by Ruby Namdar
The museum’s founder, the rabbi-priest, now appeared, interrupting the intellectual banter. He wore a large white yarmulke embroidered around its edges with seven-branched candelabra in gold and indigo thread, and the open collar of his white shirt, neatly folded over his jacket lapel, reminded Andrew of his first trip to Israel. Yet the man was well spoken and sensible, and his riveting, far from trite lecture maintained a self-reflective humor even when touching on the final Apocalypse, which he described as if it were a pastel-colored daydream. Only the strange fire in his eyes, which made Andrew think of an evangelical preacher’s, gave an indication of his uncompromising, dangerous zealotry. Andrew didn’t listen to what he said very carefully. Not that it wasn’t interesting. He was more captivated by the beautiful, pure gold objects and the large murals of sturdy, virile-looking black-bearded priests in their white linen garments and turbans, lighting oil wicks, carrying golden fire pans and censers, and prostrating themselves before a gold candelabrum on the marble floor of a great hall. . . .
A bolt of lightning struck Andrew’s brain with a loud, explosive clap. The doors of the shrine swung open all at once, all but torn from their hinges. Bright light flooded the hall, and in it swirled a mixture of fiery ancient sights and drab everyday New York realities. An uncontrollable wave of fear turned his innards to ice as he toppled dizzily into a bottomless chasm in which there was no up or down, no possibility of finding his balance. His free fall seemed to last forever. Time and space ceased to exist. Terrified, he nevertheless felt the strange joy of plummeting willingly to his own destruction. A burning candelabrum blazed against the black background of a mountainous sky, its oil bowls and ornamental knobs and flowers living flames in the heart of the darkness. Desperate to stop his plunge and the inevitable crash it would end with, Andrew forced himself to open his eyes. His fall stopped, stranding him midway between heaven and earth. The chapel hovered in front of him, a small world apart, revolving on its axis. He saw it from a vantage point high above, astounded by the sudden clarity with which his mind registered every detail of his impossible situation. He shut his eyes hard. When he opened them, the chasm was gone. Space had returned to its ordinary dimensions. The chapel’s air conditioner droned like a far-off echo of the speaker. Andrew instinctively turned to look for his mysterious neighbor from 110th Street. To his dismay, the man was no longer there.
Andrew leaped up and stumbled for the exit, bumping drunkenly against the wooden bench in front of him. He had no idea where he was hurrying to or what he would do if he saw the man in the lobby. What would he say to him? They weren’t acquainted. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. He had to find him. The loud screech of his shoes on the recently polished wooden floor sent a ripple of protest through the chapel. Disapproving stares followed him to the exit. Andrew, well-bred, perfectly mannered Andrew, neither noticed them nor did they slow his mad dash. A gold fire pan with burning coals appeared so close to him that he might have been holding it in his hand. An intoxicating scent of incense tickled his nostrils. Dream state and waking state, night and day, all were one. He had to find the man. He had to talk to him, to somebody! A round of applause. A new speaker. The opening lines of an Amichai poem resounded in the chapel and escorted him out of it.
On the grounds where we always are right
no flowers will grow
in the spring.
The grounds where we always are right
are packed hard
like a yard.
19
Andrew shot out of the chapel, its heavy doors banging behind him. His eyes scurried across the lobby, looking for the familiar, mysterious stranger. He wasn’t there. Could he have been a figment of his imagination? Who was to say? Now wasn’t the time to think about it. Clearheaded! He must stay clearheaded!
He was back in the formal, empty, depressing lobby. The Judaica in its glass cases looked like scientific displays, dead fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. Andrew walked past them in a daze, oblivious to what he was looking at. Although the large, gleaming burnished bronze candelabrum beckoned alluringly from its stand, he did his best not to look at it, afraid of its burning intensity. He quickened his pace without knowing where he was going. What was he doing in this place? A half-formed thought was seeking admission to his mind. It took a while for it to crystallize. Yes, he was looking for a rabbi, a Jewish rabbi! He needed to talk to a rabbi! The knowledge of this embarrassed him, embarrassed him no end. Too desperate to be deterred by this, however, he swept it aside, promising to think about it later. A rabbi! He had to find a rabbi! There must be rabbis here, mustn’t there? It was a rabbinical school, for fuck’s sake! He glanced around him, looking for someone to ask. Two mousy young women stepped from an elevator and headed for the street. Their knit skullcaps pinned to their tightly woven hair made him think of the fiery, charismatic rabbi-priest of his Jerusalem tour, sending a new wave of anxiety down his spine. No, he couldn’t ask them. He would only scare them. They would run from him as though from a lunatic.
