The Cloister

by James Carroll

  The mustachioed clerk put in cautiously, “That is what the friends of Job say, attributing sin to him to explain his woes, but they are wrong. Job was exceedingly righteous. The text is clear.”

  “Job was a Gentile,” said the politician, happy as always to raise a flag of skepticism.

  Rachel assumed that the man’s point was that Job’s experience counted for less if he was not a Jew. Yet Bible readers, she thought, were surely intended to sympathize with Job, whether he was a Jew or not. Well, the question was moot. The politician was not skeptical enough, since, as Rachel knew from her father, Job was a figment of Moses’s imagination. Job did not exist. His story was a parable. For that matter, maybe Moses was not its author. Who actually wrote the books of the Pentateuch? Speaking of skepticism.

  The architect had brought up the text to make a point, and now he pushed it. “God chastises a man so that he should return to the study of Torah,” he said. “ ‘For whom the Lord loveth, He correcteth.’ ”

  “Are we being corrected here?” the clerk asked bitterly. “How is this correction?”

  “How is this love?” the politician asked.

  “You say ‘the Lord,’ ” the clerk declared with heat. “The Lord is gone!” The clerk turned fiercely on Saul Vedette. “You, Rabbi, tell us! Where is the Lord in this?”

  Vedette smiled thinly. “Do not honor me with ‘Rabbi,’ friend. I am a simple citizen of God’s holy nation.”

  “But you know the Ramban. He said that what we suffer here is somehow our fault! So we are punished. The Lord punishes us with His absence.”

  “The Lord’s silence is not His absence,” Rachel’s father said, with a tranquillity that, for the hundredth time, astounded her.

  “But suffering! The Lord visits suffering upon us because of sin. What sin for this suffering?”

  Vedette was quiet. He let the silence settle once again. Finally, he said, “These are the great questions. We were put here to ask them—not to answer them.”

  “But there must be an answer.”

  Vedette nodded. “The answer to a text may be another text. Do you think that might be so?” Nothing in Vedette’s tone was tentative, yet neither was there certitude. He seemed at home with query.

  “What other text?” the architect asked.

  “Perhaps someone has a suggestion,” Vedette said. He looked from one man to another, exuding respect.

  “You, Professor,” the clerk said. “The text is yours to propose.”

  Vedette nodded: all right. “When the Lord looks at His people,” he said calmly, “it is not sin that He sees. What he sees is suffering. He does not inflict suffering. He wants to end it.”

  “Where in the Rabbis do you find that?”

  “I find it in Moses. There’s the second text for today—an answer to the Ramban. ‘And the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians,…unto a land flowing with milk and honey.” ’ Where in that, my friends, find you God concerned with sin?”

  “But where in Drancy find you milk and honey?” the clerk asked.

  “I find it in your fortitude, brother,” Vedette said.

  Rachel imagined her father adding, “I find it in the exquisite care you take with that perfect mustache of yours. Your mustache is a refusal to be reduced to the state of mere victim—a refusal that passes here for milk and honey.”

  “But the Ramban—”

  “The Ramban was not in Pharaoh’s Egypt,” Vedette replied. “Nor is he in Hitler’s Drancy. Not all suffering is the result of sin. On the Lord’s scale, Moses tells us, suffering weighs more than sin. The Lord knows the sorrows of His people. And what happens then?”

  “When?”

  “After Egypt.”

  “Forty years of exile.”

  “And where was the Lord?”

  The clerk did not reply, but the garment merchant spoke up. “The Lord went with them.”

  “And where was the Lord when Babylon destroyed the Temple and carried the people off to captivity?”

  “With them,” the merchant said.

  “And after Rome destroyed the Temple and drove our fathers off?”

  “With them.”

  Vedette waited. Rachel sensed that the men had joined him in the secret place of his magnanimity. Finally, he said, “And this presence of His, with the people in exile and in captivity—did the people see it? Or hear it? What do you think?”

  “They saw the pillar of fire.”

