A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  To her surprise, the author demolished this theory in a ­paragraph, just as he had demolished the other three. He mentioned birth defects, and she wondered what illnesses he must have encountered as a doctor eight hundred years ago. But the main problem, he claimed, was the impossibility of free will existing alongside an omniscient God—or, Josie apologized to an imagined audience of atheist nerds, alongside the laws of physics and genetics as their own form of fate. Then the book provided its Fifth Theory, one of “absolute free will.”

  Fifth theory. It is due to the eternal divine will that all living beings should move freely. Another fundamental principle is that all evils and afflictions as well as all kinds of happiness of man, whether they concern one individual person or a community, are distributed according to justice. We are only ignorant of the workings of that judgment.

  This seemed to Josie to be merely a slightly worse version of the fourth theory, until the author clarified it in a way that stunned her.

  My opinion of this principle of divine providence I will now explain to you.

  It may be mere chance that a ship goes down with her contents and drowns those within it, or the roof of a house falls upon those within; but it is not due to chance, according to our view, that in the one instance the men went into the ship, or remained in the house in the other instance … Divine influence reaches mankind through the human intellect, and divine providence is in proportion to each person’s intellectual development.

  Josie struggled through the footnote in old-fashioned French:

  As a physician, Maimonides knew of the human capacity to ease or even eliminate sufferings that were supposed by many to be ordained by God. This passage considers intellectual capacity to be the element of the divine image granted to humans (cf. Part 1, Section 1). Divine protection of humanity, in this view, is not effected by direct divine intervention in human affairs, but rather by the divinely bestowed gift of intellect, which affords men the opportunity to alleviate or prevent misfortunes.

  The idea was heartless and beautiful, humming in the dungeon room like a classical fugue, an intricate harmonics of faith and reason: utterly and cruelly logical, intolerant of nonsense—and, Josie imagined, infused with possibility. All Josie needed to do, to fulfill both divine and free will and her husband’s and daughter’s dreams, was to think her way out of this room. But what if she failed?

  As she fell asleep that night, she thought of her mother.

  Not her mother now, lost to a disease no human was yet smart enough to cure, but her mother in days long past: when Josie was a child, and her mother was a prophet.

  “Don’t be too good, Josie,” her mother had once warned her.

  Josie now remembered that she had been in the car then, in the front passenger seat next to her mother, on her way to an evening violin lesson. Her father had moved out weeks earlier, and Josie had noticed her mother’s brittleness. Josie had tried to distract her. She spoke, her voice too fast as she tried to fill the silence, about how she had been unable to play a certain concerto with any degree of quality, no matter how much she practiced. Her teacher, a bitter Russian Jewish immigrant who had once been a principal in a regional orchestra but who now worked as a supermarket cashier, had told her in his heavy accent that perfection was attainable, that not attaining it was failure. Her father liked him.

  “Don’t be too good,” her mother repeated, staring through the windshield. “You will be punished for being too good. And if that happens, don’t be surprised or think it’s unfair, because it will be your fault.”

  At thirteen, Josie read the Bible of adult words literally. “I don’t think Mr. Vedemyapin is going to punish me for improving my Liszt.”

  The car stopped at a light. Josie’s mother turned to look at her, rubbing mascara off her face. She had recently found work at a doctor’s office, her notes and drafts for her unfinished dissertation on string theory dumped into boxes in a closet, behind a locked door. She frowned.

  “You’re a lot like your father, you know,” her mother said, in a voice that glanced off Josie like a tangent, a perfect Platonic line directed elsewhere. “You remind me of him.”

  Beneath the words, Josie heard what her mother meant: Don’t remind me.

  FIFTY DAYS AFTER SHE had first been captured (for she knew the date now; it loomed before her at the bottom of the computer screen, a slow burn at the root of her soul), Josie was writing code, toggling back and forth between the code and Genizah on her screen, when the voice of her captor jarred her back into her cell.

  “What is this?”

  It was a moment of what programmers called dump shock—the world-shaking instant of being forcibly removed from the flow of codewriting and thrown back onto the alien planet called Earth. She hadn’t even heard the door to the cell opening; the man appeared as if created from nothing, a talking ghost. She jolted, staggered on her knees from her crouch on the floor, jerked out of a happy dream. It had begun to feel normal to her to work while kneeling on the floor, in chains. After fifty days, she knew who she was now.

  “I give you blank program,” he said. He was bending above her, squinting at the laptop. She glanced back at it and saw that Genizah was open, her mock Genizah, her fabricated memories on the screen. “You are writing English. Not machine code.” She could hear the fury in his voice.

  She tried to control her hands as they trembled. It was as though he had ripped off her clothes. “It’s—it’s just to test the software,” she stammered. She was surprised that her voice was hoarse. She clutched the keyboard as though covering her naked body.

  He tore it away, stripping her.

  “First day of school,” he read aloud, rounding the vowels. He pronounced “school” as “shul.” “Tali says her best friend is named Sor—Svor—” He looked at her. She watched as his face deepened, choking back an almost animal rage. “You are sending secret messages.”

