Sometimes she thought, “I am betraying him.” Sometimes she thought, “I am keeping him safe.” The thoughts went round and round in Dora’s heart, like a rope that tightened and wrung out tears.
Once, Rabbi Shlomo said, “Aunt Dora, why are you crying? Have I done something to hurt you?”
“No, Shloimy, it’s only how wonderful the things are that you tell me. That, or dust in my eye.”
“Shall I stop speaking now?”
“Maybe that would be better.”
Once, as they walked home, he said, “Why do your lips move, Aunt Dora? What are you saying to yourself?”
“Oh, I have to buy some groceries, and I don’t want to forget my list.”
“Write it down as soon as you get home, why don’t you?”
“Yes, Shloimy, that’s what I’ll do.”
This went on for a long time. Shlomo turned seven, and Shlomo turned eight. The little rabbi grew faster in the latter year than in the former. Faster and faster he grew, in his mind and in his heart and in other subtle ways, but in stature he stayed small. He told her, and Dora wrote, of the shapes of the branches of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and of what hung on every branch, what budded, what bloomed, and what fell.
Following his words, she recorded eighty-seven righteous acts that no one had ever heard of, enlarging the traditional list of six hundred thirteen mitzvot to an even seven hundred. She wrote down the words that Moses had uttered to part the sea, and she drew a picture of the mystical gesture that accompanied them.
It all went into the old wise men’s hole. At the butcher’s or the fish market or the rear of the synagogue on shabbos, they would nod to her sometimes, she thought, but apart from that, they never said a word, no, not so much as a thank-you or a grunt. Even the nods might have been nothing, after all. They might have been little bows for the prayers that the wise men prayed in their minds. The old wise ones, everyone knew, were always praying in their minds.
Shlomo turned nine, and Shlomo turned ten. The little rabbi grew faster and faster. As with his erudition and his spiritual life, so with some of his other qualities, though in stature he stayed small. It was as if Rabbi Shlomo’s Earth turned faster than the ordinary one, and his seasons were shorter, and his sight finer and quicker in proportion. At nine and a half his voice changed, and he started to grow a beard. In other respects he seemed a child. He was respectful as a good child is. He lived in his father’s house.
One Sunday morning, sunny but cold, some of the old wise ones went to Dora in the back yard of Shlomo’s father’s house. She was hanging up the little rabbi’s tzitzit, the ritual undergarment with sacred embroidery and tiny fringes, to dry. She loved to do it, for love of the boy. She heard the crunch of the old ones’ black leather shoes on the driveway gravel. She never lifted her head. She saw their black pants, spattered with mud, and the hems of their serious black coats. She dropped her clothespins. She picked them up again. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
One of them said, “Dora, you are a good woman, but you are making a mistake by not telling us everything.”
“Oh, no, Your Reverences, I write down all he says.”
They were quiet for a moment. She saw shoes shift and tap. Then the same old wise one said, “You end too soon. If there are reasonings, they trail off, and we can’t see where they are leading. If there are words and spells that want to be spoken or gestures that want to be made, they are always lacking a crucial last step. We can’t get them to do anything.”
Another wise one broke in and said in a high-pitched voice, “We could help the people. We could do much good. Rabbi Loew of Prague, it is said, made a man out of mud with such words, and it saved the people from a terrible pogrom. That is nothing to what we might accomplish by the mysteries that Rabbi Shlomo enunciates. But they are incomplete.”
Dora said, “Learned sirs, I can’t help it. I’m a simple woman. I listen as long as I can listen. When Shloimy starts in to naming the deeper mysteries and untying the holy knots where no one has ever fit a finger, why, my heart goes numb, my skin bristles, I shake and shiver, day becomes night, night becomes day, and I don’t know what I am.
“Have Your Reverences ever opened up and finished reading the testament our Shloimy spoke when he was three? I wrote that one down completely, despite my shattered nerves, in tongues of which I understood not one single syllable. I had to sleep three days running to get over that one. Didn’t that testament make you reel, even you wise ones, so that you had to lock it up? Shloimy was only three when he gave us that one. How can you expect to fare better with something new, even if I should survive the listening to it and the writing of it after?”
