People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
Page 32
However, by the time I entered college, I no longer ate meat, and I no longer hoped for a Messiah. I did not wish to go to Jerusalem and devour the flesh of Leviathan. It was at this time that I received the prophet, along with a pen set, as a gift to celebrate the onset of my adult life. I despised my responsibility for Elijah. I had no love for this man, who had been a burden on my family for too long. He was little more than rags and bones now, and he gave off a powerful odor that I could not inhale without gagging. I did not want to tend to Elijah.
I hid the prophet in the closet of my dormitory room, opening the door only long enough to fling scraps from my dinner plate onto him. I felt a mixture of guilt and resentment toward the old man. At night, when I would hear the voice of the prophet mumbling in Yiddish from inside the closet, I would close my eyes and secretly hope that God rejected those incomprehensible prayers. I imagined the words of Elijah rising to Heaven as wisps of smoke, and entering through the nostrils of God. I imagined God spitting the prophet’s prayers out of His mouth as though they were filthy rags. Then I would sleep, and in my dreams, I would be terrified.
Elijah disgusted my girlfriend, who shared her dorm room with an easily shocked girl from Iran. This rendered neither of our rooms suitable for intimacy. We struggled to find locations to satisfy our desires, but every abandoned classroom or empty soccer field failed us. In the first instance, just as we were flinging our discarded clothes onto the chalkboard and front row of desks, a dozen first-year calculus students filed in and burst into embarrassed giggling. In the second instance, as we lay on the grass, furiously pawing at each other and gasping for air, a squad of cheerleaders stormed the field and stood above us, arms akimbo, demanding that we leave.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend’s Iranian roommate never seemed to leave their dorm room, where she spent hours on the telephone speaking in rapid-fire Farsi. If we intruded during her conversations, she would stare at us from underneath her veil and her eyes would widen, followed by an inevitable high-pitched gasp. My girlfriend did not want to imagine how her roommate would respond if she witnessed us doing so much as holding hands.
My room was no better an option. No amount of discussion concerning Elijah made the prophet any less offensive to my girlfriend. She was not Jewish, and did not care one way or the other if he was a figure from the Old Testament. “Whoever he is,” she would complain, “he needs to be in an nursing home. At least there they would clean him!”
Finally, in order to act on my lust, I decided to pay fifty dollars to the two wrestlers who lived in the dorm room next to mine. I asked them to look after the prophet for several hours. When I left the old man with the wrestlers, he turned away from me and pressed his head and hands to the wall, shoulders rising and falling gently as he wept. The wrestlers seemed unconcerned. “He’ll be all right,” they promised me. “Go and take care of your lady.”
While my girlfriend and I indulged our desires, the wrestlers fed Elijah beer and pizza. They turned their music up and danced around the old man, clubbing each other with their massive arms and howling. They went through their drawers and found their cheapest cologne, which they dumped on Elijah to cover his smell. They watched a pornographic movie with the prophet, smoking marihuana out of a six-foot plastic bong and blowing the smoke in Elijah’s face. They used cigarette lighters to singe his beard and sidelocks, and they brought trinkets from their Hawaiian vacation out of their closet and decorated the old man with them. When I came for Elijah, two hours after I had left him, he was slumped on one of their beds with a plastic tropical-flower lei around his neck, a grass skirt around his waist, and a coconut-half bikini top slung over his shoulders. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, not blinking. One of the wrestlers lifted a tiki mug to me, toasting me with a tropical cocktail. “Hey,” he said blearily. “Your grandfather is pretty cool.”
The prophet was not breathing.
It took twnty minutes of CPR before paramedics produced a heartbeat. I visited Elijah every afternoon for a month, drowning in shame. I sat by his hospital bed and stared at the old man. I spoke quietly to him and grasped his hand, rubbing his dry, paper-like skin and praying he would come out of the coma. At the end of the afternoon, my father would join me, and we would go down to the hospital’s cafeteria and eat dinner in silence. At first, I tried to apologize to my father, but he raised his hand to silence me. “It was too big a responsibility,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is my fault. I should never have asked you to care for Elijah.”
