The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  Mr. Glassman gave Dad a slow, careful smile, like a test. “She is quite something, your daughter, yes, Mr. Meyer?” he said. “She is the best student in her class. Best student I have ever had! You must be . . . you should be . . . very proud of your daughter . . . yes?”

  Dad said nothing. I was afraid to turn right and look at him, so instead I turned left just as a very fat lady squeezed herself into the seat beside me. She was out of breath and I wondered if it was because she was very fat or because she had rushed to get to synagogue. I thought about what might have happened to make her need to rush so much, and then I thought about what might have happened to make her need to eat so much, and then the bat mitzvah started.

  First Mr. Glassman got up and made a speech. Then the first of the girls, the one at the right end of the half-moon, stood up in front of the microphone and read from the Torah. Then the next girl in the half-moon stood up and the whole thing happened all over again, except this time the reading felt about five times longer. I started to pick my nose, but then I realized what I was doing and stopped. I took a deep breath and looked out at the crowd and felt how the air was heavy with all the people and all the words they wished they could say but couldn’t say because girl after girl was crossing the bima and chanting from a very ancient scroll.

  I couldn’t really see, because Mr. Glassman’s gray hair was standing up right in front of me, but one thing I noticed was that all the girls read either too fast or too quiet. Sometimes they stumbled over their words and lost their place and had to go back and everyone in the audience sank a little lower in their seats. Another thing I noticed was that the fat lady sitting to my left kept fanning herself with the program and yawning. She had on a purple silk suit and a gigantic pearl necklace, and she looked unbelievably bored. I thought, who could blame her?

  After about four billion years and three gazillion songs, the last girl got up on the bima and I made my neck long to see over the hair in front of me and it was my sister. My sister, who was not most people. Her hands shook when she took the scroll, but then she started chanting.

  And there it was, the weird something in her voice. It was not too fast or too quiet but slow and steady, as if she had all the time in the world, as if it was just for her, just for this moment, that the whole world had been created. I closed my eyes. Inside her voice I could hear each letter, and each silence between each letter, and I felt happy and sad and lonely, because in each perfect silence was a smaller, hidden silence, like dolls inside dolls that go on and on forever, and inside the smallest doll I could suddenly see the list curled up, the list of all the reasons, the reasons for my sister’s sadness.

  The answering machine on the kitchen counter. The sticky seeds on the floor. The red bicycle in the garage. The closed door. Two small palms smeared with strawberry jam. A store full of musical instruments. A woman’s fingers braiding ropes of dough. Voices singing. Feet dancing. Two boys, laughing, pointing. Hundreds and hundreds of old books. A dead bird. A familiar freckled face with a streak of paint across it, the mouth twisting down. A group of girls standing on a playground, seen from up above, their thin backs turning. And underneath all these pictures, down below the deepest one, a single question burning. It was coming closer, growing bigger and bigger like a shadow on the wall, and I turned away because the question was too big and too cold and too much and because it wasn’t meant for me, it was not my question to answer, and then the voice fell away and it was all over—I opened my eyes.

  I blinked once and the synagogue reappeared. It reappeared so suddenly, it almost hurt. It was like the feeling you get coming out of a dark movie theater into a bright sunny day. For a second, I felt almost dizzy. Then I blinked again and everything was normal.

  Everything was so normal that now I wondered, maybe it was just me? Maybe it all just happened in my head? What if I’d fallen asleep from boredom and missed the whole entire thing? I was still afraid to turn right and look at Dad, so instead I turned to my left.

  The fat lady’s hands were trembling. Her eyes were squeezed shut and a single tear was rolling down her cheek. It slid down her skin and fell with a plop onto her purple silk skirt.

  It wasn’t just me.

  There was a pause, and then Mr. Glassman crossed the bima to make the final speech. He had cue cards in his hands, but his fingers were shaking, and he could barely get the words out. He seemed confused and a little blind, like his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the sunlight, either. He kept turning to look at Sammy. Finally he said good night, and then there was the sound of one hundred bums lifting out of one hundred seats, and Sammy came down from the bima and stood very still beside me.