  “I was testing the malware,” she begged. “I can’t test it unless there’s some content in the—”

  A vein in his neck bulged. “We are not stupid. You think we are afraid to kill you?”

  Josie clutched at her chain, her fingers tapping its links compulsively, like keys. “You can erase it all,” she pleaded. Her voice was shaking now. “It’s nothing. Look, I’ll erase everything.” She pulled herself up to stand, nearly fell, bowed before him to reach the keyboard, and quickly deleted all the text behind the door, purging her child as the man watched. It’s nothing, she thought. Beneath the vanished text was a glowing, lurid void. “I can show you all the doors, the whole archive, and erase absolutely everything. The malware was going to erase it anyway. That’s what I was testing.”

  “Erase it now.”

  “But the malware—” she corrected herself, or de-corrected herself—“the virus isn’t finished yet. When it is, you can just stick in the flash drive and it ought to erase everything immediately.”

  “No. Now.” He put the laptop back down on the concrete block. “I will see if you are lying. Erase it now.”

  The steel cuff scraped Josie’s ankle as she sank back to the floor, rearranging her legs. She began opening doors on the screen, trying not to read what she was deleting. She worked quickly as she listened to the man’s hard breathing behind her, emptying imaginary closets and rooms behind imaginary doors. But then she opened a door she hadn’t remembered making. She clicked it open.

  Tali told me and Itamar that the rabbi at the nursery school had taught her about God. I asked her what she had learned, and she told us, “God is one.” We nodded, like proud idiots. Then she said, “But I’m bigger, because I’m already three.”

  That night in bed, Itamar told me that whenever he hears people argue about whether God exists or whether the world is fair, he feels like the argument is not just silly but dirty, and he had never understood why until now. “Because when people talk about that,” he told me, “I imagine that from God’s point of view, it’s as if we’re arguing about whether God is thr
ee years old.” I hadn’t known how much he believed.

  The software had labeled the door with the words Tali’s soul.

  Josie stared at the screen, transported to her bedroom on the other end of the world. Tali’s comment was the kind of thing that she would have saved in the software at home. She probably had; she usually ran the recording components when Tali was around, and it was a cute joke, the kind of adorably funny mistake that cute children make, and that was what Genizah was designed to save. But it now occurred to her that she never would have thought to record what Itamar had said.

  The voice jarred her back: “Erase now.”

  She babbled absently, still in that room. “I will, I am, I just—”

  The man grabbed her by the neck. She turned around and stared at his dark glasses until he released her, her elbow knocking against the concrete block. When she saw him raise his hand again, she spoke.

  “At home I use Genizah to keep records of my daughter—pictures, movies, school projects, things she says, everything,” she said, almost in a whisper. To her astonishment the man did not interrupt her. “Genizah arranges everything intuitively. I don’t have any photos or anything now, so I just wrote down what I could remember.” It was a lie, she knew. She remembered nothing. The man remained silent. “The software sorts everything so you can always find it,” she continued. Her words came almost automatically, as if she were speaking to the businessmen at the Four Seasons Hotel. “It can time-lapse your photos so you can see a person growing, or locate where the pictures were taken, or cross-catalogue with other people’s archives, or match handwriting or a voice to a particular time period. Things like that. When you have enough material to work with, you can almost build an entire person out of this. It’s like bringing someone back to life.”

  She swallowed, rubbing her face. She felt unspeakably tired. What purpose did it serve, after all? They would kill her at some point no matter what, and everything would be forgotten. And Tali was too little, Tali wouldn’t remember her, Tali would know only what she and Itamar had stored in the software—how she had once been an adorable, silly child, with brilliant parents who had no souls. Josie would become no more than an electronic mother, illuminated waves and particles on a screen. Most likely she already was.

  “I’ll erase it now,” she said.

  The man stood before her, his hands at his sides, and spoke.

  “Can you make a Genizah of my son?”

  6

  FUSTAT, SCHECHTER SAW out of the rabbi’s carriage windows, had indeed seen better days. Its narrow streets were like open sewers, their cobblestones covered with a thick sheen of urine and filth. Schechter had spent his first three weeks in Egypt in imperial Cairo, among the opera houses and cafés and wide boulevards of what could easily have been mistaken for a European city if it weren’t for the hansom cab drivers dressed in ankle-length robes. But now he was traveling through a neighborhood that appeared to have only deteriorated since the death of Maimonides in the year 1204. Schechter had grown up in poverty, but he had never seen anything like this. Thick rivers of brown sewage flowed along the open gutters at the center of each tiny stone street. The calls to prayer from the minarets which he had heard from his hotel room were here amplified by church bells and by the cackles of injured chickens, who wandered the alleys as though ownerless. Children dressed in rags crowded their coach, banging on the glass windows and pointing to their mouths until the turbaned driver threatened them with his whip. The worst was the tannery, an alleyway crammed with enormous clay vats full of red and orange dyes and shaded by drying skins that hung suspended on ropes between the buildings. The odor transcended the normal experience of smell to become aural, visual. It was like being inside a dead horse.

