by Sigal Samuel
And God, God was still there—Lev wasn’t so reactionary as to stop believing in God—but clearly, he thought, clearly this was a God without a plan.
Glassman was sitting very still in his darkening bedroom. The sloping walls and his wife’s breathing made him feel that he was trapped inside a giant muscle. A lung, perhaps, or a heart.
Rousing himself, he opened the desk drawer and pulled out King Lear. Though this was the book he had grown to treasure above all others, it also inspired in him a fair amount of guilt. Samara had forgotten it in his classroom after one of her bat mitzvah lessons. He’d made a mental note to return it to her. But then he’d picked it up and started reading it. And, once he started, he found he couldn’t stop. Later, after she had abandoned him, he’d kept the book as a memento of his favorite student. A few months ago he had finally made an effort to return it to her, but her resentful father had slammed the door in his face. And really, who could blame him? When Glassman first agreed to those after-school lessons, he hadn’t known Samara was contravening her father’s wishes. But the more information little Lev let slip about the man’s views on religion, the more he began to suspect it. And yet. He hadn’t stopped.
Now, gripping the worn copy of Lear in his pockmarked hand, he was grateful for that slammed door. More and more these days, Glassman found himself appealing to the pleasure of carefully measured, beautifully proportioned words to stave off the specter of the old mistake that encroached on his mind when everyone else in the world was asleep.
If only, if only he could understand what the old lunatic was raving about! Because these Shakespearean words, beautiful as they were, were horribly confusing. Their meaning was gray and dim, like a dream that slipped away at the first signs of daylight. Glassman hated that night after night he kept brushing up against the limits of his own abilities. He wanted to understand. But he had no method, no teacher or friend who could help him push those limits further out.
Which was why it was so exciting when Alex showed up the next Tuesday bearing a volume that looked distinctly different from the science textbooks he usually toted around. King Lear.
Throughout that afternoon’s lesson, Glassman struggled to concentrate. He and the boy were seated side by side at the rolltop desk in the second-floor bedroom, where his wife also lay, inert in bed, helping to fulfill the Talmud’s two-student requirement. They had finished their study of Ani and begun their study of Yesod.
“Foundation,” Glassman translated from the Hebrew text in front of them, “is the first meaning of Yesod. Without this vessel, our world would be empty of balance and stability.”
“Wait—the first meaning? As in, there’s a second one?”
“Well, yes, each vessel has more than one association. In kabbalah, there are always meanings within meanings. But this is really the most—”
“So what are the other meanings?”
“The other—?” Glassman stalled. “Oh, nothing for you to worry about.” He moved his finger surreptitiously down the page. “As we were saying, foundation—”
“Hey, you skipped a part! What do these lines say?”
“Which lines? Ah, these? Nothing—not important.”
“Mr. Glassman, please. If I’m going to know what Samara’s up to, it’s all important.”
He sighed. “Very well. You see, each vessel is also associated with a part of the body. In this case, Yesod . . . it is a part that only men have. The ‘foundation’ of all future generations.”
Alex looked embarrassed, then confused. “But Samara’s not a man, obviously, so—so how’s she supposed to get access to . . . ?” His face clouded over.
“I am afraid our sages never intended for a woman to make this climb. Samara, she may be the first. She will have to find her own way . . .” He trailed off. Just as he’d feared, Alex now looked completely miserable. To distract him, Glassman said, “I see you have a new book?”
“Hm?” Alex said. “Oh, that. Yeah, I picked it up at The Word on my way home.”
Glassman took the book and, with strenuous casualness, asked, “What is it about?”
“Lear? Oh, well, it’s the story of this king and his three daughters. Two of the daughters are real pieces of work, and they totally betray the king, who eventually goes kind of mad. But the third daughter, her name’s Cordelia? She’s sort of okay, I guess.”
“Yes? And what happens to her?”
“Oh, she dies.”
“And the evil sisters?”
