But Hillel said nothing until he collapsed an hour later into a seat on the last number three train. There, to his horror, a single faint snore came suddenly from deep within his chest.
The next day Miriam made a momentous decision. She took the illegal file from the filing cabinet and photocopied every one of its thirty pages. Then, after a hurried call to her mother, she posted the duplicate to her in Chicago, insisting that she promise neither to read it nor to disclose its existence to anyone else. It was insurance for the widow in case the file should be stolen or destroyed. There was no doubt in her mind, after mulling over Aaron’s anxious behavior before he died, that both O’Brien and Safecom were not to be trusted.
She walked home pensively, and couldn’t help wondering whether Safecom weren’t trailing her somehow. She tried to place herself in Aaron’s frame of mind during the last hours of his life. He must have been both petrified and deeply torn. Her husband had loved his company, had always spoken about his colleagues as if, after the community, they were his family. Safecom had recruited him in his last year of university and he’d always felt honored to have been selected. Aaron had testified many times in court for the insurance company, believing entirely in both the morality and honor of his employers. He had even been elected employee of the month several times over. The discovery of the file must have been a huge shock to him; a perfidy of the worst kind for an ethical man. Whatever the risk, Miriam did not want her husband to have died in vain.
As she turned the street corner a small crowd gathered in her front yard came into view. Thinking that Myra might have died Miriam broke into a run.
She pushed past the queue of people to get into the house. Her mother-in-law was sitting on the top step in a wooden chair that was pushed up against the front door. “You can’t get in! You can’t!” she was screaming to those assembled.
Miriam rushed to her side. “Mother, what is going on?”
“Thank God you’re here. Somehow the word is out. They all want to talk to their dead relatives—idiots!” The last was shouted at the bunch of onlookers who stood solemnly in their best clothes, men on one side, women on the other, as if they were attending a wake.
Myra turned back to Miriam. “What can we do? They won’t go. Oi! If the rabbinical council hears of this we’re in big trouble.” Her wig was on crooked, her dentures were slipping, and she looked exhausted.
The young widow turned back to the crowd. Some of the faces she recognized from temple: several widows; Mr. Rubens who still mourned his wife thirty years after her death; Sara Rosenberg who had lost her entire family including twin babies in the holocaust; and young Rachel Schoff whose son had died of an asthma attack three months before—all searching Miriam’s face for understanding.
Mr. Rubens shuffled forward. “Please, we promise not to cause any trouble, we just want to make contact. We know something supernatural is going on here. Aaron was a good man, a kind man, surely his ghost is too?”
“There is no ghost here, go home! This is blasphemous! What do you think the Rebbe would say about this if he was alive? God bless his soul,” Myra retorted before Miriam had a chance to reply. But the onlookers ignored her, their faces all leaning toward the young widow.
“Myra is right—there is no ghost as such. But you can stay if you like and see for yourselves,” Miriam answered, not having the heart to disillusion them entirely.
And so it was that the community’s bereaved spent that night in neat rows on the floor of the bedroom and the landing. All listened respectfully, some clutching their stars of David in awe, others rocking and praying, as the snore whistled above them.
Within the week pilgrims were coming from as far away as New Jersey to listen to the miraculous snore, now rumored to communicate all kinds of messages in the nuances of its grunts and gurgles, from financial advice from dead loved ones through to racing tips.
By the end of the week the snore had become audible at the end of the street and entrepreneurial vendors had sprung up outside, selling earplugs and plastic effigies of Aaron’s nose.
“Any day now that phone is going to ring and we are going to be summoned to the rabbinical council to be chastised and maybe excommunicated,” Myra announced grimly, pointing at the china 1930s’ telephone she had placed ominously at the head of the breakfast table. “Lik
e the fall of Leningrad it is only a matter of time. And all over a stupid nasal phenomenon that has nothing to do with my son!” she finished, slamming the table with her knobbly fist.
But Miriam was too busy wrestling with her conscience to notice the burgeoning industry around her dead husband’s affliction. Three times she’d gone to ring up the lawyers and three times her courage had failed her. What was she frightened of? It wasn’t the possibility of losing her rightful inheritance from the company, although that was a factor; it was more the courage of initiating action for the first time in her life and having the strength to withstand the immense publicity and hostility such an action would incur. But surely the snore was urging her to act?
On Friday night Miriam and Myra relaxed, knowing that everyone would be at their family tables. They had just sat down to their own shabbat meal when the squeal of truck brakes sounded outside.
Miriam peeped through the curtains: a huge Fox News van had pulled up. Already a stream of cameramen and crew were disembarking with armfuls of equipment.
“Gott im Himmel!” Myra exclaimed in shock, slipping into the Yiddish of her childhood and momentarily forgetting Aaron was dead, “Wo ist seinem Mann?”
Still clutching a piece of herring Miriam rushed outside. An anchorwoman with immaculate blond hair and an inch of makeup perched on four inches of heel that were slowly sinking into the Glucksteins’ narrow strip of lawn.
“Miracles are everywhere, even in these grim and sad times,” she said into her microphone, smiling at a camera balanced precariously on the shoulder of a disheveled man who, much to Miriam’s disgust, had neither beard nor skullcap. “We bring you a story of hope from here…” the camera panned along the row of brownstones, “the orthodox Lubavitch community in Crown Heights—a story about a miraculous snore that once belonged to one Aaron Gluckstein, who passed on only a month ago—”
“Get away! Get away!” Myra flew out of the house and hit the anchorwoman firmly on the legs with her walking stick.
The woman winced painfully as she wrangled her facial expression for the rolling camera.
“We seem to have a disgruntled resident with us right at this minute.”
Smiling bravely she thrust the microphone at the irate nonagenarian.
“What’s our connection to the snore?”
“Connection? I am the mother. Now get off my lawn—you are breaking both religious and state legislation. This is private property plus it is past sunset—it is already the sabbath and you should not be working.” She thudded her walking stick dangerously close to the reporter who backed away a few steps.
“But, Mrs. Gluckstein, is it true the snore has predictive powers?” the anchorwoman asked undaunted, experienced as she was in frontline reportage.