by David Miller
That was all. In a day or so I returned the notebook to Sheindel. I told myself that she had seven orphans to worry over, and repressed my anger at having been cheated.
She was waiting for me. “I am so sorry, there was a letter in the notebook, it had fallen out. I found it on the carpet after you left.”
“Thank you, no,” I said. “I’ve read enough out of Isaac’s pockets.”
“Then why did you come to see me to begin with?”
“I came,” I said, just to see you.”
“You came for Isaac.” But she was more mocking than distraught. “I gave you everything you needed to see what happened and still you don’t follow. Here.” She held out a large law-sized paper. “Read the letter.”
“I’ve read his notebook. If everything I need to fathom Isaac is in the notebook I don’t need the letter.”
“It’s a letter he wrote to explain himself,” she persisted.
“You told me Isaac left you no notes.”
“It was not written to me.”
I sat down on one of the dining-room chairs and Sheindel put the page before me on the table. It lay face up on the lace divider. I did not look at it.
“It’s a love letter,” Sheindel whispered. “When they cut him down they found the notebook in one pocket and the letter in the other.”
I did not know what to say.
“The police gave me everything,” Sheindel said. “Everything to keep.”
“A love letter?” I repeated.
“That is what such letters are commonly called.”
“And the police – they gave it to you, and that was the first you realized what” – I floundered after the inconceivable – “what could be occupying him?”
“What could be occupying him,” she mimicked. “Yes. Not until they took the letter and the notebook out of his pocket.”
“My God. His habit of life, his mind … I can’t imagine it. You never guessed?”
“No.”
“These trips to the park –”
“He had become aberrant in many ways. I have described them to you.”
“But the park! Going off like that, alone – you didn’t think he might be meeting a woman?”
“It was not a woman.”
Disgust like a powder clotted my nose. “Sheindel, you’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy, is that it? Read his confession! Read it! How long can I be the only one to know this thing? Do you want my brain to melt? Be my confidant,” she entreated so unexpectedly that I held my breath.
“You’ve said nothing to anyone?”
“Would they have recited such eulogies if I had? Read the letter!”
“I have no interest in the abnormal,” I said coldly.
She raised her eyes and watched me for the smallest space. Without any change in the posture of her suppliant head her laughter began; I have never since heard sounds like those – almost mouselike in density for fear of waking her sleeping daughters, but so rational in intent that it was like listening to astonished sanity rendered into a cackling fugue. She kept it up for a minute and then calmed herself. “Please sit where you are. Please pay attention. I will read the letter to you myself.”
She plucked the page from the table with an orderly gesture. I saw that this letter had been scrupulously prepared; it was closely written. Her tone was cleansed by scorn.
“‘My ancestors were led out of Egypt by the hand of God,’” she read.
“Is this how a love letter starts out?”
She moved on resolutely. “‘We were guilty of so-called abominations well-described elsewhere. Other peoples have been nourished on their mythologies. For aeons we have been weaned from all traces of the same.’”
I felt myself becoming impatient. The fact was I had returned with a single idea: I meant to marry Isaac’s widow when enough time had passed to make it seemly. It was my intention to court her with great subtlety at first, so that I would not appear to be presuming on her sorrow. But she was possessed. “Sheindel, why do you want to inflict this treatise on me? Give it to the seminary, contribute it to a symposium of professors.”
“I would sooner die.”
At this I began to attend in earnest.
“‘I will leave aside the wholly plausible position of so-called animism within the concept of the One God. I will omit a historical illumination of its continuous but covert expression even within the Fence of the Law. Creature, I leave these aside –’”
“What?” I yelped.
“‘Creature,’” she repeated, spreading her nostrils. “‘What is human history? What is our philosophy? What is our religion? None of these teaches us poor human ones that we are alone in the universe, and even without them we would know that we are not. At a very young age I understood that a foolish man would not believe in a fish had he not had one enter his experience. Innumerable forms exist and have come to our eyes, and to the still deeper eye of the lens of our instruments; from this minute perception of what already is, it is easy to conclude that further forms are possible, that all forms are probable. God created the world not for Himself alone, or I would not now possess this consciousness with which I am enabled to address thee, Loveliness.’”
