“The innkeeper is relieved. ‘Is that it? You’d had me worried! I thought maybe my wife’s beet borscht had, God forbid, been off. Just try to keep your holy wailing down so that you don’t disturb the other guests.’ The good man goes back to his bedroom and explains the situation to his wife. Five minutes later, he’s back at the master’s door. ‘My wife sent me to ask you whether, when the Messiah comes and restores us to the kingdom of Israel, we will be allowed to take our chickens with us.’ The master is taken aback by the question. ‘Chickens? As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t say anything about chickens. You might have to leave your chickens here when the Messiah comes.’ ‘I’ll tell my wife.’ Five minutes later, there’s another knock on the door. ‘My wife requests that you please not pray anymore for the Messiah to come. We are doing fine here and would prefer to stay with our chickens.’ The master is confounded by this reaction. ‘What do you mean, you are doing fine? Don’t you know how precarious our exile is? At any moment the Cossacks could arrive and take your chickens, your wife, all your money, and even your life! Are we not better off in our Promised Land?’ The Rebbe’s words make sense to the innkeeper, but he still has to inform his wife. Five minutes later, another knock. ‘My wife requests that you pray for the Messiah to come and take the Cossacks to the Land of Israel—so we can stay here with our chickens.’”
Klapper’s face was completely deadpan as he finished the tale, and Cass, who was certain the story was supposed to be as funny as he found it, was uncertain whether Jonas Elijah Klapper agreed. The uncertainty choked the laughter somewhere around his epiglottis, but not before a smile briefly fanned out.
“You smile, Reb Chaim. And, indeed, there is a comical element, brought to bear by the risibility of the word ‘chickens.’ Retell the tale with the substitution of ‘cattle’ for ‘chickens’ and the humor will substantially diminish. The wife’s poultry-centric worldview signifies the untenability of the Maimonidean position. The presence of ‘chickens’ is a shrewd evocation of the absurd, similar in ploy to the koans of Zen Buddhism, which, I presume, make you smile as well.”
Cass nodded.
“The absurd is here employed as a means to incite the Messianic exigency, kept alive in Judaism only by the subversive counter-modality of Hasidism, against the establishment effort to contain the destabilizing energies of Messianism. I here but follow the explication of the preeminent secular authority on Qabalah, Yehuda Ickel, who maintains that the Qabalist embrace of the insurrectionist ideal of the non-tarrying Messiah was the deepest point of conflict with the mainstream rabbis, who would have us believe wholeheartedly in a Messiah so long as he is not here! The true Hasid believes that if his own Rebbe is not the Messiah— or Moshiach, as he is called in Hebrew, and which literally means ‘the anointed one’—then maybe his brother-in-law’s Rebbe is Moshiach.”
Again, there was that inquisitorial stare, demanding at the very least a question.
“So Hasidim all believe their own Rebbe is the Messiah?”
“The point I am making, Reb Chaim, is that for the Hasid the Messiah will not present a rupturing of history, with the ordinary giving way before the extraordinary. For the Hasid, the ordinary is already brimming with the extraordinary, or, to put it in plainer terms, the extraordinary is immanent within the ordinary as the ordinary is immanent within the extraordinary, and the role of the Messiah, who is a man both more ordinary and more extraordinary than all others, is to reveal the divine depths of the extraordinary-cum-ordinary. As shall become, I trust, manifest to you on our next voyage to New Walden—which, I am sure you concur, ought to occur on the holy Sabbath day, so that we can experience the Valdener Hasidim in their full glory, from sundown to sundown. I leave the practical arrangements to you. I request only that this time the Rastafarian not accompany us.”
XVI
The Argument from the Longing on the Gate
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:15 a.m.
subject:
Are you awake?
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:16 a.m.
subject: re:
Yes.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:18 a.m.
subject: re: re:
Are you worried about the child?
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:21 a.m.
subject: re: re: re:
It’s hard not to worry.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:25 a.m.
subject: re: re: re: re:
I dream of having such worries.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
date: Feb. 28 2008 5:28 a.m.
subject: re: re: re: re: re:
You’re right to dream of such worries. And to worry about such dreams.
XVII
The Argument from Strange Laughter
Since Roz was in the Amazon for several weeks with Absalom Garibaldi, Professor Klapper’s request that she not come along with them on this second trip to New Walden was easily met.
Professor Klapper had instructed Cass to pick him up at his house at noon, sharp. Cass had been so nervous about getting lost or hitting traffic or encountering any contingency that might make him late that he had gotten to the house on Berkeley Place at eleven-twenty and parked the car in front, happy to lean back and wait out the forty minutes in the rented Lincoln Continental. Cass had made certain to reserve the same car, since Professor Klapper had remarked on its roominess and solid feel, once Rox had been safely restrained in the back. The sidewalk leading to the front porch was poetic with daffodils. Could Jonas Elijah Klapper himself have had them planted, in homage, perhaps, to Wordsworth’s jocund company? But then one of Klapper’s students would have been made to ply the spade. They were always called upon to take over the tasks the professor knew better than to request of the naval verteran, Marjorie Cutter. The daffodils must have come with the house.
