The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  The feeling I had after running for forty minutes was midway between nausea and vertigo. I stood with my hands on my thighs, a grimace on my face. Three Hasidic boys in identical striped shirts whizzed past me on their scooters. A pair of girls raced in the opposite direction, yellow silk bows flashing in their hair. Plastic dolls ogled me from the neighbors’ peeling steps.

  As I waited to regain my breath, my eyes fell on Katz, who was sitting cross-legged on his front lawn in the blistering summer sun. He had dabbed sunscreen on his face, but had done a careless job of it; a big glob of white was visible on the bridge of his nose, while the entire right side of his face was pink and sunburned. He looked happy as a lark.

  Still surrounded by his tin cans, he was running twine through the holes he’d created in each of them, humming as he did so. The tune was the sort of wordless, joyful melody often heard in synagogues on Friday nights—a Polish nigun—yet Katz’s face registered none of the simple pleasure usually worn on the faces of nigun singers. Instead, his eyes had a laser-beam focus that reminded me of Alex preparing a science experiment.

  The stitch in my side had finally relaxed. I gave Katz a perfunctory wave; then, seeing that he had been completely unaware of my presence, I began to jog down the block, ducking along a back street when I saw the indefatigable Mrs. Glassman tottering toward me, muttering under her breath. The green of the trees and the red of the fire hydrants zinged on the undersides of my eyelids. The countless baby strollers, scooters, tricycles, and toy cars that overflowed the porches and littered the curbs—I hurtled over all of them. Houses whipped past. My hands, flat as knives, sliced the wind on either side of me. First my feet, then my legs began to ache, each strike against pavement sending a shock through the arches and around the ankles and up into the calves, which seized up, relaxed, then seized up again. Bouquets of pain blossomed in each muscle and I welcomed them. In the past few weeks, pain had become, paradoxically, my greatest source of pleasure. Had become my pathway to the still, small voice—which was not so still now, not so small, that was growing louder with every heartbeat . . .

  Aaaahhhh . . .

  The first syllable was audible—I tilted murderously forward—the second syllable was welling up, I could hear it wanting, waiting to burst forth . . .

  Aaaahhhh . . . aaaahhhh . . .

  Ani.

  I froze in mid-lunge, crumpled to the ground. A stinking heap of screaming tissues and beaten, battered bones. Ani. I let my body stretch itself out. The pavement felt cool and welcoming against the base of my skull. Ani. Not the indeterminacy of Ayin but Ani, Ani, the nexus of great absolutes—Authority, God, Meaning. I closed my eyes.

  Somewhere a voice was calling. Another voice was answering. I opened my eyes. A flock of blackbirds was darting across the whiteness of the clouds. I stared, for a long minute, at the piano-key sky. Then I got up and slowly, painfully, began to walk.

  Judging from the position of the sun, it must have been at least noon; I marveled at the fact that I had lain undisturbed on a suburban sidewalk for upward of an hour. Then, bending my steps in the direction of home, I found myself marveling at everything around me. The parked car at the corner of Lajoie and Querbes was leaking gasoline onto the pavement, and the iridescence of the resultant rainbow seemed magical and poignant and also terribly human and wasteful and also, for that very reason, achingly beautiful. Tears sprang to my eyes. How vastly things could change in a matter of minutes! In the space of a single heartbeat! Light streamed down, imbuing everything it touched with purpose. On the neighbors’ lawns, each blade of grass was swaying with a deliberateness, a grace, that could only have been preordained. I thought of the Hasids in Chagall’s hometown, who claimed that behind every blade of grass stands an angel urging it on: Grow! Grow! I thought of Epictetus: I move not without Thy knowledge!

  I reached home, drew a deep breath, and smiled at my own obtuseness. Everything my mind had been pitting itself against all these years, I thought as I turned my key in the lock, was everything my heart had been laboring so hard to teach me.

  On the first morning in July, I was reading in my study when the ringing of the phone laid siege to my ears. I sprang up to get the portable. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  The sound of the phone being replaced in its cradle followed.

