Collected Stories (60 page)

Rabbi Nechemia stood at the open window. Outside, there was a pale blue sky; around a golden-yellow sun, little clouds curled like the flax that is used to protect the ethrog in its case. On the naked branch of a desiccated tree stood a bird. A swallow? A sparrow? Its mother was also a bird, and so, too, its grandmother—generation after generation, thousands of years. If Aristotle was right that the universe always existed, then the chain of generations had no beginning. But how could that be?

The rabbi grimaced as if in pain. He formed a fist. “You want to conceal your face?” He spoke to God. “So be it. You conceal your face and I will conceal mine. Enough is enough.” He decided to put into action what he had contemplated for a long time.

II

That Friday night the rabbi slept little. He napped and awoke intermittently. Each time he fell asleep, horrors seized him anew. Blood flowed. Corpses lay strewn in the gutters. Women ran through flames, with singed hair and charred breasts. Bells clanged. A stampede of beasts with ram’s horns, pig’s snouts, with skins of hedgehogs and pussy udders emerged from burning forests. A cry rose from the earth—a lament of men, women, serpents, demons. In the confusion of his dream, the rabbi imagined that Simchas Torah and Purim had fallen on the same day. Had the calendar been altered, the rabbi wondered, or had the Evil One taken dominion? At dawn an old man with a crooked beard, wearing a torn robe, ranted at him and shook his fists. The rabbi tried to blow the ram’s horn to excommunicate him, but instead of a blast the sound was a wheeze that might have come from a deflated lung.

The rabbi trembled and his bed shook. His pillow was wet and twisted, as if it had just been wrung out from the washtub. The rabbi’s eyes were half glued together. “Abominations,” the rabbi muttered. “Scum of the brain.” For the first time since he could remember, the rabbi did not perform the ablutions. “The power of evil? Let’s see what evil can do! The sacred can only stay mute.” He walked over to the window. The rising sun rolled among the clouds like a severed head. At a pile of garbage, the community he-goat was trying to chew last year’s palm leaves. “You are still alive?” the rabbi addressed him. And he remembered the ram whose horns were caught in the thicket which Abraham had sacrificed instead of Isaac. He always had a need of burnt offerings, the rabbi thought of God. His creatures’ blood was a sweet savor to Him.

“I will do it, I will do it,” the rabbi said aloud.

In Bechev they prayed late. On the summer Sabbaths there was barely a quorum, even counting the few old men who were supported by the court. The night before, the rabbi had resolved not to put on his fringed garment, but he did so anyway out of habit. He had planned to go bareheaded, but reluctantly he placed the skullcap on his head. One sin at a time is enough, he decided. He sat down on his chair and dozed. After a while, he started and got up. Until yesterday the Good Spirit had attempted to reprimand the rabbi and to threaten him with Gehenna or a demeaning transmigration of the soul. But now the voice from Mount Horeb was stifled. All fears had vanished. Only anger remained. “If He does not need the Jews, the Jews don’t need Him.” The rabbi spoke no longer directly to the Almighty but to some other deity—perhaps to one of those mentioned in the Eighty-second Psalm: “God standeth in the Congregation of the mighty, He judgeth among the Gods.” Now the rabbi agreed with every kind of heresy—with those who deny Him entirely and with those who believe in two dominions; with the idolators who serve the stars and the constellations and those who uphold the Trinity; with the Karaaites, who renounced the Talmud; with the Samaritans, who forsook Mount Sinai for Mount Gerizim. Yes, I have known the Lord and I intend to spite Him, the rabbi said. Many matters suddenly became clear: the primeval snake, Cain, the Generation of the Flood, the Sodomites, Ishmael, Esau, Korach, and Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. To a silent torturer one does not speak, and to a persecutor one does not pray.

The rabbi hoped that somehow at the last moment a miracle would occur—God would reveal Himself or some power would restrain him. But nothing happened. He opened the drawer and took out his pipe, an object forbidden to the touch on the Sabbath. He filled it with tobacco. Before striking the match, the rabbi hesitated. He admonished himself, “Nechemia, son of Eliezer Tzvi, this is one of the thirty-nine tasks prohibited on the Sabbath! For this, one is stoned.” He looked around. No wings fluttered; no voice called. He withdrew a match and lit the pipe. His brain rattled in his skull like a kernel in the nutshell. He was plummeting into the abyss.