“They die, too.”
“And the king?”
“He dies, too.”
“I see.”
“That’s Shakespeare.”
“That’s life.”
Alex’s eyes veered toward Glassman’s wife—pale, motionless, shrouded in blankets.
Glassman flipped, as if by chance, to the scene where Lear goes raving into the storm. He poked Alex’s shoulder to get his attention, then jabbed at a line in the text. “What does this mean? ‘Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once, that make ingrateful man!’ Why is the old man talking about Germans all of a sudden?”
“He’s—he’s not actually talking about Germans. He’s talking about, um . . .” Alex’s cheeks glowed red. “He’s talking about the seeds from which human beings grow.”
Glassman frowned, then nodded. This explanation reminded him of another perplexing passage, and he flipped to it now with a speed that smacked of familiarity. Alex regarded him curiously. But Glassman was too excited to turn back.
“Look at this, here. What do you make of this?” he asked, and read: “‘Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful! . . . From her derogate body never spring a babe to honor her! If she must teem, create her child of spleen . . . that she may feel how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’”
Alex cleared his throat. “He’s asking the gods to make his daughter, you know, sterile.”
Glassman stared.
“Childless.”
“Why would he do such a thing?”
“Well, because he hates her. Why else would you inflict childlessness on someone?”
Glassman winced. He closed the book, stood up, turned away. He adjusted the pillows beneath his wife’s head. He took her hand.
Alex cleared his throat again. “It’s getting late.”
“Yes,” Glassman said absently. “Late.”
“I’ll see you on Thursday?”
“Yes. Thursday.”
“Good-bye,” Alex said, leaving the bedroom and shutting the door quietly behind him.
What’s that bright star over there?” Lev asked.
Alex looked up from his telescope and followed Lev’s finger to a patch of sky. They were standing on Alex’s balcony, where they sometimes spent time stargazing on clear winter nights like this one. He grinned. “That’s not a star, actually. That’s a planet.”
“Oh. Which one?”
“Venus.”
Lev was quiet. He seemed to be in a brooding mood that night. Earlier, over dinner with Alex and his mom, Lev had been uncharacteristically terse. He nodded now, blowing into his hands to keep them warm.
To make conversation, Alex said, “Know why they called it Venus?”
“Why?”
“Because, a long time ago, they looked up at it and thought that it was so beautiful and bright and wonderful-looking—kind of like a goddess. And up until pretty recently, scientists thought that Venus had conditions similar to Earth’s. They thought it could be our sister planet.”
Lev’s shoulders stiffened at the word sister.
Alex could have kicked himself. “Sister”—what a stupid thing to say! Being an only child, he knew he couldn’t fully understand Lev’s connection to his sibling, but he still had a pretty good idea how miserable Lev must be feeling in her absence. Alex was feeling pretty miserable himself. And to think—if he and Lev had succeeded in bringing their parents together years ago, th
at’s what Samara would be to him now—“sister”! He had never confessed this to Lev, but he’d been glad when it became clear they’d failed in their matchmaking efforts. He would’ve loved to become Lev’s brother. But the more time he spent around Samara, the more he realized that, when it came to her, a sibling relationship was not exactly what he had in mind.
Anxious to cover up the awkward moment, Alex rushed on. “Of course, later scientists discovered that Venus is pretty much a hellhole. The surface is over four hundred and sixty-two degrees, and it’s bone dry, and the atmosphere is full of poisonous gases and sulfuric acid rain. So, not really that goddess-like after all.” He laughed.
Lev echoed his laugh, quietly, and then the two of them stared up at the sky in silence.
It was no wonder people once mistook the stars and planets for gods and goddesses, Alex thought. It wasn’t just that they were bright and beautiful. It was that, looking up at them in the literal sense, you almost couldn’t help but look up to them in the figurative sense, too. That was what he had done all his life—what he still did. He kept his hopes pinned on the stars because a message from them would be the most beautiful and incontrovertible, the most elegant and meaningful thing of all.
