Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  I should ring my sponsor. This is exactly what he’s for. But I’ve never contacted him. He’s a bit unprepossessing, folds of skin sliding over him where the fat used quiver. He can’t afford plastic surgery so he’s doomed to walk through life like an old elephant whose hide falls down to his feet in great, grey furrows.

  Ina says it’s time for me to come—and stay—out. She means for me to come out from behind my wall of fat. Probably the kindest thing she’s ever said to me. But for all her ghastly experiences, I don’t believe she understands the junkie mentality. Food for the second generation has so many layers. A gargantuan bloody layer cake.

  Others say it’s not over till the fat lady sings. Well, I’ve been singing for quite a while and you’d think it was time—past time—for it to be over, this need to gobble, gluttonise and fress every forbidden, edible substance.

  At OA they say it’s never over. Just because you lose it all doesn’t mean you can’t put it all back on again. In only a few months, if you’re not careful, you can go from sixty kilos back up to a hundred. It’s that easy. Some people do it many times. Which makes me think now that if I had survived the Six Year Reich, yet was never to know if or when its latent scourge would become manifest again, wouldn’t I vault after Primo Levi into that Italianate stairwell? Wouldn’t I plunge?

  BROTHERS IN LAW

  If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

  — Orson Welles

  Long ago when the river was a fast, glittering blue, men and women bathed in its cool waves, though never at the same time. That would have been unseemly. But when the sun was highest, no one, except R. Yochanan, came at all.

  Occasionally he would hear the leaves whisper and know it signified women concealing themselves the better to watch him. Women had always loved to look upon him and, righteous though he was, he felt a flicker of pride. As some sort of atonement, he developed the response of sitting outside the gates of the ritual bath. It was fed by the river and women went down there monthly to cleanse themselves. When they came out, his face was the first they saw before going home to their husbands, so they might conceive.

  ‘When the daughters of the Land ascend from the bath,’ he said, ‘let them look upon me that they may bear children as beautiful and learned as I.’

  He then recited a special verse so no jealousy or haughtiness would result.

  Shocked nevertheless, the old ones said: ‘Dare you insinuate your physicality into the minds of these women when they go to be intimate with their husbands?’

  He replied: ‘I do not want them to take my image to their beds. Rather, an otherworldly likeness will materialise from my body and touch the children as they emerge from all the women who have seen me. My comeliness, my intelligence—vouchsafed to them.’

  No less shocked, the old ones asked: ‘Do you not fear the evil eye?’

  ‘I am of the seed of Joseph against whom the evil eye is powerless.’

  One burning midday, R. Yochanan lay on the grassy bank, waiting for the sun to drive him into the water. Raising his head, he saw a man on the opposite verge. Even from the distance it was clear that the stranger was huge and powerful, muscles rolling to create golden furrows on his arms and chest. He met R. Yochanan’s gaze and, in a blaze of chimerical recognition, R. Yochanan stood, slender and tall. The stranger flung off his armour, raised his spear, then planted it in the river bed. Vast and magnificent, he catapulted to the other side, splashing down in water just deep enough to buoy his bulk.

  ‘Who are you?’ R. Yochanan asked. ‘Such strength should be given to studying the Law.’

  ‘And your beauty would be better served were you a woman.’ They circled each other, bodies gleaming, eyes narrowed.

  ‘Is that why you leapt?’ R. Yochanan asked. ‘You thought I was a woman?’

  ‘Your face and body glowed under the sky. And you? You stood to receive me. Why?’

  ‘I am R. Yochanan. I am always looking for new students who might deepen the pool of learning. I thought the Holy Blessed One had provided a potent and vigorous scholar.’

  Naked and sweating, the two men finally sat on white sand in the cool shallows. High overhead, date palms swayed. In adjacent groves, clouds of pale blossoms promised a rich harvest of pomegranates.

  ‘Who are you?’ R. Yochanan asked again. ‘Why have you come?’