Andrew headed for the exit, keeping his distance from the two women to prevent them from thinking they were being followed. In front of him was a small glass table spread with some bright, glossy leaflets. An amiable young man, a knit yarmulke on his head, too, stood behind it with a welcoming smile. Andrew approached him hesitatingly, trying to think of a sane way to phrase the question. “Excuse me, sir,” he asked. “Do you know where I can find a rabbi?”
The young man regarded him with astonishment, permitting himself a polite smile in which the effort to avoid condescendence was a bit too obvious. “A rabbi? What kind of rabbi do you have in mind? There are many rabbis here. Perhaps they can help you at the reception desk.”
The young man indicated a nearby counter, his neutral but well-meaning smile remaining rigidly in place. The reception desk, of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it? Feeling reassured, as if some valuable piece of information had come his way, Andrew approached it. Yet the sight of the uniformed woman at the desk made him have second thoughts. His feverish brain could only too easily imagine the conversation that mustn’t take place.
Sir, do you have some specific rabbi in mind? Do you have an appointment with someone in this building?
No, I have no appointment. I need a rabbi.
Sir, there are many rabbis here. I need a name to refer you to.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have a name. I don’t know any rabbis.
May I ask, sir, why you wish to see one?
I have to talk to him! I need to talk to a rabbi, now!
Please, sir, I’ll have to ask you not to shout.
I’m not shouting! Who’s shouting? I just want to talk to a rabbi.
Sir, I’ll have to ask you to leave the premises. If you don’t, I’ll have to call a security guard. Security, this is Reception. I’ve got an urgent problem. Over to you.
Andrew took a quick step back and found refuge behind a large pillar near the entrance to the lobby. From there, painfully aware of the absurdity of his behavior, he peeked furtively out at the young man at the table to make sure he wasn’t being watched. The young man was chatting pleasantly with two middle-aged ladies, patiently showing them his printed wares. Andrew left the safety of the pillar and crossed the lobby quickly with the busy air of someone who knows where he is going, praying the security guard wasn’t hot on his heels. Dodging around the first corner, he dashed for the elevator, punched the call button repeatedly, and vanished into the first car to arrive. He picked a floor at random, impatiently pressing Close until the door shut.
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor. Andrew stepped cautiously out of it and looked around like a seasoned burglar. Long corridors ran in both directions, lit by greenish fluorescent lights. Uncertain which way to go, he let himself be pulled to the right. The long corridor with its offices was as oppressively empty as the lobby. It gave Andrew the uncomfortable feeling of being in a dream. Where was everyone? He passed closed doors, more, pointl
ess-looking elevators, and a large library room with no one in it, its distinguished authors arranged in perfect order on richly stained wooden shelves. Just when he thought the empty corridor would go on forever, he came to a large, brass-handled door with the sign, RABBI ARTHUR SILVER, PROVOST. Andrew stared at the sign as blankly as if it were written in code. The one word that registered, reverberating in his mind, was “Rabbi.” He wavered, took a deep breath, and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again, less hesitatingly. No, no one was there. The office was empty. He stood facing the closed door, debating what to do. The voices in his head—near or far, he couldn’t tell—caused him to throw caution to the wind. Pressing on the brass handle, he stepped into the office, keeping close to the wall as if expecting an ambush.
The front room was empty. The secretary, no doubt out for her lunch break, had left her desk. From an open second door, however, came loud sounds of conversation and lively laughter. Andrew stood there uncertainly. Should he barge in or slip away before he got into real trouble? The latter, obviously! What was he doing here, anyway? Systematically destroying what was left of his career? He shook his head as though trying to wake from a bad dream and resolved to make his getaway, go home, crawl into bed, bury himself between the cool sheets, and fall asleep. He would come no closer to the open doorway and the hearty voice booming beyond it.
He did the opposite. Standing on the threshold, a shabby-looking intruder, he peered into the room apprehensively as if fearing guards would appear to evict him. Rabbi Silver, a smiling, balding man in a light jacket and bright tie, sat talking on the phone at his desk, his stubby fingers drumming merrily on the desktop as though to the beat of unheard music. Andrew stared at him, surprised to be so disappointed that he was smooth-shaven and bareheaded. What had he expected? A Hasidic rabbi muttering ancient Yiddish incantations? The father from Chaim Potok’s The Chosen? Still, he had imagined Rabbi Silver would somehow look different, less ordinary, perhaps less secular.
