On Fourth Avenue he hailed a cab and we got in. Reuben Mecheles lit a cigar and said, “Since my wife has left me and I’ve reverted to being a bachelor, I’ve stopped eating at home. Still, you’ll get a better meal at my house than you would in those cafeterias where you can ruin your stomach. I have a new refrigerator and everything is fresh. I’m usually not hungry during the day, but in the middle of the night a hunger comes over me and I always keep food ready. I have been an insomniac for many years. I wake up exactly at two o’clock every morning and rummage around like a sleepwalker. I take walks which are absolutely dangerous. I take taxis just to be able to see how New York looks in the early hours. I like to talk to the taxi drivers and to hear their strange stories. That’s how God arranged it—that those who know life can’t write, while those blessed with talent are dreamers who know only their own fantasies. Zosia has undoubtedly told you something about me, but she is an impractical person herself. I call her a yeshivah student in skirts. You won’t believe this, but I knew her father when he was still the head of a yeshivah on Twarda Street, and also later when he turned his coat, as the saying goes. What he did is incomprehensible, but where is it written that we have to understand everything? A time has come when all people are searching for something. The Torah is certainly a great book and the prophets were divine men and even Jesus of Nazareth can’t be lightly dismissed. But all this isn’t enough for modern man. There is a hunger for something more. What is Stalin? And what is even such a murderer as Hitler? False prophets. Since no one has been in heaven and God doesn’t come down to the earth and remains silent from generation to generation, how can one know wherein lies the truth? I listen to everyone, even if he preaches that there is a horse fair on the moon.”
“Oh, I forgot to ask you—what’s new with your prophet? What’s his name again? Is he still on Ellis Island?” Zosia asked.
“They’ve released him, but he got sick and he is in Lakewood recuperating,” Reuben Mecheles replied after some hesitation. “Why do you call him my prophet? I didn’t discover him and I don’t consider him a prophet. He wrote a work that can’t be considered anything else but religious. He speaks in the name of God, but in my estimation, this is nothing more than a means of expressing truths as one man sees them. The acknowledged prophets weren’t in heaven and God didn’t speak to them either. Someone in the Gemara says that Moses never rose higher than ten cubits from Mount Sinai. He sat there on a rock and carved out the Ten Commandments. Whether he fasted the forty days or not doesn’t concern me. If this be the case, why can’t someone of our generation do the same? In what way is a fountain pen worse than a chisel and hammer? I am, as you see, a realist—”
The taxi had pulled up before a tall building on Riverside Drive, just a few blocks from where my brother lived. But this was a fancier house, with a uniformed doorman, a richly furnished lobby, with oriental rugs, paintings, tropical plants. The elevator had an upholstered bench—something I was seeing for the first time. Reuben Mecheles’ apartment looked like a museum. All the walls were covered with paintings almost to the carved ceilings. There were antiques everywhere. Old books peered out of glassed cabinets along with objects made of silver and ivory. There were spice boxes, crowns and fescues for Torah scrolls, Chanukah lamps, Passover platters.
Reuben Mecheles said, “I have every kind of luxury here outside of a maid. My wife—I can already call her my ex-wife—couldn’t get along with any maid. She kicked up such a fuss about every trifle that the maids fled from her. Now a woman comes here twice a week but I’ve learned to fix my own meals. Come into the dining room and I’ll be your waiter.”
“I’ll help you,” Zosia proposed.
“No, I won’t allow it. By me, a guest is a guest, especially such honored guests. Here in America, there are no aristocrats. Here, a millionaire rolls up his sleeves and washes his car. Here, things are easy. I phone and they send everything up. It’s summer outside but inside my refrigerator it’s winter. I’ll bring you whatever I have and you’ll choose what you like. My kitchen is like a grocery. I’ll show it all to you later.”
Reuben Mecheles went to the kitchen. Zosia asked, “Why did his wife leave him? She had a paradise here.”
“Now it can be yours,” I said.
“No, it’s not for me. He has established for himself a palace here, but he is always off to somewhere. He can’t sit home a minute. He has told me things about himself that have revolted me. It’s clear now that he went to Reno to plead with his shrew to come back to him. After what has happened between us, I’ll never start up with anyone again.”
I rose and began to study the paintings. Each picture was interesting individually, but collectively they exuded an air of tedium that astonished me. How could this be? Hundreds of talents had worked on these paintings and drawings. I felt often similar reactions in a library. I stood among the masterworks of world literature and yet I knew in advance that not one of those books could dissipate my misery. I actually felt better in my empty room. There, at least, no one tried to amuse me or to point the way to the truth.
Reuben Mecheles came in with a huge tray of food—bread, rolls, cake, milk, cream, cheese, sausage, fruit. He said, “If you’re still hungry after all this, call me what my ex-wife called me—a phony.”
6
Following the meal, Reuben Mecheles opened a drawer and handed me a huge mimeographed manuscript, so heavy that I could barely lift it. The title page proclaimed that this was the Third Testament, a Torah that God had revealed to the Prophet Moses ben Ephraim. The manuscript contained both the Hebrew text and its English translation for a total of nearly two thousand pages.
