A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  Exchanging silent greeting with the master baker, the angels led me to a storeroom in the back. Behind a pallet stacked high with flour bags was a rickety ladder leading to an opening in the ceiling, a sort of attic door. We climbed through this opening and arrived in what appeared to be an antiquarian book shop. Outside the shop’s windows, a golden light turned the façades of the marble buildings pink. greeted an old man in a velvet yarmulke and a black vest who was sitting behind a counter, stroking his beard and reading. whispered something in his ear, and the old fellow got up from his stool, searching through the riot of keys that dangled from his belt. Shuffling to the door, he unlocked it, and we slipped through it to the street.

  Outside, doves were cooing, and the smell of citrus seemed to be everywhere. “The Old City’s not so crowded today,” said, drawing in a breath.

  “Must be a bus strike,” said, frowning.

  “But where are we?” I demanded to know.

  “Why, this is the Celestial Jerusalem,” explained.

  “The Celestial Jerusalem?”

  “Yes, it hovers above its more terrestrial twin.”

  My companions seemed to know the place quite well, and we strode through its streets, past cisterns and reflecting pools, past windmills and cafés, until we came to the Celestial Temple. Its looming façades reflected the complex palette of the dying sun. Leading me through the crowds in the courtyard, we snuck in through a door below a bridge and caught a glimpse of the archangel Michael in his holy garments, or so my guides informed me, offering up the souls of the righteous on the Temple altar. They stood, like pilgrims waiting to enter a shrine, the line winding through the courtyard and out into the streets, filling every passageway and alley.

  “Has death undone so many?” I said.

  “Best not to think about it,” said. “It’ll only make you gloomy.”

  We entered the next level — the fifth, by my reckoning — via a rusty elevator whose mechanical innards wheezed as it shuddered between floors. We were let out in an opulent concert hall, its walls a shimmering blond spruce. There were rows and rows of empty choir stalls. Indeed, they seemed to stretch for miles. My guides allowed me to ascend the conductor’s podium, and from this pinnacle, I couldn’t see the end of them. An exquisite Bösendorfer stood, black and gleaming, in the center of the hall, surrounded by a goodly number of harps.

  “And where are the angels?” I said.

  “The angels?” said.

  “The hosts of angels whose job it is, if I’m remembering my lessons correctly, to sing the praises of the Holy One from this very room.”

  “No, no, Dr. Sammelsohn,” said. “That’s only during the night.” He pushed his eyeglasses onto his forehead and peered into the sheet music that had been left on the conductor’s stand. After humming a few bars, he added, “During the day, it’s up to the Jewish people to sing those praises.”

  I raised my hand to silence him, so that I might listen for these songs, but I heard nothing.

  “Precisely,” said grimly.

  I blushed. I was as guilty as anyone in this regard.

  “But even at night,” said, kicking the toe of his shoe against the wooden floor, “the singing is morose.”

  “Dirge-like,” agreed.

  “They just mumble, and at times, you can barely make out the tune.”

  “Perhaps it’s fear.”

  “Fear?” I said.

  “Fear closes down the heart, I’m afraid.”

  “Even the hearts of angels break, Dr. Sammelsohn,” said. “Or didn’t you know that?”

  “Fear, despair, whatever,” said.

  At these sad words, the three of us fell into a silence made all the more profound by the impeccable acoustics of the room. One could have heard a pin drop, or a heart breaking, for that matter. I didn’t know what to say. let out a long sigh; and seemed to growl a little to himself. I thought I heard someone, from a distance, calling my name. I was certain I’d imagined it, until I noticed that and had turned their heads in the direction of the sound, and then I heard it again.

  Someone was calling me.

  “OH, THANK GOD, Dr. Sammelsohn, I’ve found you!”

  It was the rebbe, of course. Who else could it have been? Who else would have been in the choir room at this time, singing God’s praises?

  “I’ve brought you your hat.” He ran towards me, the wings of his black coat flapping behind him, his footsteps thocking against the wooden floor, cradling my shabby grey fedora in his hands.

