It was the start of summer. The surface of the lake shone. Overhead a great spider’s web stretched from one tree to the next. This was the last thing Zev saw before closing his eyes, and he continued to see it in his mind’s eye. The web was beaded with rain from a morning downpour, and in the midday sun, in that single ray that penetrated the dark forest, the web appeared jeweled. A comforting illusion. In fact Zev knew the world to be a web of evil you had to break out of. No, this was too easy, this good-versus-evil business, this child’s way of thinking his father would openly have mocked. Better: the world was a web of passions, each stitched to the next; you could be trapped in the web or be master of it. Web was not a word his father ever used to refer to the world, it was Zev’s own metaphor, and though he recognized the meagerness of this contribution to his father’s thought, he thought the image made sense. This was the universe and this was man’s choice, to be the fly or the spider, to sit coiled in death or to swing across the damp and sticky surface of the world.
Zev was still the fly, a dirty little fly! No—he had simply not yet mastered his passions. Every night, in the room he shared with Isaac, he pretended to sleep until the moon reached a certain height. What light streamed down through the pear tree and the milky glass was barely enough to see his brother lying alongside him, on top of the sheets. But Zev’s imagination furnished what his eyes could not. In the meager light he held his breath and saw that the world was flooded with radiance.
And so why in the true light of day did this divine gift seem like a test of biblical proportions, one infinitely more difficult than any he had taken in school?
Zev breathed in and out, too fast, too conscious. His father was right—he tried too hard. But his case was more urgent than most. When he opened his eyes again, it was as though his other senses had opened as well, and only now did he realize the damp of the forest floor had soaked into the seat of his pants.
III
When the ancient sage Reb Yaakov died, a lengthy will was found in his briefcase. In this document he ordered all ten men of the Burial Society to go to the mikvah before handling his body. Reb Yaakov had been a scolding teacher and a joyless leader of his congregation. The rants of his sermons became more intolerable as he aged, and his congregants began awaiting the day when he could finally find peace. It took much longer than anyone had thought, and when the day finally arrived, the entire town made sure his last wishes were honored to the letter, so that his spirit should remain carefree in God’s presence and never have cause to return.
On the day of the funeral the ten men left their houses and fell into a procession down the town’s central road, toward the bathhouse. This sight moved Zev to ask his father to explain. Everyone knew the men would have to bathe after handling the body—why were they washing themselves before? Reb Aryeh replied that it was Reb Yaakov’s day to teach, not his. Later the ten men escorted Reb Yaakov’s body, itself purified and wrapped in a sheet, through the town and to the graveyard. The body was so small that the four men who held it seemed more than was necessary. If he hadn’t known it was Reb Yaakov, Zev would have thought a child was being taken to the pit.
The next day Reb Aryeh told his students that Reb Yaakov ordered the men of the Burial Society to go to the mikvah in case any one of them had recently had a nocturnal emission. Each was required to immerse himself 310 times, which was why they emerged from the bathhouse so long after entering it. Reb Yaakov was adding his voice to a discussion that had been taking place for centuries. While spilling one’s seed was a sin, its terrible consequences in the afterlife could be avoided by taking a bath.
The class listened in silence. Finally, the bravest student asked, “And how do you know whether you’ve had one?”
Most of the other students suppressed a laugh, but Zev continued to listen gravely.
“This is a good question,” Reb Aryeh said. “Although the Talmud prohibits touching the penis for this or any other purpose, it acknowledges certain difficulties this prohibition might cause.”
“But why did all ten have to go to the mikvah?” another student asked. “It’s unknown whether even one of the men had had an emission the night before. Is it possible all ten did?”
“Do you really believe that this of all sins was what worried Reb Yaakov the most when he wrote his will?” Reb Aryeh replied. “Here is a man sitting at his desk thinking of his own end. Were the missed procreative possibilities of the men who would handle his body really what concerned him?”
The answer clearly was no, but no one dared utter it, since no one knew what to say next.
“Of course not,” Reb Aryeh answered himself. “Reb Yaakov, may he rest in peace, was not just giving these men a chance to clean themselves. He was giving them a chance to look into their souls—this was his final blessing to them. It made no difference whether they sinned in the night or during the day. It made no difference what their sin was. He wanted them to repent. This is how we do so, as you already know—in a group. And so why do you worry about examining yourself with your hand? You should be worried about not examining what lies in your hearts and in your souls.”
When Reb Aryeh brought them all to the mikvah the next Sabbath eve, Zev looked at his classmates differently. About himself he didn’t have to wonder; he was a sapless tree, a dry well. But was it only to purify themselves before the Sabbath that they were there? He couldn’t ask them this question. Day after day they looked through him as if he were a ghost, never addressing a word to him. Perhaps it was because he didn’t exist for them that they didn’t seem to fear contagion from stepping into the same water that he did. On the contrary, they laughed like children, giggled like girls. Zev could only imagine why.
He stepped into the tepid water and didn’t stop until he was fully immersed. Crouched on the floor of the mikvah, his skinny body bare, a scum of stray hairs floating over his head, he felt like a king, clad in raiment of silk. That his father had led him to this pleasure of the senses was proof enough that the path of righteousness did not always diverge from the path of physical pleasure. Indeed that only through the body could righteousness be attained—the body made in God’s image. What else did man in his puniness have to offer? What thing greater did he possess?
