Free A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell Page A

seemed the only place. Why? I no longer have any idea.
    The Rebbe squawks and I must hurry to catch up with him. I havebeen daydreaming. We are already outside the Jewish quarter. I’m trailing a thin line of blood in the snow, but otherwise, I feel up to the journey, if a little creaky and stiff in the joints.
    The town disappears behind us.
You’ll never be back,
a voice whispers in my ear. I march beneath a thick mesh of trees.
Never, never, never
. I sing a little traveling song, to cheer myself. The Rebbe sails overhead on a nearly silent wind.
    A thatch of snow grows too heavy for the tree branch supporting it. It breaks and falls with a loud and wooden crack.

21
    Our first stop is the pit of buried Jews. How different the place appears in winter, so quiet and so still. It’s difficult even to find the raised mound beneath its many thick quilts of snow.
    “Rebbe,” I call up. “If I’m not mistaken, here is where they killed us.”
    Although it’s difficult to tell.
    The day is gleaming with the sun reflected everywhere in the bright clean snow.
    The Rebbe stretches his wings and glides easily to the ground. He lands with such grace, you’d think he’d been a crow his entire life. Because he is light, he doesn’t sink in, like me, but skates across the ivory surface of the drifts, leaving two lines of arrow-shaped clawprints as a trail. His small head bobs rhythmically forward and back, forward andback, in a black blur, and he hunts and pecks through the drifts, searching out our hidden grave.
    I watch quietly. I know better than to interrupt him when his concentration is so fierce.
    Often, at shul, when his prayers grew especially fervent, those of us near to him had to move away. Otherwise, we might have burned up, God forbid, in the holy fires that surrounded him.
    He leaps into the air.
    Flying low to the ground, the Rebbe circles the perimeter of the grave seven times, wheeling to the right, then wheeling three times to the left. He screeches out odd phrases of Hebrew and Aramaic, phrases I have never heard uttered in this fashion, nor in this order, and never in a voice so metallic and strange.
    I sense a slight trembling beneath my shoes, and soon the earth is shaking madly below my feet. Blocks of shining snowdrifts rise up, as if pushed, and crumble all about. I grab onto a branch to steady myself and accidentally bite my tongue.
    “Rebbe!” I shout, spitting out lines of bloody saliva. “The ground is churning!”
    But I have lost sight of him.
    The air erupts with an agonized groan. I have to cover my ears with my hands, so terrible are its cries. I cower, on one knee, behind a birch tree. Above me, I can hear the Rebbe’s squawking among the mad chatterings of birds as they depart from their nests in frantic numbers.
    With a great ripping, the ground splits open like an old pair of trousers.
    Inside the circle described by the Rebbe’s flight, first the snow and then the frozen dirt sinks in and falls upon itself, like white and brown sugar being sifted in an enormous baker’s bowl. Puffs of silt rise into the cold air, as though someone had dropped an open sack of flour. The entire world disappears.
    “Rebbe?” I say, coughing. “I can’t see anything!”
    From nowhere, the Rebbe lands upon my shoulder with such force, he nearly knocks me on my face.
    I clutch at my troubled back, trying to straighten up. “Be careful, Rebbe, can’t you!” I say, surprised, and alarming myself with my pique.
    He crows, “Well, Chaimka?” puffing up his little chest and seems to arch an eyebrow, although I know that cannot be. He has none. Still, he gestures me forward with his wing.
    I hoist myself up on my cane and, not without qualms, hobble nearer to the lip of the opened grave. Through the grey and white marblings of clouds, the sky lets down dusty shafts of light. I wave a handkerchief in front of us, attempting to see through the thickened, grainy air. Moving my feet without lifting them, I