The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  “The daring man stood in the center of the garden. He plucked a fruit from the lowest branch of the tree. It was like no other fruit he had ever seen before. Dark, dark red, and soft as velvet. He cracked it open and its insides glittered with hundreds of seeds. He picked one out and placed it on his tongue. His eyes popped open.

  “The pleasure was so intense that he dropped the fruit. He raced out of the garden with the single seed still in his mouth, guarding it carefully under his tongue as he ran.

  “When he got home, he woke up his wife, fast asleep in bed. The fruit had stained his hands and lips and teeth, and she gasped at his appearance, then gasped again when he opened his mouth and out tumbled—a word. Taste! he told her, offering his mouth to hers. Because that was the word he had been guarding. That was the first word anyone in the kingdom ever spoke.

  “With fear in her eyes, the woman kissed her husband. He transferred the seed delicately from his mouth to hers. It rolled around on her tongue. Her eyes popped open.

  “The couple stared at each other as if for the first time. They were naked; suddenly they understood this. That night, they tasted each other as they had never done before.”

  Lev, blushing furiously, opened his eyes and inspected the old man’s profile. But Glassman gave no sign of embarrassment. He was rocking quickly now, his voice speeding up to keep pace with his body.

  “Over the next few days, the couple went crazy for the word. Taste, taste, taste, they told one another. They discovered that the word could mean many things. It could be said curiously, flatly, bossily, snobbily, seductively. They practiced saying it as a noun, as a verb, and finally as a command. Taste, taste, taste! And seven days later, they yielded to its bold demand.

  “The couple snuck into the garden under cover of night. They told themselves what they were doing was for the good of the kingdom. They were not selfish people. They planned to share the gift of language with all the royal subjects. Awed by the beauty of the tree, they could only bring themselves to pluck a single fruit off its branches. But this fruit, with its hundreds of glistening seeds, was more than enough.

  “The couple went from door to door, waking up all the royal subjects. The neighbors gasped at their appearances, then gasped again when they opened their mouths and out tumbled—words. Table! the daring man said, pointing at the coffee table in his neighbor’s living room. Glass! the woman said, pointing at the glass of water that sat upon the table. Cold! they said together, shivering in the chilly night air.

  “But they did not shiver long. Soon all the neighbors were inviting them in. The seeds were transferred from mouth to mouth, until all the royal subjects had tasted the words. Their eyelids fluttered. Their breath quickened with pleasure. Words! How they loved the words! How they lent sharpness to age-old experience! Had there ever been anything more delicious?

  “The royal subjects were happier than they had ever been. And so they became greedy, craving ever more words, believing that the more words they had, the better they would be able to communicate with the people around them.

  “They snuck into the garden under cover of night, robbing the tree of all its precious fruit and sinking their teeth into the velvet rinds. Words dribbled down their chins, dripped from their fingers. They carried the stolen goods home and passed the seeds from mouth to mouth.

  “There spread throughout the kingdom thousands of new words. A word for every object and every experience under the sun. The crisp, supernatural light of autumn. The itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. Homesickness caused by an uncertainty of where home really is.

  “The words were so precise that they could distinguish between even the subtlest shades of meaning. There was a word that meant sadness of broken bicycles abandoned in the snow. Another meant sadness of never having learned to swim. Still another meant sadness of knowing the boy you like will never like you back.

  “But there were no general words, not for sadness or anything else. And because of this, the royal subjects could no longer speak to each other vaguely. Yet without vagueness, they realized, human relationships could not be sustained. A wife could no longer simply shrug her shoulders when her husband asked why she hadn’t smiled in days. She could no longer say: I’m not sure exactly, it’s just this sort of funny feeling I have. She had to say: It’s because you’re going bald, or, The truth is I never really loved you.

  “But the royal subjects soon discovered that, although words could be used to reveal the heart, they could also be used to conceal it. By heaping one word on top of another, by creating endless layers of noise, they could disguise, for example, the real reasons for their sadness.

  “And so the royal subjects began to waste words. They used more words than they needed in order to make their points. They used words to utter things that were not even close to true. Sometimes, they used words as a way of concealing what they really thought and felt and knew to be true, but were too shy to say.

  “Talk became cheap.

  “The veins and arteries of the royal subjects clogged with an excess of vowels and consonants, which blocked their hearts until they could no longer speak the truth beating inside them. Sick, pale, bloated with language, an entire generation wasted away and died.”

  Glassman paused infinitesimally for breath, and into that pause leaped an image of Lev’s father, his heart clogging with thousands of words, which, in their trapped state, began to murmur against him. Was that what had killed him in the end?

  “With tears of sorrow in his eyes, the king descended into the houses of his dead subjects and examined their bodies. So that such a tragedy would never again befall the land, he issued a decree. Every new child born into the kingdom would be given a finite number of words—ten times one hundred thousand—to be stored in the chambers of the person’s heart. Four chambers for the four seasons of a person’s lifetime: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. The instant the person had used up all their words, they would die. This way, the king believed, people would be able to enjoy the pleasure of words without being tempted to waste them.

