by Nomi Eve
And so he lay like this for a very long time. In the distance he could hear branches breaking and he knew that his father was watering the lower orchard. He also knew that he was safe because this part of the grove wouldn’t be watered again until the morning. Shutting his eyes, he tried to feel something. He thought that he would feel a rumbling underground. According to his own personal calculations, he had decided that there must be a golem waiting room in the center of the earth, somewhere in between the molten core and the deepest primordial layers. A waiting room where all the golems who have been mystically transported from their home on the moon were milling about, just waiting to be conjured. Yes, he whispered almost out loud, there must be a rumbling, a shifting, a tapping, maybe. So many golems in one place are probably rowdy, he thought, envisioning them knocking into each other playing golem games. But still Eliezer didn’t feel anything. He pressed his elbows into the ground, he moved his head from side to side, put his ears to the earth and listened. But still, nothing. He shimmied like a puppy getting its belly scratched, trying through unorthodox but earnest movements to tell the ground and the golem within it that he was serious, that he really wanted it to come. But no matter what he did there were no rumblings, no bumps, or pokes, or tapping on his back. The earth was quiet and unmystically smooth. So, on a final whim, Eliezer pulled down his pants and pressed his naked tussik, his bottom, into the ground thinking that maybe if he had some direct contact with the earth he would have a better chance of receiving some golem sign or crucial communication. The ground was cool on his backside, and a bit itchy too. But Eliezer persisted, and he even spread his fingers out wide in a four-fingered V for extra good luck like the priests did in their special high holiday blessing.
And still he inhabited the outline. When he shut his eyes he tried to feel it cleaving to him, tried to imagine the furrows he had drawn, rising up like little walls surrounding his skin. He wanted so much to feel it examining him, trying him on not quite for size, but for some other measurement not of human dimension. As he had kicked off his sandals, his bare toes were tickled by a gentle wind. And when he twitched his toes the furrows that had never really risen sunk back into the earth, and the earth sunk back into a cold slumber unadorned and undisturbed by either dreams or golems or the dreams of golems—“that is,” Eliezer said to himself, “if golems have dreams at all.” Eliezer exhaled loudly, and he continued to lie there for a long time with his naked behind pressed into the ground like an optimistic beacon or antenna. He lay there until his mother’s voice began to call for him, until it was so dark that he couldn’t make out the mangoes on the tree anymore, even though they were so close.
Eliezer sat down and stared at the ground by the mango tree. He had drawn the figure and it was gazing up at him. The fruit was mostly gone now. He knew that he himself personally had eaten a million mangoes that season and he thanked the tree for its amazing bounty. Then he stared back at the ground and wondered if maybe he had been all wrong, and if maybe his tussik method had backfired. Maybe the golem was offended. Maybe the golem had actually heard him humming and had actually made the journey all the way from the moon to the waiting room and then up, up, up, from the molten core of the earth. And then, just as it was about to emerge, it had seen Eliezer’s naked behind and had stopped in its tracks. Maybe the golem is bashful? he thought, sitting up straight, considering this new possible piece of information. Or maybe it thought I was being very impolite? But then Eliezer slumped back against the tree. He decided that a golem was probably not a modest creature because it came from the earth and the earth itself was completely naked— whoever heard of the ground wearing clothes? And also, any golem of his would have to understand that he wasn’t being impolite; on the contrary, his bare backside was a form of greeting. He was trying his very best to say hello. So he tried the tussik method a few more times, until the weather began to change and when he decided that it was time for a different method, one more suitable for winter.
THE CHACHAM TZVI’S OPINION:
It is true. It is as they say. I am a deeply metaphorical man. I cannot but think that the rolled scrolls of parchment and ink are merely a way of making manifest the Torah of inner whispers. And I believe that metaphors occur commonly in nature. I tell my students, “Metaphors are wild creatures. They roam free, illustrating life with meaningful pictures.” I tell them, “God is a poet, a painter, and the world speaks the language of image and art. We, like our forefather Yaacov, must learn to interpret the signs and wonders. And if we cannot interpret, then we must at least appreciate, holding out our open hands to catch raindrops we feel but don’t see.”
First a chicken. Now a golem. These questions were not intellectual exercises. They were more important than that. I felt, and still feel, that they were crucial. I sat back in my chair, pressed my fingers together at the tips. Crucial. Not because they dealt with matters of kashrut or synagogue propriety, but because of the way they entered my body. They way I suddenly needed them like sleep or like water. It was late afternoon. The men would be waiting. They would want an answer. I couldn’t delay my opinion any longer.
But did they really want my answers? I believe many unusual things. For example, I believe that when you marry, your soul grows a wife or a husband. A real and actual growth, like a bud or a branch. The logical extension of this belief is that when you have children, your soul grows a daughter, a son, and when you are born, your soul grows the sisters and brothers who make up your closest constellation. And so there is an inner family that corresponds to your outer family. I have argued this quite often. The two families reflect each other, like objects in a mirror. I rose from my chair. I wandered to the middle of the room, and I held up my hands to embrace my dead beloved. She was there, I swear she was, on my inside-out, my outside-in. In my garden of me. And this is why it hurts so much, I told myself. I tell myself over and over again. Because the mirrors don’t match anymore and I am caught groping for yesterday’s reflection.
