The Old Religion
Page 11
What did one need, finally, but the few things one could carry?
“I am of a wandering race,” he said. “The world is my home.”
Had not the Rabbi taught him, “Arami Avodi Avi …”? “My Father,” as the creed had it, “was a wandering Aramaean, who went down, with just a few, to Egypt, and, there, became a Nation.”
Each time Frank thought of this passage, he felt conflict.
He loved what was the first instance of his ability to appreciate Hebrew poetry, in the alliteration of the first three words, but he felt shame, as the word “Aramaean” conjured to him the image of a blond, a non-“Jewish,” finally, a Christian man—as if it were the purpose of the creed to claim, as he thought, more distinguished, or, more to the point, less “maculate” heritage.
“No. They’d have to be dark,” he thought, “for the sun was hot. To be light would be to be maladapted. What could that avail? Nothing,” he thought. “And my brief notion of life lived in the open must confirm the simple truth that it is better to be correctly adapted than to be in fashion. Who would see you there? And what is it but idolatry to crave fashionable appearance in the wilds; where not only is there no mirror but, yes,” he thought, “in the desert, and distinguished from ‘the woods,’ there is not even that stream or that accidental pond which would allow one to gauge one’s reflection.”
At this, he became frightened.
“Would that be, then,” he thought, “as if one did not exist?
“And what might that mean?”
He pictured an unhappy, discorporeal existence, which, in his mind, meant nothing but anomie, an existence consisting in nothing but panic, with no external manifestation of what might, for want of a better word, be called the world; and, at once, the complementary “happy” component of “not to exist,” which was a free-flowing animal consciousness of joy in oneself and one’s surroundings.
So he mused, picturing the desert. In his dream, it was a happy woods, on a low and rolling ground—much like the grounds at the Grand Hotel in North Carolina, where he and his wife’s family stayed summers.
That was the desert to him—a state of perfect balance, where he was neither hot nor cold, hungry nor full.
“But not a state of peace,” he thought. “One of ‘equilibrium.’
“But the sun would start to go down, then where would I be? I would gravitate to my camp—to my Desert Camp—where there would be a tent in the woods. This tent would be laid inside with fine Turkey carpets. There would be a fire. Within, a small ring of rocks, and a brass tripod over it, and a young girl cooking for me and the smell of coffee.
“She would look up to me as I entered, her eyes soft with submission, her eyes grave with love. ‘A woman of my tribe.’ Yes,” he thought. “Yes, I can allow myself to revel in that phrase. Who is to stop me? ‘A woman of my tribe.’ But,” he thought, “she would not have a hooked nose.”
The lights went out. He was alone in the dark, with the smell of sweat and filthy men’s bodies. At intervals, the wind would shift for a moment, and bring him a breath of the fields.
“I suppose that this filth is just another form of fecundity,” he thought, “but I can’t think so.
“Soon I’ll be asleep. Perhaps the Christians are right, and we should take all we have and give it to the poor. If they would, I would.”
His vision
“The question,” the Rabbi observed, “may be asked in a different way.”
Looking back, one could always devise or imagine warnings or signs; but, as they had been unheeded (if, in fact, they ever occurred), of what good had they been? What could they do save comfort one after the fact with assurances of omnipotence?
“That is it,” he said. “We can both suffer and mourn, ‘How was I to know?’ and, at once, celebrate our omniscience: ‘I had a sign. Which I did not heed.’
“The argument is, of course, useless. For if there were a sign, why did you not heed—and, if you did not heed, was it a sign?
“What can we not find in our memory to serve our vision of ourselves? But we can use this instance to confront idolatry.”
The Rabbi bobbed his head, and he moved closer to the table, and he frowned across the table at Frank and continued.
“The essence, you see,” he said, “is a belief in our own power. For if we believe in it at all—in our power to overcome what we might call ‘chance’—if we are unable to understand our powerlessness, our mortality, then we denominate ourselves God.
“If we are God, what can we not do? We are permitted all.
“Our difficulty lies in accommodating our weakness, eh?, into the theory. Our weakness, which we see each day and in each aspect of our day—our difficulty lies in accommodating this knowledge with the belief that we are, in effect, God.
“And, so we say, ‘I knew that it was going to rain today. I should have taken my umbrella!’
“Well, then, finally, why didn’t you?
“Why didn’t the man, who proclaims not only that he had the choice but that the choice was superfluous, as he possessed—beyond the power to choose—possessed Perfect Knowledge?
“Why didn’t you take the umbrella? He did not, do you see, as he did not know that it would rain.
“‘Ah’, but you say, ‘an observant man, eh? Perhaps a farmer, a man who understood …’” The Rabbi shrugged. “Uh … ‘The sky, the weather … surely he may have known it would rain.’
“Then why didn’t he take his umbrella?”
He looked at Frank, as to say, “I am a man without guile, without defenses. And at the moment I stand before you unarmed. Resting solely on the proposition: Do with me as you will.”
“Do you see? Which is true? ‘Ah,’ but you say, ‘perhaps there were countervailing motives.’ Yes. When are there not?