Usually the rabbi enjoyed smoking, but now the smoke tasted acrid. It scratched his throat. Someone might knock at the door! He poured a few drops of ablution water into the pipe—another major violation, to extinguish a fire. He had a desire for further transgression, but what? He wanted to spit on the mezuzah but refrained. For a while, the rabbi listened to the turmoil within him. Then he went out into the corridor and passed along to Hinde Shevach’s room. He pulled at the latch and tried to open the door.

“Who is there?” Hinde Shevach called out.

“It is I.”

The rabbi heard her rustling, murmuring. Then she opened the door. She must just have awakened. She wore a house robe with arabesques, slippers, and on her shaven head a silk kerchief. Nechemia was tall, but Hinde Shevach was small. Though she was barely twenty-five years old, she looked older, with dark circles under her eyes and the grieved expression of an abandoned wife. The rabbi rarely came to her room, never so early and on the Sabbath.

She asked, “Has something happened?”

The rabbi’s eyes filled with laughter. “The Messiah has come. The moon fell down.”

“What kind of talk is that?”

“Hinde Shevach, everything is finished,” the rabbi said, astounded by his own words.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not a rabbi any more. There is no more court unless you want to take over and become the second Virgin of Ludmir.”

Hinde Shevach’s yellowish eyes measured him crookedly. “What happened?”

“I’ve had my fill.”

“What will become of the court, of me?”

“Sell everything, divorce your schlemiel, or leave for America.”

Hinde Shevach stood still. “Sit down, you frighten me.”

“I’m tired of all these lies,” the rabbi said. “The whole nonsense. I’m not a rabbi and they’re not Hasidim. I’m leaving for Warsaw.”

“What will you do in Warsaw? Do you want to follow in Simcha David’s path?”

“Yes, his path.”

Hinde Shevach’s pale lips trembled. She looked for a handkerchief among her clothes on a chair. She held it to her mouth. “What about me?” she asked.

“You are still young. You’re not a cripple,” the rabbi said, baffled by his own words. “The whole world is open to you.”

“Open? Chaim Mattos is not allowed to divorce me.”

“He’s allowed, allowed.”

The rabbi wanted to say, “You can do without divorce,” but he was afraid that Hinde Shevach might faint. He felt a surge of defiance, the courage and the relief of one who had rid himself of all yokes. For the first time he grasped what it meant to be a nonbeliever. He said, “The Hasidic institution is sheer mendicancy. Nobody needs us. The whole business is a swindle and a falsehood.”

III

It all passed smoothly. Hinde Shevach locked herself in her room, apparently crying. Sander the beadle got drunk after Havdalah, the ushering out of the Sabbath, and went to sleep. The old men sat in the study house. One recited the Valedictory Prayers, another read
The Beginning of Wisdom,
a third cleaned his pipe with a wire, a fourth patched a sacred book. A few candles flickered. The rabbi gave a final look at the study house. “A ruin,” he murmured. He had packed his satchel himself. Since his wife’s death, he had grown accustomed to fetching his own linen from the chest where the maid placed it. He took out several shirts, some underwear, and long white stockings. He didn’t even pack his prayer shawl and phylacteries. What for?

The rabbi stole away from the village. How convenient that the moon was not shining. He did not take the highway but walked along the back roads, with which he had been familiar as a boy. He did not wear his velvet hat. He had found a cap and a gaberdine from the days when he was a bachelor.

Actually, the rabbi was no longer the same man. He felt that he was possessed by a demon who thought and chattered in its own peculiar manner. Now he passed through fields and a forest. Even though it was Saturday night, when the Evil Ones run rampant, the rabbi felt bolder and stronger. He no longer feared dogs or robbers. He arrived at the station only to learn that he would have to wait for a train until dawn. He sat down on a bench, near a peasant who lay snoring. The rabbi had recited neither the Evening Prayer nor the Shema. I will shave off my beard, too, he decided. He was aware that his escape could not remain a secret and that his Hasidim might seek him out and find him. Briefly, he considered leaving Poland.