I would walk with my father to the hospital room, and he would take a seat alongside the prophet’s bed. He would lean down towards the old man, whispering. “What now, Eliyahu?” my father would ask. “What now?”
My grades plummeted and my relationship with my girlfriend ended. I did not attend class, but instead wandered around the campus, filled with black thoughts. At night, I would watch the news, and I would hear of wars and murders, and wonder if it was not somehow my fault. What if the Messiah was ready to come, I wondered, but could not? What if the Messiah waited in Heaven, astride his white stallion, waiting for Elijah to announce him—and because of my stupidity, that announcement would never come?
Unable to bear these thoughts, I drank, and the more I drank the angrier I grew. What sort of God, I asked myself, would keep the prophet alive in such a debilitated state? What sort of God would allow Elijah to grow mad and frail, so that a little bit of excitement might kill him? Was this my fault, I asked, or God’s?
Drunk, I stumbled to the hospital. It was late at night, and the building seemed abandoned. I passed through the hallways unnoticed, as though I were in a dream, until I reached Elijah’s room. I stood above the prophet and wept, wanting to press a pillow into the old man’s face until he stopped breathing again. If the Messiah cannot come without this ruin of a man, I told myself, then the Messiah does not deserve to come.
I leaned over and pressed my lips to the old man’s ear and, for the first time in my life, I whispered to him. “Gather your prayer shawl, gather your phylacteries,” I whispered. “He is here!” Then I returned to my dorm room and slept without nightmares.
When I came to the hospital the next day, Elijah was gone. An orderly went through the old man’s room, changing the sheets on his empty bed and spraying air freshener. On the floor, swept into a little pile, were half-eaten dates and fragments of a fortune cookie. From outside the room, from some distant hallway, I heard the moans and wheezes of an accordion.
Reuben
Tamar Yellin
When I was nine years old, my Uncle Esdras came to visit.
He was a traveller, and a handsome man. Though short, he had the body of an acrobat, and with his shock of fair hair looked much like my father had in earlier life. Both wore glasses, and both possessed the family characteristics: sobriety, generosity, intellect, bad temper, the wealth of too many talents, and an obsessive nature.
There are birds, the albatross for example, which spend their entire lives in the air. My uncle was like that. He set down only occasionally, and when he did so it was never for long. His visits were rare and always unexpected, for he was always en route, and the fact that we lay on his route was just a happy accident. He was a bird of passage, and we were his way station.
My father did not share his wanderlust. He was a man of books, an earnest autodidact, whom travelling invariably made ill. He preferred to cover distances on paper, and to read about those faraway places he did not have the stamina to reach. To him there was something faintly reprehensible in Esdras, clicking his heels across the continents.
I still remember the day of his arrival. He wore a pale suit, and carried a small brown valise. This, from the state of its broken corners and the numerous labels pasted onto it, must have travelled with him for many years. He smelt strongly of nicotine, and when he bent down to greet me I was struck by a strange sense of recognition. It would be unfair to say that he was my father made handsome, for my father too had once been a handsome
man. Truer to say he was my father turned hero: a swashbuckler version bronzed by the desert sun.
My mother must have recognized it also, for her embrace of welcome was a little longer and tighter than was strictly necessary. She had squeezed into her black dress, puffed up her hair, and sprayed herself with the perfume she saved for special occasions. The house was a glade of sunshine and fluttering chintz, and she had set the table with angel cake and flowers.
Into this haven of suburban peace Uncle Esdras entered like a light aircraft, battered and bleached, footsore and world-weary, wanting only an oil-change and a wash. But he was not a man to insult hospitality; he had, after all, accepted it the world over. And really it only took a few moments for him to adjust himself. He sat down to tea and promptly turned the table into a map as he proceeded to describe, with cartographic exactness, the route he had lately followed to bring him to us. It was a typical act of conquest. He would never, in all the time he spent there, seem natural in our house, but would become a kind of resident anomaly, like the bizarre carving he had brought us from Africa, which sat on the mantelpiece next to the eight-day clock.