The rabbi, sensing Andrew’s presence, glanced up at his haggard face from the fancy knickknacks on the desk. His smile grew broader and his eyes widened with delight, crosshatching his cheeks with jovial wrinkles that gave him the look of a favorite uncle. With a suspiciously familial wave of his hand, he signaled Andrew to have a seat in the leather chair facing the desk while half-covering the phone with his other hand and whispering amiably, “Just one more minute, all right?” Andrew, nonplussed, took a step toward the chair but remained standing. Why was this portly, energetic man behaving as if he knew him? Rabbi Silver kept talking for another minute, nodding vigorously and murmuring a few words of agreement before cutting the conversation short with the apology that he had an important visitor. He hung up, came out from behind his desk, and held both arms out to Andrew in greeting. “Professor Cohen! How are you, my dear friend?”
Andrew felt dizzy. His nausea revived, turning inside him like a trapped animal. It was a dream! It had to be. This couldn’t really be happening. Where did this man know him from? For an embarrassing moment until he thought of reaching out a reciprocal hand, Andrew stared at the outstretched arms. Rabbi Silver, however, paid or pretended to pay no attention to his quandary. Clasping Andrew’s cold hand in his own two palms that were as yeasty and warm as fresh rolls, he kept it there while seating him in the chair. Clearly, a mere memory lapse was not enough to disturb the composure of a man with such sharply honed diplomatic instincts. With an admirable casualness, he reminded Andrew of the panel on which they had met several years ago, proceeding from there to a subsequent article in the Arts and Leisure section of the Times in which Andrew had contradicted, or so it seemed, some of the views he had expressed on the panel.
Andrew stammered a few words in reply. He remembered neither the rabbi nor the panel. Stripped of the illusion that he could remain incognito, he struggled to adjust to a conversation with a fellow academic for which he was ill prepared. Rabbi Silver’s doctoral degree, it turned out, was a joint one in anthropology and religion. For someone not professionally involved in the latest developments in cultural criticism, he displayed an impressive mastery of them, pleasurably rolling the common coinage of the field off his tongue. Andrew found it exhausting. The role of the brilliant polymath that he was expected to play belonged to another life lived thousands of miles away. Although he did his best to keep up his end of the conversation, it was beyond his power to convince himself that he was the eminence others thought he was.
The minutes went by. The time customarily allotted for the polite preliminaries had long since passed, but Andrew, who could hardly explain to himself, much less to Rabbi Silver, the nature of the question he had come to ask, prolonged it. The rabbi, too, seemed in no hurry to get to the matter at hand. In the end, however, feeling a need to address the elephant in the room, the rabbi asked, “So what brings you here today, my friend?”
Andrew felt his heart race. What, indeed, was the question that had brought him here? How was he to ask it? Too disconcerted to have planned his next move, he himself wasn’t sure what his madcap pursuit of a rabbi was about. The possibilities that passed through his muddled mind all seemed absurd, one more than the next. He took a gulp of air, feeling as shamefaced as if caught with a prostitute or fortune-teller, held it in for a second, and quickly expelled it with a mumbled query that sounded like, “What can you tell me about the Temple in Jerusalem? I mean its implements.”
The room fell silent. The vaguely worded, out-of-context question hung discomfitingly in the air. Andrew felt the blood rush to his face and immediately drain from it, leaving it cold and clammy. The silence persisted. Not even a public functionary like Rabbi Silver knew how to break it. He cleared his throat, leaned back in his chair, and looked at Andrew as if waiting for more. Andrew couldn’t think of more. He nervously clenched his fingers that were resting on his knees like a chastised pupil’s. An involuntary tremor of his eyelids made him think of the forgotten, bittersweet childhood sensation of giving in to importunate tears. He cleared his throat, too, desperately trying to think his way out of the predicament he had gotten himself into. He couldn’t just change the subject. Nor could he just get to his feet, thank the rabbi for his time, and make a hurried exit from his office, which was beginning to feel like one of the glass cases in the lobby, like a space he was eternally trapped in. Rabbi Silver waited another second or two. Then, despairing of any rational explanation for Andrew’s strange question, he launched into an orderly elucidation of the symbolic status of the Temple as an organizing metaphor for the post–Second Temple period Jewish experience. It was a lecture he had obviously given before—under more propitious circumstances, it was to be hoped. The neutral, scholarly tone of his remarks soothed Andrew’s frayed nerves. He listened to them without understanding a word, allowing their familiar, buttery monotone to numb his tormented mind.