  She looked at Dad and for a second he didn’t say anything. Then he opened his mouth, but before any words could come out, Ira came rushing up the aisle toward us. His eyes were watery and his face was red like maybe he’d been crying. He stared at Sammy as if there was so much he wanted to say but he didn’t know where to start. Then he took Dad’s hands in his hands and looked right into his eyes. “Miriam would have been proud,” he whispered. “So proud.”

  Dad ripped his hands out of Ira’s and balled them into fists. A vein in his forehead was jumping up and down, and if I had to describe the expression on his face using only one word, the word I would use to describe it is fury.

  Then Ira’s wife, Judy, came up to us, dragging Jenny by the hand. “That was wonderful, oh, just wonderful!” the woman cried. She kissed Sammy on both cheeks, making her blush.

  Jenny was staring at my sister. Her eyes were so wide I thought they were going to pop out of her head. They were filled with a feeling that looked like awe and regret and sadness all mixed together. I tried to come up with one word to describe her expression but it was hard.

  Five minutes later we got into the car and drove away. Almost immediately, it started raining. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, filling our ears with a loud clicking noise. Raindrops slid across the windows like comets. I traced their tails with my fingertip.

  Dad’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and he didn’t say a word the whole way home. Except once at a red light I heard him mutter something about “sharper than a serpent’s tooth.” I didn’t understand what he thought was sharper than a serpent’s tooth, unless maybe he meant the rain, but it wasn’t even coming down that hard. In the backseat, I was sitting up close to Sammy, and when he said that I could feel her whole body shiver.

  When we got home, Dad went straight to his room and Sammy went to hers. I heard their two doors close like echoes of each other. I got a cherry Popsicle and stood licking it in the hall. The framed photos of Dad and Mom stared up at me. He was frowning, but she was smiling. Her face had a light in it that his face didn’t have, and I wondered if maybe that was emunah. I thought, was Mom a happier person than Dad because she had faith and he didn’t? Then I bit straight down on the Popsicle, pushing my front teeth deep into it until I shivered.

  I knocked on Sammy’s door and then opened it. She’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and she was stuffing a bunch of things into her trash can. The blue dress. Her candlesticks. A box of matches. The triangle she used to play in band class. The kiddush cup. Her prayer book. I asked, “What are you doing with all this stuff?” and she just shrugged, so I asked, “Can I have it?” and she just shrugged again. Then she pulled her backpack over her shoulder, so I said, “Where are you going?” and she said, “To the supermarket, go to bed,” and then she left.

  I poked around in her trash can, took out all the things except the blue dress and the triangle, and stuffed them under the bed in my room. Then I tried to fall asleep but I couldn’t. After a while, I heard the phone ring and ran to the kitchen to answer it. Even though I said hello three times, nobody answered. I hung up, but a second later the phone rang again. This time I let the machine get it. Instead of a voice, I heard a long stretch of silence, with a few taps thrown in here and there. Then the machine beeped and went quiet.

  I
went back to bed and crawled under the covers. I turned on my flashlight, made another list, and turned off my flashlight again. But I still couldn’t fall asleep, so instead I calculated how much my name equals in gematria. I calculated Sammy’s name and then I calculated Dad’s name, too, trying to see if all our names added up together equaled something I could still recognize, something maybe not that different from family.

  ALL THE SILENCES I KNOW AND WHERE THEY CAN BE FOUND:

  1. In libraries

  2. In synagogues

  3. Between sleep and waking

  4. Right before something terrible happens

  5. Right after something terrible happens

  6. Inside the bodies of musical instruments

  7. Anytime you want to say something nice to somebody but are too shy to say it

  8. Anytime you want to ask somebody a question but are too shy to ask it

  9. Between knocking over a glass bowl and seeing it hit the ground

  10. Late at night, after everyone has gone to sleep

  11. Early in the morning, before anyone has woken up

  12. Between the letters on a page

  13. On the other side of the telephone wire

  14. 25,000 light years away

  15. After the rain

  The next day a miracle happened.

