Tsvi helped me up and made me something to eat, surrounding me with warmth and concern. He was clearly in the best of spirits. Father was already sleeping on the couch in his study. And only then did I grasp the full extent of his despair, of his fear, of his disappointment, of his surrender. He was handing me over to Tsvi, who was only too glad to get me and to treat me royally. He turned off the TV, made his bed in the guest room, and went off to look for a book to read in it.
Suddenly you can hear a pin drop. I look up from my book to see the rabbi beckon to the pretty young American mother. She rises blushing in her gorgeous dress encouraged by her husband she tiptoes anxiously over to the rabbi he hands her a large porcelain bowl. She holds it in her thin hands while he raises his big wine cup and begins to list the Ten Plagues in some old chant from the steppes letting one large red drop of wine fall into the bowl for each plague. Blood. Frogs. Lice. Locusts. Vermin…
The pretty young American smiles she has stage fright and doesn’t understand the bowl shakes slightly in her hands while the rabbi continues drop by drop flicking each plague off his finger into the pinkish bowl and chanting as it falls. Boils. Hail. Wild beasts… Hypnotically she smiles at each drop. Darkness. The Killing of the Firstborn… At last he’s done. He shuts his eyes and motions her back to her seat but still she stands there reverently holding the bowl uncertain what to do with it. And then suddenly she raises it to her lips and begins to drink. Everyone shouts at once. The bowl of plagues is snatched from her. Shrieks of laughter accompany her shamefaced return to her seat where her children crowd around her and her husband gives her a kiss. And still the tenor voice quavers on.
“Rabbi Yossi the Galilean hath said…”
You paced slowly back and forth on the wet earth, careful not to sink into it, the divorced divorcing divorcer in the splintery glare of the raging spring, your pant cuffs stained with mud, your new American suit shiny in the sunlight, someone else was dressing you now, you never had such a stylish collar before. You lit a cigarette, your face dissolving into vapor in a puddle of water, you exhaled bluish smoke, you sank deeper into yourself, shifting papers from pocket to pocket. Inside the closed cottage, behind drawn curtains, the rabbis fought over our divorce, but already I was parted from you, sitting stock-still on the stoop and staring at the soft gray curls over your heart, at the thin scar hooked like a beak. All at once you stopped worrying and looked at me. What were you thinking of just then? Still of yourself as you and he the way you once used to? You turned to me so unexpectedly, so openly, so shining with wisdom, yes, even with humor — why, the worst part of it then was that you completely lost your sense of humor! “Did you really? You really did? You wanted to kill me?” Perhaps now that we’re parted at last it flattered you to think that. “Yes,” I said. But that wasn’t so. I had only wanted to cut you loose. Can’t you understand there’s a difference? To cut you loose from the desperate fear that made you want to run away, but to leave some part of you too. Because I’m sure there would have been something left. To cut you loose from your constipated fear, from your self-involved, self-diddling intellect with its anxieties and its imaginary, self-destructing missions to the world. Not at that exact spot. Although perhaps there never was a better one. But I was sure that there must be one, the fulcrum from which you would come apart. If only you hadn’t been so scared. If only you had waited another moment without moving, you might not have even felt the pain. But you didn’t know who you gave the knife to. It wasn’t to her, as you thought. It was to me, who loved you and would never have harmed you. Who wanted only to open you up. To cut you loose but not to kill you. To free you. Oh how gladly I would have taken apart that mono-self of yours! It broke my heart to see you with your apron on among those pots, a beginner in the kitchen trying so hard to cook, the dawn-star Venus upon you, a soft sun of flame beneath your steamy, boiling meat soup. You gave her the knife and you panicked because you couldn’t see how in a flicker of thought I took it from her right away. Cut him loose, don’t kill him, I whispered to her. Start with the key on his chest. If only you had kept still then as you did today, smiling patiently… we did, you know, spend so many years together, even if they were a bitter disappointment… what made you grab my hand and wrestle with me, what made you run away? But you’ve always run away. Always surrendered. Always gone to get Tsvi, to wake up the children, not that they ever did you any good. Because it wasn’t a question of doing justice or of being fair. It was a question of being together. You shouted when you should have talked. For the longest time you choked your words to death, you constipated all your sentences. Who were you shouting at? Why? And in such a high, female voice that one might almost have thought that my other was in you and was dragging you off to her wilderness. Groggy as I was I knew I had to act quickly and so did the loudly barking dog. I knew that it was either now or never to cut up that stubborn mono-self into its original parts. If only you hadn’t moved. If only you had calmed your mind instead of screaming “Oh, my God!” and springing for the door. A fresh, clear stream of words would have sprung from you instead and done the job without a drop of blood. You would have been cut loose painlessly, joyously. We could have done without the knife.
Suddenly someone bangs on a table and the murmurs and the laughter die away. Off to the side somebody starts to sing the next passage from the Haggadah and is silenced. From the other end of the room somebody else takes it up and is hushed too. “Shh… shh… wait a minute… the rabbi…” I glanced up from my book to see the young Russian standing stiffly at the head table eyes shut one hand on his heart and the other raised in the air. “Shh… shh…” voices call out. “Quiet, there! The rabbi wants to say a few words…”
The silence deepens. At last he looks at us his gaze raking us like a blue torch. All eyes are on him. Here and there the trace of a smile. He takes a step back and quietly begins to make the rounds of the tables one hand still on his chest and the other still in the air. We crane in our chairs to watch him quietly slowly circle behind us two or three times until he deftly slips into the square between the tables and begins to circle that too passing in front of us now staring at the ceiling playing some game that maybe he learned in a Soviet labor camp. All at once he halts in front of me and without even a look at me deftly shuts my book then continues on his way one hand still held high not at all the same man who fought for my marriage this morning. Slowly now he lets his upraised arm drop. No one smiles anymore. We hold our breaths hypnotically. He walks even slower he stops to look at the children he circles some more stopping to study the doctors he walks on and stops again in front of the patients from the closed ward he circles on all at once he too begins to sing from the Haggadah offhandedly in a fine tenor voice like someone singing to himself in a melody nobody knows. Done he circles again lithe and assured on his feet cherubic cheeks pink in the bright light golden curls on his nape fluffing lightly beneath his backward-tipped cap. And again he stops by the children now he sings once more his voice poignant full of longing he circles again halting this time by the patients from the closed ward scrutinizing them slowly while they blink and gape with drooling mouths staring back at him in alarm as though he were about to attack them. Yet instead he begins to speak in his soft quiet voice in his thick odd Russian accent his body arched gracefully backward.