  Cursing the mystery caller under my breath, I returned to my book only to be disturbed a minute later by renewed ringing. With an edge of irritation that I didn’t bother to keep out of my voice, I snapped, “Hello.”

  “Hello! Um, David, it’s Ira.”

  “Oh. Ira. Hello.”

  “Hello,” he repeated, somewhat stupidly.

  “Yes. Now that we’ve established that, was there any specific reason you called?”

  “I thought I’d see how you’re feeling these days. How are you feeling these days?”

  “Not very well,” I answered, with increasing tremolo. “Unfortunately.”

  “Ah, mm-hm, yes? Well. That is unfortunate, yes.” A pause. “Nevertheless, I—”

  “I’ve been working on grading those papers, though.” I glanced at the corner of my desk, where the eighty exam booklets were gathering dust beneath a jumbo-size box of tissues. The rest of the desk was strewn with my notes on the Tree of Life.

  “Ah! The term papers? Really?” he said with manufactured surprise.

  “Really,” I said, adding, “slow but steady wins the race.”

  “Yes, absolutely! So, ah, when can we expect, I mean, when do you think you might have the papers ready by, approximately?”

  “Oh, well . . .”

  “Yes?” he encouraged.

  “It’s hard to say . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “But possibly . . .”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Next week. Assuming—”

  “Great! That’s great. Well, I’m glad to hear you’re feeling so much better, and I’ll look forward to seeing those grades next week. How are the kids?”

  The shrewd bastard. “Excellent. Really excellent.”

  “Glad to hear it! Well, David, I’ll let you go. Bye for now!” he said, and hung up.

  I stood in place for a long moment, listening to the dial tone as if it were speaking to me in a foreign dialect that, with some little skill, I might be able to parse successfully. After several seconds of concerted effort failed to yield any tangible results, I gave up and dialed.

  “Allo?” answered the voice at the other end.

  Two hours later, Val and I were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table, late-afternoon light haloing her warm brown hair. She was reading The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart. I was reading papers from last semester’s Eastern Philosophical Texts.

  But I wasn’t getting very far. These essays were the work of intelligent minds. The prose was impeccable, the diction high, the arguments complex. And yet they were all so strictly English department, so clearly the products of a lit crit course, that it made me want to hurl them across the room.

  The students quoted extensively from primary sources. Their analysis of every quotation was seductively logical—but how it turned my stomach! Because underlying the whole project was a way of reading that took for granted the indeterminacy of the text, that saw it as little more than a free play of signifiers, which was the reader’s to do with as she wished. The Author was dead, and dead, too, was the idea of absolute meaning or ultimate reality. Meaning was free-flowing, cried la nouvelle critique; meaning was up to the reader to produce!

  The Author must die so that the reader may live: it was an idea that was very familiar to me. I, too, had been taught to read enthusiastically and badly, to cherry-pick, to indulge poetic license at the expense of textual particulars. And I, too, had enjoyed being given such freedoms. Yet now this refusal to fix meaning repulsed me. It was idiotic, it was absurd.

  I laid down the essays and looked a
t Val. Her gaze was trained on the page, but something in her expression caught my eye. “Are you studying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you’ve got a thoroughly extracurricular look on your face.”

  She laughed—a warm, roundish laugh—and slipped into my lap. The perfume of her collarbone filled my head with a rosé haze, a schoolboy tipsiness I hadn’t felt in decades. She leaned into me and I kissed her. Then she glanced at her watch and said she’d be right back.

  I wandered into her bedroom and sat on the bed. On the nightstand, three photographs showed Val and a friend on their recent trip to Europe. I sighed, remembering how much I had always wanted to travel the world—to see it all—to see everything. The birth of my kids and the death of their mother had made that impossible; still, I had found other ways . . .

