Two letters that completed a cycle. Encasing the heart of the matter.
It made for a nice metaphor. Jacob Lev was a man of heart.
Except, he wasn’t.
That wasn’t the way he’d been taught to spell his surname.
Two distinct Hebrew letters made a v sound. What he had learned—what Sam had taught him, what Jacob now wrote—was not lamed bet, but lamed vav—
And, in turn, the letter vav had two pronunciations: v, as a consonant, and o, as a vowel.
Which gave his name, as it was spelled, two pronunciations.
Lev.
Or Loew.
The German w, the slurred oe. Lev. Classic Ellis Island Special. The wonder was that it had taken him two days to figure it out.
Make that thirty-two years.
There, in the middle of the temporary home of Special Collections, Jacob burst into giddy, hysterical laughter.
He didn’t know his own name.
“Kindly lower your voice.”
He quieted down, his stomach muscles twitching.
He craved alcohol.
So he shared a name with a famous rabbi. So what? There were plenty of Loews in the world. And even if he really was a great-great-great-great-whatever, who cared? Families grew exponentially. He’d once read that there were something like a thousand Rockefellers alive, no more than four generations removed from the original wealth, most of them ordinary middle-class Americans—a few of them poor. People reverted to the mean.
The Maharal had died in the early 1600s. Figure twenty-five years to a generation—maybe less, because people got married early and died young in those days.
Sixteen generations, eighteen. At best he was one of tens of thousands of descendants.
Even so, his father’s obsession with the Maharal took on new meaning. Much more than academic curiosity.
Then why say nothing about it? You’d think it would be a point of pride.
He shut his eyes and Sam appeared before him, interchanging rapidly with the clay model Peter Wichs had shown him.
The image shifted to Wichs, studying him. Processing him. Recognizing him?
But Jacob didn’t look like Sam.
He took after Bina.
You are the detective, Jacob Lev.
He had taken the guard’s use of his full name as a quirk of speech or an affectation. It’s your name, isn’t it? Now it began to feel like a rote lesson, a drill, the sounds scratched over and over again into the clay of Jacob’s mind, until they took.
Jacoblevjacoblevjacoblev.
Why did you let me up here?
You asked.
I’m sure a lot of people ask.
Not a lot of policemen.
Every Hebrew letter corresponded to a number. Lamed was thirty. Vav was six.
A durable legend had attached to that number: in every generation, thirty-six hidden righteous people sustained the world.
Your father the lamed-vavnik.
Anyone who thinks he’s a lamed-vavnik is by definition not a lamed-vavnik.
I don’t think. I know.
Grandiose thinking: another sign of incipient madness.
The pencil snapped between his fingers. He could no longer restrain himself; he burst into laughter.
“Sir.”
He turned to the librarian to apologize and she recoiled, as if she perceived in him something unspeakable. He stood up and she scurried behind the desk; he asked her to return his possessions and she held the basket at arm’s length. When he thanked her, she didn’t reply, and as he tripped toward the stairwell, he heard the door to Special Collections slam and bolt.
THE WHEEL
Looking back, Yankele, I can hardly believe it, how young we were. What does a six-year-old girl know? Nothing. A ten-year-old-boy, even less.”
The topic of tonight’s monologue is love, inspired by the recent betrothal of the Loews’ youngest daughter, Feigele. In honor of the couple, Perel is fashioning a spice jar, for use in the havdalah ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath. She builds up speed on the pottery wheel, her wet hands beginning to glow silver.
“Even at that age, Yudl was known as a scholar. Our parents agreed we’d marry when he returned from the yeshiva. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.”
Perel smiles. “Also, he was tall and handsome.” She touches her fingers to the clay, and it shivers like a lover’s body.
The aura erupts around her.