And if he was honest, wasn’t that why Samara’s strange letter had so appealed to him? It wasn’t just that it was from her. It was that the message had fallen on him from up above—just like, come to think of it, every message she’d ever transmitted to him: the sign taped to her bedroom window, the wordless conversations passing through telephone wires overhead. Above was where meaning lay, if it lay anywhere; above was the source of the truest answers we could ever hope to find. Samara understood this. And whether she herself had climbed up Katz’s tree to stash the letter in a tin can, or whether it had flown up there of its own accord—it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she understood. It was because she had always understood, right from day one, that he’d fallen in love with her in the first place.
While Alex was looking out at the night sky, Glassman was looking out at Katz’s tree. The tin cans caught the starlight and reflected it back into his eyes at crazy angles, and this irritated him. The whole tree irritated him. Ragged lines, slings of sloppy string—a chaotic contraption meant to catch, what, a miracle? It offended his Misnagedish sensibilities, that German part of him that viewed reason and logic as the ultimate tools for interpreting Judaism and life in general.
This taste for reason had led him to excel at math as a boy—and, later, to take comfort in his wife’s habit of working out logical proofs under her breath. When she talked to herself, she spoke in the language of truths and falsities, validities and invalidities, theorems and propositions and QEDs. For decades he had found this—more than their quiet walks together, more than their three-times-daily meals together, more even than their sporadic lovemaking—endlessly soothing.
Then came the day of his wife’s last stroke. Just before she collapsed in the kitchen, he heard her murmur to herself: If p then q . . . and not p entails q or not q . . . we derive p if and only if . . . This was no different from her usual murmurs, and so he did not look up from his afternoon tea. But then she began to grow agitated, shaking her head violently, saying: No, no, you cannot derive this, this would be invalid, I would dispute this . . . And then she was sinking to the floor.
He rushed over to her, crouched down on the tiles, and stared with horror at her stuttering mouth, her fluttering eyelids. For a split second she took the extravagant step of looking him straight in the eye. She repeated, “I would dispute this!” Then she fell into a coma.
That phrase had haunted him ever since. As it echoed in his mind, he heard in it a valiant, almost heroic correctional gesture. A final attempt to prove the invalidity of an argument he had been making for decades without even knowing it . . .
Now, sitting beside her unconscious body, Glassman had to grind his teeth to keep from crying out in pain. Desperate for a distraction, he looked out the window again. Katz’s tree stared back at him. But this time, instead of catching on the tin cans, his attention snagged on those low-hanging branches. He remembered a spring day many years ago when he’d watched Samara pass beneath them.
She had been eight, maybe nine years old. A beautiful, curious little girl. The morning sun haloed her hair as she left her house and set out down the block for school, alone. As she passed beneath the branches of Katz’s tree, she paused. After a long winter the branches were finally coming alive, little green buds opening stickily. She pulled a branch toward her. She touched the tips of a brand-new bud. She brought it right up to her lips and closed her eyes and kissed it. Then she released the branch—it went flying backward—and, just as she was opening her eyes again, it swung forward and slapped her in the face.
She jumped back, startled.
For years afterward Glassman saw her body veering (perhaps unconsciously) away from that tree anytime she walked down the street, as though not just her brain but her muscles had formed a grudge against it. Forever trying to expand his vocabulary, he’d wondered if this was what was meant by muscle memory.
And then, immediately after her bat mitzvah, as though she’d reached out and been slapped in the face by an invisible branch, she ran away from the very religious tradition that she had weeks earlier begged him to teach her. When he chased after her, she only shook her head and veered (perhaps unconsciously) away from him. She never tried to get near religion again.
