kaddish.com

by Nathan Englander

  And so Larry does.

  “I promise,” he says. “I won’t miss.”

  At that, Dina lets out a wail, heartrending. If she could have thrown herself into Rabbi Rye’s arms for comfort, if these people touched outside of marriage, she’d be sobbing on his shoulder, while he stroked the wig that covers her hair.

  Instead, she says to Rye, “I told you. I told you he’d say that. I tried. I did like you said.”

  Larry responds, as if Dina were addressing him.

  “But I said Yes. That I would. I said I’d do it.”

  “But you’re lying!” she yells, her feet solidly planted, and sort of heaving her upper body his way.

  “Now, now,” Rabbi Rye says to Dina, calming. “Let us not say ‘lying’ when we can assume goodwill. Are you lying?” he asks Larry.

  “No,” Larry says. “I’m not.”

  “You see?” the rabbi says to Dina, using a tone straight from the rabbinical playbook. “He knows, your brother, that it is a blessing such a responsibility. We all want the same for your father, that he should find a lichtige Gan Eden, a truly radiant afterlife. And for him to achieve this? We all know that for eleven months the Kaddish must be recited in his name.”

  Larry points out that they all do, in fact, know this, and had known it since childhood, and that his sister had just said it like two seconds before. He also points out that it is really insulting to even pretend to need to restate it for everyone’s benefit.

  And it is for just this moment that Duvy Huffman was recruited. Because anyone who’d made a condolence call had seen how short and crabby and plain angry Larry seemed with his sister. And every Jew in town, including Rye himself, knew that, as effective a clergyman as he was, when the good rabbi wasn’t preaching to the like-minded, hook-line-and-sinker crowd, he was without any charm at all. And so, to Duvy, it falls.

  “What the rabbi and your sister are trying to say,” Duvy says, “what they mean—”

  “Yes,” the rabbi says. “Tell him what we mean.”

  Under pressure, Huffman tilts his head this way and that, while his thoughts line up. “The concern is that you might tell us you’ll do something, while really feeling it is none of our business what you actually do. You may be thinking, ‘What does it matter? Who, in the end, will be the wiser?’ ”

  What a fine interpreter the rabbi and Dina have chosen! What a good translator of intent they’ve found in Duvy Huffman. For that is just exactly what Larry is thinking to himself.

  “It is this worry,” Duvy says, raising his voice an octave, “that has your sister using harsh words and has the rabbi, inadvertently, condescending. It’s not for me that I inquire again, but for your father. We’re just trying to surmise, to get at the veracity—”

  “Of my commitment? Which I’ve just made?”

  Huffman thinks about it, while Dina stands with her arms crossed, seething.

  “If you are only promising so as to get us off your back,” Duvy says, “then we ask, please, at the very least, tell it like it is. Shoot straight. So that we may find an honest starting point for what is a very important conversation.”

  Now it is Larry’s turn to consider. He takes his time doing it, and Rye, he can’t handle the silence.

  “The Kaddish. Every time you utter it,” Rye says, “it affects your father’s status in the World to Come. It literally affects his neshamah in the place where he may, this very second, be gathering wood for his own fire.”

  That, it does Larry in.

  “Are you nuts? You think my dad is gathering sticks to burn himself?”

  “It’s maybe a metaphor, the wood,” Rabbi Rye says, raising his hands in the air.

  “And the fire?” Larry wants to know.

  “Fire is fire.” Rye wears an expression that says, “I cannot lie.”

  “You’re really crazy. All of you. And the sins of the son don’t go up to the father! That’s not how it works.”

  “In some instances they do. For the child under bar mitzvah age, say, that would be an example of an upward pass.” Rabbi Rye steps behind Dina as Larry tenses, red with rage. “But that’s not what we’re discussing,” he says over Dina’s shoulder. “In this case. Here it’s not negative. It’s beautiful. It raises you up. And raises your father up. It even raises up God! As Rashi tells us—”

  “No Rashi!” Larry yells back. “No opinions. No commentaries. No stories. Just facts! Our dad, he was the purest, kindest, most selfless man,” Larry says, looking now at a responsive Dina, drawing her in. “Do you really think, if I sleep in one morning—”

  And he watches as his sister’s face falls.

