kaddish.com

by Nathan Englander

  That’s the gist of the letter the two send off.

  And it’s the last they hear from kaddish.com.

  XVI

  If the prior period of silence had been torturous to Reb Shuli, this—an active rejection—fills him with an unrelenting despair. He barely survives until Shabbos, which is an unmitigated disaster.

  Prohibited from touching electronics of any kind, Shuli feels his most Larry-like impulses emerging. By Saturday lunch, he’s so distracted that he stumbles through the Kiddush. Holding that brimming cup high above the table, the children giggle as Shuli sloshes wine over the sides.

  The urge to sneak into school to fiddle with that mukzah computer is so great, he actually asks Miri to restrain him. It’s the closest he’s come to breaking the Sabbath since he’d turned religious again.

  Miri leads him out back after benching and sits him on the steps to their overgrown yard. She takes his hand between hers and holds it in her lap. “There,” she says, “you’re restrained.”

  He goes on to tell her everything he’s done, filling her in on the control lost at school, the boundaries crossed. Miri hears it all with equanimity until he gets to the photo that he and Gavriel attached to their letter.

  “Did you really use a picture of that poor boy’s father, may his memory be blessed?”

  Shuli tells her that he had. And just as Miri starts on being horrified, the children scramble out of the house. They lean on their parents’ backs, hugging their necks—Nava on his, and Hayim on hers.

  “Go nap,” Miri tells them, shooing them away.

  “We’re too big,” Nava says.

  “You are until you aren’t. It comes back around,” Miri says, “and then you dream all day of napping again.”

  “And you also go back to diapers,” Hayim says, “and also to no teeth.” This cracks him and his sister up to no end.

  Shuli frees his hand from Miri’s and twists around to pat Hayim’s cheek.

  “This is true too,” Shuli says. “But your parents want some privacy.”

  “Is it secret?” they both want to know.

  “You want secrets?” Shuli asks, because he really has one these two might like. He’d bought a bag of candy for Gavriel and filled a second to give the children the next time they brought home good grades. “I hid a mountain of sugar under the sink,” he says. “Now go rot your teeth.”

  They’re gone in a flash, and Shuli, feeling the moment is anyway lost, stands up to follow. He looks to Miri, sad eyed. “What if I can’t get my birthright back?”

  “If God wants you to have it,” she says, “you will.”

  * * *

  —

  Shuli finds the kids on the living-room floor and talks them into forking over a stretch of candy buttons stuck to their paper strip. He sits cross-legged beside them, gnawing away, and thinking about what Miri said. Yes, if God wants you to have it, that’s easy. But what if God doesn’t? What if one is being tested and needs to show God the lengths to which he’ll go?

  Shuli ponders it all day, right up until they gather for Havdalah. It’s Nava’s turn to hold the braided candle, and Hayim is in charge of the besamim, passing the cloves under everyone’s noses.

  With the blessing done and the wine sipped, Shuli—on purpose this time—spills it into a saucer on the table. Shuli dips the wicks, putting the candle out, and as he does the smell of glim smoke mixes with the cloves and muddles with the taste of sweet wine.

  He presses his fingers into the saucer and touches those wine-wet fingertips to his closed eyes, making his weekly wish. He opens them, blinking, the air still cool upon his eyelids, and already he’s looking this way and that, shifty and nervous that Miri has read his mind.

  They all wish one another a good week, and then Shuli slips out and goes straight into school. He returns on Sunday morning and Sunday night, facing an empty in-box each time. On Monday, he patrols the sidewalk in front of the yeshiva, waiting for Gavriel. He carries that nice big bag of kosher Paskesz candies, telling himself it’s more than a bribe. It’s a thank-you, and an incentive, and maybe a way to keep Gavriel from eating the treif ones on his own time.

  As soon as he sees Gavriel, Shuli races over with the bag, pressing him to create another profile, another e-mail address, to help him lure someone at kaddish.com into writing back again.

  “You want me to lie?” Gavriel asks, as he shoves a Sour Stick into his mouth.

  “We already lied,” Shuli says. “What’s the difference now? Just eat your candy and make up someone dead.”

  And Gavriel does, creating losses, inventing tragedies, great and small, throughout the week. Shuli pops his head into Gavriel’s other classes, pulling him from his studies without hesitation and plopping him down at a terminal in the computer room, sometimes kicking another student out of a chair mid-lesson.

  The computer teacher, a woman who looks no older than Gavriel, appears to be having a panic herself. Reb Shuli has seniority, and Religious Studies has primacy, and Shuli knows there’s something about the unbalanced confidence to how he barges in, unapologetic, that make the interruptions seem purposeful and beyond challenge.

  As for Gavriel and Reb Shuli’s endless stream of new profiles—which they kept track of in the spiral notebook that holds Eitan’s original instructions—none of the related applications receives a single response.

  “They know it’s you,” Gavriel says, matter-of-fact.

  How they might know on the other end, Reb Shuli can’t fathom. He asks Gavriel how they can possibly tell the real from the fake.

  “We have their ISP address,” Gavriel says. “I guess they’ve also got ours.”

