kaddish.com

by Nathan Englander

  Everything one might want to familiarize oneself with the service, to be made comfortable and secure in the application process, Reb Shuli locates with ease. The single thing he has trouble tracking down is the single thing he’s after. He’s looking for a contact page where he might call or write someone directly.

  It’s been eons since Reb Shuli needed information that an old copy of the yellow pages, or a favor asked of Mrs. Meyers, the school secretary, could not help him find. How helpless he feels, searching fruitlessly for a place to write a letter to the manager, or the webmaster, or whatever the word, today, was.

  Reb Shuli tries to stay positive, imagining himself sitting across a table from a middle-aged Chemi, explaining who he’d been then and who he was now. He’d offer thanks to Chemi for being his emancipator—the one who’d freed him from his obligations. And that’s the rub, is what Shuli would say, for now Chemi had inadvertently become his captor, the one who keeps him shackled to his old ungrateful self.

  He would then broach a reverse kinyan. Let Chemi pass off something symbolic, maybe an actual pen after all this time, and then let Shuli reclaim his mantle so that he might raise his own head high—if only to look Chemi in the eye in this world, and his father in the next.

  When summoned to the World to Come, Shuli wants nothing more than to take his seat at that infinite table with dignity, to learn Torah unencumbered by time.

  He clicks and clicks and clicks. Getting nowhere, Shuli navigates his way back to that opening page. What he finds truly amazes. Had it been five minutes? Ten? And the number had already gone up once more: 2,786.

  * * *

  —

  Shuli goes home to his family and sleeps a deep sleep, hugging his Miri until morning. He walks to school with a spring in his step, not at all put off by his failure to make contact, excited only for the journey ahead.

  He waves to the students as they hop off buses and sprout from the subway entrances. He waits on the yeshiva’s front steps, taking it in, watching the walkers walk and the well-to-do exit their Ubers. He drinks in all that youthful energy as the future of the Jewish people piles through the school’s front doors.

  The bells have yet to ring, and davening is still a few minutes off. Shuli fetches his coffee and drinks it in front of the same computer he’d used the night before. He’s already come up with a solution. Shuli returns to the site and clicks on the introductory form.

  He enters his name, and where he’s asked for the name of the deceased, he puts “G-d Forbid It Should Be So” as a first name and “All Are Well, Tfu, Tfu, Tfu” as a last.

  Where biographical details are requested, he types a simple, friendly note—Chemi-style. He wishes he’d kept that long-lost one-line letter he’d received.

  Reb Shuli writes only “I’m trying to locate a student named Chemi who prayed on my father’s behalf, and in my stead. With Care, Shuli.” He leaves, as a contact, the school e-mail address that Mrs. Meyers checks for him, and from which she prints out the parents’ e-mails when they write, and into which she types Shuli’s handwritten responses when a phone call won’t do.

  With the form submitted, Reb Shuli races for his tallis bag and slips into davening. There he rocks at his shtender, keeping the boys focused, making sure their lips are moving and, with his renegades, giving a faux-supportive squeeze to the shoulder, to check if their tzitzit are on under their shirts.

  When the Kaddish comes and he sees Gavriel sitting silent, it puts an ache in Shuli’s heart.

  During the breakfast break, Reb Shuli hovers around Mrs. Meyers’s desk, though she’s told him his in-box is empty.

  He teaches a double period of Gemara, sneaking over at the start and end of recess, and, once, pretending he needed to use the bathroom so that he might pass the anteroom outside the rosh yeshiva’s office, where Mrs. Meyers sits.

  To his query, he receives no reply.

  He checks with Mrs. Meyers during lunch, asking her to refresh and refresh and refresh. He does the same around Minchah, stopping by on the way to, and from, afternoon prayers.

  He returns again at the end of classes. Mrs. Meyers pulls on her coat very obviously, and ties her scarf with a sort of anger, trying with every movement to signal that her day is done.