The lake Zev had never dared set foot in could not feel like this. He imagined it was colder, so cold it could stop the heart. It may have been just as holy as the mikvah—Reb Aryeh taught that the water needed to “live,” to flow from a natural source—but to Zev’s knowledge it had not been blessed. It was the presence of his brother’s body in water that blessed it, and so Zev knew the mikvah had been consecrated. His father had brought him to the mikvah when he became a bar mitzvah. His brother had come too—this was a ritual Isaac actually enjoyed. After Zev came out of the water, he stood next to his father and watched as his brother descended. The perfect V rising from his waist, the compact muscles ranged between his shoulders—this was not a scholar’s body, Zev thought, and he wondered if his father was thinking it too. It worried Zev that Isaac wasn’t a scholar, for it meant his brother’s future was unknown to him. The smooth white marble of Isaac’s skin—if this was what Terah’s idols looked like, no wonder Abraham had seen such power in them and smashed them all. As he descended, the straight black hair on his brother’s legs floated up and pooled on the surface of the water, surprisingly long and fine.
IV
Zev had been born in the month of Elul, at the end of summer, and it had not gone unremarked that his birthday fell in the season during which the risk of fires was greatest. But now that it was almost fall, his fourteenth year had nearly passed and the town was still intact. After he turned fifteen, there would be only one month left before the new year, and if, God forbid, a fire came during this month, then certainly he could be said to have nothing to do with it. But even if God chose not to burn the town this year, Zev expected no great change in the attitudes of the townspeople toward him. He sensed they almost wanted their town to burn—or at least
for the cycle to remain righted. They couldn’t imagine a world free of fires. The best they could do was believe they could anticipate them, not even to control them but rather to be prepared, to confirm their ability to see the divine plan, feel more secure of their own place in it. Narrow, yes, ignorant, yes, they were even stupid. Isaac openly mocked them and the town itself. He dreamed of moving to the city, which he had never even seen; dreamed of going to America, planned on ending up there. And upon his confidence bordering on arrogance, the ignorance he mistook for certainty, Zev saw a shadow fall, and the shadow, he feared, was sin. Zev kept his thoughts to himself, though he hoped that if he could just attain his birthday without a fire, then maybe a change would come to other areas of his life as well.
The last month of Zev’s fourteenth year was passing more slowly than the previous eleven months combined. It was as though time were stuck, and he himself stuck in it, although he was surrounded by evidence of time’s passing. Even at its height the sun hung a little lower in the sky. Shadows, including his own, lengthened along the forest floor, and occasionally on the wind came the breath of the tomb. Afternoons buzzed like the undertone of a thousand voices, the days stretching themselves so taut that it seemed they would snap open, though the deluge that was always about to pour forth never came. Perhaps for this reason there was something new in the gazes that fell upon him, something at once imploring and threatening, as if the townspeople expected him to bring forth either rain or fire, or at least expected it to be in his power. Now when Zev fled to the lake he looked over his shoulder, worried he was being followed. This made it that much harder to concentrate when he closed his eyes and breathed and waited for something to happen.
The nights were still hot, but this didn’t bother Zev, who barely slept anyway. It was in the small hours of the morning when he felt most calm. Isaac turned from side to side and even after he had fallen asleep continued to turn, trying in vain to find a cool spot. He tangled himself in the bedclothes he had cast off to begin with. This frenzy of activity made it more perilous for Zev to stare. Although he was in a position to know better, he imagined that Isaac regularly had the fabled nocturnal emissions, his seed as numerous as stars. Sometimes Zev thought he saw Isaac’s eye opening, and Zev closed his own eyes and stiffened like a corpse regardless of what position he happened to be lying in. Sometimes he shifted his gaze to the door.
Isaac had once conjured a golem there. Zev was nine years old. When the moonlight struck the back of the door so as to illuminate it fully, Isaac had Zev stare into the glow until the door seemed to vibrate, and out of the light itself materialized the golem, taller than a man, greenish of hue, an emissary from the world of darkness. This was how Isaac described it during that year of trying to scare his brother to death. Zev saw how maddening it was to his brother that he wasn’t scared, that in his fascination with the game and with the attention he seemed incapable of fear. And so Zev played along. He saw the golem, he did, but it took form from his brother’s words rather than from moonlight. He tried to appear scared—Oh! he cried, ducking under the blanket. Isaac’s hands reached under and grabbed him, the deep voice crying, The golem is going to get you! The golem’s hands have gotten you! The golem will take you away down below! Zev lay there screaming with his heart pounding and his eyes closed, hoping the golem would keep him in his clutches as long as it took to reach the Promised Land.
Now Isaac ignored him like everyone else in town; not to avoid contagion but simply because Zev had no place in his brother’s life. Zev was too young to be one of the boys Isaac passed his free time with in the market square. He would always be too young.
