Visiting Professor (2 page)

For several years there had been a standing offer of a visiting professor’s chair from the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary
Chaos-Related
Studies; the Institute would be thrilled to have Lemuel patrol his Pale on its turf. The day Lemuel discovered the exit visa
in his mailbox, he remembered the Institute’s offer of a chair at the same moment he realized that he badly needed to sit.
He had been on his feet for forty of his forty-six years, queuing for food, for toilet paper, for windshield wipers for his
beloved Skoda, for permits to Black Sea spas, for mud baths at the spas, for the apartment he shared with two couples eternally
on the brink of divorce, if not murder. He had joined queues simply because they were there, without knowing what was for
sale until his turn came. He had queued to get married and queued to get divorced a decade later. Over the years his ankles
had swelled. His heart, too.

With the exit visa tucked into his passport, Lemuel had slipped out of Russia without a word to his ex or his colleagues;
without even telling his daughter, the common-law wife of a black marketeer who had cornered the market in computer mice.
The only person he confided in was his occasional mistress, a bleached-silver journalist for
Petersburg Pravda
named Axinya Petrovna Volkova, who devoted Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings to conjuring erections from Lemuel’s weary
flesh. Axinya, a creature of routine who invariably spent half an hour putting Lemuel’s room in order before allowing him
to fumble with the zippers and clasps and buttons of her clothing, took the news of his impending departure badly.

“You are trading one chaos for another,” she told him, “in the mistaken belief that someone else’s chaos will turn out to
be greener. Your pal Vadim told you American streets are paved with Sony Walkmans. Admit it, Lemuel Melorovich, in your head
you know it’s a fiction, but in your heart you think it may be true. In any case, the trip is bound to end badly—you have
always been more fascinated by the going than the getting there.”

When this argument failed to impress him, she trotted out the big guns. “People kill for tenure at Steklov. How can you abandon
it like that?”

“Everyone in Russia has tenure,” Lemuel observed crabbily. “The problem is they have tenure in Russia.”

Ladies first, the
visiting professor (still clutching his duty-free shopping bag) and the reception committee crowd into the Institute’s minibus
for the twelve-mile drive back to the village that is home to both the university and the Institute. Word Perkins, the Institute’s
factotum (he doubles as a chauffeur, night watchman, switchboard operator, plumber, electrician, carpenter, ice-salter and
snow-shoveler), brings up the rear. “So what’cha got in here, huh, Professor?” he wants to know, struggling with Lemuel’s
enormous valise. “Bricks maybe?”

“Books maybe,” Lemuel replies in a voice that conveys remorse.

Matilda Birtwhistle flashes a supportive smile. Lemuel grins back uncertainly.

Perkins, huffing, slides in behind the wheel, raises the earflaps on his mackinaw cap as if it is a preflight requirement,
adjusts the hearing aid hooked over an ear, works the choke and guns the motor. Snow chains on all four tires set up a rattle
that renders conversation difficult. “So where is the visitin’ professor visitin’ from, huh?” he calls over his shoulder.
“And when he gets his act together, what is his act?”

The Director twists in his seat and blinks his eyes rapidly—his way of apologizing for the egalitarian nature of American
society that permits chauffeurs a degree of impertinence. “He has come from St. Petersburg,” he shouts to Perkins. “As for
his act, he happens to be one of the world’s preeminent randomnists.”

“I can’t promise I know what a predominant randomnist does for a livin’, but if it’s got anythin’ at all to do whit snow,
he’s come to the right place, huh?” remarks Perkins. “What whit all this snow we got, we got us a randomnist’s paradise. Hey,
professor from Petersboig, in case yaw the athletic type, the village staw under Tender To rents out lightweight cross-country
skis.”

D.J. rolls her eyes to the tops of their sockets. Matilda Birtwhistle suffocates a smile in her Tibetan glove. Lemuel, mystified
by the conversation—why would a randomnist need skis? And what or who is tender to?—stares morosely out a window. Now that
he has finally gotten where he is going, he finds himself struggling against a persuasive postpartum depression. His first
glimpse of America the Beautiful does not help. The minibus rattles down a wide, bleak main street paved with cracking volcanic
tarmac, not Sony Walkmans, past mountains of plastic garbage sacks that look as if they have washed ashore on a tide. Long
stalactites of ice trickle from lampposts and store signs and the giant clock over the revolving door of a bank at an intersection.
The minibus, making its way between drifts of dirty snow, crosses
a bridge with rusting girders, passes darkened, dead gas stations and supermarkets and cut-rate furniture stores and an all-brick
drive-in savings-and-loan next door to a gray-washed wooden church with a movie marquee advertising
CHRIST SAVES
, without specifying what. Lemuel spots an illuminated billboard at the side of the road that makes him wonder whether he
can get by with his Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual English.