  In a voice rough and bruised, like shale splintering underfoot, the stranger replied: ‘My name is Reish Laqish and’—he lay in the water and slapped his sides—‘and my flesh is my cushion. I have learned that no ground is too hard for me to rest upon. You see, once I was a student of the Law like you, but adversity forced me to relinquish my studies. I sold myself to Ludus gladiatorius.’

  ‘In Rome?’

  ‘Of course, in Rome. I learnt to fight with the gladiators.’

  ‘So you became a student of battle instead.’

  ‘I had to feed myself.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then they sent me to Ludus Magnus—the foremost school for fighters.’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘For a scholar you know a great deal about combat.’

  ‘I know a great deal about a great deal,’ R. Yochanan said.

  ‘I have heard of you,’ said Reish Laqish. ‘Your erudition is renowned.’

  ‘Erudition,’ mused R. Yochanan. He savoured the word.

  Running his eyes over the gladiator’s body he resisted touching the scars which ran deep but were no longer livid.

  Reish Laqish smiled under his scrutiny. ‘I needed to take advantage of the favours the Lord had granted me. My strength meant success in the arena.’

  ‘The Lord also gave you a brain.’

  ‘I told you—once I was a scholar, but I had no patron.’

  ‘You could have come to me,’ said R. Yochanan.

  ‘I did not know you and even had I, it would have been too redolent of begging.’

  ‘You would not beg of any man?’

  ‘Or woman,’ said Reish Laqish.

  ‘Worse, is it, to go to women?’

  Reish Laqish shrugged, a hunted look rising in his eyes.

  ‘So, you worked as a gladiator, not as a teacher, scribe or librarian?’ R. Yochanan demanded.

  ‘You may not judge me,’ said Reish Laqish.

  ‘I do not.’

  The big man shook his head, a bear emerging from an icy stream. There was enchantment in the air, compelling him to more speech than he had expended for years.

  ‘Eventually, risking my life in contests with wild beasts—animal and human—became more than I could bear.’

  ‘So, then what?’

  ‘Why is it that you do all the asking and I the answering?’

  R. Yochanan shrugged. ‘What is it you would ask of me? I was born, I went to school, I entered the academy and I never left.’

  A late afternoon breeze, scented with wild jasmine and wisteria, unsettled Reish Laqish. Its coolness made him aware of the time. He was far from camp.

  Abruptly conscious of his nakedness, he rose quickly, staggering in his haste.

  ‘I must get back,’ he said.

  ‘Stay with me,’ said R. Yochanan. ‘Come back to the academy. There’s food and a bed big enough even for you.’

  ‘In my haste I left my weapons and armour across the river. I need to light a fire at my campsite before dark. My men may be waiting for me.’

  ‘Your men?’

  Without answering, Reish Laqish picked up his spear to repeat his vaulting feat. More than ever was he conscious of his lack of armour. Under R. Yochanan’s gaze he ran, pausing to embed his spear in the bank before arcing high into the air. The spear snapped and Reish Laqish fell to earth.

  Splayed on the ground, he did not move. R. Yochanan stood above him.


  ‘Come,’ said the scholar, ‘I will dress and make a fire. You will wrap yourself in my cloak and we will eat. In the morning we will return to the academy.’

  ‘I wish to return to the other side.’

  ‘You cannot go back.’

  ‘You forbid me?’

  R. Yochanan touched Reish Laqish’s shoulder. The heat of the man’s body startled him.

  Reish Laqish jumped back. ‘And what shall I do if I stay?’ he asked. ‘Be your guard or your janitor in exchange for food and board?’

  ‘We have janitors and guards aplenty,’ said R. Yochanan, beginning to build a fire. Reish Laqish took the cloak, aromatic with the young philosopher’s fragrance. The temperature dropped as the moon rose. He felt cold but refused to share R. Yochanan’s meal of a few dates and figs.

  ‘There is enough only for one,’ he said, pulling the cloak around him, drawing close to the fire. ‘If I eat half, both of us will go hungry.’

  In the darkness R. Yochanan smiled. He lay back, gazing at the night’s velvet drop sheet, misty and ragged with spikes of light.

  ‘We teach,’ he said, to test his companion’s understanding, ‘that flowing water and the Law are kindred elements, both able to hurl and submerge.’

