White Tiger on Snow Mountain

by David Gordon

  When I got to the shul that night, yellow light was blurring the high windows and the blank building was hidden by two big trees that I hadn’t seen before. I walked across the lawn and up the steps and pushed in the door. The place was packed. I had pictured a few old men like the rabbi, mumbling together, but there had to be a couple of hundred people in here. Where did they all come from? How come I had never noticed? They had to live within walking distance, I knew. It was as if these black-clad strangers had been hiding in the shadows of my neighborhood, like bats or dark butterflies, folded into leaves, motionless, invisible until, with the night, they swarmed. Except LA had no shadows. The sun laid this city bare.

  An old man greeted me silently at the door, finger to his lips, and handed me a yarmulke and prayer book. I was early, the services weren’t done, and I ducked into a pew in the back. The room was plain, just packed rows of wooden benches and a balcony running around three sides. The rabbi was in front, the Torah unscrolled on the lectern before him. He wore a white skullcap and a tallis. While the men around me rocked and muttered, the rabbi’s prayer climbed higher, twisting as it rose up past the balcony to the roof. That voice that had seemed out of place on the street, too high, too singsong, too foreign, now unfolded its gorgeous feathers. Like a stick-legged bird that plays the fool on land, his voice was made for music. It sounded out of tune in mere speech. My gaze drifted up with the floating prayer and lit on a pair of eyes.

  Now, the balcony was covered with a wooden lattice, and I knew that the women were hidden back there, where they wouldn’t tempt the minds of men from God. So I really couldn’t see much, and to be honest, I pictured a bunch of ancient, storybook women, with witchy noses and hairy warts, with head scarves and old-world woolens over their lumpy forms. I’d heard that they shaved their heads and wore wigs (or was that nuns?) and had sex through a hole in a sheet, like cartoon ghosts. Let’s just say, I wasn’t exactly scanning for hot prospects. But there, in the gap between two wooden slats, I thought I saw two eyes.

  How? I don’t know, maybe I was imagining things. I couldn’t name their color or describe their shape, but my heart jumped and I gripped the prayer book like a believer. My vision narrowed to those twin points, and now it was I who was peeping through a crack in my cell, out on the world of light. The man beside me tapped my hand. I was on the wrong page. He pointed my finger to the correct line that I couldn’t read anyway. I nodded thanks, pretended to scrutinize it for a second, and then turned my face back to heaven, searching the walls and ceiling, as if looking for a star in the clouded sky, but my eyes were gone.

  After the service ended, I had to wait until the last of the worshippers left to turn everything off and lock up. I stood under a tree and searched the departing faces for that face, those eyes. No luck. Was it oval or round? Was the skin dark or fair and freckled? I somehow had the impression of dark curls, but maybe I was wrong. Now, dressed as shadows and walking through shadows, everyone looked the same. Finally, as the last stragglers moved off in groups of two or three and disappeared into the street, I gave up and went in to find the rabbi. He walked out of the sanctuary, arm in arm with a girl in her twenties. Of course, you’ve already guessed it was her, but I didn’t notice at first. I was distracted by the limp.

  She moved with a kind of up-and-down motion, her right hip jutting sideways and her right foot turned out. She had those shoes where one is higher than the other, but not the big Frankenstein ones I’d seen before. These were subtler, like regular black leather ladies’ boots, but with a good inch of extra sole added to the bottom of the right one. Maybe one of her legs was too short? It was hard to see what was what. She wore an ankle-length dark skirt and a white blouse that came to her wrists and buttoned high around her neck. But even those modest garments couldn’t hide the fact that there was a live girl underneath: I sensed the spread of her hips, the tiny waist where the blouse tucked, the push of her breasts against the stiff fabric. A heart was beating in there. Her head was bowed demurely, with the hair piled on top, but I could see a graceful ear and part of a pale nape, like a slice of moon behind the cloud of lace.