The first old wise one thundered, “You let us worry about that, Dora. Your Shloimy isn’t the only soul God speaks to. We old wise ones listen to Him constantly. That the Almighty has chosen the little rabbi as his confidante in certain small matters doesn’t make us nobodies, you know. We have most of it with or without little Shloimy. There’s just a thing or two we want to clarify, as we’ve told you.
“If you can’t inconvenience yourself for the work of God, if you can’t put up with a case of nerves or a chill up the spine or two, what good are you to anybody? Do you think you’re doing Rabbi Shlomo a service by withholding things from us, his protectors?
“We’ve been talking about this. We are of a mind to send Shlomo to Al B’nai to be taken care of properly. His mother and father won’t object. There’s only you, and you haven’t any rights.”
Dora saw by their shadows that all the old wise ones were nodding. A breeze picked up; Shlomo’s tzitzit whipped back and forth on the clothesline at her back. The fringes tickled her neck.
“I’ll do everything just as you say. I’ll listen to the end. I’ll write down all of it. Only, please, Your Holinesses, no more talk of Al B’nai. I couldn’t stand to be parted from my little Shloimy.”
The old wise one with the high-pitched voice said, “Especially write down more exactly how to part the sea. That would be something to know.”
That very day Dora accompanied Shlomo to his hill. He held her hand as they walked there. He liked to do that sometimes. They smiled at each other but hardly spoke.
The little rabbi seemed to grow beside her as they walked, like a carrot top in a cup on the windowsill, visibly, hour on hour, or like the moon climbing up from the horizon, higher by the second. She seemed to feel her forearm move like a clock hand as they walked and as Shlomo grew, his hand in hers rising higher, because he was taller and taller.
As always, the little rabbi climbed up to have his talk with God. As always, Dora waited. But today she could neither read nor nap nor nibble nor whistle. Sometimes she sat and sometimes she stood and sometimes she paced or kicked stones. She spread out the quilt, and she folded it up again. Then she spread it again. Then she folded it again.
She said to herself, “Who am I to doubt the holy learned ones? I am here for my Shloimy. I am here for those wise ones. It’s all God’s work, one and the same. What I said I’d do, I’ll do.”
Rabbi Shlomo came down the hill. He seemed older than before.
“What news, Shloimy? Is it anything?” The quilt, which she had gathered under her arm again, Dora spread again. She sat, and the little rabbi sat close beside her. He leaned his head upon her shoulder and spoke now into Dora’s ear and now below. His lips brushed the hollow of Dora’s ear, and he planted his words in her mind. His lips brushed the delicate skin under Dora’s collarbone, and his words penetrated her heart.
He spoke of the Garden of Eden, how the Creator, Blessed be He, had pulled the rib from Adam as he slept. Rabbi Shlomo took Dora’s hand—she didn’t understand at first, because she was busy trying to engrave this phrase and that phrase into her memory—and he slipped it along his tzitzit to the spot where a man’s missing rib had been, close to his heart. He held her hand there as he spoke. She felt his voice tremble through her fingers from his heart to her own.
All too soon Rabbi Shlomo came to the point where Dora would have said, stop. Of itself her brow furrowed and arched so, she thought it might turn to an angel and fly up into heaven. He was speaking of the taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, how it lingered on Eve’s tongue long after the serpent had gone.
The little rabbi grew.
He spoke, and she listened. She never said, stop, and he never paused to hear if she would say so. As revelation piled on revelation, ecstasy on ecstasy, Dora’s heart fluttered, then pounded; her blood turned to hummingbirds, and her skin became the sky. In her mind, it was like the time, if there was one, before yom echad, when there was neither firmament above nor firmament below.
She forgot to remember it, to write it down later. He spoke with his heart, anyway, as much as with his tongue, through her hand as much as to her ear. How could a person write such things in English, in Cyrillic, or even in the holy alphabet of Hebrew or Aramaic? She forgot who the old wise ones were. She forgot who she herself might be, or if there was somewhere a little rabbi named Shlomo or a place called Schuylertown.