Later I found he had taken over my room, and turned it, in a few moves, into his own, a sort of explorer’s base hut. Strange objects were scattered among my childish possessions, dark, worn, heavy things, whose presence made everything else unfamiliar: a pair of thick boots, a leather-covered camera, a canvas knapsack fastened with giant buckles. I did not see how they could all have emerged from that one modest suitcase, but my uncle, along with his many other talents, was an expert and indefatigable packer.
On the bedside table a black sticky volume was lying, bound round with an ancient elastic band and decorated with stains and squashed mosquitoes: my uncle’s travel journal. I opened it. It was written in purple ink, in a strange spidery code. Here and there it was splashed with a crude drawing: a temple, a tree, a tremulous smoking mountain.
I do not know, to this day, what precisely it was my uncle did. I thought of him then as a kind of scholar-adventurer, performing in actuality what my father only read about in books: leaping crevasses, discovering hidden cities, recording the dialects of distant clans. I imagined him living a life more dangerous and romantic than that of anyone else I had ever met.
He did not take much notice of me at first. Apparently he valued his privacy, for as soon as he entered the room I was dismissed with a clap of the hands. Later I peeped in to find him lying back on the bed with his boots on, blowing smoke meditatively at the ceiling. This struck me as entirely an adventurer’s thing to do.
Afterwards I found that by standing on a flowerpot beneath the window I could satisfactorily spy on him, although there wasn’t much to see. However restless his lifestyle, he had the capacity to lie still for long periods. His expression was neither troubled nor entirely peaceful: from the depth of the grooves on his forehead he seemed to be calculating the solution to a particularly difficult sum.
I managed to sit quietly through dinner while my parents and uncle talked, but found it impossible to follow the conversation studded with foreign and exotic words. During dessert I nodded off to sleep, and was ignominiously sent to bed. Three hours later I was up again: creeping down in my pajamas I found them, like mountaineers in a tent, playing kitchen-roulette on the tablecloth. My uncle had set up a circle of condiments, my father with skill and dexterity spun the knife; my mother had got out an heirloom bottle of brandy. The stakes, it seemed, were more spiritual than monetary. They all smoked cigarettes, and I felt I had stumbled on something adult, sinister, and exclusive, an intimate threesome where I was an unwanted fourth.
This was my first introduction to Uncle Esdras. Next morning I discovered him, a dawn riser, sitting in the lounge with his inevitable cigarette and a line of curious objects ranged on the coffee table in front of him. He did not glance at me, but raised a finger. I stopped at a deferential distance of about three feet and looked at the objects. There was a ball of patterned metal, a fragment of red coral, and a string of beads. A tooth, a gourd, a coin, and what I knew later to be a lemur’s foot.
Uncle Esdras contemplated this booty, and while wielding his cigarette in one hand, adjusted their positions relative to one another as though playing an odd kind of solitaire. There seemed to be great deliberation in the way he did this, and if I had known better I would have said he was trying to pique my interest.
After a while, having arranged them to his satisfaction, he sat back with a sigh, and finally deigned to turn his eyes on me. I suppose you would like to take a closer look, he said, and patting the cushion invited me to sit down next to him. I hesitated at first. There was something of the predator in Esdras which I instinctively recognized, but I let my curiosity get the better of me and slid in beside him onto the green sofa.
Then he proceeded to explain the origins of his seven objects. He asked me if I knew the meaning of the word talisman. Each of these was a kind of talisman and very necessary to the traveller. The coin, for instance, which was decorated with a curly script, if kept in a pocket guaranteed you would always have two coins to rub together. He had found it by chance in an Arabian market. The coral he had won from an old sailor in Calcutta, who in turn had obtained it from a great fakir. It had the power of calming bad weather when thrown into the sea.