  This leaves Shuli feeling so hopeless and unmoored, he fails at his attempt to whisper, yelling out, “How much longer will God punish me for one moldy crime?”

  The computer teacher, along with her computer class, freezes. It seems they are waiting on an answer.

  Shifting his gaze from terrified face to terrified face, Shuli wonders if he should share the answer. If he should tell them that his agony will end when he finds Chemi and makes a kinyan again.

  But Shuli doesn’t get the chance. The rosh yeshiva, Reb Davidoff, is already pushing through the door.

  * * *

  —

  Mrs. Meyers can’t even look at them, so preposterous is the picture before her. In her decades of service to the school, she’s clearly never seen a rabbi and a student in trouble together and sharing the bench outside the head rabbi’s office.

  Regarding the being-in-trouble part, Reb Shuli is impressed with Gavriel’s calm—more composed, by far, than his teacher. And why shouldn’t he be? The bench might as well have a little brass plaque with his name engraved on it, so often is he perched there, waiting to be sentenced.

  It’s over the nature of the offense that Shuli feels particularly bad. How confusing it must be for Gavriel, somehow in trouble for following a rabbi’s orders, when he was always in trouble for exactly the opposite.

  Shuli wishes he could take this occasion to tell the boy he’d done good, to shower him with more than candy for his valiant efforts, and to apologize for any difficulties suffered until now, and for the ones about to come.

  Shuli would have liked to wrap up with a sincere prognosis for Gavriel’s shining future, but on their hurried walk down the hallway, the rosh yeshiva had made clear that this little twosome was over and done with. That Reb Shuli wasn’t to say a word in the moment and—after their stint on his punishment bench—to keep away from the boy, physically, verbally, electronically, and for good.

  Steaming with anger, Davidoff had also mentioned a call he’d received from Gavriel’s mother, spilling the beans. This made Shuli happy. Being ratted out in this way must mean that communication between mother and son was already improving.

  When Mrs. Meyers answers
her phone, she glowers at them both. Shuli takes a deep breath, combing at his beard with his fingers, waiting to see which of them has been called out of the batter’s box.

  Gavriel, reading the same signal, raises up his bottom and pulls his notebook from underneath. Rifling through, with an impressive amount of gravity, Gavriel finds what he’s after and tears out a page. It zips free with a spiral-paper ripple that, even steeped in dread, Shuli appreciates as a lovely sound.

  He passes the page to his teacher as Mrs. Meyers orders Gavriel to his feet.

  Shuli, condemned to silence, says nothing and simply looks down.

  On that piece of paper is a sweet, hand-drawn map of the area where the kaddish.com yeshiva is located. It’s the drawing the boy had been working on in the computer room the previous week, and which Shuli had rejected as the poison fruit of the digitized world.

  Shuli’s heart races as he reads the names of the cross streets, written in stiff, Hebrew-student letters. He looks at the box in the center, meant to be the building, and marked in red pencil with a dramatic, treasure-map “X.”

  Oh, this special child. Reb Shuli is overcome.

  “I thought you might want it. Even if you didn’t want to see the picture on the screen,” Gavriel says aloud, in his normal speaking voice. Shuli stares up at Mrs. Meyers in abject terror. This boy, he is a model of how to be. Living his life, bold and unafraid.

  Gavriel takes the handle of the rosh yeshiva’s door.

  “The information. It’s out there, Rebbe. This part is not a sin.”

  part three

  XVII

  To look down from the sky upon a place is one thing. To walk the streets, to hunt in real time and real space, humbled by one’s 1:1 human scale, is wholly another.

  Here, in the dark, with everything he’d brought stuffed into a knapsack borrowed from his daughter, Reb Shuli stands under a streetlight in Jerusalem and fishes out from its front pocket the map Gavriel had drawn. He contrasts that stark sketch with the city around him, wondering what he’d done.

  As always, Shuli turns to the Bible for comfort. How many of its stories were meant to aid a pilgrim in exactly his straits? How many tales intended to support the faithful through the weariness of just such a night? He takes stock of the wonders revealed to those rash in their faith and patient in their quests, the wayfarers rewarded for bad judgments made with good reason.

  Shuli thinks he may be, right then, only feet from the yeshiva’s front gate. What if he shares that very streetlight with Chemi, its halo sneaking through some window and brightening the pillow where rests that righteous man’s head?

  As tantalizingly close as he might be, Shuli folds his map and walks toward the center of town, to check into his overpriced, no-star hotel.

  * * *

  —

  Miri had sniffed out his plan before he’d said a word. She’d come into the kitchen, her nose wrinkled, to find dinner already cooking, the dishes washed, and her husband home hours ahead of schedule. His jacket hung on the open stepladder and Shuli stood at the fleishig sink squeezing the suds from the sponge. He had his sleeves rolled, half for chores and half for the argument ahead.

  “Whoever heard of a teacher being suspended, along with a student?” Miri said as soon as he’d told her. “It’s absurd.”

  Gavriel had been given only a day—which would not go on his record. Shuli was put on ice for two weeks, the first, without pay, as sanction, the second, back on the rolls, for mental health.