We went into the living room and I began to leaf through the pages and scan a line here and there. The first chapters recorded that Moses ben Ephraim was a Sephardi, from his father’s side a tenth-generation Sabra. His mother was from Jerusalem but her parents came from Egypt. The revelation had come to Moses ben Ephraim in a cave not far from Safad. He had run away from home to study the cabala with a blind cabalist. One night when the blind master had gone off to spend the night on Rachel’s grave, the cave had grown brilliant as if from a thousand suns and Moses had heard a voice ….
I flipped through the pages at random—a scriptural style. The Almighty bade all the nations should become a single people and study the Torah of Moses ben Ephraim. God had revealed that Hitler was a descendant of Amelek and that the English who had come to America on the Mayflower were all descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. God had labeled Roosevelt “my messenger.” He had praised Wilson and had predicted that following Hitler’s defeat the League of Nations would shift to Mount Zion in the land of Israel and Moses ben Ephraim would use the League as an instrument by which to teach the nations justice and bring about peace and unity. All people would speak a common tongue—Hebrew. The children would also be taught Aramaic and English in the schools. Lord Balfour and Herzl would be among the saints who would be resurrected and belong to the Sanhedrin of seventy-one elders headed by Moses ben Ephraim.
I skimmed some hundred or so pages and learned that Jesus of Nazareth and his apostles had been true prophets. Judas Iscariot had not been a traitor but had remained loyal to Jesus. The tale of the thirty pieces of silver had been fabricated by idolators in Rome. In subsequent chapters, God revealed that Stalin was a product of Haman and Vashti, who had betrayed King Ahasuerus and had been a secret mistress of Haman’s.
Reuben Mecheles said, “You’re smiling, eh? The world needs a new creed. The concept of a chosen people has done the Jews lots of harm. You’re only scanning the book but I took the trouble to read it from beginning to end. Mankind must be united, not torn apart into races and cliques. The first Moses was a person, not an angel. He ordered the murder of the Canaanites, the Hittites, and the Amorites, but Moses ben Ephraim calls all Gentiles brothers. He wants peace between Isaac and Ishmael, between Jacob and Esau, between the whites and the Negroes. I don’t believe in his miracles, but he wants un
ity, not a splintered humanity.”
“I’m sorry to say that Moses ben Ephraim won’t unite mankind,” I said.
“Who then will unite it?”
“No one will.”
“You mean to say that people will always hate each other and wage wars and that there will never be peace?”
“It’s entirely possible.”
“And you can come to terms with that notion?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Well, I can’t. I must believe that the human species is growing better, not worse.”
“On what do you base your belief?”
“I don’t know myself on what. After all, we were once apes and now we’re humans. It’s a long distance between a gorilla and Mahatma Gandhi or our Chafetz Chayim. You mustn’t think that I don’t know what goes on in the world. I’ve seen all kinds of villains—among Russians, among Poles, even among us Jews. I lived for years with the most wicked woman. No matter what I gave her it wasn’t enough. No matter how good I was to her, she kept demanding more and more and cursed, and abused, and threatened suicide and even murder. She spent a fortune on doodads, clothes that she never had the opportunity to wear, jewelry that was stolen or robbed from her, fake art. When she fell into a rage, she tore, trampled, burned costly things, threw them in the garbage. She cheated on me with every brute she met and even had the gall to bring them to my house. They slept in my bed, wore my pajamas. When the time came when I could stand no more and wanted to put an end to it, she found lawyers as vicious as herself—Jewish lawyers—and they took everything I had. The American courts of law, which are supposed to concern themselves with justice, promptly took her side because not the victims but the evildoers and the criminals support the lawyers and the judges.
“I saw all this and much more, but I still couldn’t completely lose my faith in man or my hopes for a better world. My mother, may she rest in peace, didn’t behave like my wife. She bore my father eleven children and she buried seven out of the eleven. She worked at home and in the store sixteen hours a day, if not more, while Father sat in the study house or went to his rabbi’s where he dallied for weeks on end. As poor as we were, Father, may he rest in peace, brought a pauper for dinner on the Sabbath and Mother took the food out of her own children’s mouths to carry food to the poorhouse ….”
It grew silent for a while. Reuben Mecheles took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow.
Zosia said, “May I ask you something? If you can’t answer me, it doesn’t matter.”
“What do you want to ask?”
“How was it you flew to Reno to make up with such a wife?”
Something akin to a tearful smile came over Reuben Mecheles’ face. “I’m crazy, that’s what I am. I once read of a professor who predicted that all mankind would come to an end because of madness. Everyone would go berserk. It’s not far from this now. If Russia lets itself be ruled by a maniac like Stalin, and Germany by a Hitler, how far is it from the time when the whole world will turn mad? My madness consists of the fact that I was cursed with an overdose of compassion. I try to put myself in another’s place, to learn what led him or her to do what they did. There is a book out by a professor who maintains that criminals are not responsible for their acts. If a murderer kills someone the killer should be taken to a sanitarium and kept there until he is cured. Naturally, the cost for this would be borne by those who work to support themselves and their families. The truth is that the human species is already crazy and I am a part of it.”