  What Mrs. Meyers has already recognized, what Reb Shuli is only beginning to face, is the exhibition of a kind of behavior from Reb Shuli that Reb Shuli thought he’d long ago conquered. His anticipation over locating Chemi, of seeing his sonly duties restored—it is extraordinarily, relentlessly consuming.

  Standing alone in the empty hallway, with Mrs. Meyers gone, Shuli can’t stop agonizing over when his reply might come. That this obsessive streak is so easily triggered in him leaves Shuli breathless with fear.

  * * *

  —

  On the second day of waiting, he fights bothering that nice woman with all his might—allowing himself only a polite morning and evening query. Shuli doesn’t sleep that night.

  On the third day of racked anticipation, the day the Bible makes clear is the apex for any kind of hurt, Reb Shuli shuffles into Mrs. Meyers’s office, approaching with greatest humility, his eyes cast down.

  So low does he stare that his view is of the dinged and dented metal legs to Mrs. Meyers’s desk, and the near colorless industrial tile on which they rest. What he does not see is that Mrs. Meyers, expecting him, already holds out a piece of paper.

  As he accepts it, Mrs. Meyers does something Reb Shuli has never seen before. She rolls her eyes. Just as his sister would. A near-perfect match.

  “Thank you,” he says, though he’s not at all thankful. He can already tell it’s not his dreamed-of reply—a disappointment that so rattles Shuli, the paper shakes in his hand. Instead of a letter, Mrs. Meyers has given him instructions for the school’s e-mail system. In thick black marker she’s added his e-mail address (which he knows) and his password (which he purposefully doesn’t).

  “You’re on your own,” she says. “The e-mail Pony Express is hereby out of business. I’m shooting the horse.”

  “Understood,” Reb Shuli says, trying to sound chipper, while the fear already gripping him twists tight.

  He hadn’t planned to let a computer back into his life. The surfing he’d done, the form he’d sent, he’d intended it to be a singular, outlying occasion. It was, Shuli had hoped and prayed, a onetime affair.

  XIII

  Forbidden from hounding Mrs. Meyers, Reb Shuli finds himself again bedeviled by the machines. He can’t keep himself from the computer room, or off the computer. He’s there at the start and end of davening every morning, and at every period break. In the days that follow, he leaves his own class more than once to interrupt another. He waves at the computer teacher, saying, “Go on, go on,” as he sits down at an empty workstation to check his e-mail again.

  Shuli can’t rid himself of the sense that he’d entered his address wrong and that he, not Chemi, was the one who couldn’t be reached. He can’t fathom any other explanation for the silence, which is why, each morning, Reb Shuli submits the same form again.

  It’s a theory he clings to until he’s faced that empty in-box for the whole of a week. That’s when he decides his terseness must be at fault. He’s clearly coming off as too cold and too remote, and so he begins sending long epistolary meditations about his father and Chemi, about his wife and precious children, about all he’d done wrong in the past, and those things he now does right.

  He fires off mini-musings like, “Do you know how old my father seemed when I lost him? Only at fifty do I see how young a man he really was.”

  Shuli hopes that whoever is receiving these dispatches might take pity and reply. In the interim, he begins searching for another way to make contact on his own.

  Luddite that he is, Shuli still knows how to poke around the Internet, googling different permutations of the bits
of information he has. Beyond some happy Yelp reviews, Shuli can’t find anything concrete, no direct e-mail or phone number or Jerusalem address, leaving him feeling as if he might actually lose his mind. What if he never finds anyone? What if he does—but they tell him Chemi has disappeared? What if, in that volatile region, some tragedy, God forbid, has struck Chemi and it’s too late to put what was so egregiously wrong into the right?

  What if someone this very minute mourns his mourner?

  With this new worry, Shuli begins writing the site with panicked missives, inquiring about Chemi’s health and well-being, and pleading for news.

  Often, after hitting send, he berates himself for coming off as too intrusive or too hysterical, and so follows up with apologies, which he immediately regrets sending, and which also garner no reply.

