She was such a strange person, she thought, now with a heavy sort of sorrow—and there would be no escaping that into a new self. She would always be the same, stumblingly fanatical woman she had always been—since the day she brought home her first piece of homework in kindergarten and did it with such delight at the dining room table. The fanaticism would always be there, as much as the perspicacity, as much as the grief, as much as the aloofness that seemed inextricable from the academic mind-set with which she’d been brought up—her zealotry always impelling her to take one step, or a thousand, too many. No one would ever appear to rescue her from that. She glanced once more at the horizon—then began hopping around to the front of the building.
She made it to Jonah’s door; as she was about to open it, the door beside it swung open and a skinny, dark-skinned man in a blue cap and an oversize pink polo shirt walked out, carrying a broom. He stared at her, aghast.
She couldn’t imagine what he made of her: in a billowing T-shirt and basketball shorts, barefoot and bleeding, having stayed up all night. “I’m a friend of Jonah’s,” she began, lowering the toes of the wounded foot to the ground. “I was just … visiting…”
He nodded his way through this information—and then he broke into a startlingly happy smile. “You are the woman!” he declared.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that’s right.”
This, apparently, was hilarious: He nearly doubled over with laughter, clapping his hands in delight. “I said to him, I said today,” he laughed. “Oh, I told him, sister, I told him.”
Judith was touched that Jonah had told other people about his search for her—was touched, too, by how genuinely pleased this man seemed that it had been a success.
“Now you must tell me, sister,” he said, when his laughter finally abated. “Where were you hiding?”
She hadn’t thought of herself as hiding—though she understood that from a certain point of view, she had been. “It’s … difficult to explain,” she answered.
“I always keep my eye on him, sister,” the man went on, tapping his eye. “Now you keep an eye on him, too.”
She couldn’t identify his accent as anything but African, and this ignorance bothered her. “Where are you from?” she asked him.
“From Mozambique,” he replied. “In Africa.”
“You speak Portuguese, then?”
He answered in what she could recognize as the language, but she didn’t understand it. She was fluent in French, conversant in German and Italian, and if there had been a copy of the Aeneid lying around, she could probably have translated a good deal of it. But she didn’t speak Portuguese—and it struck her, you could spend your whole life, and never know what you’d need to learn.
“What’s Mozambique like?”
He considered for a few seconds, as though the answer was complicated—which, she reasoned, it must be. “Mozambique is beautiful. Not like here. Oceans, mountains, people. Everything in Mozambique is very beautiful. But too much…” And he made his face elaborately sinister and performed a gesture of plucking something from his pocket.
“Graft?” Judith offered.
“Here is better. Work, work, work, you get a little money, yes, only a little money, but then more and more. My brothers come soon,” he said. And then he added with pride, “Later, I will marry.” He reached into his back pocket, took out a Velcro wallet—handed her a three-by-three photograph: a heavy-set woman with dark black skin and a somber expression on her face, her hair elaborately braided, seated before a screen painted with blue sky and gauzy white clouds.
Judith thought of the portrait of her great-grandfather that had hung in her childhood living room. She thought of her family: the Kleins, her mother’s side, murdered en masse in Europe, her grandmother the only survivor, arriving in Philadelphia at sixteen; the Bulbrooks, her father’s side, immigrants from Austria to New Jersey sometime in the first decade of the previous century, for forty years owning a shoe store on Bloomfield Avenue in Caldwell. They had left Europe, as this man had left Africa, survivors of everything—and built a new home, a new family, from out of nothing. Those were her forebears.
“It’s too bad there’s only one America,” she said to him. “It’s too bad there’s nowhere else to go to start all over from here.”
He didn’t answer, just smiled at her—and after a moment she realized he hadn’t understood. And why should he? she thought. His English was better than her Portuguese. Besides, he was in the midst of playing the central role in a great story: the migration across continents—the genesis of a new way of life for his descendants for generations to come. Maybe one day his portrait would hang in the living room of his great-granddaughter—and she would grow up to be one of those hypereducated overachievers who goes on to change the world, or doesn’t: like Judith Klein Bulbrook.
No, there was no other America. There was no other place where this man’s story would have been possible, where hers would have been possible. And as the Colonel often said, there wasn’t much of it left. For the first time it occurred to her that she owed something to the stories that had preceded hers; that she had to have a certain faith in those stories, and in her own story, as well. Only she could be the hero of her own life. It was the way she’d been raised.
She went back into the room. Jonah had gotten up, was gathering his things from out of the drawers—packing. “Wait,” she told him. “There’s something I have to do first.”