“No road runs straight, Yankele. When I was sixteen, my father made a bad investment. His entire fortune disappeared overnight. Our Sages say the rich person is the one who is contented with his portion. They also say a poor man is like a dead man. Before the catastrophe, everyone had taken to calling my father Reich, not Schmelkes, which was his real name. You can imagine what that felt like, being called rich, then losing everything. Father was so ashamed, he could barely face us.”
She can imagine. She knows well the mockery of a misnomer.
Perel works the clay. The aura does not drape her body evenly, shining brightest at her hands, head, heart; beneath her skirts, between her legs.
“Everyone expected Yudl to break the engagement. My father wrote to him, stating that he could no longer afford the dowry. I was heartsick, of course, but what could I do?”
The vessel achieves symmetry, taking on shape and dignity, the aura growing to an unbearable brightness, engulfing Perel in a rainstorm of grays: quicksilver, tin, and fog, but also silence and boredom and ambiguity and patience and wisdom and that terrible, terrifying sludge that is pure wickedness.
The coexistence of these elements mystifies her. What does it say about the Rebbetzin?
“I was a teenager. I felt my life was over. I sank into melancholy, I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. My mother worried I had plague. She moved me out of the room I shared with my four sisters and had me sleep in the attic.” A soft smile. “Maybe that’s why I like it up here so much.”
She wonders if she has an aura, too. If she does, she can’t see it. Perhaps that’s what the animals are responding to when they snarl and cower. While it saddens her to think that she will never know herself as well as a dog does, she has decided that this experience is universal. People perceive the nature and texture of others more easily than their own. It is evident, for example, that Perel’s own aura is invisible to her. If she could see it—bubbling like molten silver—she wouldn’t be chatting so blithely.
“Being alone didn’t help me, it made it so much worse. But when I was with people I was miserable, too, and nobody wanted to be with me because I would try to draw them into my misery. So they avoided me, and consequently I felt more alone than before. A dreadful pattern. I was in the depths, Yankele, the absolute pit of despair.”
The memory clouds Perel’s lovely face, and she works for some time in silence, fashioning an interior lip. She lets the wheel slow. The aura dissipates. When both motion and light have died away, she inspects the jar. Finding it satisfactory, she removes it to the side.
“That’s the easy part. It’s the lid that takes practice.”
Perel picks up the gut string cutter, and slices off a hunk from the mound of riverbank clay. For several minutes she wedges it against the floor to force out air pockets; then she kneads, pressing down with the heels of her hands, forming a face that she folds over on itself.
“Two things saved me, Yankele. The Holy One, Blessed Be He, and clay. From out of the depths I cried out to Him, and He bent his ear to the voice of my plea, for His mercy is eternal. One afternoon I was walking along the river, lost in unhappiness, and I sat down to rest. Without thinking, I gathered up a handful of mud and began to squeeze it, so that it oozed between my fingers, as if I was forcing out black feelings, and I realized that I had stopped weeping. Well, I thought, ‘That’s good, but it won’t l
ast, I’ll be miserable again soon.’ And I forgot all about it until a few days later. I was walking in the same spot. And wouldn’t you know it? The shape of my palm—I found it lying there, just as I had left it. It had dried. My fingers fit into it perfectly.”
The Rebbetzin pulls away a chunk of clay and begins to form the lid, rekindling the aura.
“It’s special stuff, you know, Vltava mud. Strong and elastic. It dries hard, even without firing. I began to go to the river whenever I felt sad, and I would make shapes. Animals and flowers. I made a kiddush cup for my father. He was pleased. It was the first time I had seen him smile since he learned of the loss of his cargo ships. He thanked me for bringing beauty back into his life. Little by little, I began to get better.”
Perel gauges the size of the lid against the bowl, resumes shaping.
“In those days the mail was slow, Yankele. There was a war going on, too, and that caused lengthy delays. When a letter came from Lublin, we saw that Yudl had sent it seven or eight months before, in response to my father’s offer to end our engagement. You know what he wrote, Yankele? I will remember it word for word until the day I am exempted from this world. ‘Reb Shmuel, I will delay marriage only until such time as I can locate sufficient funds to give your daughter the home she deserves.’”