  “A sign. But was that the Lord?”

  “We do not see the Lord.”

  “Ah,” Vedette said, “but we know nonetheless that the Lord is with us. No? With the Temple destroyed, where do we find the Temple?”

  “In Shabbat, the Temple in time.”

  Vedette opened his hands. Here. He said, “If the Lord is struck dumb by what befalls us early and late, that is not absence. That is evidence of His presence. He is struck dumb, as we are.”

  “So the Lord’s silence proves that He is with us?” The architect was clearly unconvinced.

  Vedette shrugged. “What we have in Exodus is the start of our whole story. There it is, my good brother: ‘For I know their sorrows.’ Of whom is the Lord speaking when He says such a thing?”

  “ ‘For I know their sins.’ ” The architect put in. “That is the Ramban!”

  “Would Rabbi ben Nachmanides choose his own disposition over what is given in Torah? By what authority say you so?”

  “ ‘Ein yisurim be-lo avon.’ ”

  “I repeat myself, brother. The Ramban is not at Drancy. Your sin, perhaps, has put you here. Assuredly, mine has put me here.” Vedette let his hand fall quietly on his daughter’s head. “But that is not the Lord’s concern. I repeat: sin is not the point. And not even suffering is the whole story. This place is alive with righteousness, the virtue of those who, in fortitude, hold fast. To the right of us, and to the left of us—there are those who hold fast, even as they see the little ones loaded onto cattle cars. Innocents. Pure innocents.”

  “And where is the Lord for them? The little ones?” The question came plaintively, from below. It was the toothless man, on the floor. This was his first intervention.

  “The Lord knows their sorrows, too, brother,” Vedette said with fresh gentleness. “That is the only word that Torah gives us to say. For the rest, we must be silent. As the Lord is silent. Silence now is the only way of speaking.”

  “No! No!” The man clambered to his feet. He shook his fist at Vedette, and fairly shouted, “We must speak by saying ‘No!’ ”

  “Ben Joseph, sit,” the clerk said. “Sit! They will hear—”

  “Let them hear! My children are gone! Carried to their deaths!”

  “We do not know that—”

  “Of course we know it! Do not speak to me of holding fast! You are fools, all of you! With your talk of Ramban and Rashi and Moses and the Lord! Who cares? Who cares?”

  Vedette stood and, balancing himself unsteadily, drew close to the toothless man. He opened his arms, an implicit asking of permission. When the man did not back away, Vedette wrapped him with a stout embrace. The man fell against him, and his shoulders began to move. “We care,” Vedette said. He repeated softly, “We care.”

  Rachel had an impulse to stand and join in her father’s embrace, but she did not move. She sensed that the others, too, might have had such an impulse. Though no one moved, Rachel imagined them standing, one by one, to join in locking the heartbroken Pole in a mute circle of concern. That Vedette and the Pole remained, in fact, standing alone took nothing away from the air of potent solidarity that had all at once transformed the room. Silence was not absence.

  Finally, her father said quietly, “ ‘Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.’ ‘Exalted and hallowed be God’s great name in the world which God created.’ ”


  Rachel looked up at her father. Later, she would realize that she had not found it possible, while listening, to give real assent to anything he had said: to her, God’s silence and God’s absence were very much the same thing, and, from those days on, always would be. Who am I now? she would ask, wondering what it was to be an unbelieving Jew. But if she could not move her conscience to affirm the faith of her father, she could move her legs and her arms; she could come to her feet and stand, which, at that moment, had to be enough. And it was.

  Soon all of the men had come to their feet. Each was careful to keep his distance, yet they joined, some more fluidly than others, in the solemn recitation of the prayer Saul Vedette had begun. It was the Mourners’ Kaddish, and they knew it too well. As they prayed, the toothless man went on sobbing.