He hadn’t been there for more than five minutes before the front door opened and a towering figure stepped forth, and all the world went reeling, the thirty-odd areas of the primate brain devoted to interpreting visual input—especially the circuits that neuroscientists call the “What” system—struggling to apprehend what it was that Cass was seeing, and while they were struggling, Cass heard background laughter that was in-furiatingly familiar, though he couldn’t quite identify it—no, wait a minute, that was Roz’s laughter that his overworking brain was imagining as the reaction to what it still couldn’t assemble into an image that could cohere with the web of his beliefs, starting with his belief that he wasn’t given to visual hallucinations in the brightness of nearly noon on a perfect spring day, the crowd of daffodils nodding on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that looked so unmistakably like a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, except for the phantasm manifesting itself in gleaming black leather boots into which the bottoms of its pants were tucked, which was enfolded into a capacious iridescent black satin caftan, which was ornamented with a jet-black velvet strip of paisleys and curlicues, tied with a wide and long satin sash encircling it right under its belly, and a snow-white dress shirt, buttoned to the top, emerging above the collar of the caftan to choke the monumental neck that supported a head swathed in a halo of the dimensions of those golden auras that encircle Jesus and the saints in Quattrocento paintings, only this nimbus was made of dead animals and was lodged more firmly and lower down on the pate of the author of twenty-eight books and the object of literary reverence the world over with the exception of Great Britain.
Jonas Elijah Klapper was locking his front door, and the crashing surf of Roz’s laughter was swelling, so that Cass thought
he should look away as Professor Klapper got himself down the stairs awkwardly—the boots hadn’t been broken in—but found that he could not, for all its risks, avert his gaze. He half expected the hat to disintegrate as Klapper approached, for the mad mirage to yield to what was actually there.
Klapper placed the small suitcase he was carrying down on the sidewalk and stood beside the passenger door, his hands dangling helplessly at his sides, and the homunculus in Cass’s head broke off her laughter briefly enough to demand, “Why the hell doesn’t he open the door?”— which was enough of a cue to make Cass jump to action, leaping out of the car to scurry around and open the door for Jonas Elijah Klapper and place the bag on the backseat, taking care to keep his eyes away from the professor’s face, lest he see that the solemn expression he expected was there. But he did take a quick, furtive glance from close range, just to dispel any lingering doubts that his brain had been playing tricks on him, as when he was a child, lying on his bunk bed under Jesse, and the bathrobe hanging on the door had become an intruder approaching the bed, and Cass had known to pretend to be asleep but was terrified that his little brother would wake up and start screaming and get them both killed.
There was no delusion now. The shtreimel was the shape of a layer cake, large enough to feed a Hasidic family. Klapper had it pushed down on his high forehead so that it rested above his turbulent eyebrows and ascended to at least six inches above his head, making a man of five foot nine tower over a man of six foot two.
Cass got back in the car and buckled himself in. Klapper was having trouble with his seat belt, but Cass didn’t trust himself yet to lean over and help, so he sat quietly, staring down at his hands, and waited. Finally, he heard the click of success and turned on the ignition, carefully pulling away from the curb, trying to concentrate on his breathing like a woman in labor—no, like a Zen practitioner. He’d had a girlfriend in college, Felicia Lebowitz, who had been a yoga practitioner, and she used to say, when she was teaching him how to meditate, “If a thought comes to you, observe it and let it go,” or “Instead of thinking the thought, just let it be thought,” which he thought sounded pretty close to what was usually going on in his head, and it certainly had never led to any nirvana, and in all likelihood it wasn’t going to help him now.
He maneuvered through the traffic of Harvard Square, and there was silence in the car, but it was a thin silence, which couldn’t be trusted, and Cass realized that the thoughts in his head, the ones he was letting be thought without thinking them, came from a song he’d learned in first grade that was sung to a waltz with a Viennese lilt, the kind they play on the organ at ice-skating rinks—he and Jesse often went on Saturday mornings, and Jesse had been on a local hockey team until there had been an incident and he was asked to leave—and whose words were:
Ice-skating is nice skating
But here’s some advice about ice-skating
Never skate where the ice is thin
Or else it might break and you’ll fall right in
And come up with icicles under your chin
If you skate where the ice is thin!
They were across the Larz Anderson Bridge now, heading for the Massachusetts Turnpike, and Cass was finding that his meditative techniques had not improved since the days of Felicia, and Roz’s laughter was still dangerously coiling in the dark water beneath the thin ice, and he decided to visualize the cover that Time magazine had had a few months before, emblazoned with the word “FAMINE” and asking the question “Why are Ethiopians starving again?” with the picture of a mother staring down with eloquent sorrow at the dying child on her lap, his head bulbous compared with the shrunken body, the match-thin arms prematurely wrinkled, and his eyes filled with the precocious knowledge of his own doom. It was surely immoral to use an image of others’ tragedy to counteract the painful urge to laugh, but he was a poor meditator and a desperate man.
