The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  17

  June 27, 2001

  The 6th of Tammuz, 5761

  Once more that noise out of hell, as if it never stopped, and the low-grade home movie that makes everything look like a bad dream. The title this time is Michelle Likes a Drink Now and Then. The camera zooms in jerkily on the same basement and focuses on the young woman. She is completely drunk, squatting on all fours on a low table like a little white rabbit, her bare bottom a bright patch against the dark background. The college students surround her, shouting and miming the repetitive, apelike movements of a cheerleading team. The young man behind her has already penetrated her and tosses her back and forth like a rag doll. Michelle’s toneless muscles can’t hold her up and she flops from side to side, a new wave of cheers urging her on each time she nearly tips over. Nonchalantly, the young man lifts her small body, straightens it on the table, and resumes his thrusting as if it never had been interrupted. Is she enjoying it? Resisting? Does she have any idea of what’s happening? She’s so drunk that there’s no way of knowing. A second youngster, his pants down halfway to his knees, stands at the other end of the table and tries to stuff his erect penis into Michelle’s mouth. She shakes her head with a stubborn, mulish obstinacy and struggles to spit out the foreign object, which he keeps trying to push past her flaccid lips.

  The screen goes dark. A new scene. She’s now flat on her back on the table, thrown this way and that by whoever is on top of her. Her round, firm breasts have fallen out of the blouse and bounce comically, up and down. The young man in front of her hasn’t given up and is still trying to force his penis into her mouth. Michelle shakes her head disjointedly from side to side with stubborn helplessness.

  The screen goes dark and is silent again. Scene Three. Michelle is sprawled, vanquished, on the stomach of a young man. (His face is not in the picture, but who cares about his face?) She is impaled on his erect penis. At some point, she must have passed out. Her miniskirt is pulled down and her goose-pimply bottom is clawed red. A drunk college student sticks his face into the rectangular field of the film. He waves a beer bottle in greeting, grins at the camera, and says something inaudible to Michelle. His checked flannel shirt, baseball cap, and vulgar self-satisfaction suggest a big game hunter photographed with a trophy. Darkness, The End. The video clip is over. How can such things be allowed to happen? It’s rape, gang rape, pure and simple! There are laws against it. Poor little Michelle. What have they done to her? Those firm little breasts, the pounding piston-like thrusts. They didn’t even bother to undress her. They ran her down like an animal, pulled up her skirt and had their fun. That sweet little, goose-pimply, red-streaked bottom! Is she cold? Is it cold in the satanic beer cellar she’s been raped in by devils? They’ve pinched her, raked her skin, vented their bestial lust on the soft hillocks of her flesh. She lies without moving, spitted on a huge uncircumcised penis as though on a monstrous iron stake. Not even the twins can save their Michelle, their unattainable love. They lie far away in their beds, wallowing in their pain, powerless.

  18

  June 28, 2011

  The 7th of Tammuz, 5761

  Twelve noon. Andrew, pale and wan, sunglasses shading eyes red from sleeplessness, walked slowly eastward on West 4th Street, bound for the formidable redbrick building of Hebrew Union College. Standing in the middle of the NYU complex, it was a structure he knew but never had been in. He had been surprised to receive an invitation to a memorial gathering there to mark an academic year since the death of the celebrated Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; he had no idea where the event’s organizers had found his address or why they had added him to the list of invitees. Although Andrew had first met the Israeli poet when Amichai was a visiting lecturer at NYU and had kept up an acquaintanceship with him until his death the previous September, they weren’t close friends and didn’t move in the same circles. Nonetheless—if nothing else, his insomnia had forced a painful honesty on his usually well-defended mind—he welcomed the excuse to take a break from his routine and get out into the world. Above all, he was glad to take time off from the wretched article that he still hadn’t finished.

  What time did the memorial begin? He had left the invitation at home and couldn’t remember if it was twelve or twelve thirty. A cup of coffee (it would be his third of the day) wouldn’t hurt. It might restore his energy level, which had run down in the course of a morning that had started with waking far too early.

  The traffic on Broadway, which roared like a rampaging river, broke Andrew’s troubled train of thought. How had he gotten all the way to Broadway? Confused, he looked in both directions, unable to orient himself on the city’s grid. The HUC building was farther west, near the Levitt Building. Feeling as woozy as if he had had a few drinks, Andrew turned around. Ahead of him, 4th Street now ran westward to the invisible river hidden behind the city’s clutter. He blinked and shook his head, trying to get over his sudden dizziness. Where, damn it, was HUC? Could he have passed it without noticing? Hurriedly he began walking west. There was no time now for coffee or a bite to eat. The overhead sun, directly above him at its noonday zenith, seemed to saw the sky deafeningly, drowning out the sounds of the city. He walked on, carried more by his inertia than willful locomotion, blindly following the street to its next corner in the harsh light flooding the city. West 4th and Mercer. How could that be? He knew the area well. It was his home turf—or had been, anyway, until a few weeks ago—and he was certain that the building was not west of Greene Street. Could he be dreaming? Turning around once more as though sucked into a nightmare, he was startled to see, just a few steps away, the high, square entrance of Hebrew Union College looking down at him with unconcerned mockery.