He leans forward and taps D.J. on the shoulder. “What does it mean, ‘Nonstops to the most Florida cities? How can one city
be more Florida than another?”

“Hey, professor from Petersboig, take a gander at them trees,” Perkins calls before D.J. can dredge up a Serbo-Croatian translation
for the billboard’s message. ‘They all been turned into weepers, huh? We just had us the woist ice storm since 1929—rained
cats ‘n’ dawgs mosta yesterday, huh? Last night the temperature went an’ plummeted on down to five.”

“Five degrees Fahrenheit,” Sebastian Skarr notes, “is the equivalent of minus fifteen degrees Celsius.”

“Cats? Dogs?” Lemuel, bewildered, asks.

“That’s an American idiot,” Charlie Atwater explains. He hiccups sheepishly.

Up ahead, a pulsating light atop a vehicle sends tiny orange explosions skidding across the ice-lacquered pavement. The minibus
catches up with a truck spewing sand over the highway. Squinting through his window into the night, Lemuel begins to make
out the branches and power lines coated with ice and sagging under its weight. Slipping into a tantalizing fiction, he conjures
up a night moth batting its wings somewhere in the vast wasteland of Siberia. The trivial turbulence created when its wings
flail the air sets off tiny ripples that amplify with time and distance to produce the swirling tempest of ice paralyzing
the east coast of America the Beautiful.

Another footprint of chaos!

D.J. points out the road sign planted at the spot where the countryside ends and the village begins. The sign, encased in
ice, reads: “Backwater University—founded 1835.” Underneath is a smaller sign: “Home of the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary
Chaos-Related Studies.” Moments later Perkins eases the bus to a stop in front of a green clapboard house with a wraparound
porch set back from Main Street. A gust of icy air invades the bus as Perkins, his mackinaw buttoned
to his jawbone, his earflaps down, opens the door and, gripping the rope handle of Lemuel’s cardboard valise, picks his way
along the sanded path toward the house.

The Director twists in his seat. “What with the cold et al., I think I’ll pass up the chance to go in with you.” Leaning toward
Lemuel, he lowers his voice. “Who cuts your hair? You don’t mind my asking?”

“I cut my hair. In a mirror.”

The Director slips an envelope into a pocket of Lemuel’s faded brown overcoat. “Some cash to tide you over until you deposit
your first paycheck.” He clears his throat. “Uh, you won’t resent a suggestion?”

“If you please.”

“There’s a barbershop in town over the general store.” He treats Lemuel to a conspiratorial wink. “It’s open mornings until
noon.” The Director speaks again in a normal voice. “The professor you’ll be sharing the house with is expecting you. Tomorrow
there’s a faculty luncheon in your honor, after which I’ll show you your office and introduce you to your girl Friday.”

“That’s what we call a secretary,” D.J. explains in her Serbo-Croatian.

Wondering who will take his letters Monday through Thursday, Lemuel makes his way up the aisle, mumbling his thanks, shaking
hands right and left, thinking, as he approaches the door, that he is about to parachute from a plane into an icy abyss. He
gives his khaki army-surplus scarf another turn around his neck, tightens the straps on his Red Army knapsack and steps into
the void. Making his way up the footpath, he crosses Perkins duck-walking back to the bus. Perkins attempts to high-five Lemuel,
but gets only a puzzled look for his trouble.

“Don’t they high-five folks in Russia, huh, professor from Petersboig?” the chauffeur calls cheerily.

Lemuel pauses on the front porch to watch the minibus pull away from the curb. The red brake lights flicker and vanish around
a corner. In the stillness, Lemuel raises his right hand over his head and stares up at his fingers.

High. Five. Ah! High-five.

The whetted air knifes through Lemuel’s corduroy trousers, numbing his thighs. He turns and reaches for the corroded brass
baseball, but the door flies open before he can rap the baseball against the corroded
brass catcher’s mit. A hand shoots out from a starched cuff. Powerful fingers grip Lemuel’s khaki scarf and haul him inside.
Lemuel gets a whiff of a vinegary deodorant, a glimpse of nicotine-stained teeth, a thick scraggly beard, coillike sideburns
dancing in the air, bright Talmudic eyes bulging with carnal curiosity. The door slams closed behind him and Lemuel, pulled
almost against his will into an outrageous fiction, decides he has come face to face with Yahweh.