  When I woke up in the morning, it was still early. The house was asleep but the sun was already shining. I walked outside in my pajamas. The rain had cleared everything away and the neighborhood smelled clean and fresh and blue like the inside of clouds. I started walking in the direction of Mr. Katz’s house.

  When I got there, he was standing in the middle of the lawn staring up at the Tree. He was also in pajamas, and his mouth was hanging open. I stood next to him and looked up.

  In each one of the cradles sat a perfect yellow lemon.

  The longer I squinted up at them, the more my eyes started to hurt, but I didn’t want to look away. It was as if the lemons were giving off a light of their own, a bittersweet light. Mr. Katz pulled at my sleeve and said, “You see? When you have emunah, the Kadosh Baruch Hu answers your prayers.” His eyes were glowing like maybe he’d been staring into the light for too long. He went over to the Tree and picked the lemon from the lowest cradle. “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” He bit into it and his eyes popped open.

  I got really excited to tell Mr. Glassman that I knew what fruit was on the Tree of Knowledge, so I ran over to his house. On the way I saw somebody disappearing around the corner and it looked a bit like Sammy but I couldn’t tell for sure because the sun was in my eyes. I skidded to a stop in front of Mr. Glassman’s door and knocked, my heart thumping like crazy.

  When I saw his face, I remembered that Mrs. Glassman was sick a few days ago, and maybe she still was and I shouldn’t be here, banging on their door so early in the morning. But then I heard her voice calling, “Lev, boychick, is that you?” Mr. Glassman smiled and brought me into the kitchen, which was full of the smell of fresh rugelach baking. Mrs. Glassman pinched my cheeks and said, “Skin and bones, sit and let me bring you what to eat!”

  While I sat and waited, Mr. Glassman talked about Sammy’s bat mitzvah reading. He couldn’t stop saying how much she had touched him. His voice was relaxed and happy and I decided not to tell him about the things I’d seen her throwing into the trash can last night.

  Instead, I put my hands in my pockets. In my right pocket I could feel Mr. Glassman’s scrap of paper, the one with his name and his wife’s name calculated out in gematria, which he’d let me keep the other day. I started to think about the story he’d told me and what it said about the tattoos they got in the camp. The more I thought about it, the more made-up and meshuggeneh it all sounded. What kind of Nazi officer would let you choose the number of your tattoo? It didn’t work that way! Mrs. Glassman was wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and while she moved around the kitchen getting the tea and rugelach ready I tried to sneak a good look at the number on her arm, to calculate and see if it really did add up to her name, but she kept moving too fast and the sunlight was making everything fuzzy and all the numbers blurred together and I couldn’t tell anymore what was what.

  Part Two

  DAVID

  No sooner had I bolted awake than I spluttered the words, “Where is she?”

  Above me, an unfamiliar face swam into view. A dark-skinned, dewy-eyed, thirtyish man was saying, “Mr. Meyer, please, try to calm down—”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Samara. My daughter. Is it over?”

  “Is what over?”

  “Did she leave already? I have to tell her—to apologize—the bat mitzvah—”

  “The what?”

  “Bat mitzvah! I have to—”

  “Dad,” said a small voice. “That was ten years ago.”

  I looked to my left as someone moved into my circle of vision. It was Lev, my Lev, but it took me a second to recognize him. The little boy I’d just seen fidgeting in my mind’s eye was gone; in his place, the grown-up version of my son. Here, in real life, he looked even more scared than he had in the dream—because it was a dream, I understood suddenly, the synagogue and speeches and Samara’s downcast eyes, that was a memory—past, not present.

  “Where am I? What happened?”