He fell asleep and was awakened by the ringing of a bell. The train had arrived. Earlier, he had bought a fourth-class ticket because in those carriages there is never any illumination; the passengers sit or stand in the dark. He was apprehensive of encountering citizens of Bechev, but the car was full of Gentiles. One of them struck a match, and the rabbi saw peasants wearing four-cornered hats, brown caftans, linen trousers—most of them barefoot or with rags on their feet. There was no window in the car, only a round opening. When the sun rose, it cast a purple light on the bedraggled lot of men, who were smoking cheap tobacco, eating coarse bread with lard, and washing it down with vodka. Their wives reclined on the baggage and dozed.

The rabbi had heard about the pogroms in Russia. Bumpkins such as these killed men, raped women, plundered, and tortured children. The rabbi huddled in a corner. He tried to cover his nose from the stench. “God, is this your world?” he asked. “Did you attempt to give them the Torah on Mount Seir and Mount Paran? Is it among them that you have dispersed your chosen people?” The wheels clammered along the rails. Smoke from the locomotive seeped through the round hole. It reeked of coal, oil, and some indiscernible smoldering substance. “Can I become one of these?” the rabbi asked himself. “If God doesn’t exist, neither did Jesus.”

The rabbi felt a strong urge to urinate but there were no facilities. These passengers seemed to be flea- and lice-ridden. He felt an itch beneath his shirt. He began to regret having left Bechev. “Who prevented me from being an infidel there?” he asked himself. “At least I had my own bed. And what will I do in Warsaw? I have been impetuous. I forgot that a heretic too needs food and a pillow under his head. My few rubles will not last long. Simcha David is a pauper himself.” The rabbi had been informed that Simcha David was starving, wore tattered clothes, and in addition was stubborn and impractical. “Well, and what did he expect? There is no lack of charlatans in Warsaw.”

The rabbi’s legs ached and he lowered himself to the floor. He shoved the visor of his cap lower on his forehead. Jews boarded the train at various stations; someone might recognize him. Suddenly he heard familiar words. “Oh, my God, the soul which Thou gavest me is pure; Thou didst create it, Thou didst form it, Thou didst breathe it into me; Thou preservest it within me; and Thou wilt take it from me but wilt restore it unto me hereafter …” “A lie, a brazen lie,” something in the rabbi exclaimed. “All have the same spirit—a man, an animal. Ecclesiastes himself admitted this; therefore, the sages wanted to censor him. Well, but what is a spirit? Who formed the spirit? What do the worldly books say about that?”

The rabbi slept and dreamed that it was Yom Kippur. He stood in the synagogue yard along with a group of Jews who wore white robes and prayer shawls. Someone had locked the synagogue, but why? The rabbi lifted his eyes to the sky and instead of one moon he saw two, three, five. What was that? The moons seemed to rush toward one another. They became larger and more radiant. Lightning struck, thunder rolled, and the sky blazed in flames. The Jews emitted a howling lament: “Woe, Evil is prevailing!”

Shaken, the rabbi awoke. The train had arrived in Warsaw. He had not been in Warsaw since his father—blessed be his memory—fell ill and went there to see Dr. Frankel a few months before his demise. Father and son had then traveled in a special carriage. Sextons and court members had accompanied them. A crowd of Hasidim had waited at the station. His father was led to the house of a rich follower on Twarda Street. In his living room Father interpreted the Torah. Now Nechemia walked along the platform carrying his own valise. Some of the passengers ran, others dragged their luggage. Porters shouted. A gendarme appeared with a sword on one side, a revolver on the other, his chest covered with medals, his square face red and fat. His tallowy eyes measured the rabbi with suspicion, hatred, and with something that reminded the rabbi of a predatory beast.

The rabbi entered the city. Trolley cars clanged their bells, droshkies converged, the coachmen flicked their whips, the horses galloped over the cobblestones. There was a stench of pitch, refuse, and smoke. “This is the world?” the rabbi asked himself. “Here the Messiah is supposed to come?” He searched in his breast pocket for the scrap of paper bearing Simcha David’s address, but it had vanished. “Are the demons playing with me already?” The rabbi returned his hand to the pocket and withdrew the paper he had been searching for. Yes, a demon was mocking him. But if there is no God, how can there be an Evil Host? He stopped a passer-by and asked for directions to Simcha David’s street.