  At that point, because of her father, the human capacity for fellow feeling still weighed more—on Rachel Vedette’s scale, forgetting the Lord’s—than the things that make for hate.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A clap on the head, coming again and again, with the effect not of clouding her perception, but of sharpening it; accompanied by a nauseating sense of vertigo, as if she would never walk steadily again, or be at ease as herself in any circumstance—such was the experience Rachel had when she realized, after days of the priest’s not returning to The Cloisters, that she had yet again betrayed her father—this time by carelessly giving his precious book away.

  For more than five years, she had never been without that particular copy of Historia Calamitatum: Heloissae et Abaelardi Epistolae. A dozen times—with her father, and after him—she had hurriedly bundled a few possessions while moving, or being pushed along, or escaping, or following in a line of supplicants, or queuing before an intake officer’s desk, or simply running. And each time, she’d found a way to bring his book. Alone of all she possessed, she had clung to it. It was not an amulet: what protection from harm had it offered? Nor was it a talisman: what luck had it ever brought? Not a relic, either: her father was no cult object, even to her. The book was simply the last point on a thread of connective tissue, palpably linking her to a past—and a deeper past—from which she’d sprung, and from which, in any case, she could not break free, even if she’d wanted to. But, above all, the book was her father’s, not hers. Given all that was consumed in the fires of Europe, the book, despite its Christian content, enshrined that profoundly Jewish man’s essential legacy, a hint of what he’d hoped for at the end. And now she’d lost it.

  The strange priest cared nothing for what she’d entrusted to him. But why should he? What, to him, was one book among so many? Especially a book that, in the indomitable Héloïse, railed against all that any priest could be expected to revere? Rachel rebuked herself each time she thought of it.

  Not in years had she so acted on impulse, and this was why. She should have known from that cursed late day in Drancy: impulse, for her, meant the doom of all she valued.

  Again and again, she had circled back through the museum’s varied arcades, gardens, galleries, and chapels to pass by the Chapter House in the central Cloister, the one from La Chapelle-sur-Loire, where they’d first met. Each time, she allowed herself to picture him, sitting there, his back straight against the cold stone wall, her father’s book on the bench beside him. Sometimes she imagined him in the black suit and Roman collar, sometimes in his plaid shirt and windbreaker. But he never appeared. For the first time in the year and a half that she had been employed at The Cloisters, she’d begun to understand—no, she’d begun to stand-under—the museum’s meaning as a monument to what was not there.

  When she came outside at the end of her workday, the pale sun was already hovering just above the treeline of the forested Palisades across the river. She pulled the fabric of her cloak closer around her shoulders, and set out along the path that would take her to the subway stop. When, coming around a curve and up a slight hill, she approached the onetime gatehouse, now the coffee shop, she slowed her pace. She had done so each afternoon that week, picturing him there, too. She had imagined his profile in the window, the one beside the table where they had sat together. Twice, at the end of work, she had gone into the shop and taken that table, as if then he would come. The waitress had served her with the usual cold neutrality, having no idea with what frenzied agitation Rachel’s mind was spinning. She rehearsed the conversation that she and the priest would have been having at that table: humanism and mysticism, yes; but also the theological roots of violence; the terrors of sexual restlessness; the real defeat of Abelard; the holy indignation of Héloïse; the Church’s epochal amnesia; the twelfth century’s curse on the twentieth. None of this was abstract to Rachel, but each time Father Kavanagh had failed to show, the recognition had come to her—how little any of what the medieval lovers had written to each other would have meant to a sane person living now; how little, apparently, it meant to him.

  As for herself—well, why should shards of decisive days and nights at Drancy not have flashed across the field of her distraction all week, given what that priest had set loose in her?

  She drew nearer to the coffee shop, and stopped.

  There he was!

  Now, when she saw his sharp profile in that window, she thought at first that she was once again imagining him. But he turned, and looked directly at her.

  Him.

  She resumed walking. By the time she climbed the few flagstone stairs to the entranceway, he was there, having moved to the door, waiting for her.