The only time they spent alone together and awake was when they walked silently to their father’s schoolroom to attend the nighttime readings and then walked back home. As Reb Aryeh’s son Isaac couldn’t avoid the readings. Reb Aryeh’s students roused themselves every morning at half past midnight. They read from Lamentations, remembered the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, beat their breasts. They cried together, Zev more loudly than the rest. He pulled out strands of hair, pounded the thin bones of his chest until they ached. Surely he wept the bitterest tears. And yet through his blurred vision he clearly saw Isaac sitting there stony-faced, thinking of something else.
V
Reb Aryeh taught his students the law through the perspective of the emotions—those that needed to be controlled and those that needed to be expressed. There were fourteen in all. Humility he placed high on the list; also love. The town had never known this kind of teaching. The rabbi’s knowledge of the emotions seemed so intimate that he must have experienced them all, even the sinful ones. The townspeople whispered about him, even as they sent their sons to his school. Reb Aryeh explained to his students that by knowing themselves, by always moving toward ethical perfection, they would also move closer to God.
The range of man’s emotions was great, but it seemed to Zev that in the schoolroom during the day his father talked about nothing but lust. “When you feel the Serpent of lust coiled around your heel,” Reb Aryeh instructed, “stand barefoot on a cold stone floor.” It didn’t even matter if you happened to be married, for sexual relations in marriage were also strictly regulated. You were commanded to make love to your wife on the usual occasions—holidays, on the eve of the Sabbath, before a departure and after a return—but also whenever her own passions were stirred for you, this point seeming to set Reb Aryeh apart from the town’s other teachers, their cold dry gazes almost as blind to men’s passions as they were to women’s.
And yet Zev knew that his father’s advice, however well intentioned, was wrong. Zev would never dare say it, it was probably a sin to think it—but standing on a cold floor only cooled the feet, it did nothing to douse the flames of the loins. Certainly, it didn’t clear the mind. Zev knew because he had tried. He stood on freezing stone and turned his gaze to the wall—and thought of his brother. His father once told about the man in synagogue who closed his eyes to say the sh’ma and saw a beautiful woman. There she was, in the darkness behind the man’s lids—and the only way he could make her go away was to open his eyes. But to do so was not to say the sh’ma, not to call out to the people and with the people that the Lord was one. To open his eyes was to cut himself off from God and man.
Even though his age was a matter of public obsession and only at his peril did he lose track of it, Zev couldn’t remember how old he was when he heard this tale. He couldn’t remember it well at all, for it had meant nothing to him at the time. The story may have been set on the Sabbath, or perhaps it had been a holiday or just an ordinary day of the week. But the urgency of the man’s plight Zev remembered. Also Reb Aryeh’s solution: keep your eyes closed, and in this way you will remain in God’s presence.
Perhaps if Zev could rest he wouldn’t worry so much—but it was the worry that kept him alert, prevented him from sleeping to begin with.
His brother did not have this problem. Even when he was tossing about he was fast asleep; his ears were closed to his own sonorous snores. Their father never so much as looked at Zev in class, though more than once he caught Reb Aryeh stealing amused and only mildly exasperated glances at Isaac during the midnight readings, Isaac who was never more than half awake; his sleepy eyes contributed to his charm. Zev couldn’t blame his father, though he expected more from such a great sage, an attitude other than the moonstruck one everyone else had around his brother.
There were times when you had to wake up.
Every night Isaac had a hard time getting out of bed for the midnight readings. Zev had always encouraged his brother gently, tickling his toe, trying to pull his arm out of its socket—the kind of thing a younger brother feels entitled to do. But one night, when Isaac would not budge, Zev jumped into action. He felt a kind of energy pulsing through him, he was, despite the season, shivering. In an act of ventriloquism that startled him, Zev said, “I know what you’re feeling, that headache you have from being roused from a deep sleep. But
don’t succumb. Be swift like a raven, don’t think, just stand up as if you’re only a body responding to an impulse, then wash your hands, as prescribed by law. Also wash your face, even though there’s no requirement to do so. I find that helps me wake up. If you do this just a few times in a row, instead of lying in bed for another few moments as you always do, then you’ve developed a good new habit. It gets easier, I assure you. The deed is easier than the thought—try it, you’ll see!”
Isaac looked at his younger brother blackly. Getting up never got easier, as Zev himself could see. “Tell him I’m tired.” Not Father; not even Papa—but him. “I helped Mama in the market all day. I’m too tired to do anything but sleep. It’s not normal to be awake at night anyway.”
“But we do it every night!”
“Night is for sleeping. For God’s sake, even an idiot could tell you that. I bet it’s in the Torah.”
“Don’t take God’s name in vain,” Zev said.
“Why not? I don’t believe in him anyway.”
Zev gasped, and all the air was sucked out of the room.
He had been fearing for his brother’s soul for a long time, but now Zev’s sense that it was in imminent peril was confirmed. It wasn’t that Isaac was too tired tonight to go to the midnight reading. It wasn’t, as he seemed to be saying, that he was too tired every night. The reason he was never really present at the readings was because he didn’t believe in God. He wasn’t just slipping beyond his family’s reach; he was in danger of slipping beyond the reach of God Himself.
Fire Year Page 16