(Page 6 of 7)
Sputz looked over at a bookcase and picked up a small pamphlet. “If you see something like this, with a brown stain on it, then it’s blood, or God forbid, some guts. You must put it aside. Also, any bullets you find, take aside and put in a plastic bag. We don’t want the family to be looking through stuff and finding bullets, right?” He smiled good-naturedly, making the best of the situation, and the students nodded. “Now, I want four boys on the fifth floor, packing up books, and four boys on the second floor….” The young men dispersed and began.
Menachem pointed upward to where the wall met the ceiling. There were three clocks with their hands frozen at different times. The one in the middle showed the time in London; the labels for the others had disappeared. “Look, he was making it like an airport in here. Can you imagine? You never would have thought, bumping into this guy, that he’d know all these things. This place had everything. He was a genius.”
Inside the rabbi’s office, Menachem gave one boy the task of separating the documents that did have brown stains from the ones that did not. “Is it blood?” asked the boy. “Yes, yes, it’s blood,” said Menachem. “It’s blood all over, okay? We’re stepping on blood. See, the grenade popped here, so of course it’s blood.” Separating bloody documents from clean ones—this was just another logistical hurdle.
Mendy Kessler arrived and began poking through the kitchen pantry, where Sandra Samuels hid for the first twelve hours of the attacks, before she escaped with young Moshe Holtzberg. Kessler was salvaging bottles of kosher wine and considering what to do with the freezer. At first the plan was to treat it like a salvage operation, to find some Indians who would take it away for free with the promise of being able to sell it; that way, Mendy and Menachem wouldn’t have to pay for labor. Then Shmuel Avraham told Mendel that the students opened the freezer by accident and found maggots inside, as thick as his thumb. They realized there was nothing to salvage.
Levi Jurkowicz arrived to deal with the situation, and suddenly the atmosphere changed; things began to happen more quickly. He told the students to seal the door of the unit with packing tape. Then he stalked outside to a construction site, where a foreman with tobacco-marked teeth sat in a lawn chair. Levi accosted people until he found an English-speaker who would translate. “I have a fridge. I want to take fridge and throw it to Pakistan,” he said. He informed everyone, as part of his bargaining terms, that he would beat up anyone who tried to cheat him.
Levi was familiar with the process of drafting labor in Mumbai. He did it frequently, whenever something needed to be moved or built. Now he found four porters across the Colaba Causeway and beckoned them to Nariman House. They all wore white paper hats, like short-order cooks from the fifties, and they were Hindus, vegetarians, so nobody told them what was inside the freezer. They took ropes and slid them underneath the unit, grappling with its weight. Each porter weighed perhaps one hundred and ten pounds. Together, they might have outweighed the freezer.
Levi stood by, overseeing as the porters pushed and pulled the bulky vessel, which had no handles. They cursed in Marathi. The students told Levi that the porters were getting sick from the smell. “Make sure they don’t stand the fridge up, so the water doesn’t come out, and don’t tell them what’s inside,” Levi said by way of reply. He laughed and sang a tune from the 1970s. “Taking care of business, every day!”
The porters dragged the fridge over the broken slate and marble, to the stairway. Two men went in front of the freezer, and two behind. They grunted and shouted each time it slipped down a few steps, threatening to crush the two men in front. As they got to the bottom, they had to stand the freezer up, to get it around the bend that led to the courtyard. Levi yelled at them to stop, but it was too late; they couldn’t resist the inertia of the massive block. There was a sandy, scraping noise, and then two sharp bangs, as the freezer slid down the bottom steps, settling on the ground. The men jumped back as the seal broke and a huge stream of maggoty water flowed down into the cement courtyard, expanding into a shallow, sulfurous lake. The smell became intolerably sweeter and more revolting than it had been before, the growth of its awfulness like the difference between a sapling and a fully grown tree. Outside, in the gathered crowd, children retched and adults yelled in consternation. Suddenly, I had new understanding of the biblical phrase ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ The smell threatened to break the bounds of odor and become transfigured into a sight, a sound, a fierce, probing touch.
Only Levi was thinking clearly. He rushed upstairs and came back with a fire extinguisher. “Stand back,” he shouted, “stand back!” He began to spray the puddle with the fire extinguisher. The chalky plume of chemicals occluded my vision, invaded my lungs, and did nothing for the smell, but it slowed the spread of the water. “What are you waiting for?” Levi yelled at the porters. “Get that thing outta here! Pakistan, Pakistan!” Through one of the students, the porters asked what to do with the fridge. “I don’t care,” Levi said, “just get it out of here. Your problem, not mine.” The men dragged the fridge through the pool and out the door and down the lane. Then Levi got more workmen to cover the puddle with dirt. Later, another crew would remove the dirt and swab the floor with a special chemical recommended by a friend of Levi’s at the municipal corporation, who used it at the morgue, to purge the smell of cadavers.
Afterward, Mendy Kessler asked Jurkowicz where the freezer had ended up. Rivka Holtzberg’s family had expressed interest in the appliance, if it could be cleaned, for it reminded them of the happy home that was once their daughter’s. But no one knew where it went; the porters had dragged it away. “Not my problem,” said Jurkowicz.
—
A few days later, I was sitting with Levi in the hotel suite that Mendel and Menachem shared, a combination sleeping quarters, office, and cafeteria. Mendy had the queen-size bed, while Menachem took the daybed. They had stockpiled enough food to start a kosher bomb shelter: boxes of Lieber’s Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies, a pallet of tomatoes, kosher wine, cans of tuna fish, jars of mayonnaise. There was an entire cabinet filled with vitamin supplements and protein powders to augment the effects of their occasional workouts at a nearby gym. Neither of the men were present at the moment; they were out with Rabbi Kantor, who had finally arrived from Thailand. Perhaps he would decide on a building to rent for the new Chabad house.
Kantor had brought meat, as promised. Levi tore open the foil-wrapped pans, looking for schnitzel, his favorite dish. He cursed as each pan revealed something that was not schnitzel—first burgers, then rice vermicelli, then kebabs. He tore open the last pan. “Meat!” he bellowed. He made himself a sandwich and munched happily. After he finished a schnitzel, I asked if he believed in God.
“Do you want the religious answer or the real answer?” he offered. Both, I said. “I believe in everything about Judaism—except for God. I was raised religious. I know how to keep shabbos—I can keep the commandments. But there is no God. God was invented so that people will have something to believe in. A nonreligious person might say they don’t believe in God, but they believe in morality. That was also invented so people would have something to believe. But without God, how can there be morality? Go to Pakistan,” he said, “and they say it’s right to kill Jews. So who is right? It’s all from where you’re from. By you it’s immoral, by him it’s moral. Here I am, eating meat. But the Hindus, they say that’s immoral.”