The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg

by Barry N. Malzberg

  VI

  In the third of his imaginary dialogues with God (whom he pictured as an imposing man, somewhat the dimensions of one of the elders but much more neatly trimmed and not loaded down with the paraphernalia with which they conducted themselves) Leviticus said, “I don’t believe any of it. Not any part of it at all. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Doubt is another part of faith,” God said. “Doubt and belief intertwine; both can be conditions of reverence. There is more divinity in the doubt of a wise man than in the acceptance of fools.”

  “That’s just rhetoric,” Leviticus said; “it explains nothing.”

  “The devices of belief must move within the confines of rhetoric,” God said. “Rhetoric is the poor machinery of the profound and incontrovertible. Actually, it’s not a matter of doubt. You’re just very uncomfortable.”

  “That’s right. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t see why Judaism imposes this kind of suffering.”

  “Religion is suffering,” God said with a modest little laugh, “and if you think Judaism is difficult upon its participants, you should get a look at some of the others sometime. Animal sacrifice, immolation, the ceremony of tongues. Oh, most terrible! Not that everyone doesn’t have a right to their point of view,” God added hastily. “Each must reach me, each in his way and through his tradition. Believe me, Leviticus, you haven’t got the worst of it.”

  “I protest. I protest this humiliation.”

  “It isn’t easy for me, either,” God pointed out. “I’ve gone through cycles of repudiation for billions of years. Still, one must go on.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here. It’s destroying my health; my physical condition is ruined. When am I going to leave?”

  “I’m sorry,” God said, “that decision is not in my hands.”

  “But you’re omnipotent.”

  “My omnipotence is only my will working through the diversity of twenty billion other wills. Each is determined, and yet each is free.”

  “That sounds to me like a lousy excuse,” Leviticus said sullenly. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all.”

  “I do the best I can,” God said, and after a long, thin pause added sorrowfully, “you don’t think that any of this is easy for me either, do you?”

  VII

  Leviticus has the dim recollection from the historical tapes, none of them well attended to, that before the time of the complexes, before the time of great changes, there had been another kind of existence, one during which none of the great churches, Judaism included, had been doing particularly well in terms of absolute number of participants, relative proportion of the population. Cults had done all right, but cults had had only the most marginal connection to the great churches, and in most cases had repudiated them, leading, in the analyses of certain of the historical tapes, to the holocaust that had followed, and the absolute determination on the part of the Risen, that they would not permit this to happen again, that they would not allow the cults to appropriate all of the energy, the empirical demonstrations, for themselves, but instead would make sure that the religions were reconverted to hard ritual, that the ritual demonstrations following would be strong and convincing enough to keep the cults out of business and through true worship and true belief (although with enough ritual now to satisfy the mass of people that religion could be made visible) stave off yet another holocaust. At least, this was what Leviticus had gathered from the tapes, but then, you could never be sure about this, and the tapes were all distributed under the jurisdiction of the elders anyway, and what the elders would do with material to manipulate it to their own purposes was well known.

  Look, for one thing, at what they had done to Leviticus.

  VIII

  “I’ll starve in here,” he had said to the elders desperately, as they were conveying him down the aisle toward the ark. “I’ll deteriorate. I’ll go insane from the confinement. If I get ill, no one will be there to help me.”

  “Food will be given you each day. You will have the Torah and the Talmud, the Feast of Life itself to comfort you and to grant you peace. You will allow the spirit of God to move within you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Leviticus said. “I told you, I have very little belief in any of this. How can the spirit — ?”

  “Belief means nothing,” the elders said. They seemed to speak in unison, which was impossible, of course (how could they have such a level of shared anticipation of the others’ remarks; rather, it was that they spoke one by one, with similar voice quality — that would be a more likely explanation of the phenomenon, mysticism, having; so far as Leviticus knew, very little relation to rational Judaism). “You are its object, not its subject.”

  “Aha!” Leviticus said then, frantically raising one finger to forestall them as they began to lead him painfully into the ark, pushing him, tugging, buckling his limbs. “If belief does not matter, if I am merely object rather than subject, then how can I be tenanted by the spirit?”

  “That,” the elders said, finishing the job, patting him into place, one of them extracting a rag to wipe the wood of the ark speedily to high gloss, cautiously licking a finger, applying it to the surface to take out an imagined particle of dust, “that is very much your problem and not ours, you see,” and closed the doors upon him, leaving him alone with scrolls and Talmud, cloth, and the sound of scrambling birds. In a moment he heard a grinding noise as key was inserted into lock, then a snap as tumblers inverted. They were locking him in.

  Well, he had known that. That, at least, was not surprising. Tradition had its roots; the commitment to the ark was supposed to be voluntary — a joyous expression of commitment, that was; the time spent in the ark was supposed to be a time of repentance and great interior satisfaction … But all of that to one side, the elders, balancing off the one against the other, as was their wont, arriving at a careful and highly modulated view of the situation, had ruled in their wisdom that it was best to keep the ark locked at all times, excepting, of course, the adoration. That was the elders for you. They took everything into account, and having done that, made the confinement, as they said, his problem.