  Two weeks in, and Shuli can’t take it any longer. He is in the gym that doubles as a lunchroom that triples as a house of prayer. He crosses his eyes, and straightens the box of his tefillin on his head and adjusts the wings of his tallis on his back. Abandoning his lectern, Shuli slides onto a bench, alongside some pious, dutiful boys. He stares mournfully at the basketball hoop hanging above him, wondering how he might face another day. He imagines himself seated across from Chemi. In his daydream, that gym humming with prayer transforms into a little steakiyah in Jerusalem, with him and Chemi at a table for two, a bowl of hummus and a plate of fresh pita between them.

  The true distance from that reality so saddens Reb Shuli, he lets out an audible sigh. All the boys look his way but for Gavriel, daydreaming himself, his head tilted back and his eyes glazed with wonder.

  Why hadn’t Shuli thought of it until now? The solution is obvious. Those same lost students who didn’t know their way around a page of Gemara were also the ones who could, blindfolded, build a cell phone from loose parts. In this world, the one in which we’re forced to plod miserably along, these boys cared for nothing. But in the alternate universe of computers and games, these monsters shined. Gavriel could surely help him out.

  It was a Friday, a short day, when the kids go home early to prepare for Shabbat. Reb Shuli, who knows he can’t corral the child until after the weekend, spends his own Shabbos preparations stiff with anticipatory stress.

  Miri, who has nearly given up on him, who has begged him to seek from his own rabbi some advice, now presses him to make an appointment with their psychiatrist neighbor.

  “To mope around in front of the children, when the Shabbat Malkah is about to descend, it doesn’t make sense,” Miri says, referring to the Sabbath Queen that alights on every Jewish home. “And it doesn’t make sense to suffer like this over a Kaddish for a father twenty years in the ground.”

  Shuli follows the words, doing his best to signal serious concern.

  “Are you listening to me?” Miri says. “On Shabbos, even the dead are given a break from the tortures of Hell. I’m worried for your health.” She taps at her temple, letting him know where the problem rests, and tells him to go knock on their neighbor’s door and at least ask for a few pills. “You’re in a depression, Shuli. A real one. I think it’s a delayed kind of trauma over your father, coming to catch you two decades late.”

  “Sadness,” Shuli says, “doesn’t hide away for that long.”

  “It absolutely does. If this house had Internet, I’d show you.”

  “Not that discussion now, I’m begging,” he says.

  “So forget the computer and trust your wife! Your student has stirred everything up. Maybe that’s a blessing. Because now you can face it and let it go. Gavriel is the one to tip you over, but I’ve watched, for too long, as you teeter on the edge.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Shuli yells. “And I’m not teetering or tipping or depressed.”

  “Super-duper! Then prove it. Sleep when it’s time to sleep, and be happy when you’re awake.”

  “I will.”

  “If you don’t, it’s the doctor. Make a real appointment and start on some pills. It’s your choice, but you need some peace, either way. Choke it down with water, or find it in your heart.”

  Shuli opts for the latter. He tries to muster all weekend, picturing himself with Chemi, the two of them walking a street in Jerusalem, chatting and holding hands. He flashes an overly broad, strained smile whenever Miri glances his way.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday, Shuli waits inside the school’s front door for Gavriel to arrive. As soon as the boy walks in, Shuli rushes over and gives a good squeeze to his shoulder, friendly. But the boy looks bitter. He pulls the tassels of his tzitzit from under his shirt and says, “I’m wearing them. They’re already on!”

  “No, no, chas v’chalilah,” Reb Shuli says. “I wasn’t checking. God forbid! I only wanted to let you know that you’ve really been, these days, toeing the line in class. As a thank-you, I’m instituting a triple recess today—in your honor.”

  Gavriel just stares.

  “For being a good boy. A tribute!”

  “Do I have to talk to you again?”

  “During recess? No. You’ll be outside, with the others. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a treat. What I could use is some help now, before davening.”

  Shuli can see the child wondering if it’s some sort of trap.

  “Do you remember when I said we were in some ways the same?”