  Andrew breathed deeply, trying to pull himself together, and shuffled toward the entrance. He felt about to faint. Somehow, he had forgotten to eat today. Leaning one hand against the brick side of the building to steady himself, he removed his sunglasses with the other and stuck them in his shirt pocket. For a while, eyes covered by his fingers, he stood desperately seeking to regain a sense of reality. Voices echoed in his head. Fragmentary visions, the splinters of shadows, passed before his eyes, knocking on the gates of consciousness as if threatening to break them down and burst into the world. Pedestrians strode nimbly around him, regarding him with a moment’s puzzlement that quickly receded into a customary urban indifference. The minutes went by, void and disconnected. His head was spinning more slowly now and the bitter reflux in his throat had retreated to his stomach. Uncovering his eyes, he pushed his way through the revolving door and entered the lobby. Passing the security guard and reception desk, he crossed the marble floor slowly, as if still unsure of his legs, and wandered through the cold, remote, ultramodern lobby of the Reform rabbinical school.

  The walls of the lobby, painted a museum white, were hung with a dozen or so mediocre works of art displayed with pride in modest institutional frames. They were concerned with the usual variety of Jewish themes and conveyed in the simple, unimaginative, semiabstract style that was a feature of contemporary religious art. Andrew filed past them, regarding them with a mixture of disdain and—for some reason—vague guilt. They were so depressing. He turned to the lobby’s display cases in which modern and ancient Judaica reposed lifelessly, protected by double-glazed panels. Hushed, hesitant voices were speaking to him. He was looking for something, something forgotten but important—but what? He glanced at the exhibits without mentally processing what he saw: Sabbath candlesticks, Kiddush cups, Hanukkah menorahs and wooden dreidls—unwanted, discarded objects, caged in glass, that life no longer had a use for.

  A pristine, thrilling gleam of burnished bronze interrupted Andrew’s brooding. A huge, rounded, seven-branched candelabrum, crafted with a skill belonging to an age gone by, stood grandly on a stand, shining with an inner light that illuminated its surroundings with an unearthly vitality. It was a thing of astonishing beauty. Andrew’s breath was taken away. This was it! This was what he had been looking for—this ravi
shing, golden-hued artifact! He approached it with controlled excitement and halted a few feet away, his heart beating like a pilgrim’s who has finally reached his longed-for destination. For a long time he stood looking at the glorious object, lingering on its magnificently executed details. Although he had seen such menorahs more than once, some of them in rare Judaica collections, this one was special. He thought he saw a strange halo surrounding it, an invisible electrical field.

  A museum label at the candelabrum’s foot described its provenance. It had been looted by the Nazis from a Jewish banker’s home in Frankfurt am Main, only to turn up after the war at a shady antique dealer’s in Philadelphia. Bought from him for a hefty sum by the wealthy American descendants of another Jewish Frankfurt family that had emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, it was donated by them to the Reform movement in honor of their deceased father after he passed away at a ripe old age surrounded by his American progeny. Though intriguing, this history was only half-absorbed by Andrew, as was the information that the candelabrum was meant to be an exact reproduction, based on ancient Hebrew and Aramaic sources, of the renowned Menorah pillaged by the Romans when they destroyed the Holy Temple of Jerusalem in the year AD 70; supposedly brought to Rome and displayed with other sacred objects in Titus’s triumphal procession, it then disappeared, inspiring esoteric speculation throughout the ages on its whereabouts. Andrew was in too much of a state to take all this in. His pulse hammered in his temples. The doors of The House opened wide and a river of light poured through them. Although the two candelabra, the one on the stand and the one in his vision, were highly similar, there were unmistakable differences. The oil bowls in the burnished bronze reproduction were smaller than the original. Its branches were set at a wider angle. Its base, too, didn’t look quite the same, perhaps because it was portable and the candelabrum of his visions was not.

  Suddenly, the doors of Andrew’s vision slammed loudly shut. Its glow that outshone the lights on the lobby’s ceiling faded away. As if a wire plugging a mental screen into a distant current had been severed by a sword stroke, Andrew was torn from the ravishing sight. He blinked in surprise, waking from his dream. The large, empty lobby was still there, its glass cases like striped gray rocks in an untilled field. Where was he? What was happening? What was he doing in this place full of dread? Right: the Amichai memorial. His visions. What was he going to do about them? He would go crazy, that much was clear. He would be locked up in a madhouse if they didn’t stop. What time was it? Late, very late. He had to find the chapel.

  Andrew cautiously pushed open the heavy wooden doors of the chapel, hoping his late arrival would go unnoticed. The vestiges of his vision ran through him like the ripples of an aftershock, flaring in his consciousness like the last flashes of lightning at a storm’s end. The ceremony was already under way. The spotlighted front of the auditorium was full. The first row was occupied by the scholars, university professors, and lecturers whose demeanor bespoke the refined ennui of literary grandees. In the second row sat the New York Hebraists, a motley assortment of aging eccentrics reminiscent of musty old newspapers and high-minded intellectual debates. Rows three and four were taken by the rabbinical students, most of them young women with brightly knit skullcaps perched on their heads. Behind them, out of range of the spotlights, were the hoi polloi: poetry lovers, homesick Israelis, and the usual oddballs who filled the galleries at public events.