  IX

  Now the ritual of the Sabbath evening service is over, and the rabbi is delivering his sermon. Something about the many rivers of Judaism, each of them individual, flowing into that great sea of tradition and belief. The usual material. Leviticus knows that this is the Sabbath service; he can identify it by certain of the prayers and chants, although he has lost all extrinsic sense of time, of course, in the ark. For that matter, he suspects, the elders have lost all extrinsic sense of time as well; it is no more Friday now than Thursday or Saturday, but at a certain arbitrary time after the holocaust, he is given to understand, the days, the months, the years themselves were recreated and assigned, and therefore, if the elders say it is Friday, it is Friday, just as if they say it is the year thirty-seven, it is the year thirty-seven, and not fifty seven hundred something or other, or whatever it was when the holocaust occurred. (In his mind, as a kind of shorthand, he has taken to referring to the holocaust as the H; the H did this; certain things happened to cause the H, but he is not sure that this would make sense to other people, and as a matter of fact wonders whether or not this might not be the sign of a deranged consciousness.) Whatever the elders say it is, it is, although God in the imaginary dialogues has assured him that the elders, in their own fashion, are merely struggling with the poor tools at their command and are no less fallible than he, Leviticus.

  He shall take upon himself, in any event, these commandments, and shall bind them for frontlets between his eyes. After the sermon, when the ark is opened for the adoration, he will lunge from it and confront them with what they have become, with what they have made of him, with what together they have made of God. He will do that, and for signposts upon his house as well, that they shall remember and do those commandments and be holy. Holy, holy. Oh, their savior and their hope, they have been worshiping him as their fathers did in ancient da
ys, but enough of this, quite enough; the earth being his dominion and all the beasts and fish thereof, it is high time that some sort of reckoning of the changes be made.

  Highly unfair, Leviticus thinks, crouching, awaiting the opening of the’ ark, but then again, he must (as always) force himself to see all sides of the question: very possibly, if Stala had approved of his position, had granted him sympathy, had agreed with him that what the elders were doing was unjust and unfair … well, then, he might have been far more cheerfully disposed to put up with his fate. If only she, if only someone, had seen him as a martyr rather than as a usual part of a very usual process. Everything might have changed, but then again, it might have been the same.

  X

  The book of Daniel, he recollects, had been very careful and very precise in giving, with numerology and symbol, the exact time when the H would begin. Daniel had been specific; ‘he had alluded to precisely that course of events at which period of time that would signal the coming (or the second coming, depending upon your pursuit); the only trouble with it was that there had been so many conflicting interpretations over thousands of years that for all intents and purposes the predictive value of Daniel for the H had been lost; various interpreters saw too many signs of rising in the East, too many beasts of heaven, stormings of the tabernacle, too many uprisings among the cattle or the chieftains to enable them to get the H down right, once and for all. A lot of them, hence, had been embarrassed; many cults, hinged solely upon their interpretation of Daniel and looking for an apocalyptic date, had gotten themselves overcommitted, and going up on the mountaintops to await the end, had lost most of their membership.

  Of course, the H had come, and with it the floods, the falling, the rising and the tumult in the lands, and it was possible that Daniel had gotten it precisely right, after all, if only you could look back on it in retrospect and get it right, but as far as Leviticus was concerned, there was only one overriding message that you might want to take from the tapes if you were interested in this kind of thing: you did not want to pin it down too closely. Better, as the elders did, to kind of leave the issue indeterminate and in flux. Better, as God himself had (imaginarily) pointed out, to say that doubt is merely the reverse coin of belief, both of them motes in the bowels of the Hound of Heaven.

  XI

  The rabbi, adoring the ever-living God and rendering praise unto him, inserts the key into the ark, the tumblers fall open, the doors creak and gape, and Leviticus finds himself once again staring into the old man’s face, his eyes congested with pain as he reaches in trembling toward one of the scrolls, his cheeks dancing in the light, the elders grouped behind him attending carefully; and instantly Leviticus strikes: he reaches out a hand, yanks the rabbi out of the way, and then tumbles from the ark. He had meant to leap but did not realize how shriveled his muscles would be from disuse; what he had intended to be a vault is instead a collapse to the stones under the ark, but yet he is able to move. He is able to move. He pulls himself falteringly to hands and knees, gasping, the rabbi mumbling in the background, the elders looking at him with shocked expressions, too astonished for the instant to move. The instant now is all that he needs. He has not precipitated what he has done in the hope of having a great deal of time.

  “Look at me!” Leviticus shrieks, struggling erect, hands hanging, head shaking. “Look at me, look at what I’ve become, look at what dwells in the heart of the ark!” And indeed, they are looking, all of them, the entire congregation, Stala in the women’s section, hand to face, palm open, extended, all of them stunned in the light of his gaze. “Look at me!” he shouts again. “You can’t do this to people, do you — understand that? You cannot do it!” And the elders come upon him, recovered from their astonishment, to seize him with hands like metal, the rabbi rolling and rolling on the floor, deep into some chant that Leviticus cannot interpret, the congregation gathered now to rush upon him; but too late, it has (as he must at some level have known) been too late, from the beginning, and as the rabbi chants, the elders strain, the congregation rushes … time inverts, and the real, the long-expected, the true H with its true Host begins.