I had an urge to ask Reuben Mecheles how he could afford to pay rent for such a large apartment and how he had managed to accumulate so many paintings and antiques when his wife took everything away from him, but I decided against it.
Zosia said, “It’s late. I must go.”
“Where are you staying? Back in the same hotel?”
“Yes, there.”
“You can sleep here if you like. I mean the both of you. I have not one bedroom but three, and I’m not going to spy on you through the keyhole.”
“I thank you, but I must go,” Zosia replied.
“I hope you’ll be staying in New York for a while yet,” Reuben Mecheles said.
“No, I’m going back to Boston tomorrow.”
Ten
1
That summer was a hot one. The air in New York was stifling. My brother had invited me repeatedly to come stay with him at the seashore, but I remained in the city. In my mind, Seagate was connected with Nesha and Nesha had married that would-be writer and genuine fellow traveler Zachariah Kammermacher, whom I had encountered in Paris and later in her house that evening when I had been delayed in coming to see her.
I had had a long chat with her on the phone. Nesha had told me that she didn’t love Zachariah and she knew that she never would, but she lacked the strength to go on working. She had reached a stage in which she had been seriously considering suicide. She hadn’t deceived him. She had told him frankly that she couldn’t love him, but Zachariah Kammermacher had told her that he didn’t believe in love. He had been widowed and he needed someone to run his household. He had a married daughter and a son who had been educated in England. The Communists provided Zachariah with all kinds of ways to earn money—articles in their magazines, lectures. He had a job on their Yiddish newspaper. He had a spacious apartment on West End Avenue and a summer house near Poughkeepsie. He had offered to adopt Nesha’s son. Nesha said the usual things women say in such instances: She would never forget me, we would remain friends. At the same time, she hinted that she was sick and that she didn’t expect to live much longer. I asked her the nature of her illness and she replied, “Everything.”
Two years passed by but I had been left alone. I heard nothing more from Stefa or from Lena. Only my cousin wrote to me. She had married an electrician from Galicia. Her friend, Tsipele, had gone to live with her uncle who had left his wife. I had read in a Yiddish newspaper that “the well-known philanthropist and art collector Reuben Mecheles had married Miss Zosia Fishelsohn,” a convert to Christianity who reconverted to Judaism, and the pair went to live in Jerusalem.
My state of mind had robbed me of the appetite to write to such an extent that I had to make an effort each week to complete my brief column, “It’s Worthwhile Knowing.” My fountain pen invariably leaked and made blots. My hand cramped. My eyes took part in the sabotage, too. I had heard of hay fever while still in Poland, but I had never suffered from it there. All of a sudden, I started sneezing in August of that year. My nose became stuffed up, my throat grew scratchy, my ears filled with water and developed a ringing and a whistling. I took a daily bath and kept myself clean, but I suffered from an itch and had constantly to scratch. No pills helped my constipation. I spent whole days in bed being baked by the sun that shone in through my window from noon to twilight. I didn’t even bother to lower the shade. My sexual fantasies grew even more bizarre. By day I dozed, at night I stayed awake. I still brooded on the mysteries of the universe. Maybe it was possible to find a way to penetrate the enigmas of time and space, the categories of pure reason, the secret of life and consciousness? I had read somewhere that Einstein had for years been searching for a kind of super-Newtonian formula that would include gravity, magnetism, and the electromagnetic forces. Maybe there existed somewhere a formula that could combine—along with what Einstein was seeking—life, thought, and emotion as well? Maybe there existed such a combination of words and numbers that would encompass the whole riddle of Creation?
Neither God nor nature could hide forever. Sooner or later must come the revelation. Maybe it was I who was destined to receive it. I mentally tabulated everything that I had read of the philosophers, the mystics, the modern physicists. Einstein was right, I told myself, God didn’t play dice. Somewhere there was a truth that explained Chmielnitzki’s outrages, Hitler’s madness, Stalin’s megalomania, the exaltation of a Baal Shem, every vibration of light, every tremor of the nerves. There were nights whe
n I awoke with the feeling that I saw the formula in my dream, or at least some part of it and I stayed awake for hours trying to recollect what I saw.
Each week when I delivered my column late at night I groped in the mail box, but no one wrote to me. I had broken away from people and they had abandoned me. An indolence settled over me. I even lacked the energy to eat at the cafeteria and I missed meals. I had fallen into a crisis that could last to the end of my life.
One day in mid-July, someone knocked on my door. I opened it and saw a man and a young woman. Both their faces seemed familiar but I had forgotten their names as well as where and when I had met them. I stood there for a moment looking at them, perplexed. The man said, “I swear he doesn’t recognize me. It’s me, Zygmunt Salkin.”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes! Come in! Welcome!”
“We met on your first day in America. This young lady is Anita Komarov. She tells me that she gave you your first English lesson.”
Love and Exile Page 36