Somewhere around the Natick/Framingham exit, Jonas Elijah Klapper broke the silence.
“You are probably wondering how I procured these garments.”
Cass nodded, not glancing over, knowing that Klapper would understand and heartily approve his taking his driving so seriously.
“I had Ms. Cutter arrange for a car service to pick me up and drive me to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a store that specializes in Hasidic vestments. I was able to purchase the kaputa”—Klapper indicated his caftan with a flourish of his hands—“and the shtreimel—”he gestured upward to his fur piece—“at one place. I had to go to another establishment for the boots.”
Cass nodded his head again, his eyes fixed on the road. He had questions, but he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to ask them. For example, was it Marjorie Cutter who had located a store selling fur hats shaped like giant hockey pucks? Did they have his size of kaputa in stock, or did they need to special-order? Had the money for the car service to and from Williamsburg come out of the discretionary funds that Frankfurter had conferred on Jonas Elijah Klapper? And what species of dead animal was it that was perched on Professor Klapper’s head?
The professor removed the shtreimel, laying it carefully on his lap.
“It is toasty warm. I could have used such a defense against the elements back in frore February.”
Cass had a bad moment as the image came unbidden to him of Jonas Elijah Klapper clambering over the snowdrifts of Plotnik Quad dressed like a Valdener.
“Please be so good as to pull over at the earliest convenience.”
The Charlton Full Service Rest Stop was coming up, and Cass pulled off the turnpike and into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.
“In the zippered pocket at the side of my satchel you will find a large blue plastic bag. Please take it out and place this within it, and then carefully deposit it on the backseat. I know I needn’t tell you, Reb Chaim, that this shtreimel, which is Russian sable and made out of thirteen tails, represents an expenditure in the thousands.”
There was an answer to two of Cass’s questions, and to one that he hadn’t thought to ask.
“As long as we have stopped,” said Professor Klapper, when Cass got back behind the steering wheel, “I would like to use the facilities. I don’t know why they have chosen to make it such a trek to get from the parking lot to the rest stop. Please drive up to the building and wait for me in front.”
A young woman who was heading inside held the door open for the sad-eyed fat man in the splendid black robe and boots. Even though he waddled, you could see he had a great deal of dignity, and she thought he must be a religious dignitary, maybe a Greek Orthodox priest or a Wiccan. He passed through without acknowledgment.
As soon as Jonas Elijah Klapper disappeared into the building, Cass let the laughter that had been pushing up through his trachea come gushing out, gaining a new understanding of the cliché “to laugh so hard it hurts.”
When Roz’s laughter had finally expended itself, he found that he urgently needed to use the facilities himself, but he was nervous about leaving the car. It would be a disaster if Professor Klapper came out and the Lincoln Continental was nowhere in sight. Could Cass leave it illegally parked here and just dash in? But he’d have to leave it unlocked so that Klapper could climb in and wait, and he’d just been informed that the thirteen tails of Russian sable curled up in the blue plastic bag on the backseat represented an expenditure in the thousands. He compromised and left the locked car parked right in front, so Professor Klapper would see it when he got out.
By the time the professor exited, carrying a cone with a double twist of vanilla and chocolate ice cream—there was a Baskin-Robbins in the plaza—Cass was sitting in the car, fully composed. He popped out and held the cone for Professor Klapper while he settled himself into the car, struggled with the buckle, and then reached out his hand for the ice cream. He tiled several paper napkins across the expanse of his lap and tucked one into the collar of his kaputa and proceeded to lick.
They spoke little on the way. Cass had gone from resisting t
he awful attack of laughter—a sort of Zen laughter demanding to be laughed even if Cass didn’t want to laugh it—to being overcome by a despondency that was like feeling sick before any of the symptoms had appeared.
He thought a lot about Gideon. He thought about that first night at The View from Nowhere, when Gideon had told him to go back to pre-med. How would Gideon react if he were to see Jonas Elijah Klapper now? Would it matter as little to him as the remarks of a random philosophy student in The View from Nowhere? “Wovon man nicht knows the first fucking thing, darüber muss man schweigen?” That was pretty powerful stuff, and it hadn’t shaken Gideon in the least. Gideon was brilliant, and he had seen fit to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper for the past twelve and a half years, and he was as convinced as the rest of them that Klapper was on the verge of a breakthrough of epochal proportions. Who was Cass to challenge that view? Was he so influenced by the sight of Klapper looking ridiculous—but why more ridiculous than the Valdeners themselves? why more ridiculous than the Rebbe?—that he was ready to throw up his hands and agree with Roz?
That had been Roz’s laughter, not his own. He loved Roz, but that didn’t mean he had to adopt her cynical view of Professor Jonas Elijah Klapper. Gideon and the rest of the seminar would only have been awed by Jonas’s capacity for throwing himself so completely into another Weltanschauung, appropriating it so that he could understand it as those within could not hope to, reading it as he read the great poets, so that they yielded their innards to him far more torrentially than the poets themselves could have experienced, so that he might crisscross all the vast reaches of human conception and see its arteries coursing with the ichor of psychopoiesis.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 22