  “You were in the square at Tłomackie Place,” he said, a little breathless now, “and as I was approaching you in order to greet you, I saw it fly from your head. I ran to retrieve it, naturally, and having done so, I called out to you, but in the excitement of the moment, what with all that thundering and the storming, I suppose you didn’t hear me. I thought I’d follow you.” He looked at the two angels. “One must return lost objects to their proper owners, after all.”

  He was quoting the Talmudic law to them, it seemed to me, in the hopes that it might provide him with a legal excuse for being here, if or were inclined to throw him out as a poacher from this Heavenly precinct.

  Instead, bowed. “Your Holiness,” he said.

  “Rav Szapira,” said, doing the same.

  The rebbe nodded and encouraged them to stand, clearly embarrassed by their adulation. Not knowing what else to do, he glanced about the room. “Ah, is that a Bösendorfer?” He pointed towards his ear. “I thought I recognized the tone.”

  Allow me to stop for a moment to dwell on this curious tableau: here we were, two Jews, one religious, one not, in our wintry overcoats and our hats, with our hateful armbands pinned to our sleeves, standing in the Choir Room of the Fifth Level of Heaven in the company of our angelic escort, one dressed, more or less, in the costume of a professor from the Old World, the other, in his black leathers, as a thug from the New, and yet the harmony between us was serene.

  “Shall we proceed, then?” the rebbe said to and . “And with your permission, may I join in with you?” The angels nodded in agreement.

  “Thanks to my brushing up on what are known in our tradition as the Hekhaloth texts,” the rebbe whispered to me, as he took my arm, “I was able to make my way past all the previous guards.”

  “Guards?” I said.

  “Naturally.”

  “I didn’t see any guards.”

  “I’m not certain I’d have been as successful the rest of the way.”

  CHAPTER 8

  and hurried us along a knotted rope bridge. Upon entering the Sixth Heaven, however, we discovered it was in a complete disarray. I cupped my handkerchief to my nose. “What is that smell?”

  “Rats,” said.

  “It appears they’ve broken into the storehouses.”

  “And what exactly is stored here?”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” said, inspecting the damage.

  “Trials and vexations,” told me.

  “Trials and vexations?” I said.

  “Well, yes.”

  I looked about. The place was indeed a wreck. Doors were bursting open, some were hanging off their hinges. Snow and hail had spilled out across the floor, and it was difficult not to slip on the mess. Noxious dew was dripping from more than one vat, and a military magazine stocked with storms had been ransacked, it appeared, as had several cellars holding what told us were very precious reserves of smoke and ash. Also a laboratory in which a rare bacterium was kept had been pilfered.

  “And all so close to the Holy Blessed One,” the rebbe said with a tone of wonder in his voice. Like me, he’d covered his face with a handkerchief.

  and were hanging back, I’d noticed, near the exit doors.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t have brought them here,” said glumly.

  “No, no, I want to see it all. I must see it all.” The rebbe circled around, taking in the room. “Now, if I’m not mistaken, that door is all that separates us from the Seventh Heaven and the Throne of the Mer
ciful One Himself.” He pointed down a long passageway toward a door that appeared to be on fire.

  “Not exactly, Your Holiness,” said. “Behind that door is another door, and behind it is another door as well. There are twelve, in fact, each hotter and more blazing than the last.”

  “The Throne itself is guarded by the archangel Metatron.” lowered his voice and whispered this odd-sounding name, and the rebbe nodded, as though he were familiar with the figure. “But you’ll have to take our word for it, as unfortunately …” said, looking helplessly at his brother.

  “Ah, yes, unfortunately … well … how to put this?”

  “They’re renovating at the moment.”

  “And consequently, it’s closed to the public.”

  “We’re sorry to have brought you all this way, gentlemen.” clapped his hands together as though he were a tour guide at the end of a tour. “However Heavens One through Six are not nothing.”

  “You may return to your homes content to have seen the greater part of it, certainly.”

  The two angels shrugged at each other, as though they knew their bluff was as ludicrous as it seemed.