  “You’ll sleep in every morning!” she yells. “You’re not going to daven. Just admit it.”

  “It can’t matter. It can’t,” Larry says, trying to organize his argument, to lift it above the roiling emotions, to give voice to his beliefs. “If there’s God, for real, it can’t possibly matter to our father’s afterlife what I do here. That’s not—it can’t be—how it works.”

  From his sister comes a piteous “It is. It is. It is.” She reaches out, she takes her brother’s wrists, lightly, with love. “It was his wish,” she says. “He loved you so much. But our father was terrified that you’d let him down.”

  “No,” Larry says, shaking his head.

  “That’s the last thing he said to me in this life. ‘The Kaddish. Don’t let your brother let me down.’ ”

  In front of these two men. The sheer size of it.

  To his sister, Larry says, “He didn’t. I was there.” And then, for good measure, he adds a “Fuck you.”

  The men recoil. But Dina, she has been his big sister for a very long time.

  “Big shot,” she says, dropping his wrists.

  “You are merciless, Dina. Really, go fuck yourself. Or let horny Avi help you, you monster.”

  Huffman, drained of color, steadies himself against the rabbi, a hand on his shoulder for support.

  Still, a brave man, Duvy speaks. “To be dying and afraid no one will say the prayer over you, it is a serious matter.”

  Larry takes Huffman’s measure. He looks even shorter and fatter standing next to that gristly Rye. He deserves, Larry feels, a “Fuck you too!” but Larry does not deliver it.

  What he says instead is, “It mattered deeply to my father. But he didn’t die afraid. Not because of me. As cruel as it is to insinuate—”

  “I didn’t insinuate,” his sister says. “I stated it. Because I know.”

  “I was with him too,” Larry says, “and he went happy. He went in peace, knowing who I really am.” Larry practically cries. “I’m a good boy! He told me himself.”

  They stare at him, with nothing less than compassion. Sad specimen that he is.

  Dina asks him again, this time calmly, “Will you promise to do it, to say your prayers?”

  “I won’t promise and I won’t pray,” Larry says. “Not with a group, and not by myself. I’ll do it at home when I’m in the mood. I’ll honor my father my way. And I believe—just like you believe things—that it’s just as good.”

  “But it isn’t,” his sister says, despairing. “And God made you the one—the only one for the job.”

  “But why?” Larry says. “Why can’t you do it, Dina? Why don’t you say the fucking prayers? If you’re the person in this family Dad could trust, if he gave you his fucking body to keep, then take on the responsibility that comes with. Say the Kaddish yourself.”

  “I’m a girl!” she says. “I can’t.”

  “For one, you’re a woman,” Larry says. “For two, fix your religion.” To Rabbi Rye, he says, “It’s nonsense to stay in the fucking Dark Ages. Make it even. It’s 1999. It’s time. Fix your community. Let her say the Kaddish!” The rabbi looks openly pained and drops down onto the edge of the open couc
h bed. “Come on, Rabbi,” Larry says. “Tell her it’s OK, so that it will be OK. Be the first brave rabbi to allow it.”

  “This is not how it works,” Rye says.

  Larry turns to Huffman. “What about you, Duvy? Why don’t you try to make smart the rabbi’s backwards position? Tart it up for us. Make it look good.”

  “It isn’t backwards,” Duvy says.

  “Great.” Larry addresses his sister, as if the others are no longer there. “Why not have Avi do it? ‘A second son,’ is what Dad always called him. He already prays like fifty times a day.”

  “Avi’s my husband. He’s not blood!”

  “So your boy, then.”

  “You want to hear cursing, hotshot?” his sister says. “You want to hear a foul mouth, you sick fuck of a brother? You want a child to mourn instead of you? He’s not even in line. No, Larry. You’re the one.”

  “Well, then I guess our father’s going to Hell.”