Perel smiles.
“The Sages say that arranging a match is harder than splitting the Red Sea. The Holy One, Blessed Be He—it was His doing, Yankele, that I should find a husband so well suited for me. I can find no other explanation.”
Perel falls silent again, working the lid smooth. “The top and bottom will both shrink, but not at the same rate. Normally I’d let the bowl dry first and then make the lid, but Chanukkah is less than a month away. Soon it’ll be too cold. The clay becomes impossible. It’s like trying to knead a stone. I suppose I could have you do it for me, eh? No, I’m only joking . . . I hope Isaac and Feigie will be happy together. I trust they will.”
She nods agreement.
“Thank you,” Perel says. “That’s kind of you to say. He’s a fine young man. Yudl considers him like his own son.” She laughs. “Which, in a sense, he is.”
That Rebbe has chosen a Torah scholar for his youngest daughter is appropriate and expected. What has the ghetto buzzing is which young Torah scholar: Isaac Katz, Isaac the Hatless, Rebbe’s foremost disciple.
More to the point: the widowed husband of his older daughter, Leah.
Except for Rebbe, all interested parties have reservations about the new match. Including the betrothed couple. Long accustomed to averting his eyes in the presence of his sister-in-law, Isaac now looks as though he might faint. Feigie paces, reciting psalms for hours on end, like a woman praying for a stay of execution.
Perel says, “I’ll miss being up here in the winter. It’s so peaceful. It’s like I’m a girl again, dressed in finery, my desires attended to. Funny, because look at me: I’m filthy. It’s a feeling of belonging, a wonderful feeling.”
I don’t know what that feels like.
“I gave up working with clay after I got married. Yudl didn’t like it. He said it was the dust of idolatry. He was very zealous in his younger days, you know. He still won’t let me put my name to the pieces, or tell anyone where they came from. But he loves me, and there’s no greater leniency than love, mm? Anyhow, he knows he can’t stop me, and he knows better than to try. When Leah died, it was the only thing that allowed me to forget my sorrow. Every woman loses children. I lost three before her, all of them less than a month old. But Leah was a woman. Modest, and elegant. Too frail for this world. I was always afraid for her, and—I was right.”
The Rebbetzin wipes her upper arm against her eye, laughs hoarsely. She holds out the lid. “What do you think, Yankele? Too plain? I think a flower would be nice. Feigie’s that kind of girl.”
Perel’s hand hovers over her tools. There are knives; wooden combs; paddles of varying sizes with soft, scalloped edges. Things of beauty in themselves, the smooth handles glowing from within. She picks up a roller and begins to flatten out a piece of clay.
“Leah would have preferred it plain. She was good at clay herself, you know. I don’t know why I keep talking about her. It’s Feigie I should be thinking about. I keep telling myself Leah can’t have been as lovely as I remember, as witty, as kind. We remember only the best parts of those who are no longer with us. But what does that mean for my other daughters? How do you mourn the dead child and celebrate the living one? That’s what I struggle with, Yankele.”
Perel raises the sheet of rolled clay. It is thin enough for lamplight to pass through. She drapes it carefully atop a plank. Moistening a whetstone, she draws the smallest knife against it with a pleasant, methodical rasp. She plucks out a single strand of silky black hair and draws it floatingly down upon the blade. It splits with ease, and she tugs gently at the sheet of rolled clay to free it of lumps and bubbles, commences cutting out tiny ovals.
“I don’t see why one ought to conceal one’s talents, especially if they bring good into the world. There’s enough suffering as it is. There’s nothing wrong as long as your intentions are correct. Isaac and Feige, they’ll make the blessing over the spices, and smell the sweetness, and I’ll be participating in their joy. Don’t you agree? Of course you do. You know, Yankele, that’s why I like having you around: you never argue.”