“The man looked at the sky. He perceived it might rain. He chose not to encumber himself.
“Or, who can say, the umbrella had been put away. And he was rushed. And unsure of its location. Or perhaps he felt it shabby, and his duties of the day … You see my point?” The Rabbi said, “Or, or, perhaps, it was too fine, of too fine …” He searched for the word. “… a manufacture. And, similarly, that it would be inappropriate to carry it among the people he would see that day.
“Perhaps he wanted to wrong himself.”
He cast his arms up, to say, “Are we not mature men, and should we shrink at these things?”
“Perhaps he’d had a fight; and, thinking it would rain, looked forward to the very utterance ‘I have seen the better path, but I take the worse,’ and wished to inflict pain through the … the objectification of his self-hatred.
“And perhaps none of these is true, and he’d only wished, truly, to’ve had power over forces powerful over him.
“Who is to say?
“It remains: If he had had the choice, why did he not exercise it?
“If he’d not had the choice, why did he make the assertion?
“The human mind is fashioned to compare.” He paused.
He sighed, and took a package of cigarettes from the lapel pocket of his coat. He offered one to Frank, who nodded and took it.
The Rabbi took one, and drew a kitchen match out of his pocket. He put his hands on the table, the match sticking up between the fingers of his right hand. He looked down at the crumpled pack of cigarettes lying between Frank and himself.
Frank glanced at him. “How can those,” he thought, “who are not Jews understand Jews?”
The prison library smelled of old paper. The scent of hot pine came in the window, as if a sheet, drying in the wind, had billowed, and let the air pass. The Rabbi let the match fall onto the table. He took it and scratched it underneath the table’s lip, and he lit both their cigarettes.
“You say that you had a ‘vision’ on that day. A ‘vision’ that you should not have gone to the office.
“Well, then, perhaps,” he said, “you should not have gone.”
He shrugged.
“First, whom would you tell? And, then, would you be happier? And, finally, is such knowledge necessary to serve God?
“Torture yourself if you will. The fact is, you did go into the office. The question may be asked, not, ‘Was it my imagination,’ but, ‘Of what is my imagination a product?’”
The library
But perhaps there was such a thing as the goddess Nemesis.
And could it be that one was punished not for having more, but for an awareness of it?
Was he meant to act, then, like a Christian disciple, and give all he had to the poor?
The Christians themselves didn’t act that way, and they were enjoined to. How much less appropriate, then, for a Jew? And, as he had not been so directed, why was he being punished?
For the voice said, “You have too much.”
And were there not many, many more prominent than he, richer than he? More rich? “Hell,” he thought, “more rich. I was not rich at all. Am I to be persecuted because I am not starving? I didn’t set the wages, nor the hours, and there are places within ten blocks of the factory where the girls are treated far, far worse. …”
“No, the day did not drag,” he wrote to his wife, and, “Yes, there is a satisfaction in the order of the day. I am sure that the Appeal will prevail, and I do not write that merely out of form, nor from false hope, nor out of belief in some eventual triumph of goodness or reason, or of balance in Human Affairs—though such might exist, in fact, and I don’t discount that possibility, neither embracing it, as I say, naively.
“No. I believe the Appeal will prevail, as I hold that there is a rhythm, if you will, in human intercourse, which one can see in politics, in business, or in any interaction. I see that one violent moment gives rise to its opposite, as a wave dashing on a rock, or as a sudden surge, out of all reason, in the price of a stock; or in the adoption of a style in dress.
“Violence must engender its opposite. And the rush to conclusion, absent any fact (in our case), must, given time, cause, if not an equal, a substantial outpouring of—I may say—equally unthought-out sympathy (of course I will be happy to enjoy it).
“I feel it as one feels a change in the barometer; absent all other signs. We sense the shift in human affairs with an animal sense; and I know it will be so here.
“Already I see it in the attitude of my jailers, and, more significantly, in that of my fellow inmates, who, little by little, but perceptibly, cease to look on me with that unconquerable loathing of prejudice, and commence to see me as a man.
“Perhaps I imagine it; but, no, I do not. Just yesterday a fellow told a joke, and, as I meant to move away—not to seem to wish, uninvited, to presume to be part of the group to which he intended speaking—he gestured (in the minutest way, but there was that communication nonetheless) that I was to stay.
“Which I did. Gratefully. For these are not small acts. They are, to the contrary, that by which our history is woven.
“Which brings me back to the issue of Jim; and an incident which transpired a year ago. Perhaps more. Say, a year ago, when he was leaving work, and I joked … (It was a Saturday: Is that ironic? No? Is it significant? No. Probably not, but how could I, at that point, fail to remark it? I could not, I don’t think.)
“I joked that he seemed in quite a hurry to be gone—as I would have joked with any employee, I think. For who would not be glad to be off? Anyone on Saturday. I accept it and avow their right. For why should they stay one moment longer than those for which they had contracted? And I have … I will not say ‘searched my soul,’ but ‘considered’ it, and do not feel at all that I implied anything in the least recriminatory, although it may have been the very license of financial authority which made my joking onerous.