  And with that, Larry finds the emotional pressure point he didn’t know he’d been after. Dina begins wailing, unhinged.

  When she gains control of her sobbing, she says, “When you want to be mean, little brother, there’s no one more brutal.”

  “Really? Because that’s nothing compared to telling me our father died afraid—because of me.”

  “Then prove him wrong,” Dina says, “and do your part!”

  “I will. I swear it,” he says. “But I’ll do it my way.”

  His sister looks right then to the rabbi, who has somehow floated back to his feet. His sister turns to this man, and the institution he represents, hoping for salvation.

  Larry joins her, the two of them finally on the same side. “Yes. Fix it, Rabbi.” he says. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Rabbi Rye breathes so deeply that his chest puffs out, pigeon-like. He seems suddenly different, ready for the challenge. With a considered pull to his beard, he seems to Larry truly rabbinical for the first time.

  “On your father’s side?” Rye asks. “There are no siblings left?”

  “No one,” Larry’s sister says. “No men in any direction, just this one useless son. The only man. Only he’s not man enough.”

  The rabbi gives another few strokes to his beard, as if to tame it.

  “You could,” the rabbi says, “you could yotzei someone else, in an emergency like this. You could assign a kind of shaliach mitzvah—like an emissary. A proxy to say it in your staid.”

  “A proxy?” Dina says. “Even with this one right here, alive?”

  “The Kaddish getting said is all that matters. First we try the best case. Then we problem-solve from there.”

  “So her husband could,” Larry says, “if he wanted—”

  “Not Avi,” Dina says. “Not my husband. You want a proxy, you find a proxy.” To Rabbi Rye, she says, “But if he finds someone else, that would really be kosher? Fully? Same as if he said it himself?”

  “Fully and totally. A thousand percent kosher if the person who’s saying it doesn’t miss and keeps your father in his prayers. Don’t spread it around, but it really is—halachically—the same.”

  Sister looks to brother. Brother looks to sister.

  And Dina nods her ascent.

  “You figure it out, Larry. Tonight. Or I will chain you to the bed. You understand? If I don’t know it’s being said you’re not getting out of my sight.”

  Dina turns to Rabbi Rye. “If it’s as kosher as you say, Rabbi, then I can live with it. But the obligation to see it through, it stays on him. Let my brother take responsibility for once in his gornisht life. For once, let him fix his own fucking mess.”

  V

  Here lies Larry with his burden upon him. How would he find someone to say the Kaddish in his stead?

  He knows he’s irrational from exhaustion, from despair and grief, from being in his sister’s space and stripped of his routines. If only he could sleep for a little. If only he could make it to morning, he’d tackle the problem head-on.

  Also, if he sleeps soon, he might not lose his mind.

  But to sleep, Larry knows, he needs a release. For nearly a week, despite his small rebellions, he’s smoked neither cigarette nor joint, he hasn’t had a stiff drink (or three), he hasn’t once sunk into the living-room couch to binge eat and binge watch, gorging on junk (visual and edible) until the stomach acid burned and his brain conked out.

  Larry had even abstained from his digital diversions—no e-mails, no games, and, beyond his useless nephew-aimed maritime search, he’d refrained from surfing the Web. He’d done nothing that offered him pleasure or escape. And wasn’t that what shivah was about, after all?

  Thinking himself down this path is, he knows, a classic example of Larry-like cowardice and dissociation, the epitome of his unwillingness to engage with his own most intimate thoughts.

  If he was pondering relief, and searching for escape, and honestly just hankering for some rest, the list in Larry’s head would be one entry long. What he most definitely hadn’t done since his father’s passing was the thing he couldn’t admit he was about to do now.

  It had taken Larry years of post-religious, practiced focus to turn off the Godly eyes, and the dear-and-departed eyes, so that, steeped in his depravity, he might feel himself unseen. But since his father’s loss, he hasn’t once pornified, unable to shake the ghostly feeling of his newly dead father looking down.