  “There you are,” the rabbi said, then, “This is my daughter Leah.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I held out my hand. Leah glanced at her father quickly and then briefly touched my hand. I realized that maybe I’d made a mistake: She wasn’t supposed to touch a man but hadn’t wanted to be rude. Blushing, she looked up at me.

  Her eyes were brown but darker than her father’s, less sad and with a gleam that, however shy the lashes, met and challenged my dim blues. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then the rabbi cleared his throat. He glanced around the foyer.

  “Are you chilly?”

  “What? Oh yeah,” I said. “Mind if I turn off the air conditioner? And the lights?”

  The rabbi groaned and Leah laughed, a small wild giggle, like a bird fluttering out of my hands. Her eyes flickered twice, between two beats of their lids. As I ran downstairs to the switches, I heard the rabbi shout good night.

  When I got back to my village, Merv was out front. “Hey, Larry,” he yelled with a slightly drunken gaiety. “Have a beer.” He rustled his paper bag. “Shit. None left. How about a Coke?”

  “Sure.” He went inside. His screen door banged, and the sky flapped above me like a dusty blanket. The stars shook out. Palm fronds scratched in the wind.

  Later, Merv went out to a bar and I went home, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about those eyes through the lattice, as if seen through a veil or the filigreed wall of a harem. About that high shoe and the body hidden under those clothes. I flipped through Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, but it was no use. I went out on the steps and felt my sweat dry and watched my smoke go up. Then I lay back down and read the Norton till dawn, Wordsworth to Keats straight through. When the sun lit my window, I went to the Chevron for a large coffee and a donut. On the way back I noticed two feet sticking out of the bushes next to Merv’s door. I parted the branches, and there he was, snoring away. He had his keys in his hand. Looked like he was coming home drunk and just missed by a few inches. I unlocked the door, and with a lot of prodding and pleading, he let me help him up. I got him onto the couch and covered him with a blanket. I noticed a pale band of skin around his wrist that used to be a watch. I wondered if they got his wallet too.

  “Steve,” he mumbled.

  “It’s Larry,” I said.

  “Larry.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Of course not,” I whispered, gently shutting the door. Who would I tell?

  I left early for shul. Lawn sprinklers were throwing a glow on the grass, but no wind moved the leaves and I could see it was going to be another killer day. I unlocked the door and turned on all the lights. I got the A/C going. Then I took my book and sat on the steps to make sure I wouldn’t miss Leah. But I couldn’t read. My racing mind surged ahead of the lines. At last she came rocking up the path, holding her bent father by the elbow. It was unclear who was supporting whom. I quickly kicked the mashed cigarette butts I’d accumulated into the shrubbery and smiled.

  “Good morning,” I called.

  “Shabbat shalom,” the rabbi answered. Leah said nothing, a punch in the heart, but when the rabbi went in, she loitered out front, turning her closed eyes to the sun. I grabbed the chance to study her face, trying to store up every detail for later, when she’d disappear again behind the screen. Her skin was astonishing. There were no splotches or marks, only a blending, from milk to pink to deep rose. Her hair was a liquidy black, and each curl seemed to be alive, growing, twisting right then. I realized how long it had to be, coiled up like that. If she let it down, how low would it fall? To the small of her back? To her hips? She opened her eyes and caught me staring. I fled back down to my book.

  “What are you reading?”

  “A poetry anthology. Keats, actually. I’m up to Keats.”

  “Who’s Keats?”

 
“Who’s Keats?” I blurted loudly, then caught myself. In a rush, I told her everything I knew about Keats. How he was self-taught, really, working class, and died of TB at twenty-five, broke and bereft in Rome. How he wrote all his greatest works in only twelve months, and in that brief flash burned himself into the heart of English literature. He wrote some of the most beautiful love poems ever, yet some speculate that he may have died a virgin. Her throat bloomed red, and I realized that I’d said “virgin” to a rabbi’s daughter. I blushed back and tried to extricate myself by getting high-minded but only dug deeper.

  “You know what Oscar Wilde said?”

  She shook her head no. Of course not!

  “Never mind,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that Keats’s grave was the holiest site in Rome.”