A golem who prays. A chicken without a heart. I returned to my chair and sat still, feeling sure that these odd creatures and questions were obvious metaphors for my own mourning. And not only mine, I thought. No, of course, not only mine.
I sat and I sat. Finally, after hours of pondering, I took up the quill and wrote my responsa without flinching. I wrote thinking not of the chicken’s absent heart nor of the golem’s absent soul, but of the young wife and child in whose presence I still believe even though to others they are invisible.
Kosher? Of course!
To be counted? For sure!
I put forth my opinions and fought the opposition. I did not back down. And when they came asking for proof I was prepared. I stood up in front of them and with my right hand, I thumped the empty cavern of my chest where I knew my heart not to be, and with my left hand I tapped my skull, willfully conjuring the echo of all the emptiness inside.
I explained: “My friends, you ask if a chicken without a heart is kosher, and you ask if a golem, who everyone knows is a creature without a soul, can be counted in a minyan. In response, I tell you that I myself am a man with no heart, and that my soul too was taken from me long ago . . . long ago at Ofen. And yet, you pray with me, my friends. Eh, and yet you pray with me.”
I wrote for a long time.
I wrote, “Somewhere buried in the earth is a golem Torah, but of course it is blank; the scrolls have no words.”
I wrote, “Somewhere in heaven there is a kitchen where angels bake the sinews and souls of daughters and sisters and mothers and wives into the sinews and souls of sons and brothers and fathers and husbands— and in this way, the metaphysics of marriage and birth become manifest in the human body.” When I was done writing, I said my prayers, and then undressed and climbed into bed. Soon I was saying the Shema in a fervent chant that testified with syllables of great sorrow not only as to the oneness of God but also as to the indivisibility of a family so violently rent. I lay awake for hours wondering, “Which was my heart
—wife? Which was my soul—daughter? Or were they both, both?” When I finally fell asleep, both were both, and my arms were wrapped around my two beloveds.
Chapter 14
“A HEAT WAVE, LIVING FRUIT”
I WRITE:
The silence that was born with Gabi’s disappearance did not come suddenly to their house as had the child’s birth, or Moshe’s death. Rather, it crept in on its belly, a slow-coming creature. No, the silence did not come to their house like the other tragedies had, with sudden shocks, violent collisions. It came slowly like a hot summer wind, a sharav from the desert singeing the words out of their mouths, a natural force that could not be reckoned with. Miriam answering a stranger’s question, “Yes, two sons, sixteen and nine.” And Eliezer marveling at how no one corrected her, but of course, neither did he or Tomer. The silence came blowing, airless and thick, blowing from out of their own lives, blowing between their eyes and bodies, blowing not to destroy but to protect. Protecting a mother, a father, two sons. And they prodded it along, doing what they could to facilitate its hot gusty journey.
This, Eliezer would always remember—standing in the doorway of the salon, watching his father taking the pictures out of the photo album. Eliezer knew which pictures Zohar was making disappear—he had no doubt that they were of Gabi. Looking back, Eliezer would always think it very strange that Zohar hadn’t even tried to hide what he was doing. He hadn’t taken the pictures out late one night when everyone was sleeping, or during the day when Eliezer was at school. He did it in the afternoon, and out in the open, in the middle of the house. Zohar looked up from his work and saw Eliezer staring at him. But Zohar didn’t say anything to his son, he merely pushed out his lower lip and made a tsk tsk sound with his teeth. He stopped what he was doing, hands on the book, and stared at Eliezer. No words passed between them, but Eliezer understood completely. It was as if Zohar were saying, “We are colluding in all of this and that is part of the plan—to forget someone altogether, not by mistake, but on purpose.” Zohar looked away, and then went back to work, inelegantly prying the pictures with their decorative wavy edges up from the black pages, and then not even bothering to rearrange the ones that were left to cover the spots where Gabi had been. All in all, it was a clumsy, rather quick operation.
Later on that night, when his parents were asleep, both of them snoring loudly, Eliezer crept into the salon and opened up the wooden cabinet where they kept the albums. He wasn’t surprised at what he found. There was enough moonlight coming in through the windows to see that the albums were filled with empty spots that were darker than the rest of the pages. Darker because the photographs that had once been affixed there had protected the paper from the fading ravages of time or light. Eliezer put one palm over the emptiness and pressed down on it. On top of where the missing picture had been was a picture of himself, smiling with his mother. They were on a trip to the Dead Sea. He was eleven years old. His mother was smiling, too, and she was standing with her hands on her hips, looking out over the salty water. Eliezer pressed down on the emptiness with the heel of his hand. He pressed down hard, not at all concerned that his fingers were pressing into the photographs that had been left on the page, pressing down on his own skinny legs, pressing down his mother’s face. He pressed down so hard that his wrist started to hurt. But he kept pressing; he was sure that he could feel his hand pressing through to another dimension. There was no end to the dark space his hand was traveling. Finally, Eliezer stopped pressing down and the space snapped back up at him with a strange little thump.