A chair scraped in the next room. The secretary was back from her lunch break. The bubble of quietude burst. The building came to life, humming like a beehive. The rabbi’s expression changed, too. He glanced at his watch and gave Andrew a friendly but businesslike, end-of-conversation look. Once more he came out from behind his desk, held out both hands, and deftly escorted his visitor to the door, thanking him for dropping in so unexpectedly and handing him a visiting card with his private number. “Feel free to come by any time you’d like to talk,” he said with an avuncular twinkle. Andrew expressed his appreciation for the rabbi’s enlightening remarks and pocketed the card, which he found comforting, though he knew he never would use it. Stepping into the corridor with the sensation of having been rescued from a disaster at the last moment, he took the elevator to the ground floor, crossed the lobby without glancing at the candelabrum, averted his face as he passed the reception desk, and stepped from the building into the bustling, light-filled street. He didn’t want to think about what had happened. He didn’t want to think about anything. It was too much even to have to walk to the subway. A taxi. Taxi! Home! To sleep!
&nb
sp; END OF BOOK SIX
BOOK
SEVEN
1
July 8, 2001
The 17th of Tammuz, 5761
Jesus Christ, it’s hot. The city, faint with heat, is trapped in its sun-stricken daydreams. The walls of ruined ancient citadels flicker in the blue, blanketing haze, their pointed turrets stabbing the sun. The faded, melancholy colors of midsummer’s flowers converge until they all look the same. The sightless pupils of the white marble statues stare reproachingly into space. The horned stone demon carved on the Firemen’s Memorial at Riverside Drive and 100th Street irregularly spurts water from its rectangular mouth, spewing its greenish bile into a stone basin. At its foot, set among the cobblestones, there is a curious bronze plaque. Dismounted from his vehicle, a wagon driver raises his stick on a fallen beast of burden whose long neck is turned to him in anguished supplication. Above them stands a tall, winged, long-haired figure—an angel of the Lord, its sword drawn over man and beast alike.
The city is faint from the heat, but the large apartments of the blissfully rich stay pleasantly cool. Their controlled climate has its occupants shivering with cold and gratitude. Andrew, too, has decided to leave the air conditioner on tonight. He has taken the comforter from the top shelf of the closet where Angie put it while doing her spring cleaning and pulled it up to his neck, seeking in vain to find some comfort in it. He is praying for sleep. He needs it now more than ever. What a terrible month June has been, a month of horrors! He hasn’t begun to process the latest events, hasn’t absorbed what has happened. He has simply tried to ride them out and survive, one day at a time.
The air conditioner drones with a wet clatter. Why is it that every time you’re sold a silent air conditioner it sounds like an old outboard motor after a year? Not that it matters. Nothing matters anymore. He has to sleep. He has to rise fresh enough in the morning to finish the damned article that has taken a year off his life. He shuts his eyes tight, desperately seeking sleep. Although he is still awake, his eyelids have begun to twitch of their own accord. The visions he sees are frighteningly vivid. The world is a mad, hallucinatory inferno—as if painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Red, boiling blood runs in the streets. The walls have been breached, the besieged city has fallen. The cries of raped women mingle with the bestial roars of the plunderers. A massacre is under way, a naked, vicious, foul slaughter. Men and women, young and old, are cut down indiscriminately, run through with a wild animal fury by spears, swords, and daggers. It is murder at its filthiest and bloodiest—rhythmic, nonstop, almost intimate. The burly arms of the soldiers wield their weapons like butchers’ knives, cutting through bone, gristle, and fat. Stomachs are slowly sliced open. Greenish-gray intestines, looking more like pallid sea creatures than anything human, spill from them. Punctured lungs, bared to the sunlight with unspeakable savagery, wheeze in and out while jetting a crimson serum. Pregnant women are thrown to the ground. The swollen mounds of their bellies are a game won by whoever can slit them open most expertly, spear their unborn babies with a sword, and wave them high in the air like little red flags.