“In any case, I joked that he must have had a full night planned; and I saw his eyes narrow, and perceived that he thought I had intended it in a suggestive way, which, before God, I did not, and I saw that he resented it ‘full sore’; as if my position permitted me pleasantry which, had he employed it, might result in penalty—perhaps in a severe penalty—to him. And I allow that, and would not, for the world, have offended him—but I saw that he was angered and that he’d remember it.
“A man wrote that we should be slow to hire and quick to fire—that if we saw an employee would be trouble at some point, we’d better discharge them then and there, paying whatever was necessary to the end of whatever contracted term, but get them removed from the premises before their attitude … (And, of course, our attitude toward them—for who could function with suspicion? Suspicion is the heaviest weight—that cumbersome anxiety, ‘Will they be obstreperous?’ and so on) … that we should remove them immediately, as the cheapest course. For if we see or suspect that they might cause trouble, that suspicion constitutes trouble in itself, which cannot be borne in a well-regulated business.
“When I saw his eyes, I felt, frankly, I had wronged him. Though I did not intend to; and although I regretted it. But one of us—well, no, I will not be facetious, I will not say, ‘One of us would have to leave.’
“He should have gone. I should have dismissed him. And I think, perhaps that I kept him on out of a feeling of obligation, as I had subjected him, as I saw that he felt, to ridicule.
“The Rabbi reminds me that we do not believe in false gods, nor in prophecy. And this comforts me, for I am disposed to wonder at the power of the ‘goddess Nemesis.’
“As I said. But sober reflection, in light of the Rabbi’s words, reminds me that she is nothing but an elaboration of my human feeling that if I had acted differently, all would be well.
“And I know that nothing I have done has brought on this occurrence—that I am not sufficiently powerful, nor is my happiness or lack of it of sufficient moment to the world, to engender this chain of events. To think so is to aggrandize my importance. I see that it is Idolatry.
“My disposition, in spite of that knowledge, to the idea of Nemesis is not magical; nor is it indication that she does, in fact, exist. It is, I know, a simple human urge to accept the attractive lie and call the power of its attraction Truth.”
He nodded to a Trusty shelving books on the far wall.
He laid the pen down on the wooden writing board. The board was scoured by years of use. “So smooth,” he thought. “And how could it become smooth other than through use? It could not.”
As he mused, the man to whom he’d nodded left the shelves and walked behind him, drew a knife from his shirt, grabbed Frank’s chin from behind, and cut his throat.
The hospital
Beyond the window there was fairyland. He tried, but he could not dispel the illusion. It brought him back to his youth; beyond youth, to an infancy. He looked and thought, “This will pass quickly, and I will be touched at the quaintness of my thoughts,” but it did not pass.
He stood looking and thought, “And I cannot even call myself ‘fixed,’ or ‘mesmerized,’ but I do not want to move.”
The light was blue grey, and the moonlight shadows were grey brown.
“It is so bright,” he thought, “that, as they say, I could read a newspaper by it.” He tried to think of a print so small as to thwart the moonlight, but he found the thought too mechanical to grace the scene, and left it unfinished in respect.
The view was soft. The shapes were soft.
“There is nothing in the world,” he thought, “equal to this.”
He tried to imagine animals as shapes moving in the blue light, but he could not. “It is empty,” he thought, “of everything but spirit.”
Now, in his cell, he recurred to that night by the lake.
“How perfect it was,” he thought, and, “What were my worries? What sick folly would have caused me a moment’s unrest then? Could I but recapture that time …”
And yet he told hims
elf that could he return, he would, in days, in months, certainly, resume his previous ways—return as he put it, “to myself.”
There was the ripped pain in his throat. He could still feel the knife where the man had cut him. He remembered, with a strange shame, thinking, “Why, it isn’t even sharp.”
He felt the itching which meant that the wound was healing. He remembered the sick, rank sweat in the man’s coveralls when the man straddled him and grabbed his hair back to expose the neck and cut his throat, and the look in his eyes of calm happiness as he cut his throat.
“What is more lovely than belonging?” he thought. “Nothing.”
“Once a month the moon is full and stays full for how many days, and then ebbs to nothing. And at every stage it can be beautiful or stark, or it can fill us with dread—there is no saying what concatenation of circumstances might produce what effect. The man who tried to kill me looked as if he could have been participating at his daughter’s wedding, or at the confirmation of a child. Or the receipt of some reward.
“Does perfect innocence exist? What good is it if these crimes are committed in striving to return to it? Should we not simply repudiate it?
“Should we not simply avow we cannot return?
“For if we are lured to return to innocence through sin, should we not say, ‘I am incapable of distinguishing it, so I will renounce it’?
“Or he could have been a child going to sleep; or on the edge of a perception, when he raised the knife. He held it with the blade extending back, out of the little-finger side of the hand, and back almost parallel to the forearm.
“Who would know to hold a knife like that when you did a murder? Where would one learn that? Who would teach that?”
He smelled the carbolic, and the iodine, soaking the bandages on his neck. He turned his head to the side and saw the white-painted metal of the hospital bed, and, below the paint, the iron.