THE DEAD SEA NEAR MASADA
He shut the album and when he went to put it away, he found the discarded pictures in an envelope at the back of the stack of books. Eliezer wasn’t surprised that his father had left them there, for he had a feeling that he was supposed to find them. He flipped through them—there was the missing picture of Gabi and Tomer together on their mother’s lap. And there was another one, Gabi wrapped in a baby blanket, and another, Gabi in his father’s arms, another, Gabi in Eliezer’s own lap, another, Zohar holding Gabi and Tomer with Eliezer draped over their father’s shoulders. And when Eliezer closed the cabinet without returning these pictures, these tiny testaments to what had actually been, he knew that he was somehow both colluding with his parents and acting against them. He was stealing a piece of their silence—taking it without permission; but he was also adding to their silence, making it a darker shade of quiet, a more dangerous shade of missing, because now he, Eliezer, would be the only one who could see Gabi outside of his own soul. The only one who possessed visual evidence that such a son had actually existed. Eliezer slid the envelope into the waist of his pants and snuck into his room where he hid them in between the pages of a very big book that no one ever read but him.
Not long after this, Tomer, aged seven, developed a facial twitch. His right eye would jump open too widely, and then close too tightly over and over again. The psychologist whom Miriam took him to suggested that perhaps Tomer was afraid he would be sent away just like Gabi. Miriam and Zohar asked Eliezer to talk to Tomer about Gabi. “To see,” they said, “if Tomer even remembers him.” Eliezer decided to show Tomer the hidden pictures. At night, by the light of the moon streaming in their window, one by one they looked at the photographs together. Eliezer let Tomer hold the pictures while he pointed to Gabi’s image and said, “Do you know who this is?” Tomer nodded, and held the pictures close to his face. When Tomer asked Eliezer what had happened to their little brother, Eliezer calmly said that Gabi was sick, and had to live in a hospital forever. “Forever?” Tomer asked. “Forever,” Eliezer answered, covering his little brother’s hands with his own. By the next morning, Tomer’s facial tick had gone, never to return. And that was the one and only time Eliezer ever took the pictures out of his hiding place to show anyone else what Gabi had once looked like.
The same year that Gabi was taken away, 1952, the year Eliezer was fifteen, President Chaim Weizmann died, and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion offered the Israeli presidency to Albert Einstein. Einstein graciously declined, but the momentousness of this invitation was widely reported in the newspapers and was not lost on Eliezer. He knew that children from all over the world wrote letters to the great scientist. In school, his class had written letters asking Einstein about his childhood, and he had actually replied. Now Eliezer thought about writing to Einstein again. He wanted to write, “Dear Dr. Einstein, there must be a theorem, an absolute formula to explain what happened in our house.” He wanted to write, “Dear Dr. Einstein, I know by now that ordinary math books won’t contain it.” He wanted to write, “Dear Dr. Einstein, is there something about your theory of relativity that can help us?” In the end he never sent the letter, he never even wrote the words down, perhaps because he was afraid the great scientist would have an answer, perhaps because he feared he would not. But in his head, Eliezer constructed many replies. Einstein would say, “My dear boy, your family is privileged to be part of a unique mathematical experiment.” Or, “ Relativity is yours, my son!” Or, “My child, I regret to tell you that math is not the field for you and you must instead devote yourself to philosophy and religion.”
One night, as he was lying in bed, Eliezer told himself that there must be some way to explain what had happened to their family. He stared at the ceiling and tried to count himself to sleep but it didn’t work. He was wide awake, even when he reached one thousand. He wondered about spiritual math, gematria, the kabbalistic system in which letters stand for numbers, and words have values, and through the matching of words with values disparate things get tied together. They were learning about it in school. He thought about when Gabi had been born. On the way home in the car with his uncle and father and cousin, night had been falling. Now, lying in the dark, Eliezer remembered that other darkness descending. And he counted up the night and counted up the stars and counted up the hospital. He counted up mother and he counted up father and he counted up uncle and brother, baby, new, our, all right. He almost
said the word brother, ach, out loud. It did not surprise him at all that the gematria for “our brother,” achinoo, equaled the gematria for “night,” lilah. Eliezer had great faith in the goodness of numbers, but for the first time in his young life, he hoped that they were wrong.
The next day, in the tiny village library, Eliezer found a book of gematria that translated almost every word in the Bible into numbers, breaking the verses down into words that matched other words, not in meaning, but in value. He tried to add up all of their names and match the total sum with sentences in the Bible that were descriptions of disasters or harbingers of disasters to come. But in the end, this approach didn’t work. Nothing matched; the sums were always radically different. Still Eliezer wanted to believe that there was an equation, and that if he were to solve it, he would have in his hands the right tools to use should the future dare to present him with a similar set of circumstances that threatened, on the same terrible scale, not to work out.
He tried another technique, once again translating their lives into numbers. But instead of leaving them as numbers, he then translated the numbers back into something else—another word or sentence with an equivalent value. Using this method, he would make the entire story disappear into a column of dry ones and twos and threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens that, when deciphered correctly, could stand for their story, but could just as easily stand for someone else’s, or stand for nothing at all.