  If he didn’t feel his own life hanging in the balance, if he didn’t believe that, without releasing the pressure, he, himself, might drop dead in his nephew’s narrow bed, Larry would not, under Dina’s roof, succumb.

  Larry fires up his laptop and clicks on his browser. Headphoneless, he mutes the volume and types in a site. Then, with deep breath and dramatic pause, Larry hits enter, flooding his sister’s pious home with the world’s filthiest filth.

  * * *

  —

  When Larry comes, he suffers such guilt and such shame that he can’t even bear the way those fish flit around, gawking at him, full of judgment. Hoping to distract those terrible creatures, Larry goes over to the tank. He opens the top and grabs the fish food, those sodden tissues still balled up in his hand.

  He shakes the smelly tin and, amid a snow of flakes, a sizable dollop of sperm drops into the tank.

  Larry watches as that blob hits the surface, immediately transforming into a kind of viscous, tendriled sea creature and beginning its watery descent.

  Setting down tin and tissues, Larry races for the net. But it’s too late. Those fish, they are all already upon it, pecking away with their puckered fish mouths and fish lips. It—that bit of Larry—is gobbled up, and gone, in an instant.

  Larry wants to cry as he rids himself of the remaining evidence and creeps back into bed. In his misery, he’s surprised to discover that, more than the crushing embarrassment, it’s the warm and fuzzy chemicals released that are winning the battle inside his brain.

  Suddenly relaxed, suddenly sleepy, suddenly (despite it all) unburdened, Larry opens a new browser window (clicking off the porn-soused one whose tiny tabs peek up behind). Feeling inspired, he begins googling his way toward a solution for all that ails. Pausing in this fugue state to be horrified by the source of his newfound vision, Larry manages what is for him a rare and very different kind of self-love. He forgives.

  Is it anyway anyone’s business from whence comes a person’s inspiration? What matters is that he finds what he’s looking for. The answer to his prayers.

  Who ever thought the solution to his, and his sister’s, and the spirit of their father’s intractable problem might be reached by melding all their disparate beliefs?

  For the Internet and new technology is the answer, and tradition is the answer, and that spread-to-the-corners-of-the-earth idea of a linked and universal Jewish home ends up being the answer too.

>   Larry had chanced upon a website based in Jerusalem, and behind that website was a yeshiva, and behind that place of study was a group of deeply committed students who—a paid service—would say the Mourner’s Prayer.

  Sharing the worry that plagued Rabbi Rye and Duvy Huffman, that tore at the heart of Larry’s dear sister, and that rested on Larry’s fat head, these young scholars were offering a resource designed to spare the innocent, forsaken soul from the heat of a cleansing hellfire.

  Larry laughs out loud. All that time searching only to land on an address that Larry, on instinct alone, should have entered at the start: kaddish.com.

  To sign up, one filled out a form with the name of the deceased, his or her birthday and death day, their likes and dislikes. Then there was a space for biographical information, and any anecdotes or representative memories that might better muster a portrait of the departed.

  According to the FAQ page, upon receiving the application, the site’s administrator would create a profile to circulate among the available students, finding the perfect match for the fallen. It was like a JDate for the dead.

  He’d have thought it harder to choose the stories that best described his father, to rattle off preferences, summoning for strangers the true heart of the man. In engaging with a flood of memories, Larry feels closer to his father, and more at peace with his passing, than he has since his death.

  Larry submits the application and then waits exactly ten seconds before checking his e-mail for a reply. When none appears, Larry refreshes in an endless cycle, tapping at the trackpad to his heart’s content. When he’s had his Skinner-box fill, Larry finally clicks the window closed, satisfied on a number of fronts.

  * * *

  —

  Woe is to Larry, for his short-lived comfort. The kaddish.com page snaps closed only to reveal a window lurking behind. It had been there the whole time, waiting, while Larry so lovingly filled out the form.

  Larry’s pop-up blocker had failed him. And so he’s thrust from the purity of his reminiscence into the crude, crude reality of his life. A woman stares back at Larry through the ether. She’s busy with—and what can Larry do but call it what it is?—a lubriciously large glass dildo.