But now, inexplicably, she was trying. And what a thing she was trying! The Tree of Life. Something extraordinary must have happened. She must have seen some sort of a sign—or thought she’d seen one. But as he knew, signs could be misleading, and attempting to do what she was doing on that basis was a terrible mistake. A mistake not unlike the one he’d made long ago, the one his wife had tried to dispute with her last conscious words. And so if only he could help Samara, then maybe his problem would be solved, maybe he’d be worthy of rest . . .
Lev had barely taken two steps out of his house when he heard a voice calling to him from up above. Craning his neck in the morning light, he saw Glassman leaning out of his bedroom window and waving. “Lev!” he called. “Come up here, boychick! I want to talk to you.”
Lev sighed. He hadn’t seen the old man in weeks, and yet he wasn’t surprised to hear himself being summoned this way now. This was something Glassman had been doing for years—calling him into the house to pose a question, or tell a story, or ask after his favorite former pupil, Samara. Out of respect for his old teacher, he opened the front door—which Glassman never locked—and made his way up to the second floor.
“Boychick! So good it is to see you,” Glassman said. But Lev, standing in the doorway, couldn’t help noticing that the old man wasn’t even facing him; he was sitting on the bed, facing his unconscious wife. Glassman said, “Sit, sit!” and waved him into the chair by the desk.
“How are you, Mr. Glassman?”
“Fine, fine.”
“How’s Mrs. Glassman?”
“She will also be fine, with the help of the Kadosh Baruch Hu.”
Lev said nothing. Mrs. Glassman was comatose. Her basic bodily needs required a nurse who seemed to be forever clomping up and down the street to the Glassman house. She would obviously not be fine, with or without God’s help. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it.
“So,” the old man said matter-of-factly. “You will mind if I tell the story in Hebrew?”
“Um, what story?”
“Yankel’s story! The story my wife’s brother wrote—the one I promised to tell you!”
Lev’s mind cast around wildly. Finally, he remembered that the old man had indeed promised to tell him such a story. He had promised it ten years ago. Now he was acting as if no time at all had elapsed, as if nothing could be more natural than for him to tell this story today.
“Well?” Glassman sounded impatient. “If I tell it in Hebrew, you will mind?”
“No,” Lev said. He did underst
and Hebrew—not perfectly, but well enough to get the gist of a story. It was Glassman who’d taught him, after all, all those long years ago. “But I—”
“Good,” Glassman cut in. “Because, you know, Yankeleh, he told the story in Hebrew, and this is how I remember it. These are the words I know by heart.” Rocking gently back and forth, he began to speak in a soft singsong voice. “In the beginning was the word. Only one word, that’s all there was. Close your eyes and it will come to you. It will be the first word that comes to mind.”
Lev, leaning back in his chair, closed his eyes obediently. He cleared his mind and waited for the first word to make its presence known. But even before a single letter could pop into his head, the old man continued chanting.
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with the king,” Glassman said. “The king loved the word and so, to protect it, he planted it in the center of the royal garden and placed a flaming sword at its gate. He watered the word every day. With time, it grew into a beautiful tree, so tall it could be seen from anywhere in the kingdom. Rumors began to spread. It was said that the tree bore six hundred and thirteen fruit. Each fruit contained six hundred and thirteen seeds. Each seed contained a single word. What exactly a word was, nobody knew. Nobody in the kingdom had ever sung or spoken. This was a kingdom of silence.
“The tree was a delight to the eyes. The royal subjects longed to get close to it. Their fingers itched to pluck its fruit. Their mouths craved the taste of its words. But nobody ventured to make a move.
“Until one night, a daring man snuck into the garden all alone. Nobody knows how he did it, how he got past the flaming sword, though if you close your eyes now it will come to you. It will be the first thing that comes to mind.”
Once more, Lev waited with his eyes squeezed shut, this time for the daring man’s method to spring to mind, but again Glassman’s voice moved on without giving him time to think. As if, even though Glassman had seemed desperate for him to come and listen to this story, the old man wasn’t really speaking to him at all.