  Andrew tiptoed inside, trying to blend with the shadows, and found a seat in the back, shrouded in semi-obscurity. The chapel resembled a small concert hall more than a place of worship. Only a few flimsy prayer shawls, neatly folded like theatrical props on an antique-looking wooden rack by the entrance, testified to its official purpose. He surveyed the scene with weary eyes. Although the speakers’ remarks reached his eardrums, they failed to penetrate the circuits of his brain. He felt an ominous mixture of nameless anxiety, nervous exhaustion, incipient hysteria, and—surprisingly, considering that he and Amichai did not know each other that well—an unexpected sense of bereavement. The poet’s warm irony and unique, clear-sighted humanity would be missed. . . . A memory connected to him was struggling to rise from the bottom of Andrew’s consciousness. It was something that had fallen into the sea of forgetfulness, where it glittered in the depths like a bright, precious object whose refraction shimmered dreamily on the surface. He couldn’t believe he had forgotten. Just a minute or two ago it had been there.

  Andrew looked up and glanced at the audience distractedly, only half-seeing its profiles that were turned attentively toward the speaker. In a far row, a familiar face that he couldn’t place roused him from his thoughts. For a moment, their glances met. With a flicker of recognition, the man smiled slightly in Andrew’s direction. Embarrassed, as though caught peeking, Andrew looked down at the ground, still feeling the man’s eyes on him.

  It was his neighbor from 110th Street! The man with the two dogs, the man from Alison’s Sunday school who was writing so passionately in the café! What was he doing here? Of course. He was an Israeli, he spoke Hebrew. Even if he didn’t look like a literary type, he had come to pay his respects. Yet the sight of him had a powerful effect. Andrew felt drawn to him with an eagerness he couldn’t describe and didn’t know what to make of. He wanted to get up, cross the room, and say something. Had it not been so absurd, so insane, he would have said that the man held a key to the mystery that had taken control of his life, a secret code that might help decipher it.

  He recalled their first meeting in the street. Dredged from his memory, it brought with it another, more substantial recollection, the one that had lain on the seabed of his consciousness all morning, unable to surface. When had it happened? He couldn’t say. At least several years ago: his mind was too groggy to calculate more exactly. He was with a group in Jerusalem as a guest of the Kandel Institute for Social and Cultural Studies. His hosts, who attributed great importance to his presence, had gone out of their way to introduce him to the cream of Jerusalem intellectual society, no doubt in anticipation of similar treatment when they visited New York.

  One of the high points of his stay in Jerusalem was a guided tour of the Old City, a fascinating personal glimpse of it given by none other than Yehuda Amichai, already then Israel’s unofficial poet laureate. The tour took place on a Jerusalem spring day that was like summer in every respect. The luncheon preceding it had been heavier than was the norm in Europe or America, and the guests were drowsy and lethargic by the time they reached the narrow lanes of the restored Jewish Quarter with their asphyxiating, fortresslike atmosphere and the obscenely excessive use of local Jerusalem stone that felt like an arrogant, light-crazed architectural nightmare. The tour’s climax was a half-comically intended visit to an out-of-the-way museum that displayed facsimiles, based on ancient descriptions, drawing, and engravings, of the implements used in the Second Temple. The rabbi who founded and ran the place, Amichai warned his charges with a friendly, ironic wink at Andrew, as was apparent from his last name, was himself a descendant of the ancient priestly clan and had a more than theoretical interest in his project. The museum was less a repository of the past than an “exhibition of the future” whose reproductions would serve as a basis for the Third Temple that would rise on the ruins of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, called by “our friends, the Bible-quoting fanatics,” as Amichai referred to Israel’s religious Messianists, “Desolate Abomination.”

  Amichai’s ironic manner vanished as soon as they reached the entrance of the museum, replaced by a more vehement, judgmental tone that Andrew took to be an indication of distress. Although the poet continued to speak of the place they were in as a curiosity, one more bizarrely colorful feature of a sacred, wonderful, and thoroughly daft city, his increasingly frequent use of the words “insane” and “insanity” sounded like the apology of someone forced to introduce a guest to a deranged relative. As though fearing to be associated with such a person, he stressed that the museum represented the lunatic
fringe of a sane society and was funded not by Israelis but by American Jews. (Here he threw Andrew another, somewhat less friendly but even more ironic look.) Andrew, sensing Amichai’s discomfort, had come to his aid with some urbane comments on the invention of nationalism, the construction of the past in the image of the present, and the longing for an imagined golden age that accompanied all nation-building projects—“in this case,” he said, pointing to the strange implements on exhibit, many of which were made of pure gold, “a quite literally golden one.” Their surroundings now contextualized by the academic clichés they were accustomed to, the members of the group responded with relieved laughter. Amichai, too, smiled appreciatively, although his discomfort hardly seemed relieved.