She coils one of the ovals around itself, moistens it with a droplet so that it adheres to the top of the lid. The aura flickers back to life: rippling, tentative.
More ovals, pressed together, form a minuscule rosebud.
“The key, Yankele, is proportion.”
She thinks of her monstrous self, the mismatch of body and soul.
Perel begins a second rose. “It must get very lonely, not being able to speak.”
You will never know.
Perel stops. “Have I offended you? If I have, I beg forgiveness. I didn’t mean to mock you.”
She shakes her head: no offense taken.
“Thank you, Yankele. You’re a mensch . . .” The Rebbetzin glances at her hesitantly, then says: “Your mind is sound. It’s your tongue that’s the problem, you know.”
She tilts her head. She did not know she had a tongue; she assumed she didn’t. No point in giving a tongue to a mute.
Perel drags the bucket of water between them. “Here. Open your mouth.”
Open her mouth? She cannot open her mouth.
It then occurs to her that she has never tried.
“Open your mouth,” Perel says, “and stick out your tongue.”
Clumsy lips part, and in the black glossy surface of the water, she beholds stumpy teeth forming the bars of a cage. She pries them open and gazes down her nose at a runty piece of flesh, lolling in the cavity of her mouth like a deep-sea creature mistakenly hauled to the surface.
A tongue, sure enough, though it hardly deserves the name. It fascinates and repels her. It’s been inside her this whole time and she never knew.
She squeezes her cheeks together, forcing it out farther, and receives another shock.
Her tongue has a waist.
A string, tied so tightly that it causes the gray flesh on either side to bulge out. There’s a knot, too, with a big floppy bow, ends sticking out, begging to be tugged free.
Or—she squeezes her cheeks harder—not a string, but a thin strip of—
Paper?
No wonder she can’t talk.
How exhilarating to finally grasp that the problem is so simple. Simple problem; simple solution.
She reaches up to untie the strip.
Perel shrieks. “No.”
She pauses.
“You must never, ever do that,” Perel says. “Do you understand? Never.”
She nods.
“Tell me: you will never touch that.”
What kind of absu
rd, cruel demand is that? She can’t tell her anything, not with her tongue tied up like a dog.
“It’s the Divine Name. Written on parchment. If you take it out . . .” Perel pauses. “Don’t touch it, please.”
She stares sadly at her reflection for a few moments more. The stupid little organ, the pathetic little scrap. They—not her misshapen body, not her glutinous mask of a face—are what make her a monster.
“I’m sorry, Yankele. I shouldn’t have shown it to you. I just didn’t want you to think there was anything wrong with you.”
But there is. And there always will be.
She knows that, now.
And now that she knows the knot is there, she can’t stop feeling it. She scrapes it against the roof of her mouth as the Rebbetzin completes the final two roses in silence.
After cleaning her tools and rinsing her arms in the bucket, Perel dries her forearms and rolls down her sleeves.
“Pour this out for me, please, Yankele?”
Obedient, as always, she carries the bucket to the small arched door set into the garret wall, lifts the iron bar, and dumps the water out onto the cobblestones below.
Perel dries her tools, bundles them in leather, and stores them in the drying cabinet, along with the new spice jar.
“I’m sorry for showing you that. I truly am.”
She nods. She’s already forgiven her.
“I’m going to show you something else. Hopefully it will lighten your heart.” Perel stands on her stool, reaching to the back of a shelf. She removes an object wrapped in wool and tied in twine, begins undoing the knots.
“Yudl must never know,” she says. “He’d be furious.”
Unfurling the wool, she holds up an astonishingly lifelike model of Rebbe’s head.
“It was an experiment, to see how realistic I could make it. You can’t use a wheel for something like this, you have to trust your fingers. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s very good. Is that vain? I meant to destroy it after I was done, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. More vanity. I want my creations to live on. I also think—maybe I’m being self-serving—but I think it would be a shame if no one were ever to know what he looked like.” The Rebbetzin grins nervously. “Nu? What do you think?”
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