  “You’ve suffered a myocardial infarction—a heart attack,” the man explained. “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands now. You’re at the hospital. I’m Dr. Singh.”

  I squinted up at him. Something metallic swung in front of my eyes, catching the late-afternoon light and temporarily blinding me. The doctor applied a gentle pressure to my shoulders, making me lie back. Then he grabbed his stethoscope, pressed it to my chest, and asked, “Mind if I have a listen?”

  Instead of replying, I stared out at eye level. My gaze fixed on Lev’s hand. His finger marked his place in a leather-bound book, its spine stamped with Hebrew letters. I frowned. He’d been praying for me—reciting psalms, as if that would save me. Then I remembered that he was a yeshiva boy now and only doing what the rabbis there taught him to do. Still, it pinched: I’d gotten one kid off religion—at great personal cost—only to have the other turn.

  “Your sister,” I whispered to my son’s hand, “is she coming?”

  “Of course!” Lev said. “I called her a few minutes ago, and she said she was getting on the Metro from McGill right away, so she should be here soon.”

  I nodded weakly, unsure whether to believe him—Samara almost never came home of her own volition—and disoriented by the recollection that she was now college age, a university student more than halfway through her undergraduate degree. Moments ago, in my dream, she’d stared down at me from a synagogue bima with a young girl’s hopeful, vulnerable eyes.

  “Are you okay, Dad?” Lev asked. “Do you need anything?”

  Dr. Singh smiled. “Oh, he’ll be all right. What he needs now is lots of rest. Lev, why don’t we go into the hall and let your dad sleep for a bit? You and I can talk later, Mr. Meyer.”

  Exhausted, I dozed off.

  When I next awoke—it could have been minutes or maybe hours later—the shadows in the room had lengthened. Someone was hovering in the same spot Lev had occupied when I’d first regained consciousness. Samara. As soon as she saw me recognize her, she flinched. I looked into her face and she looked into mine and we held a silent moment between us. I opened my mouth and she ran from the room, too scared to talk to me, too scared to see me in this weakened state. And then I knew that the news of my collapse had terrified her, and I cried. Not because I was sad that she wouldn’t come closer. But because I was happy that, despite everything I’d done wrong, she still loved me enough for my mortality to fill her with a fear so strong she couldn’t quite look it in the eyes.

  Four days after the heart attack, I was ready to be released. Stooped over my hospital bed, Singh pressed his stethoscope to my chest one last time. He listened intently, as if a Verdi ope
ra were playing beneath the metal, then straightened up and handed me the instrument. “Have a listen.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you’ll want to hear this.”

  I placed the buds in my ears, the disc to my chest. It was not Verdi, or Scarlatti, or Mozart, but something like music was happening inside me. “What is that?”

  “A heart murmur.”

  “Is that—dangerous?”

  He raised his palms apologetically. “Not usually. Yours is a bit unusual.”

  “Unusual?”

  “Well, as you can see—hear—it’s audible. The murmur occurs during systole—that’s the phase of the cardiac cycle in which the tissue experiences contraction—”

  At that word, I sat up straighter. The opening chapter of the academic manuscript I’d been writing came back to me: The great kabbalists taught that God began the process of creation by contracting His infinite light. He poured it into ten vessels—each representing one of His qualities—that together form the Tree of Life. As the light trickled down through these vessels, it condensed into physical matter and gave rise to the world as we know it . . .

  “And the volume is, you might say, irregular. Once you’re stronger I may ask you to come back for a few tests. But for now, try not to think about it. No work, plenty of rest, and minimum physical exertion over the next few weeks. Do you have any questions?”

  “I assume it’s all right for me to go running?”

  “Well, a little bit of exercise is fine, yes, but don’t overdo it. Remember that running is what landed you here in the first place, so steer clear of anything strenuous or prolonged. Jogging might be better. Or walking. Okay?”

  I nodded, though it was not. “And what about, you know, sexual activity?”