“Mr. Wyle…” Schwartz shook his head in a tut-tutting gesture. His voice, to Denton’s ears, did not ring true. He was now looking down at his hand, which had creepy longish fingernails and was carefully realigning papers on his desk.
Denton flipped open his notebook. “So I dug into a bit of research…” Actually, he’d paid his research assistant, Loretta, to do it for him. “…and came up with some other interesting cases. Moses ascended to Heaven in a cloud. Ezekiel vanished on a ‘fiery wheel.’ And there are lots of folktales about medieval rabbis and kabbalists pulling all kinds of, um, crazy stunts.”
He laughed, but with a touch of respect, “heh-heh.” He’d swerved into this later lightheartedness in an effort to get Schwartz to smile. He could sense which way the ball was rolling and was trying his darnedest to get on the other side of it.
But Schwartz rolled right over him. “Is there a question in there, Mr. Wyle? Or just foolishness?”
“You think the Ezekiel story is foolishness, Rabbi?”
“What’s foolish is that I still don’t know why you’re here.”
“I, um, hoped to get a little background on kabbalah. Speak to someone who really knew it. The real thing.”
Schwartz steepled his fingers together on his belly thoughtfully, then shook his head. “You want background on kabbalah? No. I think you want foolishness—floating rabbis, mud golems, descending clouds. And I think this Mysterious World of yours is a foolish publication.”
In all his days as a reporter Denton had run into plenty of naysayers and skeptics. But never had anyone been so unabashedly rude. “Uh. Well…”
“Kabbalah is sacred. Can you understand that? It is deep, sacred work.” Schwartz leaned forward, glaring. “There are things in it so sacred they mustn’t be said out loud even.”
“Well, I don’t mean any—”
“Kabbalah is, in fact, a privilege so rare, an elixir so potent, that even a Jewish rabbi may never earn it.”
Denton sat frozen, his mouth still more or less in the outline of an understanding, patient smile.
“Well, I’m really just looking for a little sidebar material. Maybe I should ask some questions. Is there anything in kabbalah which could explain a disappearance? Someone vanishing into thin air? Or maybe some old stories about incidents like that? Because this eyewitness account seems really…”
Schwartz was holding up a hand, had been for some time. Denton trailed off, his words thudding to the ground like overripe tomatoes.
For a moment there was silence. Schwartz pressed his lips. “This is what I will give you. I will give you a story for your ‘sidebar.’ Ready?”
Denton nodded. He crossed his legs and tried to look grateful.
“Four sages entered Paradise. One was so enamored with what he saw that he could not bear to return to his life on earth and he died. One looked and became so immersed in the contemplation of the mysteries that he went mad. One thought the glory of the angels rivaled God Himself, and he gave up his religion in confusion and became an apostate. Only one had the maturity to handle what he saw. He survived to become a great teacher.”
“That’s nice. Thank you.”
“Mr. Wyle, it is not nice. It is a warning to those who would thoughtlessly approach the gates of Heaven! I hope you will heed it.”
Schwartz’s eyes were piercing. Denton sat for a moment, trying to find something to say and failing.
Schwartz stood up, his tone lightening. “Done. I hope you enjoyed your visit upstate. It’s beautiful countryside.” He held out a hand. Denton stood slowly and took it. “Shalom, Mr. Wyle. God go with you.”
Denton stood outside the yeshiva, rerunning the scene in his head. The moody clouds of spring opened above him and it began to rain. It sprinkled for about half a second; then it poured.
Water running down his face, still rooted to the driveway, the comic value of the deluge was not lost on him. He might even have laughed, were he not so humiliated. What! What on earth had just happened—besides the fact that he had walked in there completely unprepared? Why hadn’t someone warned him that Schwartz was a kabbalah nazi? Why had he not bothered to seek out some of Schwartz’s scholarly writing and figure out his agenda ahead of time? But no, that would have been too much trouble. He’d gone in there like a complete moron, “Oh, please, let me interview you!,” assuming that like all decent religions—Christianity, for example—Judaism would not be able to resist a little free PR and a chance to sink its teeth into fresh meat. It was like an Ethiopian Jewish homosexual walking up to Goebbels and saying, “Hey, can I get your autograph?” ahuh ahuh ahuh.
Denton, you ass!
And he’d gone to so much trouble to interview a real kabbalist, too. They weren’t exactly listed in the phone book.
The Kobinski story described in Tales was the most legitimate disappearance case Denton had ever run across. Real, live, historical people were involved. It hadn’t happened in a locked room, not exactly, but it had happened on perfectly dry land in the midst of a group—as in eyewitnesses. And the kabbalah spin had been too rich! He’d so been able to envision his article given the weight of legitimacy by fuzzy black wool vests, long beards, mysterious tomes, and fringes and freaking tweezers!
He plodded morosely to his car, shoes squishing, got in. He was angry at Schwartz, angry with himself. But overtaking that, like some tardy but determined tortoise, was a squeezing in his chest, a sense of doom and danger—a panic attack.
He leaned against the steering wheel and took deep breaths. He hadn’t been able to get Rabbi Schwartz on his side. Why, Rabbi Schwartz had never even smiled at him; he’d seen through Wyle’s shtick as easily as if Denton were a housewife wrapped in Saran—hadn’t liked him, hadn’t engaged with him, hadn’t given him the slightest freaking break.
Denton had a very hard time with rejection. When he was a boy and he’d felt this panic, he’d had visions of a rabbit: a rabbit sitting in a cage in the children’s playroom, knowing that the kids had stopped being charmed by its cute fluffiness, had stopped coming around at all, and that the cook had a strange glint in his eyes these days. For when you were a rabbit, cute and fluffy was all you had.
But he wasn’t that needy little boy anymore. Many, many people liked him now. Women, for example, he always had, and male friends, too, a lot of them. Some of them didn’t even know about the money. He usually didn’t tell the women he slept with, just to avoid problems. And mostly he got any woman he wanted—and many he didn’t. Yes, people liked him very much as a rule. He was a goer.
But not Schwartz.
A movement caught Denton’s eye, making him sit up straight in the seat and paste on a pleasant face. It was a kid walking a bicycle down the driveway. Denton had seen the boy in the library earlier, with his red curly hair and big glasses splattered, now, by rain. The bicycle had a large wicker basket strapped down on the rear guard. The kid paused at the end of the driveway, looked up the hilly road with an unmistakable “do I really have to do this?” set to his shoulders, and mounted up. Town, as Denton had recently found out, was five hilly miles away. He started the car.
“Hey!” He rolled smoothly up to the bike. “Can I give you a lift? It’s raining pretty hard out here and I was just leaving.”
The boy looked at Denton’s clean-cut face, then glanced up the road. He brought the bike to a stop, balancing it between his two legs, and took off his glasses to wipe. They smeared wetly. “You going to town?”