  “In any case,” warned, “there’s no way through the corridor of fire.”

  Looking again at the twelve burning doors, I was inclined to take him at his word. There seemed little point in our proceeding. Even if we made it through the doors alive — and I assumed we would not — the Holy One (of this, I was certain) would never deign to answer our petition for clemency and mercy. This was the same deity, after all, who’d enlisted Ita as a special emissary to return to Earth for the purpose of destroying the Esperanto movement! Six celestial and one terrestrial level below us, children were freezing to death on the streets of Europe! If God could turn a blind eye to that, what good would the petition of two miserable Jews do, even though one of them was an Hasidic master?

  Surely, the rebbe was on the point of conceding as much, and it was only a matter of moments before we turned back and descended to Earth. However, he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and scratched his beard, and said, “Dr. Sammelsohn.”

  “Yes, my cousin?”

  “Shelter with me beneath my talis and do not release it until we are through the corridor of fire. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you, yes. However …”

  “Good.”

  and clucked their tongues and grumbled, as I sputtered out a litany of protests. Meanwhile, the rebbe simply and quietly withdrew his prayer shawl from some inner pocket of his outer coat. Does he keep the damned thing on him all the time, I wondered? Reciting the appropriate blessing, he whipped it into the air, wrapping it about his shoulders and his head. Holding it above him as though it were a tent, he beckoned me to join him beneath it.

  What could I do? His insistence upon forging on had clearly consternated our angelic hosts; only the reverence in which they held him seemed to be keeping them from restraining us bodily. I hated to act against their wishes — surely, they’d already compromised themselves in bringing us this far — and I was equally loath to get myself into trouble. And yet I had to wonder: What’s the worst that could happen to me? Either I was already dead or the journey back to Earth would kill me, and if it didn’t, the Germans certainly would. All things considered, wasn’t burning up in the divine conflagration between the Sixth and the Seventh Heavens the preferable course?

  The rebbe pulled back the sides of his jacket, and I saw that he had two rams’ horns, on either side of his waist, tucked into his belt. They looked like pistols and he, having tied his handkerchief over the lower half of his face, like a Mexican bandito. Why not go out in a blaze of glory? I thought.

  “This isn’t your fight, Dr. Sammelsohn. You know that,” said to me, as I joined the rebbe beneath his talis.

  “But perhaps it is,” I said, tying my own handkerchief about my face. “Perhaps it’s everyone’s fight.”

  “Ready, Dr. Sammelsohn?” the rebbe said.

  “Ready, Your Holiness.”

  “Now, when I give the signal, we shall charge forward. And whatever you do, do not let go of the corners of my prayer shawl.”

  We huddled together, and the thought occurred to me that he would probably never find the courage to give the signal, but once again I was wrong. Before I’d even prepared myself inwardly, the rebbe blew a blast on the ram’s horn and shrilled out the word “Now!”

  I closed my eyes as we charged towards the first door. I could feel the heat of the flames scorching my skin. I crammed my fedora tighter upon my head, and the hair on the back of my hand was singed. Cringing, I moved closer to the rebbe, pressing in as near to him as I could. Nevertheless, I smelled smoke, and I worried that perhaps his talis was burning. Few must have passed this way before us, and certainly no mortals, because corridor of fire, as a description, turned out to be a gross understatement. Long corridor of fire or perhaps even endless corridor of fire might have been more apt. The smoke was so thick at times, and the heat so scalding, I assumed we’d suffocate before reaching its end.

  “Careful, Cousin, careful,” the rebbe whispered. “Every step is perilous.” The ram’s horn he’d tucked into his gartl scraped against my hip. His mouth was so near my ear I could feel his breath through the hairs of his mustache. To quell my fear, I told myself again and again that what I was experiencing, what I imagined I was experiencing — the staircase, the angels, the various levels of Heaven, even the rebbe’s presence beside me — was a vision created from a lack of oxygen reaching my brain. Though I felt myself high above Warsaw in the corridor between the Sixth and the Seventh Heavens, reason told me I was lying in the mud and the snow, far below, dying, perhaps with a helpful bullet delivered to my brain by some passing soldier. However, before I knew it, we’d pushed through the corridor of burning doors and had entered a large and beautiful library.