  Beside the photographs, an issue of the New Yorker was opened to a page crammed with text. The heading read “The Russian Professor: The Author on Tour,” by Vladimir Nabokov. In a letter addressed to Nabokov’s wife, someone had flagged the middle paragraph:

  . . . tiresome conversation, which lasted right to Hartsville. At six on the dot I was driven into a magnificent estate, to the magnificent multi-pillared mansion of Mrs. Coker (the belle-fille of the college’s founder, Major Coker), and here I remain as a guest till Tuesday. As soon as I barged in she told me that in ten minutes the guests invited in my honor would arrive, and at breakneck speed I began to bathe and tug at my dinner-jacket armor. I love you. The shirt came out so starched that the cufflinks would not go through the cuffs and it ended with one of them rolling under the bed (to be discovered only today).

  I stopped there. Exactly three words of the passage were underlined—I love you—and I thought I could see why. Between a sentence about his dinner jacket and one about his missing cuff links, the writer had snuck a hint of something genuine, the way Jews tuck their notes of prayer into the Wailing Wall. Nestled amid ego and petty details, a glimpse of truth, a flash of revelation.

  I replaced the magazine on the table and looked over at the photographs of my lover. I could not offer her any such three-word phrases; she’d get no revelatory flashes from me. And my inability to utter that simple sentence would one day be the shibboleth that would turn her against me. What did I stand to give her, anyway? A radiant mind, a decaying body, a sick heart. That was it, that was all. The longer I stood there, warming myself by the lamplight of her youth, the more I could feel death gliding toward me with the slow, inevitable grace of a mathematical proof. It would come upon me one of these days, ripping my hands from the branches of a half-grasped Tree—and then what use would I have made of my life?

  I heard the click of a door opening, then closing. Val came into the bedroom, slipping her cell phone into her jeans. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

  “It’s getting late,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s past five; I should go.”

  “Tu veux pas rester ici?”

  “No, I should get home. Have dinner with my kids, for once.”

  “Okay. I can drive you, si tu veux.”

  “Non, ça va, je vais prendre un taxi.”

  “Ah, okay,” she repeated, and looked at me quietly. “How are they taking it, by the way? Your kids—they must have been scared by the heart attack—by what could have happened, no?”

  I blinked. With all their anxious inquiries about me, had I even asked them?

  I took Val’s face in my hands and pressed my mouth first to her lips, then to the crown of her head. “Tu es tellement belle,” I whispered into her hair, and left.

  When I got home, Samara was nowhere to be seen, and Lev was zipping up his backpack.

  “Where’s your sister?” I asked from the doorway of his bedroom. And suddenly realized, with a surprising surge of irritation, how often I was found skulking in doorways. As if this weren’t my house. As if these weren’t my children.

  “With Jenny, I think. They said they were going to a concert?”

  “Oh. Right.” Earlier, Samara had mentioned she’d be out late. Or, to be more precise, had called it carelessly over her shoulder as she disappeared out the front door in the afternoon, a laughing Jenny orbiting around her like a waxing gibbous moon. “And where are you heading?”

  “I’m going over to Mr. Katz’s house for a bit.”

  “What for?”

  “Um, he asked me to help him out with a project?”

  “What sort of project?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with those tin cans he’s got piled up on his lawn?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.” He braced his shoulders. “But, you know. He doesn’t have that many friends, so.”

  “So. How’s he doing these days, anyway? Mentally, I mean?”

  Lev’s eyes widened with surprise. He stared at me for a moment, as if he were entertaining some novel possibility—the possibility, perhaps, of confiding in me. The features of his face seemed to open up, to broaden out—I had the impression of blinds being lifted, windows being raised—and through his unshuttered eyes I could see straight through to his most inward self, and it was a perfect sky, as clean and fresh and blue as the inside of clouds. But in the next instant the shutters came down.

  “He’s okay, I think. I have to go, Dad—sorry, I’m late. Bye!” He swung his backpack onto his shoulder and disappeared.

  A moment later there was a knock at the front door. I opened it to find Mr. Glassman.

  “Oh—hello,” I said, taking in the man’s white hair, his cobwebbed skin.

  “Hello, Mr. Meyer. It is so good to see you back home. You are recovering nicely, yes?”