  Police Actions

  “YOU countrymen,” the general said, “so good-hearted, so sincere, so convinced of your righteousness, so clumsy and devoted in all of your duties and for these reasons the most wicked and dangerous nation who ever worked out a policy. He took a sip of wine, motioned to the waiter for a check, smoothed lint from his fatigues (retired, he still came to our cafe in combat gear, prepared for the destabilization which might occur at any time), sighed. “It is not so much that self-righteousness that makes you such a complicated and mesmerizing factor,” he said, “for that, we must address your love of pornography and the censor alike, of damnation and religious revivals, of urban retrieval and urban destruction, those marvelous contradictions embedded in your history and responses that you work out so catastrophically on helpless subjects like ourselves.” He sighted an imaginary pistol, pulled the trigger with insouciant grace. Boom. “Someday I would like to come to your country, see your enclaves, harass your women,” the general said. “Of course someday I would like to ski Switzerland, learn Esperanto, foment a true revolution of the spirit overseas. We do not get what we want, n’est’ce pas?” The waiter leaned to whisper confidentially while, politely, we looked away although we could sense the urgent sibilance of information dutifully given. “Of course, of course” the general said, “these warnings are unnecessary. My good friends here know I am merely speculating, talking idly, the ravings of a peculiar old man in the sun-spattered cafe of an occupied and defeated country. Is that not so?” He grinned. We made conciliatory, noncomplicitous gestures. In the square, the birds lofted as if in response to rifle fire.

  It is difficult to sort out matters in the midst of self-protection.

  But the general was only one of the many counselors and advisors we met in our wanderings that year. It was a restless time, a time to seek some balance, some vaulting perspective that might protect us against the strange new times at home. It was not that we were in flight, we assured ourselves, not flight so much as a search for accommodation with those urgent, millennial versions of ourselves that were coming. The general was one of the curiosa, one of the exhibits of the tour, and he struck us, as perhaps he knew, as being a kind of bad example, a representation of an embittered general in a defeated country overrun and humiliated by our superior firepower. But unlike most of the defeated, he retained his insouciance, not to say a certain style which we found illuminating.

  Afterward, later this was, when we had obtained some kind of control over the situation and our emotions, our waiter recognized us on the street and sprinted over. All those months since he had served us and yet his recall was perfect. Out of uniform, he seemed both taller and undefined, a set of features in search of attitude. “Do let me apologize for the general,” he said, seizing one of us by the elbows in a gesture combining obsequiousness and insistence in a peculiar way. He is not himself. He is a poor representation of the man he was; he has not been well for many years. He dreams of the invasion, takes responsibility for its outcome, feels that had he performed differently, commanded firmly, showed determination in the eyes of the enemy there would have been a different outcome. The poor man takes no note of ordnance, of superior firepower. He is quite mad, do you understand? There is no other way to explain this.”

  Standing there, shouting these explanations so fervently, the waiter-in-mufti seemed to be an emblem of what we must have sought on these tours, some proof then that the world was so disordered, so filled with private grief and misapprehension that we simply were not responsible. We bore no blame for what had happened, let alone for the future. But none of this enabled us to deal better with the waiter, who at last had to be dragged off by security monitors, his voice having become enormous, threatening, appalling. Dragged away at high speed by loyal troops, he gesticulated wildly, gestures oddly those of a man displaying handfuls of silve
rware, plates of appetizer, he seemed motivated in ways both unique and characteristic. But this of course was not for us to meditate on; darkness came to the city, and instructions were issued that we should be in the hotel long before that hammer of dusk struck. The country is under control and yet there is no way of accounting for the private treacheries of the irresponsible in the unpatrolled corridors of their city.

  The “we” is not a narrative device, not a provincialism. It is a literal expression. At this post-millennial time, we had come together in the first true shock of purpose and had come to understand that not only was there preservation in our number but that individual identity was dangerous. Identity, that curious and reflexive advancement of the self, had proved again and again to be the source of so much of our trouble; with the assertion of individual demands came exposure, flight, desire, entrapment and sometimes dreadful retaliation. It was the collective we that would bear salvation, and so our little group had massed that spring to bury our histories and idiosyncrasies in a shared, compassionate circumstance. We would go through the continents as a conglomerate and show our enemies that there was a different kind of countryman, a humble and quasi-autonomous collective rather than the prideful and dangerous adventurers cursed by the general. We is not to be construed as I; there is for the intent of these memoirs no I at all, and it is surely this reserve, this calm and dedicated ascendancy of the group that matters. We are not like the others. We are the post-millennial example of the New Country, and it is in that spirit that we went forth, put up with abominable hotels, insolent agents, rifle fire at dusk, obscene and terrifying notes left in our quarters and other paraphernalia and exemplification of the brutal state of our world.