“Thee,” I echoed, and swallowed a sad bewilderment.
“You must let me go on,” Sheindel said, and grimly went on. “‘It is false history, false philosophy, and false religion which declare to us human ones that we live among Things. The arts of physics and chemistry begin to teach us differently, but their way of compassion is new, and finds few to carry fidelity to its logical and beautiful end. The molecules dance inside all forms, and within the molecules dance the atoms, and within the atoms dance still profounder sources of divine vitality. There is nothing that is Dead. There is no Non-life. Holy life subsists even in the stone, even in the bones of dead dogs and dead men. Hence in God’s fecundating Creation there is no possibility of Idolatry, and therefore no possibility of committing this so-called abomination.’”
“My God, my God,” I wailed. “Enough, Sheindel, it’s more than enough, no more –”
“There is more,” she said.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“He stains his character for you? A spot, do you think? You will hear.” She took up in a voice which all at once reminded me of my father’s: it was unforgiving. “‘Creature, I rehearse these matters though all our language is as breath to thee; as baubles for the juggler. Where we struggle to understand from day to day, and contemplate the grave for its riddle, the other breeds are born fulfilled in wisdom. Animal races conduct themselves without self-investigations; instinct is a higher and not a lower thing, Alas that we human ones – but for certain pitifully primitive approximations in those few reflexes and involuntary actions left to our bodies – are born bare of instinct! All that we unfortunates must resort to through science, art, philosophy, religion, all our imaginings and tormented strivings, all our meditations and vain questionings, all! – are expressed naturally and rightly in the beasts, the plants, the rivers, the stones. The reason is simple, it is our tragedy: our soul is included in us, it inhabits us, we contain it, when we seek our soul we must seek in ourselves. To see the soul, to confront it – that is divine wisdom. Yet how can we see into our dark selves? With the other races of being it is differently ordered. The soul of the plant does not reside in the chlorophyll, it may roam if it wishes, it may choose whatever form or shape it pleases. Hence the other breeds, being largely free of their soul and able to witness it, can live in peace. To see one’s soul is to know all, to know all is to own the peace our philosophies futilely envisage. Earth displays two categories of soul: the free and the indwelling. We human ones are cursed with the indwelling –’”
“Stop!” I cried.
“I will not,” said the widow.
“Please, you told me he burned his fairy tales.”
“Did I lie to you? Will you say I lied?”
“Then for Isaac’s sake w
hy didn’t you? If this isn’t a fairy tale what do you want me to think it could be?”
“Think what you like.”
“Sheindel,” I said, “I beg you, don’t destroy a dead man’s honour. Don’t look at this thing again, tear it to pieces, don’t continue with it.”
“I don’t destroy his honour. He had none.”
“Please! Listen to yourself! My God, who was the man? Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld! Talk of honour! Wasn’t he a teacher? Wasn’t he a scholar?”
“He was a pagan.”
Her eyes returned without hesitation to their task. She commenced: “‘All these truths I learned only gradually, against my will and desire. Our teacher Moses did not speak of them; much may be said under this head. It was not out of ignorance that Moses failed to teach about those souls that are free. If I have learned what Moses knew, is this not because we are both men? He was a man, but God addressed him; it was God’s will that our ancestors should no longer be slaves. Yet our ancestors, being stiff-necked, would not have abandoned their slavery in Egypt had they been taught of the free souls. They would have said: “Let us stay, our bodies will remain enslaved in Egypt, but our souls will wander at their pleasure in Zion, If the cactus-plant stays rooted while its soul roams, why not also a man?” And if Moses had replied that only the world of Nature has the gift of the free soul, while man is chained to his, and that a man, to free his soul, must also free the body that is its vessel, they would have scoffed. “How is it that men, and men alone, are different from the world of Nature? If this is so, then the condition of men is evil and unjust, and if this condition of ours is evil and unjust in general; what does it matter whether we are slaves in Egypt or citizens in Zion?” And they would not have done God’s will and abandoned their slavery. Therefore Moses never spoke to them of the free souls, lest the people not do God’s will and go out from Egypt.’”