  “Yes. Thanks. Uh, are you looking for Lev?” My son didn’t take lessons from our old neighbor anymore, but as the two of them were still friendly, that seemed like the safest guess.

  Softly, almost apologetically, Glassman shook his head. “I am looking for Samara, actually. Is she here? She has moved back home, no?”

  “No—I mean yes, she did move back home for the summer, but no, she’s not here.”

  “Ah.” Glassman sighed. “I was hoping she might explain some things to me . . .” He lifted a book into view: King Lear. Not just any King Lear: Samara’s old school-issued copy.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked, my voice harsher than I’d intended.

  Glassman bowed his head. “I found it in my things . . . Your daughter, she forgot it . . .”

  In my mind, I completed the sentence for him: She forgot it when she was studying with me in secret. When she chose to read books with me, not you.

  “Well, she’s not here.”

  “Perhaps I could leave this here for her, then? That way, if she wants, she could come and talk with me about it?”

  “Just keep it.”

  “But it is her book—she should have—”

  “Keep it,” I repeated, and shut the door.

  I crossed the hall and entered my study, breathing heavily. From the window, I could just make out Katz’s house, where Lev was getting up to who-knew-what. A moment later, I saw old Glassman reenter his home, his slight frame silhouetted in the second-floor bedroom. I stood there for a long time, thinking about how these two men had, over the course of a single summer, stolen my son’s heart away from me. Their piety had drawn him in a way my skepticism never could. Ironically, just as Samara’s interest in religion was dropping off—after her bat mitzvah, she never showed any enthusiasm for it again—her brother surprised us all by taking up the discarded mantle of observance and announcing his intention to wear it to the end of his days. At the time, I had blamed these two men for driving a wedge between my son and me. Yet, even then, I realized I could not say the same for my daughter. No, I had done that all on my own.

  If Val knew I was avoiding her, she was doing a good job of hiding it. And this was typical Val: calm, composed
, utterly nonclingy. In the past, I’d have counted myself lucky to have found someone of this description; now, two weeks after our last encounter, it gave me an unsettled feeling to be rubbing up against the surface of all that cool.

  I knew that I had to break things off with her, and I was dragging my feet about it, and knowing this only made me drag my feet more. Worse, there was a clairvoyant quality to the silence she was broadcasting: I was sure she knew what was coming, though she didn’t say a word. The fact that she didn’t say a word was how I knew she knew. But I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. To deliver the speech, make the call, get tangled up in an emotional upheaval—it’s not you, it’s me, mea culpa, mea culpa—that would distract from the thing I really wanted to be devoting all my mental and physical energies to: the Tree.

  I was throwing myself into work like never before, burying myself in arcane manuscripts, checking and rechecking the variant texts and making assiduous notes. Intent on getting my hands on everything to do with the ten vessels—but especially Ani and Ayin—I hauled myself over to the university libraries late at night, when I was sure the stacks would be reasonably empty. I Xeroxed any manuscripts I wasn’t allowed to take home, and the photocopied pages rose on my desk, forming a precarious structure that threatened to collapse at any moment but managed miraculously to endure. Surrounded by these religious texts, I laughed, thinking that like my namesake I’d found a hell of a way to ward off death: according to an old rabbinic tale, King David studied the Bible nonstop because he knew that the Angel of Death could not lay claim to his soul so long as it was immersed in Torah study.

  I interrupted my research only to go running—which I had begun to do with increasing frequency and, also, with increasing confusion. Racing down the same streets, expecting to hear the same message, I suddenly was not so sure of what I had originally heard. About the first syllable, yes, I was certain. That aaaahhhh was unmistakable. But now the second syllable seemed to slip and quaver like an arrow that, buffeted around by the breeze, has trouble meeting its mark. Was it really an n sound? Didn’t it sound, after all, much more like a y? The more ground I covered, the more convinced I became that my first impression had been mistaken, and that what I was actually hearing was not Ani, Ani, Ani but Ayin, Ayin, Ayin.