  “Those are the reasons Davidoff told you,” Miri said. “It’s all probably just to give that traumatized computer teacher a break.”

  She’d then lifted the lid on a pot and tasted the soup Shuli was making.

  “Are you sure you’re not fired?” Miri asked, dipping her spoon again and blowing the steam his way.

  “Not fired. Not yet. I’m pretty sure.”

  She’d relaxed her shoulders so precipitously that Shuli saw them drop. Her tone had also softened, as she asked what he planned to do.

  “Make big dinners,” he’d said. “Do more laundry. Cull the bookshelves—”

  “I don’t mean for your suspension. I mean what are you going to do about letting this craziness go?”

  “Let it go? I can’t. Not until I track down Chemi. He’s obviously the one who told them not to answer.”

  “Who, the website? Why in God’s name would he do that?”

  “Maybe he’s taken a vow, like a Nazir, pledging never to be thanked, never to be found, committed to doing his selfless work unsullied. It’s the only thing that explains it. It is the only thing that makes any sense. For kaddish.com to avoid me in particular, for them to spurn me like this—it’s basically proof that Chemi is involved. I need to get him word that all I want is the burden of my grief back and then I’ll leave him alone.”

  And that’s when he told her what he’d secretly wished for during Havdalah, explaining why he saw the time he’d been given as a sign from above.

  Miri had listened with compassion and then shook her head.

  “With such a scheme, you may end up getting your grief back in spades. You’ll grieve for the credit cards maxed out to pay for the trip, and for the job lost when Davidoff finally grasps how bananas you truly are and fires you for real. You can mourn for the wife who eventually leaves you after she finishes yanking out, in frustration, every last hair tucked under her wig.”

  This last one had knocked the wind out of Shuli.

  “You wouldn’t leave me?” he’d asked her, honestly afraid.

  Just remembering it gives Shuli a shiver in the tiny bed, in his tiny hotel room. In answer, Miri had taken her time before sharing a kind of warning. “I can tell you I’d never leave you. I can also tell you that what makes any marriage work is the knowledge that no relationship should be taken for granted. That there is always a line where the one who’d never leave you is suddenly gone.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Me?” Miri laughed. “Who wouldn’t threaten leaving in response to a husband already planning to go?”

  “It’s a few days. At most a week. I’ll be back before my suspension is done. You and I have dedicated our lives to saving Jewish souls. What about saving mine? The Book of Life,” he’d said. “How many free passes have I already been given, that I still live from year to year?”

  “After all the good you’ve done, you think for one youthful mistake God will call back your soul? You really believe that’s how Heavenly justice works?”

  “If I’d acted out of ignorance, then no,” Shuli said. “But even then I knew better. Even then, I was already not so young.”

  The Book of Life, it was not a joke, not to him and not to Miri.

  It was an actual record that one was very literally written into and—God forbid—out of, each year. Annual judgment was neither concept nor idea, it was a serious verdict, life-threateningly real.

  And Shuli had known as he raised it that Miri wouldn’t want to risk ignoring his plea.

  She took up his jacket and, folding it, laid it on the counter. She then lifted the open stepladder and carried it into the living room. Shuli, unrolling his sleeves, followed behind.

  She climbed up and pulled the ancient family Bible from the top shelf of a bookcase, loosing a rain of dust and flakes of old leather along with it. Stepping down, facing Shuli, she’d opened the back cover to reveal the family tree written inside and an envelope with the last of the Clinton Hill money, their emergency fund.

  “For your journey,” she’d said. “May it be enough to buy back what you gave away.”

  They counted it out together. It was $2,750, almost a dollar for each of the prayed-for souls listed on the kaddish.com site. Symbols, serendipities, they were everywhere Shuli looked.

  “Are you sure?” he’d said.

  Seeing
his anguish, understanding—as he’d hoped—Miri addressed him with love.

  “I’m sure,” she’d said. “Just do your best. One can’t be expected to do more. Now go call Eli Steinberg to find a cheap flight. And tell the kids what you’re up to—that part’s not on me.”

  Shuli leaned over and kissed her, and his wife kissed him back.

  “Only remember,” Miri told him, “if you don’t find what you need over there, in this life it’s permissible to forgive oneself too.”

  XVIII

  Of all the beautiful neighborhoods in the world, is any as lovely as Nachlaot in the early light of day? There’s the Jerusalem stone, and the Spanish-tiled roofs, and the mazes of side street and alleyway, on which even those used to the labyrinthine layout of the city find themselves lost.

  Shuli had spent time in Nachlaot before. He’d hung out in the area as a stoned and wanderlusted Larry, and when he’d returned to Jerusalem for his rabbinical studies, he’d whiled away many a relaxing Shabbos there during that stint.

  He knew about the tricks the neighborhood played on a visitor’s perceptions. There were mansions tucked behind rotted metal gates, and hovels where one expected a mansion to loom. A single-story cottage might actually be three stories tall as it climbed down a hillside, and some cave-like house might offer, from a rear balcony, a breathtaking view.