  IT WAS EMPTY, except for one man, or one being rather. Even in comparison to the archangel Michael, this was an impressive fellow: tall — seven feet? eight? — extraordinarily lithe with a long flowing white beard. His arms were so muscular, they bulged inside the fabric of his sleeves. He was stationed behind a tall escritoire, the sort of writing desk at which one doesn’t sit, but rather stands. He put down his quill and looked over his glasses at us, trembling before him. He consulted his wristwatch and adjusted it and made a note in his ledger book. “Precisely on time,” he said. With a great rustling of his wings — at one point, I tried to count the pairs, stopping at thirty-two — he moved towards us. In the meantime, the rebbe had released me from the shelter of his talis — I felt naked in the presence of this hierarch without it — and was adjusting it, as a shulgoer will, about his shoulders. I didn’t know what to expect. Surely we were poachers here, and I feared a fire might at any moment be exhaled from this being’s nostrils in which at least one of us — the one without the protective prayer shawl, I assumed — would be incinerated.

  Instead, the archangel Metatron greeted us pleasantly enough. “Gentlemen, welcome, welcome! Your merits, Rav Szapira, and in your case, Dr. Sammelsohn, other arrangements, I see, have brought you safely through the portal of fire. That’s all to the good. I’d offer you a drink or even a meal, but” — he removed his eyeglasses and looked about the room — “I’m afraid we’re a bit understaffed at the moment. Permit me, however, to introduce myself. I am Metatron, King of Angels, Prince of the Divine Face, Chancellor of Heaven, Angel of the Covenant, Watchman of the Night, and Teacher of Prematurely Deceased Children.” He bowed his head. “At your service.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Stunned into muteness, I took a moment to gaze about the room. I’m certain that, as time has gone by, I’ve forgotten much of what I saw there; however, I can attest to this: although the room resembled an ancient library with tall shelves and high ladders, and thick, plush chairs, upon closer examination, it all seemed to have been fashioned out of letters, words, sentences, a dense handwritten script that vibrated or even more precisely h
ummed continuously.

  The rebbe finally spoke, and I was grateful that he did. I knew I didn’t possess words sufficiently supple or eloquent to address a hierarch of such exalted stature, and certainly not within the Heavenly precincts. It’s one thing to speak to and his brother, on our groaning little planet; quite another to converse face to face with God’s Personal Valet. Also, the rebbe possessed a solid religious education, something I sorely lacked, and had spent nearly all of his life in a mystical trance, meditating on the Powers That Eternally Be. I’m exaggerating, of course, but he was in his element here, whereas I felt far outside my own.

  “Divine Sir,” the rebbe bowed his head, “allow a humble Jew to greet you. We stand before you, as I think perhaps you know, because my cousin here, Ya’akov Yosef ben Alter Nosn, challenged your brothers and sons and on their relative cowardice vis-à-vis the Holy One, Blessed be He.”

  Each time the rebbe mentioned the Lord’s name, from nowhere seemingly — or rather from everyplace at once — a chorus of angelic voices sang out: May His great name be blessed forever and ever!

  The archangel Metatron tilted his head and scrutinized me. “Your cousin?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Dr. Sammelsohn is your cousin?”

  The rebbe nodded. “And a descendant of the holy Seer of Lublin, as. am ”

  The archangel Metatron grumbled, and I regretted that the rebbe had mentioned my name, that he’d brought me into the story at all, making me, in this way, its protagonist. I was more comfortable as a minor side character, the role I’d played my entire life with Dr. Freud and Dr. Zamenhof, and with my father and my mother and my sisters and even my wives. Forced to speak now by the expectation that I would, I blustered, “Well, I might have said something or other. As I’m sure His Majesty knows, our life on earth is at a particularly low point, and perhaps I was overly critical in comparing the angels’ seeming complacence with the moral stance their forefathers — ”