  “That’s beautiful,” she said and smiled. It was the first smile. “I’d love to read him some time.”

  “You can borrow this.” I offered her the book. “I mean I’ve read it.”

  “No, I can’t. It’s so big.”

  “Well, there’s just a few pages of Keats.”

  “No, I mean because of my father.”

  Just then the first worshippers appeared, coming up the block in their black, the young kids scampering ahead. One dropped his yarmulke and ran back. On an impulse, I opened the book to the page I’d turned down and ripped it out.

  “Here.” I crushed the poem and pressed it into her palm. For a second, her eyes widened like a startled animal’s, mingling fear and high spirits. Then she hurried in, pushing my paper rose under the sleeve of her blouse.

  I sat through the whole service this time, eyes fixed on the higher realms. Again, I can’t really say what I saw through that screen, but I believe I found her in the diamond of a lattice. I believe that the prayer book she held before her face hid the “Ode on Melancholy.” I believe that when she looked up from the book and down into the congregation her eyes were searching for mine and that she found them, gazing up among the bowed heads, and that she looked right at me. And I believe she was crying.

  The next few days felt like I had a fever. It was hotter than ever and my mind felt stuck, half melted and struggling to move. It would take me an hour to get through a page of On the Genealogy of Morals. Then I’d fall asleep, just for a moment, for a single breath, and have a long dream. Once I was in Turin with Nietzsche, when he was mad, walking in the town square. He put his arm around me. “Cómo está?” he asked, in Spanish I guess, but in my dream this was Italian. “I am God,” he said, happily. “I made this farce.”

  I hadn’t seen Leah after the service. I guess the women left earlier, while the men stayed all day, and my vision of her reading the poem faded and became as unbelievable as my Nietzsche dream. I spent a lot of time out on the step with Merv, but I didn’t mention Leah, although my mind ceaselessly repeated her name. What would I say? The whole thing was better off forgotten. Still, when Wednesday came and I went to the rabbi’s house to get my pay, all my nerves were shaking and a drop of sweat fell from my forehead as I knelt to tie my sneakers on his walk.

  The rabbi lived just two streets west of me, on a block parallel to my own, but I had never been down it. The house was small, with a sloped shingle roof and a porch. The garden was rich but overgrown, a nest of wildflowers and vines and weeds, twining together without pattern. The rabbi answered the door himself. His arms were white as chicken in the short-sleeved white dress shirt, and I saw the knots of his tefillin hanging out. He sat me down in his book-choked back office and insisted, vehemently, that I drink hot tea with him, that it would cool me down. He served it in a glass with a lump of sugar on the side.

  The floor was crooked, I saw sand and pennies glittering between the warped boards, and the stuffing in my chair was shot. I had to lurch forward to grab my tea, and a little splash burned my arm. I rested my eyes on the books. They were stacked everywhere, the desk, the floor, the couch, all Hebrew, and those rows of unknowable letters calmed me down. It was a relief to look at something beautiful without straining to comprehend it. There was a photo of a woman tucked between the volumes on a shelf. She was standing in the garden, which looked even more overgrown than it was now. It teemed with crazy flowers, blues and reds by her feet and the yellow heads of sunflowers nodding from necks taller than hers. She wore a head scarf and a printed apron over her dress. The sun blanched her face, made it indistinct, but the shape of the forehead and the dark smudges of the eyes were Leah’s.

  “Is that your wife?”

  “Yes, that’s my Miriam, alav hashalom.”

  I must have smiled blankly because he leaned forward and patted my hand.

  “In Hebrew this means she should rest in peace.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. She’s been dead now twenty-four years.” Leah, he told me, had been a late last child, a surprise and they’d thought a blessing. But Miriam had died giving birth to Leah, who came with her twisted leg. Now the two lived alone in the house. His three other daughters, much older, were all long grown and married.

  “You must miss her.”

