Instead of helping others now, Shaul was helping himself. The headpiece was loosened to fit around his neck, a noose with an amulet. The knot was tight. It would hold against the weight of his body, he thought, snapping the leather. He knew he would succeed.
Good Night World
by Yankev Glatstein
Good night wide world
great stinking world.
Not you, but I slam the gate.
With the long gabardine,
With the yellow patch—burning—
With proud stride
I decide—
I am going back to the ghetto.
Good night. It’s all yours world. I disown
My liberation.
I return to the daled amot
from Wagner’s pagan music to niggun
I kiss you, tangled strands of Jewish life.
Within me weeps the joy of coming home.
This was the opening of the letter on his desk, the poem by the famous Yiddish poet. The letter went on to speak about Shaul’s desire to “go home” to death, and his craving the certainty that would accompany it. He wrote that he didn’t want to remain in the wide world, but to have definite knowledge that he would never again commit a sin. After his roommates found his body, hanging from the light fixture in the bathroom, the desk chair having been kicked away from underneath him, they gave the letter to the rosh yeshiva, who took it personally to Shaul’s grieving parents when the rabbi accompanied the body back to the States for burial.
Despite feeling incredibly shitty after going to see a body off yet again at the airport, Wendy had an appointment, made weeks ago, with Fulbright advisor Avner Zakh, in the late afternoon. She didn’t have a good excuse to break it. She was supposed to meet with him periodically over the year so he could monitor her progress. The meetings were perfunctory chats, more for his benefit than hers, to make sure Zakh was fulfilling his obligations and could continue to collect his Fulbright advisor salary, paid in US dollars. For his duties of meeting with a few students individually over the year, and the entire group once a month, he made a hefty percentage of his paltry Israeli academic’s salary.
Wendy had learned not to expect much from seeing him. She had her plan for her research, and had been more or less following it, handing out surveys, then doing recorded interviews with select subjects, Shaul among them. The trouble was, at this point, she hadn’t actually started writing the introduction to her dissertation. She knew that’s what she should be doing by this point in the year. She had done most of the literature review; she had notes on the intro; she just needed to knock it into shape, connect the ideas, flesh it out. It wasn’t complicated, but it wasn’t done either. As her undergraduate writing teacher might have said, the structure is there, she just had to paint the walls and add some furniture.
For Wendy, the hardest part of anything was making decisions. If she painted the wall one color, it closed off the possibility for another. What if she didn’t like it? Sometimes, it was easiest to do nothing. Her main advisor, Cliff Conrad, was not pushing her too hard to give him something written, but hinting via e-mail that he’d like to see something. He kept her apprised of the progress of her peers in the States, and let her know he expected she was in the same place, workwise. Wendy did have what seemed to be valid excuses. She wanted to work on the interviews, write them up more, to get to a sense of what the trends were so that she could write the beginning. She should have the general direction of the research first, because she’d have to rewrite it anyway if what she came up with differed vastly from what she initially thought. That was true.
There was also a deeper truth. She was scared to start writing. What if it wasn’t good enough? What if she didn’t have anything new to say? What if, once she wrote it, no one cared; there was no audience for her work? She hoped Zakh would not intuit how terrified she was of failing as well as how utterly empty she felt since she had heard, from Orly of all people, who called that morning to tell her of the death of another American that she heard on the morning news on the Hebrew radio station. Wendy hadn’t listened carefully, until Orly told her what yeshiva he was at. Then, when she heard Shaul’s name, she was stunned. Orly begged Wendy to accompany her to the airport send-off, which she wanted to report on for the Jewish News Media Service that she wrote for regularly. Wendy observed Orly taking notes on the proceedings, interviewing the sobbing mourners, and asking them for speculation on why he did it. Wendy had an inkling, but wondered: Did any of the things she said to Shaul push him over a precipitious ledge unseen by anyone but himself?
Wendy entered Zakh’s office in the humanities section of the University, with its ultramodern architecture. There were bright colors in each of the sections: orange, green, yellow, blue. To get to the offices, one had to go up a series of spiraling staircases. There were a few offices off each landing, then one ascended more to find the next cluster. Wendy hadn’t ever figured out where common space, or departmental office space, was. Perhaps professors just met in the cafés scattered everywhere in the building? The intense Israeli desire to socialize, she’d noticed, led to a proliferation of eating places at Hebrew U. Wendy thought that someone should do a sociological study on the proximity of food to academic departments in different countries. How does the life of the mind mesh with the life of the body? Wouldn’t it be cool to get a grant to travel all over the world to check this out? International Office/Food Configuration Strategies—what a title, Wendy laughed to herself. She thought, At least something could still amuse her, as she finally found Zakh’s office.
She’d been there only once before, because the other times she met him were always before or after the group meetings at his apartment.
On hearing her knock at the open door he looked up at her and said, “Wundy, shalom.” She tried not to be irritated that he still couldn’t pronounce her name, even after six months. “Let me just finish this e-mail.” Zakh turned back to his computer. After a minute, he finished and turned from his desk towards her.