5. AND GOD SAW THEIR WORKS
The sun rose higher in the azure sky above Las Vegas, illuminating fully the city below, the mountains across the horizon appearing like spectators in an amphitheater, gathered there to see what the day held: whatever feats, whatever failures. Pastor Keith had gotten out of bed, was stirring the sugar into his coffee as he sat at the table in his kitchen, the radio on, the spoon clinking against the side of the mug as he stared at the wall and tried to imagine how he would explain what he’d decided. By then the Colonel had been at his desk for hours. He had before him the latest blueprints for the lobby of the central tower of the Babylon Center—he was deciding where to end a line that indicated how far the concierge desk would extend to the east in front of the windows before the lake. He made the line, he erased it; he made the line again, he erased it again. A thousand feet below him, on the casino floor, convention-goers were lined up for coffee, their badges in plastic sleeves around their necks. Only a few of the table games were open, but every row of slots had a player or two—trying their luck. In Summerlin, to the west, neighbors were walking from identical doorways down identical drives for the newspaper. In the shelters on Foremaster, to the north, all the beds were being cleared for the day, and everyone going out was informed to come at least an hour early if they wanted to be sure of a bed when the doors opened again that night. How they would fill the intervening time was up to them: It was, after all, a city like any other. In Istanbul, Lindsey and Bonnie were standing in their matching North Face jackets in front of the Blue Mosque. In Amsterdam, Max and Rafik were playing chess on the houseboat—joints burning in the ashtray between them as they talked. In New York it was already well into the morning. The traffic on the bridges and tunnels had cleared a little, the dog walkers and food trucks appeared on the sidewalks. Milim Oh, now a resident at Cornell, was seeing patients as part of her oncology rotation. In the offices of Cunningham Wolf LLP, lawyers were busily preparing the final settlement between BBEC and Dyomax. On Spring Street, Brett was showing a one-bedroom apartment to a middle-aged divorcé, warming him up to give him the card for Guru Phil. Becky and Danny were talking on the phone for the second time that morning: It was part of a long, painful reconciliation or a further prolonging of a torturous breakup. Who could know? Sylvia was at her desk, reviewing the org announcement of her promotion to vice president at Ellis–Michaels. It was what she’d wanted; she felt happy. And Zoey was avoiding working on the Glossified article she needed to write by updating her résumé, and was procrastinating fr
om that by scrutinizing the JDate profile of the man she was seeing for the first time that night. He was a lawyer, but on the other hand, he did yoga.
Here we go again, Zoey thought.
And Judith and Jonah were buzzed through the gate of the Greater Love Hath No Man Church. They weren’t expected, but Fernanda told them the pastor would see them, and escorted them past the semicircle of chairs in the basement that had been set up for the weekly ESL class. In his tiny office with the purple JESUS SAVES! banner, which Judith had never seen before, Pastor Keith greeted them both with his customary assurance that they were welcome there. He seemed only mildly surprised to see them together. By the questions he asked, Jonah thought he expected them to ask him to marry them. But that was not why they had come.
Judith returned the contracts he’d signed the previous day—a little worse for wear in their plastic folder. She explained to him who owned the Downtown Las Vegas Development Group, and what its purpose was, and what the Babylon Center would be, and where it would be. And then she placed on his desk a check for $876,000. She listened to his objections serenely, just as she had listened to Jonah’s. It was the least that she owed, she said when the Pastor was done. Trying to buy the church as she had was wrong—and she’d known it was wrong, which was why she’d tried to do it. This, she told him, was what her parents would have wanted.
Pastor Keith stared at the check on the pile of papers on his desk for a long time. “This is a miracle,” he finally declared—though to Jonah he sounded uncertain. “Miracles happen every day.” He finally took the check and put it into the pocket of his sweater vest—a little wearily, Jonah thought.
As they came outside, the day had become only more glorious—the sun only brighter, the oceanic blue of the sky only deeper. And Jonah saw that already dozens of people had lined up for the soup kitchen.
* * *
They returned to the Aces High. They had stopped by Judith’s apartment before going to the church. She sat with the duffel bag of her things beside her on the bed as Jonah began to pack the clothes from the dresser into the suitcase he’d come with. As he opened the last drawer, the man in the next room was shouting again: “Oh my God, fuck you! Jesus Christ, you fucking bitch! Fuck you! God damn it, fuck you!”
Jonah shut the drawer. “I don’t understand.”
“What?” she asked.
He turned around to look at her—her long, thin legs folded before her as she sat on the bed. “What will happen to that church?” he asked.
“It will stay open.”
“Yeah, but for how long? I mean, it’s not like they won’t go ahead with the casino, right? It’s not like we stopped anything, is it?”
She recognized the desperate look on his face. “Do you want to stay and try to stop it?” It seemed an unlikely choice—but she found she was in the opposite place from him: After today, she was eager for anything.
“But what would be the point of stopping it?” he said, flinging his arms in the air. “What would we be saving? Pawnshops, and abandoned buildings, and”—he kicked the dresser—“and, and, a church no one even goes to…”
“There are things worth saving there,” she told him. “There are things worth saving anywhere.”
“But it’s all over now—and it’s all still there. What was the point—of any of it?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she answered. “It’s not all over.”
“Oh? So what happens now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. And then she added, hopefully, “We’ll see.”
