It was a serious matter. Gala’s use of the holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet had caused many rabbis, including Ben’s own, to fire angry communiqués into the always-charged air of Israel. They accused her and her producers of everything from blasphemy to producing for public consumption a kind of “intellectual pig flesh.”
Rebbe Zvetai was worried that “random turns of the wheel could produce a combination of letters that would hasten the End Times.” The End might be unleashed by an ignorant player who could unwittingly pronounce the Name in front of millions of people. The rebbe reminded Ben that it was forbidden to pronounce the Name of God. He recalled the dreadful story of the golem, an artificial being produced by a Prague rabbi in the seventeenth century, who’d had the Name of God written on his forehead. This being caused a lot of trouble until the rabbi erased the holy Name and the creature turned to dust. Gala was likewise fooling with creation, and Ben was being drawn into the unholy web, the rebbe warned.
When he thought of what the rebbe said, Ben’s flesh became even more incandescent. He burned like a Shabbes candle for Gala Keria.
Andrea entered the armed camp that housed the studios of Israel’s biggest commercial television station and waited in the lobby for someone to notice her. She wore as a dress a long sweater borrowed from Sister Rodica, who had brought it with her from the old country but no longer had any use for it. The sweater was blue and embroidered with small red poppies. It came down to just above her knees. Ankle-length white socks rose above the black saddle shoes she had worn the night she arrived at Saint Hildegard’s. Her shoulder-length brown hair was carefully combed and twisted back in a rich ponytail.
A female receptionist and a soldier sat talking behind a tall desk. The soldier’s automatic pistol was lying carelessly on the counter, next to a smoking cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. Just beyond the desk was a glass door, and on the other side of it another soldier sat on a wooden stool, reading a paperback.
A rabbinical student, his wild curls shooting like black seltzer from under his tall hat, burst suddenly into the lobby.
“Get me the Gal Gal Hamazal producer!” he shouted at the receptionist.
A baby rabbi! thought Andrea, somewhat charmed by his curls.
The receptionist turned a pair of hostile kohl-rimmed eyes in his direction. “Wait your turn, like everybody else!”
“There is nobody else!” the young rabbi shouted back.
What am I? thought Andrea. Can’t anybody see me?
“Excuse me.” Standing, she said, “I was here first.”
The young man wheeled around. “Who are you?” His Hebrew had an American accent.
“I’m the next Gala,” Andrea answered firmly.
“You and a thousand other girls!” chuckled the receptionist, buffing her nails.
The soldier just snorted.
“You are all sexist pigs!” objected the rabbi. “I am the next Gala!” he said, bowing low.
The young rabbi then announced that he was in truth Yehuda ben Yehuda and that he intended to break the monopoly of girl hostesses on Gal Gal Hamazal because it was wrong for women to manipulate the Hebrew alphabet.
Now the receptionist snorted.
“Well, that’s a new one,” said the soldier. “We should call Mr. Elahu and have him judge these applicants on the spot!”
The other soldier put down his book and came out from behind the glass to join the fun. The receptionist phoned Mr. Elahu, the show’s producer.
“There are two new Galas here,” she said sarcastically. “One’s a boy, the other a girl.”
She lit a new cigarette from the butt of the one still burning.
Mr. Elahu was an intellectual-looking man with square ebony glasses and a shiny bald head filled with the awesome knowledge needed to produce Gal Gal Hamazal every week. He invited the two young people to his office, but the receptionist and the soldiers protested they wanted to see the audition. Mr. Elahu tried ineffectively to assert his authority, but the lobby employees overwhelmed him with unanswerable Israeli arguments about democracy.
“I may be a simple receptionist!” shouted the receptionist, “but I voted Likud two times, and maybe this is the last time!”
“What’s that got to do with it?” intervened the soldier, quite reasonably, asserting, “I’m a soldier and I defend this country, and I demand to see the audition!”
“This is a democracy!” the other soldier said reproachfully.