In an instant a sensation broke in me – it was entirely obscure, there was nothing I could compare it with, and yet I was certain I recognized it. And then I did. It hurtled me into childhood – it was the crisis of insight one experiences when one has just read out, for the first time, that conglomeration of figurines which makes a word. In that moment I penetrated beyond Isaac’s alphabet into his language. I saw that he was on the side of possibility: he was both sane and inspired. His intention was not to accumulate mystery but to dispel it.
“All that part is brilliant,” I burst out.
Sheindel meanwhile had gone to the sideboard to take a sip of cold tea that was standing there. “In a minute,” she said, and pursued her thirst. “I have heard of drawings surpassing Rembrandt daubed by madmen who when released from the fit couldn’t hold the chalk. What follows is beautiful, I warn you.”
“The man was a genius.”
“Yes.”
“Go on,” I urged.
She produced for me her clownish jeering smile. She read: “‘Sometimes in the desert journey on the way they would come to a watering place, and some quick spry boy would happen to glimpse the soul of the spring (which the wild Greeks afterwards called naiad), but not knowing of the existence of the free souls he would suppose only that the moon had cast a momentary beam across the water. Loveliness, with the same innocence of accident I discovered thee. Loveliness, Loveliness.’”
She stopped.
“Is that all?”
“There is more.”
“Read it.”
“The rest is the love letter.”
“Is it hard for you?” But I asked with more eagerness than pity.
“I was that man’s wife, he scaled the Fence of the Law. For this God preserved me from the electric fence. Read it for yourself.”
Incontinently I snatched the crowded page.
“‘Loveliness, in thee the joy, substantiation, and supernal succour of my theorem. How many hours through how many years I walked over the cilia-forests of our enormous aspirating vegetable-star, this light rootless seed that crawls in its single furrow, this shaggy mazy unimplanted cabbage-head of our earth! – never, all that time, all those days of unfulfilment, a white space like a desert thirst, never, never to grasp. I thought myself abandoned to the intrigue of my folly. At dawn, on a hillock, what seemed the very shape and seizing of the mound’s nature – what was it? Only the haze of the sun-ball growing great through hoarfrost. The oread slipped from me, leaving her illusion; or was never there at all; or was there but for an instant, and ran away. What sly ones the free souls are! They have a comedy we human ones cannot dream: the laughing drunkard feels in himself the shadow of the shadow of the shadow of their wit, and only because he has made himself a vessel, as the two banks and the bed of a rivulet are the naiad’s vessel. A naiad I may indeed have viewed whole: all seven of my daughters were once wading in a stream in a compact but beautiful park, of which I had much hope. The youngest being not yet two, and fretful, the older ones were told to keep her always by the hand, but they did not obey. I, having passed some way into the woods behind, all at once heard a scream and noise of splashes, and caught sight of a tiny body flying down into the water. Running back through the trees I could see the others bunched together, afraid, as the baby dived helplessly, all these little girls frozen in a garland – when suddenly one of them (it was too quick a movement for me to recognize which) darted to the struggler, who was now underwater, and pulled her up, and put an arm around her to soothe her. The arm was blue – blue. As blue as a lake. And fiercely, from my spot on the bank, panting, I began to count the little girls. I counted eight, thought myself not mad but delivered, again counted, counted seven, knew I had counted well before, knew I counted well even now. A blue-armed girl had come to wade among them. Which is to say the shape of a girl. I questioned my daughters: each in her fright believed one of the others had gone to pluck up the tiresome baby. None wore a dress with blue sleeves.’”
“Proofs,” said the widow. “Isaac was meticulous, he used to account for all his proofs always.”
“How?” My hand in tremor rustled Isaac’s letter; the paper bleated as though whipped.
“By eventually finding a principle to cover them,” she finished maliciously. Well, don’t rest even for me, you don’t oblige me. You have a long story to go, long enough to make a fever.”
“Tea,” I said hoarsely.
She brought me her own cup from the sideboard, and I believed as I drank that I swallowed some of her mockery and gall.