  ‘I do not see it.’

  ‘One can be tossed about by the discovery of wisdom, said R. Yochanan, ‘and drowned in the depths of its judgement.’

  ‘Like an opponent in the ring.’

  Setting the rhythm of the dialectic the two men would conduct for decades, R. Yochanan said, ‘Hurl, yes, I see how a fighter could be hurled. But the element of submersion?’

  ‘Blood. He may be submerged in his own blood.’

  There was logic in the words; R. Yochanan thought he saw it. For all that, he still tried to fathom the illogicality of the other’s naked leap over the water as he risked all for beauty. The young scholar had watched Reish Laqish trying to return to the other side—to his previous life of weaponry and armour—but the gladiator had lost his sinew and his force. He had fallen into the river, into the water, into the Law. Now he would become R. Yochanan’s pupil and thereby, give away what power he had left, for that is a student’s obligation to his master.

  Does the story stop here?

  Reish Laqish lost himself in R. Yochanan’s cloak. He thought he heard the scholar prod the fire to life and felt the heat expand through his body. Sweat flared and he could not move. Passive, like a woman, he thought, not in control. My strength is sapped by that Law which I see and desire in the young sage. My spear is broken.

  ‘Surely,’ Reish Laqish said, ‘the Law must take the violence from a man if he is to exchange it for a new future. And there must be some recompense for the sacrifice.’

  ‘Mine is not a gentle life,’ said R. Yochanan. ‘You are mistaken if you think it.’

  Reish Laqish turned away from him, irritated. An impenetrable thought caused the blood to charge through his veins. He could not grasp it. Only a single word, death, surfaced in his mind.

  The men lay by the fire, unable to sleep.

  ‘Perhaps the Lord speaks to me through you,’ R. Yochanan remarked to the giant beside him.

  ‘If I tell you the rest of my story, you might not think so,’ Reish Laqish said.

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘When I could no longer bear my gladiatorial life, I escaped Rome and came back to the Land. I made my home in the wilderness, bothering no one, until one morning I was kicked awake by a brute as large as I. He wanted my weapons and food for his band of savages. I sprang to my feet and felled him with a blow.’

  ‘Felled?’

  ‘Killed. I killed him. Now his gang stood stunned. Half of them fled and the others became my followers. We were bandits and thus we made our living.’

  ‘By killing?’ R. Yochanan said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Reish Laqish replied.

  R. Yochanan was silent.

  ‘But mainly by robbing those on the wayside who travelled unprotected. It was a good life until the king’s men came after us. I sent my men in various directions and I ran with nothing but my armour, spear and dagger. I have been running ever since. Every so often some of my men find me and stay awhile, sharing my food and remembering more prosperous days.’

  The two masters—one of academe, the other of banditry—slept then, arms touching, covered in starlight.

  Or here?

  Reish Laqish awoke to the sound of water boiling in a metal can and the nutty aroma of a potion R. Yochanan was brewing. He recognised the ground, roasted root of chicory, and readily shared it.

  ‘Come back with me’ R. Yochanan said again. ‘There is food to spare at the academy.’

  ‘Am I Esau to sell my freedom for a mess of pottage? Thank you for the drink and the use of your cloak, but now I will cross the stream.’

  R. Yochanan repeated, ‘You cannot’.

  ‘Would you stop me?’ Reish Laqish laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.

  ‘I did not say you may not. I said you cannot. You are no longer able. Your spear is broken and—–’

  ‘I will swim back.’

  ‘Try,’ R. Yochanan said.

  Many times over many years, Reish Laqish would wonder why he had not tried, how he had known his arms against the water would be as useless as his spear against the earth.

  ‘If you come with me, if you repent, your life will change,’ said R. Yochanan, and again that impenetrable thought surfaced just beyond Reish Laqish’s grasp. He wondered whether death could stalk him in a scholar’s life as it had in a gladiator or bandit’s.

  ‘If I repent today and eat my fill, what is to stop me from returning to my old life and repeating my deeds tomorrow?’

  ‘You will not,’ said R. Yochanan.