As he described their powers and provenance he threw me quick glances every so often, as if to check whether I believed his tales. My expression must have looked suitably wonderstruck, for he continued to tell even more fantastic stories. The gourd, for example, was a magical source of water which had saved his life once when crossing the Sahara. The tooth had mystical healing properties.
I picked up the coffee-colored beads which hung limply on a dirty piece of string. Uncle Esdras frowned.
Oh, they are just worry beads, he said.
I would have liked to have them for my father, who worried a great deal; but all my acquisitiveness, which Uncle Esdras had so successfully stimulated, seemed hopeless in the face of such valuable items. I laid the beads down, and pushed out my lower lip.
You may handle them if you wish, Uncle Esdras said with formality, and feeling obliged, I rolled the ball of metal embossed with symbols which, apparently, brought its possessor genuine good luck. Of course, he continued, they are only useful to the person who rightfully owns them. If you were to steal that, for instance, it wouldn’t work for you.
Indignantly I denied any such intention. I put down the charm, and one by one he plopped the items into a canvas bag, including, last of all, the lemur’s foot, which I had longed but didn’t dare to touch, and for which he had still provided no explanation.
And what about that? I asked, pointing.
That, he answered, is a lemur’s foot. If you throw it down on the ground when you are lost, its toes will point you in the right direction.
Of course, a compass might have done the same; but this tool dealt in destiny rather than magnetism, and I watched him place it in the bag with envy.
After that, Uncle Esdras ignored me again. At breakfast he spoke to my mother and forgot my presence. When we went for a walk he strolled arm-in-arm with her and indulged in a tensely murmured conversation. Skipping close, I caught a few mysterious fragments.
But why not? my mother purred into his ear. You should settle down. Waiting for you somewhere is a nice woman—
Later I went up to him where he sat reading the newspaper on the patio.
Those talismans, I said. Do you often use them?
Now and then, he answered.
I thought for a moment. I asked: And a traveller—someone who wanted to be a traveller. Would they need to have talismans like those?
Esdras replied that they were more or less essential. Seeing my crestfallen look, he modified this by saying that they were certainly a great help.
I wandered off, and resorting to my room (which at the moment hardly seemed to be mine) spent the afternoon going through a certain drawer, which my mother habit
ually referred to as my “mess drawer” but which to me was full of irreplaceable treasures. There was my school badge for good conduct, the peacock feather my father had given me, and a war-scarred, tournament-winning bouncy ball. A plastic ruby which had fallen out of a piece of cheap costume jewelry and a glass drop from a vanished chandelier. Every one of these objects carried for me a kind of magical and irrational power, quite out of proportion to their actual value; the ball for example I regarded as almost human. They had been endowed with the significance which belongs only to children’s playthings and ritual artifacts.
As I sorted through them I wondered if I could convince Uncle Esdras of their special qualities. But I doubted that I would succeed in persuading him to exchange even one of them for a genuine talisman.
Of the three main family traits—short sight, a bad stomach, and an anxious temperament—my father had more than his fair measure. It was not surprising that he should take refuge in an increasing bibliomania.
For as long as I could remember he had enclosed himself, evening after evening, in his small windowless study lined with tottering books: rabbinic treatises, Kabbalistic novels, anthropological surveys of the Jewish nose; histories of seventy generations, lists of innumerable dead. Here, surrounded by wreaths of his own breath (he believed in cold) he would study the art of biblical numerology, trace his ancestry to the house of Solomon or follow the spurious trail of the ten lost tribes. Or, turning the pages of an enormous picture book, he would sate himself with images: with one hundred-and-one representations of Jerusalem. Jerusalem in woodcuts, Jerusalem in gilt with glittering minarets, Jerusalem as a chessboard with the temple in the middle; mosaic maps, archaeological plans, medieval diagrams with Jerusalem the navel of the world, the world peeled and quartered like an orange with Jerusalem at its center.
In his youth he had dreamed of becoming an engineer. His first ambition had been to design bridges. He filled his sketchbooks with flying arcs of steel, all of them unviable and unstable, hanging perilously in empty air. He had a supernatural affinity with numbers, and no idea what he might do with it.