After several rounds of this, Mr. Elahu told everyone to shut up. He would conduct the audition right in the lobby. He began with “the lady first,” and asked Andrea’s name.
“Andrea Isabel,” she lied instantly.
“Not a bad stage name,” Mr. Elahu observed, adding, “The name is not important. We can always find you a new name. It is more important that you know the Hebrew language and understand the game. Can you tell me, for instance, how many different Hebrew languages there are?”
“Rabbinic, medieval, and Israeli,” said Andrea without hesitating.
Yehuda ben Yehuda looked at the girl suspiciously. Was this a setup?
“My name is Yehuda ben Yehuda.” He shrugged. “I think I know something about language.”
“So, you are the namesake of the great linguist Ben Yehuda? Can you tell me, young lady, what was Ben Yehuda’s chief contribution to modern Hebrew?”
“Well, he wanted to enrich the modern vocabulary with words from past Hebrew literature. Ben Yehuda favored, I believe, using the Arabic lexicon in order to preserve the Semitic character of the language, and he resisted the inclusion of words from Western languages.”
“Did he succeed?” asked the astonished producer.
“No, sir. The Americans came.”
Everyone laughed, and the young rabbi blushed. He was American.
“Bravo!” approved the receptionist. “This is the last time I’m voting Likud!”
“Well, well.” Mr. Elahu looked Andrea up and down, noticing for the first time how pretty she was. A spark of recognition traveled up his spine. He’d been in the business long enough to know that she had potential.
“Literature,” he continued his quiz. “First-century Roman poet, exiled to Tomis, author of …” He trailed off, inviting her to fill in the blank.
“Metamorphoses,” Andrea finished the sentence. “Ovid.”
Even Yehuda ben Yehuda was impressed.
No, it was worse. He was infatuated! He closed his eyes and prayed to remember why he had come.
“Sir,” the young rabbi began, “I am here to register a protest. My teachers believe that Gal Gal Hamazal is offensive to our faith and to God. First, it is a sin to be careless with the holy letters, and second, if the show has to exist at all, it ought to be put in the hands of a rabbinical authority. A male authority.”
This was an argument that Mr. Elahu nipped in the bud.
“Young lady, you must return here ten o’clock tomorrow morning for a proper audition. And you, young man, please submit your complaints in writing to the executive producer, Mr. Abba. This is not a religious court!”
He broached no further dissent and quickly extracted himself from the lobby, which had become, for an entertaining half hour, a true Israeli café. One of the soldiers asked Andrea for her telephone number, but she stuck out her tongue at him. The receptionist muttered, “For shame!” and glared at Andrea.
Andrea and Yehuda ben Yehuda soon found themselves on the sidewalk in the cold sun.
“So, I go this way,” he said in Hebrew, pointing vaguely toward the Citadel.
“That’s where I’m going too. East.”
In the pedestrian mall at the intersection of Ben Yehuda and King George Streets, they stopped to rest on a bench. The mall was crowded with people.
Neotribals with bones through their earlobes, shaved and tattooed heads, pierced eyelids, and clownish costumes strolled past, ignoring the neatly dressed net surfers sitting at coffeehouse terminals.
Two Yemeni wom
en were making flat bread right on the street, patting down the dough with resounding thumps and drowning the results in a vat of sizzling oil.
A Russian violinist in a threadbare coat coaxed a few tears from his strings, crying out at intervals, “Give a shekel for the fiddler on the cobblestones!”
Next to them on the bench, two shrunken old men soaked up the timid winter sun and passed a soggy cigarette back and forth.
“One good thing about America, no smoking anywhere,” Ben observed, feeling awkward. He irritated himself sometimes.
Andrea was silent for a moment and then said in English, “Do you mean, Yehuda ben Yehuda, that smoking is prohibited in America, or that America doesn’t smoke anywhere?” She giggled at her own joke.
“Please call me Ben. I’m not an idiot.” He smiled. “Where are you from, anyway? You have no accent in Hebrew, and your English is obviously better than mine. Isabel is an unusual last name.”