  He shrugged. “I see Miriam every night in my dreams. And I hear her in the garden, singing. I haven’t touched that garden since she died, but it just keeps blooming. Once, when I had a fever, she even made me one of her special teas. Better than this we’re drinking.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling at his thoughts. His teeth were chipped and yellow. “I was lying in bed, and Leah brought me a pot of tea. When I tasted it, I was amazed. It was the tea my wife made, a special mixture only she knew. I drank it, and in the morning I was fine. I asked Leah, how did you know to make your mother’s tea? She said, Daddy, you were dreaming. It was just Lipton’s. But when I checked the pot, there it was, the herbs in the bottom. And in the garden those plants were cut.”

  “What did Leah say?”

  “I didn’t tell her. It would make her sad.” He put his sugar in his mouth and crunched it, then raised the steaming glass to his lips.

  There was no sign of Leah, and by the time the rabbi escorted me out, I was in despair. Pushing my way through the garden—it seemed to have grown denser since I came—I felt something, a leaf, a bug, brush my neck and I turned. There was Leah, in a window, watching me from the curtains. The sun was high, and the sky’s reflection flashed on the glass. The truth was, all I saw clearly was blue air and clouds and a white gem of light with only the faintest silhouette of a girl behind it, a pale oval face framed by stirring lace. Still, I reached into my pocket and slipped out the page of Keats I had carefully cut out for her, “Ode to a Nightingale,” and had folded again and again into a tiny bundle. I waved blindly and, hoping she was watching me and the rabbi wasn’t, I dropped it in the tall grass.

  “What are you waving for?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I just saw Leah.”

  He laughed again. “Go lie down. You’re dreaming. Leah’s at the market.”

  But I couldn’t rest. I rolled around on my mattress until the damp sheets were strangling me. I went to the sink and splashed water on my head. I watched moths bounce against my screens. After two nights like this, I decided to stalk her. I knew I was acting crazy, but I didn’t care. I had to get this thought out of my head. I crouched behind a parked car up the block, where I had a clear view of their house. After an hour, the car’s owner appeared and I had to pretend that I was looking for a lost necklace.

  “I’m sure it was here,” I told the guy in the Lakers jacket and cap. My legs were asleep, and I stumbled around, head bowed low over the strip of grass by the curb. “You didn’t see it?” I asked him. “It had a little charm shaped like a dog? It was my mother’s.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Good luck.” When he drove off, I saw Leah standing on the sidewalk by her house and staring at me. She turned abruptly and headed down the block.

  “Wait,” I called and went after her, but my leg
s were still numb and she moved surprisingly fast, considering her jerky, off-center sway. She was appalled, of course, to see me hobbling behind her, but I caught her by the corner, where she had to stop for the light.

  “Leah, wait, please.”

  “What?” she demanded, catching her breath. “What are you following me for? It’s Shabbos tonight. I’ve got to get to the bakery.”

  “It’s Friday?” I’d completely forgotten. I could’ve waited to see her at the shul. I had to shower and get ready myself. “What time is it now? My watch stopped.”

  She sighed with exasperation and, checking both ways, undid a button on her blouse. She reached in and pulled out two folded pages, wrinkled and pressed flat like flowers in a book.

  “Here,” she said. “Take these.” She pushed them into my hand—the Keats odes, still warm.

  “You found this?” I asked. “How did you know I left it for you?”

  She glared at me. “What do you mean? It was sitting on my front step when I got home. Thank God my father didn’t find it first.”

  “But how did you know you’d see me today?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how did you know to bring them now?”

  She blushed. Her throat turned crimson, and the blood rose quickly to her cheeks. “I didn’t. I was afraid to leave them anywhere, in case my father saw. Now just please leave me alone. My God, if he saw us.”

  “No, wait, you don’t understand. If you knew the truth about me . . .”

  “I know enough,” she said and turned to go. I wanted to grab her hand, but restrained myself. I wanted to shout, “I’m a Jew. A Jew!” but now that seemed even worse: I’d denied my people and desecrated the Sabbath just to make a little cash. I watched her race away from me, her dark hair coming undone, her hips rising and falling.