  In the previous three weeks Schechter had labored mightily to get here. Besides his trip to Giza with the rabbi, his Arabic lessons with the rabbi’s insufferable brother, and his telegrams back to Cambridge to ensure the shipment of large quantities of stamps, there had been other elaborately dressed men to convince of his worthiness, more people to bribe. Among the Jews of Cairo he had also discovered one asset, a wealthy man named Moise Cattaoui who even had a street named after him in the city, and who happily invited Schechter over for eminently edible meals. Most important, Cattaoui had gotten Schechter a room at the Metropole. But now Schechter was closing in on the prize: the Palestinian synagogue in Fustat.

  “I have heard that our holy congregations in Europe preserve only those documents that are inscribed with the name of God,” the rabbi said. “But it has been our community’s custom, for these many centuries, to retain all documents written in the letters of the holy tongue, regardless of their contents. As you can imagine, we have preserved vast quantities of garbage.” The carriage lurched over a loose stone, just missing the carcass of a donkey that had been abandoned to rot in the street. Schechter watched the flies crawling across the dead beast’s moist open eyes. “The exterior of the synagogue was renovated several years ago, as I mentioned,” the rabbi continued. “At that time the contents of the genizah were removed and placed in the courtyard for several months during the repairs to the roof, and they were only recently redeposited. So you may find that the older materials are on the top rather than the bottom, or in general the contents may be in some disarray. It has been years since I have seen it myself.”

  Schechter thought of the rug salesman, the twins’ Mr. Maimoun. There must have been endless opportunities for such people to help themselves. Disarray, he thought. He watched as they drove past a pile of severed sheep’s heads.

  When they arrived at the synagogue, Schechter was relieved to see that it was surrounded by a thick stone wall with an iron gate, which succeeded in keeping out most of the chickens. The building itself, a solid stone rectangle with a crenellated roof like a castle, was much larger and more imposing than he had expected—larger than any synagogue he had known in Romania, and more beautifully painted in greens and blues. The rabbi led him to the building’s enormous embossed metal door, and pushed it open.

  Inside was a synagogue-tomb, a cool, dark space that looked as though it had last been renovated in the late Middle Ages. The room was large, with a two-story ceiling accommodating a women’s gallery on the second floor. The only light came from the open door and a few narrow windows above the women’s gallery. Large chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls. The stone floor was worn down in so many places that the tiles spread before Schechter’s feet like the swells of a rough sea at dusk. The ceiling was wood and stone, in an intricate painted geometric pattern like the ones Schechter had seen everywhere in Cairo, except here the colors were obscured by soot. The benches along the sides of the room were dark wood, and three were so badly broken that they were actually lying on the floor, sleeping under thick blankets of dust. In the otherwise empty center of the room was a wide stone lectern whose decorative carvings were nearly worn away. The ark at the front of the room, where the Torah scrolls were kept, was a ten-foot-high wooden cabinet whose paint had peeled so badly that the colors were indistinguishable. Above the ark, carved in plaster, were words in Hebrew that were so chipped and covered with grime that Schechter could read them only because he already knew what they said: Know Before Whom You Stand.

  “This is our custodian, Bechor Maimoun,” the rabbi announced. While Schechter was studying the ruins, another man had materialized at his side—a thin man, ageless, in an ankle-length gray robe and a large black skullcap, with a thick brush of a beard, and hands so delicate that Schechter wondered whether he filed his nails. The man smiled, offering Schechter a slight bow. Schechter remembered the twins in Cambridge. Yes, he thought as he watched the man slide his hands into the sleeves of his robe, I would very much like to buy a rug.

  The rabbi turned to the custodian and muttered something in Arabic, which Schechter’s three weeks’ worth of lessons with the rabbi’s obsequious brother failed to render intelligible. Soon the man hurried away. “He will meet us on the oth
er side with a ladder,” the rabbi said.

  Schechter coughed, inhaled dust, coughed more. “Why a ladder?”

  The rabbi glanced at him. “You are here for the genizah, aren’t you?”

  Schechter saw that asking questions was pointless. The rabbi turned, and Schechter followed him, surprised to see that they were going out the main door again. Schechter swallowed his curiosity and let the rabbi lead him around the building to another smaller door, which opened onto a narrow stone staircase. It was becoming harder and harder to believe that anything worthwhile would be waiting for him beyond it, but Schechter stayed silent as they climbed the stairs and then passed through a closet full of buckets and brooms. “We are so busy with repairs,” the rabbi announced, apparently to explain why they were walking through a broom closet—though the building seemed to Schechter to be in the greatest possible state of disrepair, and also empty, save for Mr. Maimoun. At the end of the broom closet the rabbi pushed open another door. To Schechter’s surprise they were now standing in the women’s balcony, just above where they had entered. Bechor Maimoun was waiting for them, having once more emerged out of nowhere. He leaned a rotting wooden ladder against a high, decrepit wall made of a patchwork of plaster and brick. The ladder hit the wall just beneath a large rectangle of dark filth, sending chunks of plaster raining down to the floor.

  The two men looked at Schechter for a long moment in silence. Schechter waited for either of them to speak. The two kept staring at him until the rabbi waved a hand at the ladder. “Are you going up?” he asked.

  The ladder clearly led nowhere. Was this some sort of trick? “Up where?”