It was as if God was speaking to Dora directly, just as He spoke to Shloimy. He had such a big voice, the Almighty, that there was no room in the world left for the listener. She became a part of God’s voice, and she knew what He said not by listening, but because she was part of the saying of it.
She gasped once, and in between the one word and His next, God seemed to breathe. During that breath, as quick as a wing flutter, Dora was Dora, and she saw Shlomo beside her. The little rabbi was growing fast. He was growing old. Across his face a million waters streamed, so it appeared to her. Some of them streamed into Dora.
She gasped a second time, and the little rabbi was all skin and bones. What clothes stayed on him hung like cobwebs from an old rafter. The white of his bones showed at the cheeks, the forehead, the chin, and one hip, bare above loose pants. His fingers were bones. She wanted to say, stop. But she listened on.
She awoke shivering. She was sitting under a tree, all bundled up in her quilt. It was dark. She thought she saw Shlomo lying nearby on a patch of barren dirt. When she touched him, though, it was not he—what she touched crumbled at once to ashes.
“Wicked creature!” someone shouted from the dark. “You never planned to do what the old wise ones said to do. You deceived us.”
Another said, “You distrusted us, your teachers and counselors. You think we meant to harm him? Woe unto you, deluded girl!”
She heard their boots crunch the frosted grass. They came nearer. “Where have you sent him? Where is he hiding? It won’t help, you know. We’ll find him and send him to Al B’nai. It’s all over between you and your Shloimy, unless . . . ”
They let her tremble for a moment, halfway between terror and hope, as they thought; then another old wise one picked up the thread: “Unless you tell us everything. Did you listen to the end this time?”
She nodded.
Dora began to tell them the wonders and the terrors that God Almighty had secreted in her heart through the little rabbi. She chanted and she sang. Her eyes filled with tears. She did not know what words she spoke. But the more she spoke the darker and angrier old wise ones grew.
“Are you playing with us now? Do you think us fools?”
“Why do Your Reverences say that?” she asked. “Have I done something disrespectful?”
“Don’t you know what words you have been saying? Yisgadal, v’yiskadash sh’may rabah . . . Glorify and sanctify His Great Name . . . ”
“The Mourner’s Kaddish!” she exclaimed. “The prayer for the dead!”
“Of course! Of course! Everybody knows that. That’s child’s stuff. We want to know mysteries, hidden things, not this cheap prattle.”
“Reverend sirs, my little rabbi, my Shloimy, was born and he lived and he died. This Kaddish, the simple praise of God, which He has put in my heart to sing, is the highest of His mysteries. That’s the last thing Shloimy learned and the last thing that he taught me. But it’s as if all the world had suddenly turned to gold, and so, because everybody had piles of it, no one valued gold any more. Still, gold is gold, sirs. No mystery is deeper than the simple praise of God.”
Then the old wise ones were ashamed. They knew that what she said was true, just as they had known that all the little rabbi’s words had been true. There was that much gold in the old wise ones’ hearts that it would shame them to lie about this.
As well as they could manage it, they gathered the dust that had been the little rabbi, and they buried him and prayed over him and placed a marble stone there. Dora tended it all her days. She sang the Kaddish each year on the day of Shlomo’s death. It was all the Hebrew that Dora ever knew—Yisgadal, v’yiskadash sh’may rabah . . . —and the little rabbi had taught it to her, he and God Almighty.
Geddarien
Rose Lemberg
Zelig’s grandfather liked to smoke with his window half open, even though winter’s breath melted on the old parquet. When the snow on the streets turned as porous and yellow as a matzo ball, a pigeon flew into the room. It hid under the chaise, there to await compliments or perhaps bread crumbs.
Zelig asked, “Do you think the pigeon would like some cake?”
Grandfather examined the offering from the lofty height of his chaise: a piece of honey cake on Zelig’s outstretched palm. “A good one like that, he will want.”