  ‘Will not, cannot, may not,’ Reish Laqish mocked.

  ‘You will not. I know men.’

  As R. Yochanan rinsed out his few implements and packed them away, he said as though it were nothing, ‘Repent and I give you my sister, Zipporah, in marriage. She has my likeness yet is even more beautiful.’

  Or here?

  Neither spoke.

  At last Reish Laqish said into the chasm of silence. ‘How can you be sure I will want her?’

  ‘Because in her I give you a replica of myself.’

  ‘And will she want me?’ asked Reish Laqish, knowing that as he already loved the brother and as the brother loved him, the sister would have no choice but to hold him gently.

  Not asked but told of her forthcoming marriage, Zipporah thought she feared the husky, broad-shouldered outlaw. But when first they met alone, each heard the breath of the other speeding, losing rhythm. He touched her shoulder and defiantly she touched his. They stood like that, absorbing some uncanny distillation of self, seeping from skin to fingers to heart. He wanted to take her face in his hands, look deep into those R. Yochanan eyes and touch his lips to her eyelids. But he knew he would wait until vows were spoken.

  And finally, on that large, strange bed, he realised he had never felt quilted feathers before and, even had he, they surely would never have been so light and soft against his skin. Now he found himself opening to this woman’s touch in a relinquishing of reserve. His breath against her hair made it ripple and billow, as though intermittently tossed by a hot easterly. For a moment, he saw himself reflected in her eyes which shimmered in the candle flame. On that first night he had stretched up to extinguish it but she had stayed his hand.

  ‘I want you to see me,’ she had whispered to him in that long ago.

  ‘I do not need light for that.’

  ‘Oblige me,’ she insisted and, without thinking, her husband of only a few hours knew that there was nothing he would rather.

  Here would be good.

  And now ten years have passed.

  The bandit,
lost in Zipporah’s gentleness, was himself gentled, touching her forehead with his lips, running his strong, broad hands through her long, dark hair. Sometimes it seemed that he had R. Yochanan’s face beneath his fingers; and sometimes in the academy, in dispute with his teacher, he was sure it was his wife who bested him in argument. It was a bruising, blossoming existence. All the learning he had forgotten in his years in Rome and on the road, he now reclaimed and doubled.

  And here, Reish Laqish was a leading scholar who could match his teacher in logic and analysis of the legal texts. He even had students and followers of his own who preferred his mode of teaching.

  R. Yochanan was uncle to five little replicas of himself who yet had a certain roughness about their eyes and limbs. He loved them as he loved their father. Soon he would offer to share with him the post of head of the academy. And as the years passed, the tie between them became stronger than brotherhood, spirited and concentrated as they contested the law, one with the other.

  R. Yochanan said in the name of R. Simeon b. Yohai: ‘It is forbidden to a man to fill his mouth with laughter in this world, because it is written, “When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion…only then will our mouths be filled with laughter and our tongues with singing”. When will that be? At the time when they shall say among the nations, “The Lord hath done great things for them in bringing them to the World to Come”.’

  It was related of Reish Laqish that never again did he fill his mouth with laughter in this world after he heard this saying from R. Yochanan. But whether or not this account is true has never been tested.

  ‘Excessive levity leads to sin,’ Reish Laqish taught his students, remembering with no little wistfulness the campfire hilarity he had enjoyed with his men. ‘Happiness and rejoicing are righteous only when used for doing God’s commandments and rejoicing in His glory.’

  ‘So that means you may laugh with me,’ said Zipporah on one of those nights when he taught her what he had learned during the day, ‘and with our children. We rejoice in God’s glory every moment.’

  The little ones clambered over him on the huge marriage bed as Zipporah watched. She sat behind him, tousling his hair and he agreed with her. He thought that the Holy Blessed One could never object to the way in which they waited for the nights and the fiery communion they achieved. Desire without lust; love without covetousness. He gently rolled the children off him as he sat up. ‘I think we need at least one more of these.’ He kissed a child’s face. ‘Then when you go to the ritual bath you can look into the eyes of your brother, beyond the sacred waters, on your way home.’