“So I understand, you’ve . . . ah . . . what shall we say . . . Run into some . . . kushiyot . . . difficulties, yes?”
Wendy looked at him. “I . . . I don’t know. I never, never expected that my research would harm anyone, that someone would die because of it. I . . .” She put her head in her hands, and tried to keep from sobbing, to hold herself together.
Zakh handed her a box of tissues. “This is an ‘eretz ochelet et yoshveha,’ a land which eats its inhabitants, the spies tell Moshe in the Torah. They are afraid. You are brave to stay.”
“My parents would have been happy if I’d left after Benj was killed. If I had, Shaul would still be alive.”
“I saw the article on Shaul in the newspaper this morning. Did you?”
Wendy nodded no.
Zakh continued speaking, “This young man had a history of hospitalizations. This wasn’t his first suicide attempt.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“This wasn’t a new problem for him. You examined things that had been troubling him for a long time.”
“I pushed him. I could tell he was upset, and I didn’t stop asking. I . . . pressed him. I kept asking . . .”
Zakh stood up and started pacing. He looked at her, held his hand up, palm to her, and said, “Stop. I don’t want to hear any more. I got a call from Cliff Conrad this morning.”
She looked alarmed. “Oh, my God.” She put her hand to her mouth, imagining some kind of worst-case scenario. Was she being kicked out of the program, and her Fulbright taken away? Was her career over before it started? Much as she didn’t want to know, she asked, “Why?”
“You need to be careful. It is possible—he was informed by Princeton University’s legal counsel—that there may be a lawsuit. Shaul’s parents are considering suing the yeshiva for allowing you to speak to him, and Princeton University for enabling you to do this work under their aegis.”
She wasn’t sure she could keep breath
ing; all this information was so unnatural. She could only whisper timidly, feeling like a hunted creature, “So . . . what does this . . . mean?”
Zakh continued pacing. “We don’t know. You would be called as a witness; your notes and the tape recording of your interview with him would be subpoenaed. They could subpoena all your data and notes, if they wanted. Where is that tape of you interviewing him?”
“My apartment.”
“Did you coerce him to answer? Would the tape show that?”
Wendy sighed. “I . . . feel like I did. Legally, I have no idea if I did something wrong.”
“Look,” he said furtively, “I didn’t say this, okay? Yes?”
She nodded, wondering what was next.
“If you were my daughter, I would tell you this. Get rid of that cassette! Lose it, misplace it. If it doesn’t exist and there is no evidence, you can’t be convicted.”
“What would I be accused of?”
“Involuntary manslaughter? I don’t know. I am imagining it is more monetary compensation his parents want, or some kind of vindication it wasn’t their son who killed himself, but someone who talked him into it . . .”
Wendy was in shock.
Zakh continued, “Cliff doesn’t think, nor do I, that there is a legal case. If the boy had a history of mental illness, there is no way to prove you harmed him. It’s nonsense. You had an institutional review board approve everything; all research with human subjects must pass. But grieving parents . . . you can go nuts.” He paused and looked at her. “You know we lost a son. Nine years ago already.”
“I’m sorry.” She paused and then asked, “The army?”
“Nothing so glorious. He was on the end-of-year trip with his high school class, and jumped, daredevil style, off a cliff. That was my Gil—first, toughest, bravest. The water at the bottom was much shallower than it appeared from above and he was killed instantly.”
Wendy was silent, absorbing yet another tragedy in this land.
“A parent wants to do anything to preserve a child, the memory. We thought of suing the school for taking them to a potentially dangerous place where teenage boys will dare each other to jump. Or suing Gil’s friends for encouraging him.”
“Did you?”
“In the end, no. We realized it was ultimately Gil’s decision to act. We needed to grieve and accept our fate. It has been, will always be . . . tremendously difficult.”
Wendy wasn’t sure how to ask what came next. “You don’t think . . .”
The professor said emphatically, “It wasn’t suicide. Just recklessness. If someone had dropped a stone, seen the water was shallower than it appeared from the top . . .” Zakh stopped pacing and sat, lowering his head to his hands.
After a few moments he looked up. “I gave you no advice today, correct?”
“Absolutely.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and then Wendy tentatively said, “Professor Zakh, do you . . . well . . . did I . . . do wrong?”
“I wasn’t there. I can’t say. You were doing what you thought right. Others have made mistakes too.”
“On a scale like this? Someone’s life?”
Zakh pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his drawer and starting tapping one on his desk. “I started smoking again after Gil died. As a kid, he begged me to quit, so I did. But once he was gone . . .” He kept tapping the cigarette thoughtfully and turned to gaze out the window.
Zakh opened the window and turned from facing the window with his back to Wendy to face her from behind his desk, where he lit up and sat, ashtray at hand, smoke aimed at the open window letting cold air in. “You know the story of Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish? One of the first baalei teshuvah?” he said, puffing.
Wendy nodded, “I’m familiar with it.”