The boy clambered onto the chaise and wormed his way under the blanket, close to the old man’s legs. Grandfather smelled comfortably of chicken soup, hand-rolled papirosen, violin rosin. Outside the window the abandoned cathedral still sputtered pigeons into the darkening square, and a neighboring house obstructed the rest of the view.
Grandfather said, “Do you know what Geddarien is?”
Zelig flattened a piece of cake and dropped it into a crack between the chaise and the wall. Moments later, he heard hesitant crooning from below. “No, grandfather. What’s Geddarien?”
The old man closed his heavy eyelids. “These cities like ours, my boy, they have a life of their own. And sometimes, you should know,” he whispered, “the city dances.” Grandfather’s eyes opened again: watery gray with a thin grid of red, like railroad tracks across a thawing country. “Could you bring it to me? My fiddele?”
“Grandmother says it will only make you upset.” But he threw the rest of his cake under the chaise and jumped off. In the small polished wardrobe, the battered black case was buried under an avalanche of hats. Not so long ago Grandfather used to go out, dandy like a pigeon in his gray pin-striped suit and a fedora; but these days he could not even properly hold the instrument. His grumpy nephew Yankel now came to give Zelig music lessons.
Grandfather opened the creaky case, and inside it the old violin glowed, waiting for touch. “Your fiddele, now,” the old man said, “is only a quarter-fiddle, and newly made. But soon you will graduate to one-half, and then to full.” He stroked the large fiddle’s neck with his fingers. “To this one. My father played it, and his grandfather, too.” He took up the cake of rosin from the case, moved it slowly along the horse-hairs in the bow.
Zelig felt the sounds this movement created, a music of honey sap upon wind, melting the heart into his bones. “Grandfather, what of Geddarien?”
“Ah. Geddarien, there’s a story.” The old man smiled sadly. “The houses in this city, they do not meet. They are fixed in their places. But once in a hundred years they come all together, the living houses, and they dance.” He put the bow back into the case and took up the violin; his fingers shook. “And they need music then, so they call us, the musicians. My father played at Geddarien once, and I was there as well, you see, with my quarter-fiddle, and my big sister Bronya with her trombone. And my father had this violin in its case and I held to the handle right here,” Grandfather put Zelig’s hand on the worn leather, “and he took Bronya’s hand, and off we went. Oh, Zelig, the music was nothing I have ever heard. The houses, my yingele . . . I have se
en Sankta Maria spread her gray marble hands and dance, and the old Blackstone house, and this little library I used to go to, and the Town Hall—very fond of waltzing, they all seemed.”
Grandmother entered the room from the kitchen, carrying a steaming cup of cocoa on a tray. “You are not telling that old tale again, are you, Grandfather?” She shook her head and placed the tray in the old man’s lap.
“And what’s the harm in it, grandmother?” The old man blew the thin film of milk off the top of his cocoa, closed one eye and took a cautious sip.
“There are things going on in the world more important than old stories. The war will come here . . . Yankel’s wife says they are going to move away.”
“Oh, the war,” Grandfather said, not impressed. “It’s going to be just like the last time. They won’t harm us. Our languages, they are almost the same, yes?” The old man took another gulp, and boasted, “I played my fiddele to the generals of three different armies!” He paused, contemplative. A soft crooning voice came from under the bed, and grandmother tilted her head in suspicion. “Yankel isn’t going to leave this city if you paid him. He too is waiting for Geddarien. Missed the last one . . . . What are you doing? No, no . . . ”
Grandmother bent laboriously, and looked under the chaise. “Oy vey z mir! An airborne rat in my house! Are you out of your mind?” She brought the broom from the kitchen and waged war on the poor bird.
A cube of sugar sat upon the kitchen table, a small shining king adored by three musicians, two old and one young. This summer the war had reached the city of Luriberg. “This war’s nothing at all like the last time,” Yankel grumbled; but grandfather shook his head and smiled, sipping his unsweetened tea. “You see, Zeligel, war is like this, that you drink your tea looking at the tsuker. It feels as sweet, melting in your mouth, but it doesn’t go anywhere.” He winked, and Zelig smiled back, his hands busy sewing a blue star onto the old man’s second-best jacket.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 4