  “Hello, miss,” he said. His jovial air clashed with her mood. She would have liked to greet him with friendly goodwill, but managed only the barest nod. He was dressed in his black suit and collar. He gestured the way back to the table, where his cigarette smoldered on the lip of an ashtray, beside a half-empty coffee cup. Adjacent to the cup were two books—his breviary, and her Historia.

  “I am happy to see my book,” she blurted. “It was impulsive of me to give it to you.” She added, “And it was rude.” She picked the book up, to be sure.

  “Rude? Why rude?”

  “An imposition.”

  “No. No. Not at all. I found it fascinating,” he said. “Even if I had to turn to Cassell’s now and again. Héloïse uses words that old Aquinas didn’t know.” He laughed, still not picking up on Rachel’s gravity.

  Now that she had the book, her impulse was to turn and leave; she might in fact have done this, but she recognized the visceral urge as yet another instance of what had caused this trouble to begin with. She said, despite herself, “I should have told you to return it to me sooner.”

  “Ah…” The priest showed with a passing grimace that he now sensed her anxiety. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The truth is, I wanted to get here right away, after…” He stopped. She could not read him, but remembered his agitation from before. He continued, “I already told you some of it.”

  “An old friend, you said.” She hesitated, then added, “An unanswered question.”

  “Yes. You told me I could find it…find him. And I did.”

  “And you spoke of your Bishop.”

  “I haven’t been back to him yet. Time collapsed on me.” He indicated her book. “You gave it to me on Wednesday. Thursday, I found my friend, far out in New Jersey. Friday is all day at the hospital, I can’t miss it. Then the weekend…” A simple shrug conveyed a tangle of helplessness. “Hearing Confessions, writing a sermon, which, in my case, is a killer in the best of times…which, actually, this has not been.” Now, when he grinned, she saw how forced the expression was, an attempt at self-deprecation. He said, “It is only now, on Sunday afternoon, through tomorrow, that I am free.”

  Rachel was startled to realize that the weekend had, indeed, come. She saw his point, how, whatever its challenges, he had simply been living his life, with no disrespect to her. She felt foolish for seeming to have rebuked him. “I did not think of that,” she said. “Sunday at The Cloisters is just another day, but with more visitors. I cannot say, in
reality, that I notice the days in this way.”

  “Not even Sunday?”

  “No.” It only now hit her that tomorrow was her day off, too. She hated her day off.

  Kavanagh laughed again. “In the old days at The Cloisters, Sunday would have been the whole point. It’s the whole point at Good Shepherd.”

  “Does that return us to your theme, then?” She forced a modicum of lightness into her voice. “How Mr. Rockefeller’s sacred space is, in actuality, profane?”

  “My theme? Profane? Did I say that?”

  “Empty, then.”

  “Well, no sanctuary lamp. That’s true. No Real Presence.”

  The absence of which Rachel had been aware that week was this priest’s. She recalled her own words: “readiness to stake everything on the absolute.” But he had demurred at that: not the absolute, in his case, he had said. Instead, “something very shaky.” So that’s what she had sensed in him, enough knowledge of the absolute to feel cut off from it. If she had reached out to him—that was why.

  He pulled the chair out. “Shall we sit?”

  Or, he seemed about to ask, are you going to turn now and flee?

  She clutched the book, glad to have it back. And, yes, she was glad to see this man again. Not man. Priest.

  He clearly read her hesitation, even if he could never have understood it. “Please,” he said.

  It was not his shakiness that struck her, but his kindness. Yes, she could see him in a hospital, dispensing care.

  She sat. He helped her adjust her chair, and when she untied the neck strings of her cloak, he helped her arrange its folds on the back of the chair. She placed her book back on the table, beside his breviary.

  Then he sat, too.

  She said, “I might have tried to contact you.”

  “You know I am at Good Shepherd.”

  Once she had begun to fear that, through her own carelessness, her father’s book was in danger of being lost, she had fallen back on an old stratagem: instructing herself not to trust or hope, but to detach and wait. She said, “An infidèle, calling at the rectory? No.”