  “The first generation of royal subjects seldom wasted words. But there arose a new generation who did not know the king. They and the generations that followed forgot the decree and grew wasteful. Within the space of a few centuries, the average life expectancy in the kingdom dropped from one thousand years to one hundred.

  “This is still the way the kingdom works today. We are each given at birth a finite number of words, stored in the four chambers of our hearts. If we use them well, we may live to a ripe old age.

  “The foolish among us speak often and die young.

  “The wise among us speak seldom and die old.

  “The wisest among us never speak a single word. They guard their words as carefully as if they were precious stones. They know that there is nothing better for the body than silence. The wisest of the royal subjects live forever.”

  Glassman’s voice stopped. But his body kept rocking back and forth, back and forth. Lev’s palms were clammy, his heart hammering in his chest. He had the sense that the old man was trying to communicate something, yet he had no idea what.

  He waited a few minutes for Glassman to speak, but the old man seemed to have exhausted himself. Lev stood up carefully in the tiny room. “Thanks, Mr. Glassman,” he said. “I’ll come and see you again soon.” Then he made his way out into the sunlit street, alone.

  A couple of weeks after discovering the first avian dispatch, Alex pulled a second from its nest and, unfolding it, scanned its contents. At first he smiled, but as he kept reading, his smile faded. Clutching the bird tightly, he hurried over to his teacher’s house. And for the next three hours, they threw themselves into the study of Tiferet.

  With the light fading from the bedroom window, Glassman, looking sheepish, asked if they could go over the next section of King Lear. He opened his book to the soliloquy in Act 2.

  “Here,” he said, running his finger
down the page. “‘Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s!’—well, of course, we all know that. ‘A poor old man, as full of grief as age, wretched in both!’ That too is easy to see. But here. ‘I will do such things—what they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping; but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!’” The old man stopped, shoulders heaving.

  “Mr. Glassman, do you want to take a break?”

  But Glassman wasn’t listening. He jabbed at the text. “What does he mean here? ‘This heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws.’ What are flaws? A flaw is a mistake, no?”

  Alex grinned. “Well, no. I mean yes. But not in this context. Here, it means that his heart will break into a hundred thousand pieces.”

  Glassman stared at him.

  “Mr. Glassman?”

  “What did you say?”

  “His heart—”

  “Yes?”

  “Will break—”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Into a hundred thousand pieces?”

  “Yes!” For the second time that winter, Glassman was searching Alex’s face as if it might contain the solution to some terribly important, terribly oppressive problem. Then he leaned in confidentially. “But how?”

  “How what?”

  “His heart, how will he get it to break into a hundred thousand pieces?”

  Alex lifted his palms to the ceiling, smiling apologetically. “It’s just a figure of speech, you know?” Then he saw how Glassman was hanging on his every word, staring at him with hunger in his eyes, with a kind of noble anger—and somewhere in the very back of Alex’s mind, an alarm bell went off. “I mean, he’s not planning . . . he’s not actually planning to do . . . anything that would cause that to happen. You know?”

  Glassman leaned back, averting his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  After Alex had gone, Glassman watched through the window as snowflakes twirled down from the sky. Lear had it exactly right. The answer to Glassman’s first problem—the problem of how to die—lay in those hundred thousand flaws. The trick was to get the heart to burst open, to release its contents . . . But how to make that happen?

  There was a place halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness where Glassman did his best thinking. He tried to slip into it now, letting his eyes shift in and out of focus so that first the foreground—little white snowflakes—jumped into view, only to be replaced a moment later by the background—the Meyers’ house across the way—before the foreground leaped up again. It was like looking at one of those optical illusions his students had shown him years ago: First you saw two faces, then a vase, then two faces again. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t see both images at the same time. That was the power of the illusion, that rule that could not be broken.

  Glassman frowned. Usually this exercise helped to clear his mind. Tonight it was just giving him a headache. He massaged his temples. He closed his eyes. A few minutes later, he began to slip into a doze . . .

  And that was when the rule—just for a moment—bent.

  Imprinted on the undersides of his eyelids, Glassman saw both images, the house and the snowflakes, superimposed—and, caught in that dance between background and foreground, the solution to his problem.

  It had been there all winter long.

  It had been staring him right in the face.

  He laughed—and his eyes popped open.

  Last summer: David Meyer, framed by his kitchen window, was talking to Lev and holding a pill bottle; now he was taking the cap off with one hand; now he was sending into his other hand a blizzard of little white pills—pills that looked, through the binoculars in Glassman’s grip, just like snowflakes. A flurry of words flew out the open window.

  Besides, Dr. Singh gave me this. Digitalis, it’s called.

  What does it do?

  These little white helpers? Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

  What?

  They help the ticker tick faster.

  What?

  The heart. They make it contract. Make it pump harder.

  Harder? But is that, you know, safe?

  Doctor’s orders. . .

  Glassman sat bolt upright. Here it was! Here was the solution to his problem!