“Spain,” Andrea lied, glad for an opportunity to polish the story she’d pieced together from books and newspapers. “My family were Marranos. Although they left Spain when Queen Isabella expelled the Jews in the fifteenth century, they returned and lived as Catholics, taking the name Isabel. There were many like them; crypto-Jews, they’ve been called. But they continued secretly to practice their faith, never forgetting their true identity.”
Andrea watched Ben’s face carefully as she spoke, looking for signs of boredom or disbelief. She needn’t have worried. The young rabbi’s face was a study of rapt attention. He was buying the story hook, line, and sinker. Andrea resumed her narrative:
“Last year, Basque rebels started a civil war. There was fighting in our district, and I was separated from my parents and detained in a rebel camp in the mountains for three months.” This information she had gathered from an article in The Herald Tribune.
“I escaped and traveled on foot across the mountains to France. There, a Jewish family arranged my immigration to Israel.”
Andrea was extremely pleased with her performance. The story was so good she was beginning to believe it. Ben’s respectful attention now became something more. He was genuinely concerned.
“What happened to the rest of your family? Your parents? Where are they now?” He sounded worried.
Andrea conceived another twist. “My parents have disappeared.” Her voice broke slightly. “They were last seen in Cádiz, waiting for a ship to take them to America. A man who met them in Cádiz told me this”—she paused significantly—“but then, he may have been lying. I think he had a romantic interest in me.”
She sneaked a look at Ben to see if the innuendo had registered. He looked very sad. To cheer him up, she added quickly, “Maybe they did take a ship … to New Orleans.” This last detail was inspired by the scholars’ story game, in which Great Minds were traveling to New Orleans for a council on the fate of the world. They had all been reading about New Orleans in the encyclopedia.
“New Orleans is my hometown!”
Andrea had a moment of unease. When Ben had asked about her parents, she’d almost said, “They were killed in Sarajevo.” Still, she had told him the truth; her parents had disappeared. The void that should have been filled by “mother” and “father” was like a narrow valley reached by a hidden crevasse. When she called out across this valley, not even an echo returned. Her parents were anonymous people who had been killed by men who made history. To get them back she would have to stop history and run the film backward. Instead, she imagined her mother and father strolling arm-in-arm down an avenue of oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.
Ben was still processing her story. She was beautiful, multilingual, Jewish, a refugee, and most important, she believed her parents had escaped to New Orleans!
Ben was ashamed. His parents were healthy and rich. The troubles of the world rarely breached the walls of their huge garden. When they traveled, their cruise ship brushed past the shores of places wounded by war, but there was no contact. If Andrea’s parents were in New Orleans, they had to be found.
Ben reached out awkwardly and touched Andrea’s hair. It was soft and warm. She inclined her head slightly as if to rest it on his chest, but then drew back. Ben felt compassion, affection, and something else, warm, familiar, and inevitable. He would have liked to tell Andrea the story of the illuminated mystical vision that had brought him to Israel, but he felt small now compared to the grandeur of her suffering.
Suddenly he noticed how thin the girl was under her oversized blue sweater. “Are you hungry?” Ben wanted to feed her.
Andrea allowed that she was. They sat outside at an Afghan restaurant on King George. The smell of frying meats wafted from the kitchen. An old woman, the proprietor’s mother, extolled the virtues of Afghan cuisine, which seemed to consist mostly of lamb, yogurt, and ground chickpeas. Andrea had a big pita sandwich of roast lamb and a glass of red wine. She ate greedily and Ben was pleased. The longer he watched her, the more convinced he became that he had somehow been chosen to protect her.
Full now, Andrea stretched like a cat on her café seat and watched the street coming to life in the early evening. Ben ordered a whole carafe of red wine. He rarely drank, but now he felt reckless and alive, not at all like the meticulous scholar he had been only that morning. I’m celebrating, he thought to himself, and I am happy. But almost as soon as he had formulated this thought, he was ashamed. Andrea was sad and her whole life trembled before him, filled with more sorrow than he could imagine. Once again, he touched her, caressing her hand. His gesture was meant to convey sympathy, but the caress was electric. Her skin was shamelessly alive, and Ben was suffused by pleasure.