He looked at her: blond hair frizzing, face pale without its makeup, black eyes, lanky frame, surgically perfect nose—brilliant, introverted mind—all her baggage. Did she really think it was so simple? That the two of them would just go off together? And what did she imagine they would be? A couple? He hadn’t been looking for a new relationship—was that what she wanted? Would that be enough, after all of this? And how would it work between them? What if he disappointed her? What would that represent? What if it ended the way all his other relationships had? Or what if his visions made a life together impossible? And would there be more visions? And if there weren’t, would that mean success or failure? That he had fulfilled God’s plans or not? And how could you ever be certain God had a plan? When did it stop?
When did you know?
V. THE DESERT, THE OCEAN
Jonah walked from the room in the Aces High, through the parking lot—past the motels and bus stops and vacant lots—across a final strip of highway—and into the desert. He walked until the last of the road sank into the heat shimmer of the horizon behind—and Jonah saw in every direction the unbounded desert—the scrub clinging to its face giving its tracts the look of a vast, sealike rolling. And he lay down with his back on the scorched sand and with his face toward the sun, relentless and colorless—and he unfurled for the Lord his sorrow: “I never knew what it meant to be a man of God. I don’t know what I’ve done, and whether it was according to your will or not. I don’t know what the world is, and when I see you in it, it’s only in glimpses. And there is so much more in the world I know is not you. How can I live in a world I can’t comprehend? How can I serve a God whose will I can’t understand? It would be better for me to die than to live.” And as a cloud moved across the dome of the sky, a shadow was cast across Jonah’s face—and in the cool of this shadow Jonah felt a final mercy—felt all that was best in life—all that was good, and all that was holy—and in a few moments the sun had climbed higher and the cloud drifted away and the shadow was gone—and God said to Jonah, Is there not so much more under heaven than shadow?
And Jonah rejoined our vast and mysterious world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to thank a few of the many people without whose assistance The Book of Jonah would not have been possible. I am forever indebted to Susan Golomb for seeing something in my writing and for supporting it in innumerable ways, as well as to Terra Chalberg, Eliza Rothstein, Soumeya Bendimerad, and Krista Ingebretson. Gillian Blake, my tireless and extraordinary editor, Stephen Rubin, Maggie Richards, Kenn Russell, Kathy Lord, Caroline Zancan, and the rest of the team at Henry Holt were fantastic partners in the creation of this book.
Michael Ellis and Lauren Popper Ellis provided valuable early feedback, and Sheila Dvorak Galione’s insights were essential, as they’ve been for as long as I’ve known her. Caroline “Rolls” Hailey, Leslie Geddes, and Michael Geier helped ensure the characters could speak, and swear, correctly in a variety of languages. I am also grateful to everyone at the Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada for opening a window on the admirable work they do every day.
I was extremely fortunate to have had teachers—in the public schools of Amherst, Massachusetts, at Columbia University, and at Oxford University—who made it their business to give me a good education. This book is a testament to their hard work. I’m even more fortunate to have the family I do—people who supported and encouraged me in my writing when the rest of the world didn’t even know I was doing it. Mom, Dad, Jon, Sarah, Aleigh, Jeff, Grandma, my aunts, uncles, cousins, niece and nephews, and in-laws—thank you for being there. The memories of my aunt Ruth, my aunt Franny, and my grandpa Harry were inspirations in completing this book. I also want to express my gratitude to my friends, all of whom are brothers and sisters to me, too.
Finally, the greatest good luck I ever had was at the old Yankee Stadium in August 2004, when I sat down beside a woman who has filled my life with joy and adventure ever since. Julie, without your generosity of spirit, your faith, your intelligence, this book could not have been written. I don’t know if I can ever find a way to thank you for that—but I’m grateful I have a lifetime to try.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA MAX FELDMAN is a writer of fiction and plays. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, he graduated from Columbia University, and has lived in England, Switzerland, and New York City. This is his first novel.
Reading Group Gold
The Book of Jonah
Joshua Max Feldman
Discussion Questions
1. In the biblical text of the book of Jonah, God instructs Jonah to prophesy the destruction of the city of Nineveh, yet Jonah tries to escape the divine mission. Although the novel is based on a story that is thousands of years old, how does it translate to a modern story that is relevant today? What are some of the themes that are common in the lives of both Jonah of the Bible and Jonah in the novel?
2. Describe Jonah at the beginning of the novel and how he is changed after he starts having visions. Why is he no longer able to be the same person that he once was, no matter how hard he tries? Why do you think Jonah is “chosen” by God?
3. Jonah’s life unravels just at the moment when he thinks he has achieved everything he has always wanted. In the same way, Judith’s world comes crumbling down when she feels that her life is perfect, then loses everything she holds dear in life. What is the purpose of loss in life? Do you think that one must be stripped of everything in order to find out who he/she really is? Or are the losses in life mere obstacles that challenge one to become the person he/she is meant to be?
4. The story moves from New York to Amsterdam, and then Las Vegas. What are the characteristics of each location, and how does each unique setting act as the perfect backdrop for the different stages in the characters’ journey?
5. What is the significance of being naked in the context of the story? There are multiple references to the nakedness of others, and also instances when the characters examine themselves stripped down and unclothed. What does it mean when the Hasid says, “The body is clothed, but the soul is naked?”
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