  Well, not so much here as there. Over there, in David Meyer’s house. That complicated things—but he needed those pills. It seemed to him an admittedly unfortunate but ultimately forgivable fact that, in order to get them, he would have to steal.

  It would have to be in the evening, Glassman decided. Not the weekend—people’s schedules were too unpredictable—and not on a Tuesday or Thursday, when Alex came for lessons on the Tree of Life and didn’t leave until late. It would have to be one of the other weeknights, between Lev’s departure for evening prayers and his return from synagogue. Half an hour: enough time to sneak into the house, locate the pills, sneak back out again. But how would Glassman get into the house to begin with? That was the trouble, and he spent a couple of days turning it over in his mind.

  And then, just as he was about to despair, an opportunity presented itself.

  Unfortunately, it was a Thursday. Alex was seated at Glassman’s desk, studying.

  “So, why does it say that Gevurah’s red and Chesed’s white?”

  “Because . . .” Glassman said, glancing outside. Ever since he’d seen Lev leave for evening prayers, he’d been checking on the Meyer house every ten seconds. Was he imagining things, or had Lev really left the window to the study ajar?

  “Because what?”

  Glassman’s hands flapped on the desk; he sat on his fingers as if to prevent them from flying away. “Gevurah—severity—is the female quality. Chesed—kindness—is the male.”

  “Um, really? That seems pretty sexist.”

  Glassman leaped from his chair. “I did not write it, I am only telling you what it says!”

  “Hey,” Alex said, watching him pace, “are you okay?”

  “What?”

  “Are you feeling okay? You seem, I don’t know, distracted. Tired. Maybe I—”

  “Yes, yes, tired. Not at all well. We could continue with this next time?”

  “Sure.” Alex gathered up his things. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.”

  Glassman ushered him to the door, then crumpled his features into an expression of weakness. “Yes. Yes. Good-bye.”

  As soon as Alex left the room, Glassman sprang into action. He pulled on a sweater and went back to the window to check—yes, Alex was headed home, the coast was clear, the Meyer house was dark—before hurrying down the stairs and out the back door.

  Only a few feet of snowy ground separated the Glassmans’ house from the Meyers’. He could see it clearly now. The window to the study was open.

  It was only open a crack, barely one inch, and there was such a small difference between one and zero. But Glassman, who had long experience in such matters, knew that that small difference was enough.

  With surprising agility for a man his age, he pried the window open and climbed through.

  Glancing around the dark study, waiting for his eyes to adjust, he allowed himself exactly three seconds of emotional discomfort over the fact that he had just broken into his dead neighbor’s house, with the intention of stealing his dead neighbor’s pills, before his dead neighbor’s son—a boy who was the closest thing Glassman had ever had to a child—came home again. Then he got over it.

  Glassman moved to turn on a lamp, tripped on something at the foot of the desk, and fell forward onto the glass-topped surface, knocking something over in the process.

  He cried out in pain. Grasping the edge of the desk to steady himself, he cursed under his breath while he waited for the throbbing in his foot to subside. After a moment, he turned on the lamp and looked down for what had tripped him. A small stack of books. He shook his head. What in the world were books doing on the
floor? Mindful of covering up his tracks, he bent down to straighten the stack his foot had dislodged, and noticed a small cylinder rolling into the shadows a few inches from his fingertips. Wincing, he reached for it, picked it up, and peered at it in the dim half-light. He gasped—and then laughed.

  In his hand was a pill bottle, full of white capsules. Digitalis.

  He could hardly believe his luck. Already his heart was racing madly, as if to signify its eagerness to burst into a hundred thousand flaws right there on the spot. But the time for that had not yet come. And so, to calm his nerves, he put the pill bottle down on the desk and took a look around the room.

  And now he gasped for a second time. David Meyer’s study was a mess. All over the floor, volumes were piled into high, haphazard towers. Paperbacks overflowed the windowsills, their covers dusty and discolored, their pages moisture-curled. On the shelves, academic tomes had been mixed in with volumes of poetry, plays, even picture books. How could anyone work in such an illogical, unreasonable place? Why would anyone want to?

  He stared at the library. The library stared back, a locked door that refused to open, a chaos that would not be ordered. Neither a vase, nor two faces—just randomness.

  Then, all of a sudden, he heard something that made his heart twist with fear. A front door opening and closing, boots clattering to the ground. He made a mad dash toward the window, swung one leg over the sill—and groaned. The pills! He had forgotten the pills! Twisting back, he saw that they were sitting right where he had left them, bathed in warm lamplight. He lunged toward them—

  The door to the study clicked open.

  Lev stood in the doorway, one coat sleeve off, a prayer book gripped in the other hand, his mouth hanging open.

  Had the boy stared at him with eyes devoid of words, eyes that steered clear of even the vaguest intuition of language, Glassman might have remained poised on that windowsill forever. But Lev stared with a single question in his eyes—why?—which, instead of eliciting a response, had the effect of releasing its victim. With a despairing look at the pill bottle, Glassman sprang free of his trap and, swinging himself off the window ledge, disappeared into the night.