“The end? The tragedy?” he exhaled.
“One jumped into the Jordan and the other said your strength should be for Torah. He became a rabbi.”
“That is the beginning. The end of the story is that, publicly, in a debate about weapons, Rabbi Yochanan insulted Reish Lakish, telling him, You give us the answer, ben Lakish; a thief knows his weapons. The public humiliation caused Reish Lakish to become sick, to the point of death. Even when Reish Lakish’s wife pleaded with Rabbi Yochanan, her brother, he refused to budge. Reish Lakish died. Soon after, Rabbi Yochanan died as well.”
“This is supposed to make me feel better?”
“Great personalities have made grave mistakes. I don’t think there will be a lawsuit. Still, lose the cassette.”
Wendy looked at her hands in her lap.
“I persist in expecting you to do your presentation for our March meeting. Your work is important—you do know that?’ he said kindly.
“Not more important than a human life,” Wendy said, rising and collecting her coat and bag.
“Yihyeh tov, you’ll get through this,” he said in a quiet tone.
As Wendy exited, she wasn’t sure if she was meant to hear those words, as he remained seated, drawing the tobacco into his lungs and staring out the window in stillness.
When Wendy got home, after she sat at her table and ate the felafel and salad she had picked up from Rafi’s Felafel on Rahel Emeinu Street, she decided to do something right away, without procrastinating, uncharacteristically. She cleared the paper wrappers from the felafel and put her glass in the sink. She took a towel and wiped off the table to rid it of residue. Then she moved her laptop from her desk by the window and got out the cassette player from her purple messenger bag. She opened her computer file with the interview notes from the RISE/Yeshivat Temimei Nefesh cohort and went to the spot for Shaul. She supposed she would have to delete all her notes on him—no sense using notes when she would not be able to check back with the informant later.
She started sobbing involuntarily—Can’t check back with the informant—the finality of it, that she would never be able to speak to him again, was what got her. Shaul was totally silenced, he would never speak again, and she had here some of the last things he’d said to another person. Should she send it to his parents? Would it be precious to them as a reminder of who he was, what he thought about—just the physical sound of his voice should be something they would want to have. But there was this threatened lawsuit, whether it came to pass or not. Would she destroy the tape? Maybe she could just give it to someone else, someone who wouldn’t mind complying in what could become an illicit transaction. Todd—she would give the tape to him, in the extreme case that she was subpoenaed and her apartment searched.
The thought made her shudder: someone coming into her private space and looking through her things, trying to find evidence of wrongdoing on her part. What would they find? Someone a bit untidy, maybe not careful enough with her money, a bit frivolous with her purchases, impulsively buying expensive flowers from Atelier Delphine because she couldn’t resist the beautiful things she saw in the window and craved the evanescent loveliness of the blooms, even knowing they would soon fade. Were these things so terrible, her little foibles and flaws? Not in comparison with murder.
Was it really murder? Avner Zakh had told her explicitly that he didn’t think so; Shaul was a person who had been ill. He had been treated for this illness and doctors had tried to help him. She was not a doctor and Shaul was not her responsibility. End of story?
Not really. I am a human being, and imperfect though I know I am, I was not put on this earth to cause harm to others. And yet I may have. Well, one way to find out, she said to herself, breathing in deeply and then breathing out, readying herself to listen to what had transpired between herself and Shaul. The truth? Could there be a truth in this case? Whatever she said on the tape, there was no way of knowing what was going through Shaul’s mind. If he was so sunk in depression as to kill himself later, maybe he already had voices telling him all kinds of things, ideations of himself dead, and he wasn’t listening to her at all? Maybe her voice reminded him of the voice of someone else, someone who didn’t think he coul
d change or recover?
Whir . . . the hum of the cassette, its blurred white noise began, until her own voice, sounding professional, like the plummy tones of a voice-over actor, came on: “We are speaking today with Shaul Engel at Yeshivat Temimei Nefesh. Shaul is twenty-four years old, from Larchmont, New York, right near my home town.” She remembered herself smiling at him and adding the next thing: “We discussed that, right? Okay, good.” So far nothing out of the ordinary, the attempt to bond over Jewish geography. He did know people I did, those with older siblings my age, that kind of thing.
Now she heard herself start, “Okay, so let’s begin. First, what is the best thing for you about being religious?” Very cheerful in her diction, professional.
Shaul’s reply came laconic through the machine. “It makes me feel less depressed, most days. There are still bad ones, but it’s definitely better than it has been in the past.”
Wendy could hear herself pausing to collect herself and decide whether to just proceed or to leave interviewer mode and give a word of comfort, some expression of human sympathy to the person sitting across the table from her. She continued.
Now listening, she groaned. How could I not say something? In any other situation, any other interaction with a member of the human race, especially one where I am sitting with him face to face, I would acknowledge the person first, notice there is someone in pain sitting across from me. Why not this time?
She heard her voice saying, “Okay, good. Next question: What aspects of your life have changed most since you became observant?”
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