On the short side—his head comes up to Lemuel’s shoulder blades—but heftily built, Yahweh appears to be in his early thirties.
He is decked out in scuffed black lace-up high shoes and a tieless white-on-white shirt buttoned up to a magnificent Adam’s
apple. Where the starched collar chafes his neck there is a ringworm of a welt that makes it look as if he is sporting a dog’s
collar. He has on baggy dull-black trousers, a rumpled vest, a loose-fitting jacket that droops open. Above a bulbous nose,
black beetle brows sky-dive toward each other with delicious abandon. Defying gravity, an embroidered black skullcap perches
on the back of his large head. Eyeing his visitor through perfectly round silver-rimmed spectacles, murmuring
“Hekinah degul, hekinah degul,”
backpedaling across threadbare carpets as his guest advances, Yahweh lures Lemuel through the vestibule into the overheated
house.

“What language is
‘Hekinah degul’
?” Lemuel asks.

“It is Lilliputian,” Yahweh says. “Roughly translated, it means ‘What in the Devil.’ I have a theory the Lilliputians, metaphorically
speaking, are maybe one of the lost tribes of Israel.” He half circles Lemuel, sizing him up from one side, then the other.
“It’s me, your colleague and housemate,” he finally says in a singsong rasp. His bony hand closes over Lemuel’s gloved hand
in an iron grip. “The bush, burning or otherwise, I do not beat around—it is not my shtick. In academic circles I am known
as Rebbe Asher ben Nachman, the Gnostic chaoticist. In religious circles I am known as the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh,
the holy man from Eastern Parkway, which is in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. To situate myself in the rabbinical spectrum,
I am what Jews from the Venetian ghetto would have called a
traghetto
—a gondola plying the murky waters between the ultra-orthodox and the ultra-un-Orthodox. To situate myself in the historical
spectrum, I am the last but not least in a long line of rabbis who trace their lineage back to the illustrious Moshe ben Nachman,
alias Ramban, may he rest in peace, who met his Maker in Eretz Yisrael
circa 1270.” He nods approvingly. “You are trying not to smile at things which strike you as pompous. Your discretion is a
tribute to the parents who raised you.”

Dancing back a few steps, the Rebbe pulls an enormous handkerchief from the inside breast pocket of his jacket and opens it
with a theatrical flourish; for an instant Lemuel is convinced his host is about to produce a white dove or another bouquet
of roses. He is disappointed when Yahweh, deftly manipulating the handkerchief with one hand, noisily blows his long nose
a nostril at a time.

“Coming from Russia,” Yahweh says, his tone suddenly nasal, “you have probably not heard of me, believe me I am not insulted,
but you have maybe heard of Brooklyn?” As he prattles on he inspects the handkerchief, looking for a bulletin on the state
of his health. “Standing with your back to the Atlantic Ocean, sitting too, Brooklyn is immediately to the right of Manhattan.”

Folding away the handkerchief, laughing at his little joke, the Rebbe dives for Lemuel’s valise, hefts it as if it is filled
with feathers and starts up the stairs. “Before I became a rebbe and a holy man, I worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn
docks.” He beckons Lemuel with a crooked finger. “Come. I keep a kosher house, I will not eat you. Upstairs is the apartment
the Institute has put at your disposition.” He flashes a shy, asymmetric grin, transforming his face into something closely
resembling a cubist guitar. “When you have settled in and down,” he tells his wary visitor, “I invite you for tea and sympathy.”

Hefting his knapsack onto a shoulder, carrying his duty-free shopping bag, Lemuel trails after the Rebbe past waist-high leaning
towers of books stacked, spine outward, against the walls. “Tea I take with a lump of sugar between my teeth,” he remarks
gloomily. “Sympathy I take with a grain of salt.”

Rebbe Nachman turns to stare quizzically at his housemate. “That we can become friends is within the realm,” he announces.
“You have maybe heard of male bonding?”

Lemuel stops dead in his tracks. He remembers his mistress criticizing him for thinking someone else’s chaos would be greener.
Axinya turned out to be right about the Sony Walkmans. What did she know that he only suspected? “In Russia,” Lemuel notes
in a voice that attempts to convey unflinching heterosexuality, “that kind of thing is definitely against the law.”