A group of leather-jacketed, pierced people staked out the sidewalk in front of the café and passed a bottle back and forth. Yehuda ben Yehuda had been studying the eccentric young people mobbing the streets of downtown Jerusalem. He now saw an opportunity to cover up his embarrassment and appear knowledgeable and mature at the same time.
He began explaining these creatures to Andrea as if she had just landed from a planet where they were unheard of.
“They are called neotribals. When this rebellion started, piercing and tattooing were associated with sex, wilderness, and freedom. The neotribals used to kill net surfers, but now they just stare at them. The wilderness is now all copyrighted by the National Geographic, and sex, well …”
Andrea’s warmth enveloped him like a thin fragrant film. He fought the urge to touch her again, and continued: “Suffice it to say that piercing and tattooing are not true opposites of TV watching, like sex used to be. They used to call tattooing ‘elective exile,’ like you could get out of your tribe and belong to another just by your markings. But they’ve toned down. Now they watch Gal Gal Hamazal like everybody else.”
“But why,” Andrea wanted to know, “why do they pierce their bodies? Is it in imitation of Christ?” She knew that Christians in many parts of the world pierced their hands and feet in imitation of their Savior.
“There are many distinct groups of this culture,” Ben answered eagerly. “For the majority, piercing is an imitation of penetration. Very few of them have real sex anymore. In that respect, they are ascetic—” Ben had nearly said, “like me.” The rabbinical scholars at his school were expected to transcend all their physical feelings in order to commune with the divine essence.
“They are religious, then?” Andrea felt deeply sorry for the ascetic young.
“In their own way, yes. Without discipline, without education. There is a group that initiates its members by tattooing a faceless body on them. This body embraces them completely, making them sort of … self-sufficient. These people have no outside loves! They call themselves Shades.”
“Why faceless?” Andrea wanted to know.
“They claim that they are waiting for someone, an avatar. When she comes—they believe that their avatar is a woman—they are going to draw her face in the blank.”
Andrea thought about this for a moment. The streetl
ights had come on, and the smoke from the cafés and cigarettes, together with the incessant chatter and laughter from the street, filled her with something close to security. She did love the relentless energy of this young country, its vitality, its constant argument with itself, its turbulent identity. The world of Saint Hildegard’s was an oasis in this tempestuous land.
“So, you are going to stay in Israel, then?” Ben asked, shifting to firmer ground. “Are you going to study?”
Andrea looked at the cobblestones at her feet. Her face reflected the difficulty of the decision she was about to make. Finally, she looked the boy in the eyes and told him, “I have only a temporary visa. I had no papers when I arrived, so I cannot yet prove that I am Jewish. Technically, I suppose that I am a Spanish citizen—unless you consider the Basque republic legitimate.”
Ben was so ashamed he nearly hit himself across his stupid mouth. How could he be so insensitive as to breezily assume that everything was all right now? There was the matter of her parents. Andrea must have been wretchedly lonely. If her parents were in New Orleans, he would see to it that they were found. He would enlist his whole family in the search. What was important was for Andrea to be reunited with her family. But if her legal status in Israel was in question … What if she had to leave again, resume her sad wandering? Ben couldn’t bear the thought. He closed his eyes and experienced a violent realization, akin to the one that had one day caused him to change his life and leave America. He became convinced that he must help Andrea with everything at his disposal, even if that meant interrupting, for the time being, his studies in Israel. His resolve was sudden but firm. His heart told him that it was more than that.
Yehuda ben Yehuda had become so deeply intent on his sudden understanding that he did not see Andrea’s dreamy face come closer. His baby face now stood within a kissable inch of hers. When he looked sufficiently lost in himself, Andrea kissed him. The boy’s body underwent a shock as if electrified. For the next eternity or so he locked his soul to her lips and soared to heaven in delight. All mystical steps to the crystal crown of the Sefirot were illuminated.
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