beside me.  "He found his book again.  Right this minute, he's shouting the holy names with all his heart and all his mind.  He's holding the parchment written in blood, and he's standing in the magic circle."

"His book?" I stammered.  "what do you mean, his book?"

"Yeah, Mickey," Ishky said, "just like it was my Supermans you showed me.  It was Papa who sold them to the bookstore in the box with the Looks and the Lifes, but the book must have fallen in by mistake."

"By mistake!" Safim snorted.  He was having himself a good laugh.

Suddenly Safim stopped laughing.  He began to shiver.  He turned up his collar and raised his shoulders practically to his ears, like a snowbound traveler.  "Come here," he said to me.

"Don't leave the circle, Mickey," Ishky shouted.

Safim seemed to grow tired.  He was leaning back against the edge of the shaft, giving his weight to it more and more.  But he could still spit.  "Sure thing," he said.  "Look out for yourselves‑-let Shmuel send me away.  You know, Shmuel called me here because he's poor and going blind.  Now, how will he turn a buck if I go?

"What do you think, Ishky, will he get a good price on his sewing table?  Hey, little Mickey, do you think your Papa will let Shmuel win some bundle on the races?"

I said, "Can you really fix him, Mr. Safim?  Can you keep Mr. Menken from going blind?"

"Shut up, Mickey," Ishky said.  "Don't talk to him.  He's a liar."

Safim's shaking was getting worse.  He didn't seem as formidable as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses had declared a dark spirit should be: "black and black and black, stormy and turbid, a crushing malevolence."  He looked like an old man with the DT's.  His voice quivered when he said, "Sure I can fix him.  I can keep him from going blind.  But somebody's got to pay me.  I've got expenses like everybody else."

"Somebody's got to go blind?" I said.

"Shut up!" Ishky told me.  "Shut up!  Shut up!"

"Yeah.  Step out of the circle, tsaddik.  Save the poor tailor."

"No!" Ishky shouted.  I got up and pushed Ishky aside.  I stepped out of the circle.  Zelafet Safim literally jumped for joy.  His arms and legs shot out like beams of light from a sunburst.  With his shaggy head, they formed a pentacle.

"Come!" he said.

I moved toward him, mesmerized.  When I had nearly reached Safim, Ishky burst out of the circle and fell against him.  The rotten beams behind the old man gave way.  They splintered and he collapsed backward.  He was laughing!  Ishky scrambled back as Safim flailed about, crashing first through the splintering wood and then through a section of glass behind it.  The glass shattered, and Safim was thrown backward into the shaft.  His laughter echoed hideously as he fell.  Then the sickening thud and the denoument of glass and broken boards clattering to the bottom.

It was only then that I felt the searing pain in my face.  Slivers of glass had rained on my head and upper body, lacerating me in a dozen places.  All I could see was blood, and after that, nothing.  Ishky was crying, "Oh God!  Oh my God!  Poor Mickey!  What have we done?"

 

ell, let's not be so melodramatic as Ishky on the roof of the RKO.  It's true, I was blinded, but, believe me, I manage.  I am sexton at B'nai Israel‑-a cushy job, if somewhat impecunious.  Everyone has been very nice, and through the generosity of the Menkens, I have brail texts and other necessities of my work, not to mention the trust fund.

You see, Safim's death brought to public attention the numerous code violations of the RKO Palace Theatre, the "attractive hazard" of its rooftop being the least of them.  The place was closed down for almost a year.  (What did I care?  I can't see movies!)  Then, through a happy conjunction of the RKO's liability insurance and their public relations requirements, the large sum of money released by the auditors on the occasion of Safim's death, like winged seeds from an autumnal puffball, wound up in the lap of Shmuel Menken‑-Zelafet Safim had no known relatives, and the RKO had to make amends to someone.  So I wound up with a bit of it.

Shmuel Menken, feeling guilty of course, put some of the boodle in a trust fund for me.  My father became its custodian, relieving him of the necessity of cooking short orders or conducting auction.  That's probably what saved my parents' marriage‑-a mixed blessing.

The Menkens left town before Passover.  Shmuel never did go blind, though I don't think he needed to mend tzitzit any more either.  And if you think all this is just some fantasy I dreamed up to dramatize my accident, go look at the north wall of B'nai Israel in Syracuse, New York.  There's a stained glass window near the Holy Ark, they tell me, that was paid for by Shmuel Menken, God knows why.  A memorial.

On it, in ornate Hebrew calligraphy, written in the ancient fashion, without vowels, is the name Zelafet Safim, so: "ZLFTSFM."  Of course, only those versed in the sacred science of dikduk would ever think to read that memorial in the opposite direction: "MFSTFLZ"‑-the Prince of Darkness.