  “Because our fathers are dead?”

  “Yes,” Shuli says. “But in some ways, we’re very different. In those ways—with what I need help with—you’re better and smarter, for sure.”

  * * *

  —

  They sit side by side in the empty computer room. As a joke, to warm things up, Reb Shuli says, “If I’m the student, and you’re the teacher, you should at least get the hat.” And he drops his fine black fedora on the boy’s head.

  With the home page open, Shuli explains that he’s trying to find someone who worked for the site, “an old friend,” and that he’s been filling out the form but nothing comes back.

  “Maybe you can help me find an electronic contact or a P.O. box at some post office, where I can send an actual note.”

  The boy shrugs and starts typing. He slides his chair away from Shuli, who is crowding him, so Shuli stands and paces the room. Shuli bites his nails, wondering at the ethics of keeping a child away from the prayers he anyway ignores. And what if the boy tattles about this? Already, Shuli’s crazy, made-up notion of the “triple recess” was being demanded by students in other grades.

  “Is there anything?” Shuli asks, when the click-clacking stops.

  “Nothing,” Gavriel says.

  “But you’re good at this, yes?”

  “I’m OK. There’s a kid in Reb Yellin’s class who knows how to write code. I could go get him.”

  “No, no. You’re my expert. Keep doing what you’re doing. Try some more.”

  Reb Shuli posts himself at the window, looking down onto the playground. It’s absurd that these Jerusalem scholars engage in the intimate, subscriber-based work that they do and make it so hard to be found. Where was the customer service?

  Again Gavriel stops, and when Shuli looks over, the boy tilts that black hat back at a rakish angle, though it’s ten sizes too big.

  “On a regular site, there’s always a contact page, or a place with a little envelope, or phone, to click on. You know, a widget?”

  Reb Shuli shakes his head. He does not know from widgets.

  “I’m saying, there are sites where it’s easy to find, and sites where it’s hard. But on this one, it just isn’t.”

  Reb Shuli stands there, bewildered, and Gavriel frowns.

  “If a website has no address and no phone number,” Gavriel says, “if the domain owner is hidden on GoDaddy or whoever’s hosting, and there’s nowhere to write on kaddish.com except that application page, I’m saying, whoe
ver’s running it, do you think they want to be found?”

  Reb Shuli concentrates deeply, mulling over what he’s just heard. At the same time, he absorbs this new version of Gavriel, competent and well spoken, this surprising, complicated child, who has—Reb Shuli can’t believe it—just made everything clear.

  “Stay here!” Reb Shuli says, practically running from the room, like a child himself.

  He returns with a masechta of Talmud, flipping through pages as he walks through the door. Yes, the wonders of schooling, every interaction offers the opportunity both to teach and to learn.

  Shuli again sits next to Gavriel, leafing through the tractate of Yoma, until he gets to the second side of page lamed-chet. “Here,” he says, happily. “Here is where we learn about the people on whose shoulders Earth rests. It’s from the virtue of one righteous man alone that God may grant us all—every moving, breathing thing—the right to live on. It’s said of Reb Shimon that no rainbow ever appeared during the whole of his lifetime, for we were—all of us—considered to be huddled under the arch of his goodness.”

  The boy appears confused and unsettled, the same as in class. But in this case, Shuli can tell that he’s honestly trying to absorb.

  “I’m trying to tell you,” Reb Shuli says, “that I was wasting my time wondering why I couldn’t find a certain person. Then you, my star pupil, lay bare the reason. It’s so simple! Maybe the man doesn’t want to be found.”

  Inspired, Reb Shuli says, “Can I trust you further?”

  Gavriel says he can.

  Reb Shuli explains the very bad choices he’d made as a young man, telling Gavriel about his lost years, and the shivah at his sister’s, and—skipping the part that shames him—about his kinyan and the workings of the kaddish.com site. He lays it out in detail, while running his fingers over that passage in the Gemara, as if the words had suddenly risen up and could be felt like braille.