“Sheindel, for a woman so pious you’re a great sceptic.” And now the tremor had command of my throat.
“An atheist’s statement,” she rejoined. “The more piety, the more scepticism. A religious man comprehends this. Superfluity, excess of custom, and superstition would climb like a choking vine on the Fence of the Law if scepticism did not continually hack them away to make freedom for purity.”
I then thought her fully worthy of Isaac. Whether I was worthy of her I evaded putting to myself; instead I gargled some tea and returned to the letter.
“‘It pains me to confess,’” I read, “‘how after that I moved from clarity to doubt and back again. I had no trust in my conclusions because all my experiences were evanescent. Everything certain I attributed to some other cause less certain. Every voice out of the moss I blamed on rabbits and squirrels. Every motion among leaves I called a bird, though there positively was no bird. My first sight of the Little People struck me as no more than a shudder of literary delusion, and I determined they could only be an instantaneous crop of mushrooms. But one night, a little after ten o’clock at the crux of summer – the sky still showed strings of light – I was wandering in this place, this place where they will find my corpse –’”
“Not for my sake,” said Sheindel when I hesitated.
“It’s terrible,” I croaked, “terrible.”
“Withered like a shell,” she said, as though speaking of the cosmos; and I understood from her manner that she had a fanatic’s acquaintance with this letter, and knew it nearly by heart. She ap
peared to be thinking the words faster than I could bring them out, and for some reason I was constrained to hurry the pace of my reading.
“‘– where they will find my corpse withered like the shell of an insect,’” I rushed on. “‘The smell of putrefaction lifted clearly from the bay. I began to speculate about my own body after I was dead – whether the soul would be set free immediately after the departure of life; or whether only gradually, as decomposition proceeded and more and more of the indwelling soul was released to freedom. But when I considered how a man’s body is no better than a clay pot, a fact which none of our sages has ever contradicted, it seemed to me then that an indwelling soul by its own nature would be obliged to cling to its bit of pottery until the last crumb and grain had vanished into earth. I walked through the ditches of that black meadow grieving and swollen with self-pity. It came to me that while my poor bones went on decaying at their ease, my soul would have to linger inside them, waiting, despairing, longing to join the free ones. I cursed it for its gravity-despoiled, slow, interminably languishing purse of flesh; better to be encased in vapour, in wind, in a hair of a coconut! Who knows how long it takes the body of a man to shrink into gravel, and the gravel into sand, and the sand into vitamin? A hundred years? Two hundred, three hundred? A thousand perhaps! Is it not true that bones nearly intact are constantly being dug up by the paleontologists two million years after burial?’ Sheindel,” I interrupted, “this is death, not love. Where’s the love letter to be afraid of here? I don’t find it.”
“Continue,” she ordered. And then: “You see I’m not afraid.’
“Not of love?’
“No. But you recite much too slowly. Your mouth is shaking. Are you afraid of death?”
I did not reply.
“Continue,” she said again. “Go rapidly. The next sentence begins with an extraordinary thought.”
“‘An extraordinary thought emerged in me. It was luminous, profound, and practical. More than that, it had innumerable precedents; the mythologies had documented it a dozen dozen times over. I recalled all those mortals reputed to have coupled with gods (a collective word, showing much common sense, signifying what our philosophies more abstrusely call Shekhina), and all that poignant miscegenation represented by centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, fauns, and so forth, not to speak of that even more famous mingling in Genesis, whereby the sons of God took the daughters of men for brides, producing giants and possibly also those abortions, leviathan and behemoth, of which we read in Job, along with unicorns and other chimeras and monsters abundant in Scripture, hence far from fanciful. There existed also the example of the succubus Lilith, who was often known to couple in the mediaeval ghetto even with pre-pubescent boys. By all these evidences I was emboldened in my confidence that I was surely not the first man to conceive such a desire in the history of our earth. Creature, the thought that took hold of me was this: if only I could couple with one of the free souls, the strength of the connection would likely wrest my own soul from my body – seize it, as if by a tongs, draw it out, so to say, to its own freedom. The intensity and force of my desire to capture one of these beings now became prodigious. I avoided my wife –’”