OF THE BIRDS YOU SHALL HAVE in abomination, and shall not be eaten, are the following.
My sister’s fiancé, in black jacket and white shirt, paused.
I put down the huge menu. I watched him, his forehead aimed upward as if posing, or as if concentrating, or as if searching there for the words from the Torah he was reciting from memory. I thought his little black skullcap was about to fall to the floor.
Brooklyn. That’s where he told us he was from, as soon as he sat down. Born and raised in Brooklyn. His father, he told us, was a driver in Brooklyn. Limo driver, he told us. His mother worked in a beauty salon in Brooklyn. They were divorced. Didn’t speak to each other. Weren’t even Orthodox. Never went to temple. It had been years since he’d heard a word from his only sister. He said he was in Alcoholics Anonymous, that he liked to tell people that up front, from the outset, right off the bat. No reason to hide it. That’s who he was. No one in his family, he told us, would be attending the wedding.
The eagle, the vulture, the osprey, he commenced in slow enumeration.
He paused again. He was still gazing upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. His little black skullcap was holding tight. It was fastened to his straight brown hair with a metal bobby pin.
The kite, he went on, the falcon according to its kind, every raven according to its kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the seagull, the hawk according to its kind, the owl, the cormorant, the ibis, the water hen, the pelican, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron according to its kind, the hoopoe, and the bat.
He finally looked down. Smiled at me. As he was taking a sip of water, proud of himself and his verbatim memorization of the Torah, I informed him that the bat wasn’t a bird. I heard him swallow, hard. That is how it is written, he scolded me, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. The bat is a mammal, I told him. That is how it is written in Leviticus, he repeated, ignoring me, barricading himself behind the ever-literal interpretation of zealots. It flies, I told him. It looks like a bird, but it’s not a bird. It says in Leviticus, he told me, that those are the birds you shall have in abomination, and shall not be eaten. Silence. Now, in the Mishnah, he went on, it says that birds of prey are not kosher, because to be kosher a bird must possess three characteristics. There is one species of bat, I interrupted his exegesis before he could enumerate the three characteristics, that hibernates for six months in coitus. In what? asked my mother. In coitus, six months, I declared, picking the huge menu back up (my own barricade). That’s not right, my brother corrected. What it is, he explained, is that this particular species of bat reproduces only while hibernating, a state that lasts six months and in which the males mate with several other hibernating bats, half-asleep, who don’t even know what’s going on. He smiled. Some of which, he said smiling wider, are also males. Thirty-five percent of them are males, I chimed in. That’s right — he winked — thirty-five percent of the males mate with other males. More silence.
We’d watched a documentary on bats when I got back to the hotel room that evening, sitting on the narrow balcony and sharing a cigarette my brother had expertly rolled, and which my father, who came to pick us up and show us his new baseball cap (FATHER OF THE BRIDE, in gold letters), had thought was a joint.
Right, I said to my brother, just to keep it going, but I prefer to believe that a single act of coitus can last six months. What are you talking about? asked my father, as though he’d just awakened, his new cap still on, still stiff. Myotis lucifugus, I said. Long acts of coitus, I said. Bisexual bats, my brother said. We both smiled. What on earth are you talking about? my mother asked impatiently, near exasperation. I knew it was marijuana, my father said, half-joking and half-gullible. I was surprised that my sister, beneath her wig and hat (her own barricade), sat judging us only with her eyes, not saying a word. My sister’s fiancé raised a hand, requesting the floor once more. At any rate, according to law, you are allowed to eat duck, he granted me, his tone pious, his hand held out priestlike. I was about to thank him for his gracious consent. Fortunately, the waiter arrived.
My mother, perhaps in an attempt not to cry, simply kept taking quick sips of her heavily sugared green tea. My sister and her fiancé announced that, although it was supposedly a kosher restaurant, they wouldn’t eat anything in a place like this, saying these last two words with special emphasis, italicizing them. Disdainful and standoffish, whispering to each other — no touching till after the wedding — they drank only water. My father and brother shared a huge plate of vegetable chow mein in silence. My Peking duck was dry and overcooked.
I FELT MY BROTHER KICK my leg and edged farther away from him and, faceup in our king-size bed, forced myself to recall those six words.
As kids, my brother and I slept in the same room, our beds arranged perpendicularly, head-to-head. Every night after we brushed our teeth and got under the covers, my mother would finally come in, pick up our clothes, tidy up a few toys strewn on the floor, and ask us: Have you said your prayer yet? Then each of us, tucked under the covers, would repeat those six words in Hebrew, always the same prayer in Hebrew — quick, perfunctory, rote. First word: Shema. Second word: Yisrael. Third word: Adonai. Fourth word: Eloheinu. Fifth word: Adonai. Sixth word: Echad. Six words. The same six words in Hebrew that made no sense to us, that had no meaning beyond invoking the presence of my mother, who would come in to say good-night, to kiss us good-night. We would each mumble those six words and then get a kiss on the forehead and then we could fall asleep. Life was simple. Sleep was sweet. Prayers, perfunctory or not, comprehensible or not, made their own kind of sense. I can’t imagine a prayer, any prayer, having a meaning more profound than a mother’s good-night kiss. I don’t remember when we stopped saying that prayer, my brother and I. Maybe during the cynicism of adolescence. Maybe when we each got our own room. Maybe when my mother stopped offering a good-night kiss in exchange for those six words, and those six words definitively lost all their meaning, all their logic.
I felt my brother’s cold feet on mine as he lay beside me in a deep and peaceful slumber. Perhaps to get back at him, or to make sure I could actually remember them, or to see if they still held any enchanted maternal sway, I began whispering those six words into the darkness of the night, lying faceup, exhaling them up, using all of my breath to drive them upward. Over, and over, and over. Until the six words became a flat shapeless mass and I got bored or maybe I just fell asleep.
I’M GIVING THAT ASSHOLE ten more minutes.
My brother, furious, was sitting on the sidewalk beneath the meager shade of a cypress, rolling another cigarette. I kept quiet. I know his fury well, and the best thing to do is keep quiet. We’d been waiting almost an hour at the entrance to a Jerusalem neighborhood called Kiryat Mattersdorf.
The night before, as we left the Chinese restaurant, my sister had asked us to meet her fiancé there, at the main entrance, on Panim Meirot Street. He wanted to show us around the neighborhood of the yeshiva where he studied. My brother and I immediately smiled at each other, each with the same thought: Not a chance. We said no thank you, and my sister shook her head in disgust and said she didn’t even know why we had come, then mumbled something that might have been in Hebrew, turned, and stormed off. But the next morning (again I’d heard or dreamed the same shrieking or wailing in the night), my mother came to the room to wake us up: her face forlorn, her voice desperate, pleading that we go, that it wasn’t much to ask, that it would be for only a short while, that it was for our sister’s sake, for our brother-in-law’s sake. She called him that. Our brother-in-law. I hadn’t thought of him as a brother-in-law. There are words that suddenly lose all meaning.