TWO VERY YOUNG SOLDIERS passed by, holding machine guns, dressed in green, wearing black berets, and on seeing them, possibly because I was tired of waiting, I instantly recalled the one time I’d played in a heavy-metal concert. I was fifteen or sixteen. The band had telephoned me because they urgently needed a keyboardist for a concert that weekend, and they knew I played piano. They were punk, or heavy metal, or some bizarre mix of the two. They were called, to my parents’ horror, Crucifix. I didn’t understand their urgency. I didn’t understand what piano had to do with heavy metal. And though I didn’t like that kind of music at all, flattered and naïve, I accepted. We practiced once or twice at the singer’s house, and it took me no time to learn the simple, repetitive, monotonous chords of their songs. I showed up the day of the concert in jeans and a button-down shirt and they laughed at my preppy attire, and with leather and chains and black makeup and black boots and a black beret, they proceeded to disguise me as a punk rocker. We played to a theater full of teenagers, and I tickled a few keys here and there. When I got back home, I was still euphoric. Maybe even humming one of their metallic melodies. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and contemplated the punk rocker in the mirror. My costume, I suppose, had worked. I wet a towel and leaned in toward the mirror to take the makeup off my eyes, only to discover that on the black beret, smack-dab in the middle of my forehead, was an enormous swastika. A Nazi swastika. I snatched the cap off my head to inspect it from up close, without the distortion of the mirror. The swastika was embroidered in black thread. Factory stitching, expert stitching. I remembered that as they were dressing me, someone had hurriedly stuck the beret on my head. I never saw it, never saw myself with the beret on, never knew that I’d played two hours to a full audience dressed as a Nazi punk rocker. Did that make me a Nazi, at least for those two hours, at least in the eyes of those teenagers? I felt something in my stomach. Nausea, maybe. It was already after midnight, but I went back out. I walked for blocks, until I’d gotten far enough away from my house. I came to a wasteland and cast the beret into some bushes, hard, far, as if casting into the night my honor or my guilt.
HERE HE COMES, I said to my brother, eyeing my sister’s fiancé as he crossed the street toward us, his gait slow and disdainful. He was still wearing the same black suit and the same white shirt as the night before. You can’t smoke once we go in, he said the moment he approached us, no greeting whatsoever, no apology whatsoever for his late arrival. My brother muttered something, stood up, and wearing an expression I knew all too well, continued to smoke his cigarette in a leisurely fashion, making us stand there waiting until he’d finished the whole thing.
As we walked to the entrance, my sister’s fiancé explained that the neighborhood of Kiryat Mattersdorf was Haredi, perhaps the most conservative offshoot of Orthodox Judaism, also known as ultra-Orthodox. He was telling us something or other about the rabbi who’d founded it in 1959, when we passed a big security gate, painted bright yellow, still open. What’s this for? I asked, interrupting him. To close the street off later, he said, for Shabbos (the Yiddish word for Shabbat). I asked him why. He said it was forbidden for cars to come through during Shabbos. He said driving a car on Shabbos was forbidden. He said that this law was based on one of the thirty-nine prohibitions of the Mishnah, the first text written about Jewish oral traditions. He said a Jew never questions what is written in sacred texts, as they are the laws of Hashem, who is all-powerful. He said that since today was Friday, there was a lot going on. Shabbos is almost upon us, he said. We’re preparing for Shabbos, which begins in less than an hour, he said, his eyes raised heavenward.
In a tour-guide voice, and in something of a rush, he showed us the outside of the building where his yeshiva was located. He showed us the building that was the synagogue, and the building that was the school, and the building that was the old people’s home. We kept walking down the street and he kept pointing out buildings where some famous rabbi or other lived, and where yet another famous rabbi or other lived, saying their names as if we knew who they were or as if we cared. He introduced us to several of his friends, all dressed like him and all speaking like him and almost all American. The women, wearing the same dresses and head scarves as my sister, ignored us. The Orthodox kids laughed and played around us the way all kids laugh and play.
My brother wasn’t saying anything. From time to time, we simply turned to look at each other or glanced at our watches or shook our heads. I felt as though we’d suddenly stepped into another country. A country radically different from the one we’d left a few steps behind, just on the other side of the yellow security gate. A country physically confined, decidedly self-contained, cloistered somewhere between yellow security gates and huge invisible walls.
I noticed many of the men heading for the same door of an old cream-colored building. All of a sudden, we too were heading for the door of that old cream-colored building. We walked up dark steps to the fourth floor, the highest floor, and for the first time that afternoon I felt nervous.
THE APARTMENT SMELLED of sweat, of taffeta, of confined bodies. The front door was left open and black-suited men came and went. Some wore lightweight black overcoats. Some wore black felt hats. Some wore straggly beards, while others wore them neat and trimmed. Some greeted us with a pompous gesture or whispered at us in Hebrew or possibly in Yiddish. We went through the entryway and through the dining room and a long hallway and came to a room full of men standing and sitting on sofas and folding chairs. Maybe twenty or thirty men, all dressed in black, all praying. Not a single woman. Looking toward the back, I caught sight of a great white mound atop an armchair that more resembled a throne. White cloth. White silk or satin. I got the impression that all of the men there were praying to the great white mound. It took me a while to realize that within the white mound, like a shelled seed poking out from the center of it, was a head.
Rabbi Scheinberg, my sister’s fiancé whispered to us. Who? I asked. Deliberate, disgruntled, he replied: Rabbi Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg. Who’s that? I asked, watching the tiny round head covered in gray hair, and my sister’s fiancé adopted a solemn air and exhaled a slight puff of air to make my ignorance clear. A great rabbi, he said. Rosh yeshiva, he said. Morei d’asra, he said. Posek, he said. Gadol hador, he said. And all I got was that he was an important old man, well respected in the community. Right, I said, suddenly realizing that what was on top of the old man were dozens, maybe hundreds, of white shawls, white tallit. Why’s he like that? I whispered to my sister’s fiancé. Like what? Like that, I said, hiding, practically buried under all those tallit. Tales, he corrected me, using the Yiddish rather than the Hebrew word. I knew little about what the white shawls — tallit or tales or whatever they were called — signified to Jews, beyond the fact that men wore them during prayer, on their shoulders and sometimes on their heads, like some sort of scarf or tunic. I remembered the one I’d had as a boy, all white, with sky blue and gold lines. I remembered its maroon suede case. I remembered one time when I dropped it mid-prayer in the Sephardic synagogue (there were two synagogues in Guatemala: an old Sephardic one in the center of the city, and a newer Ashkenazi one built in the shape of a Star of David and right next to a McDonald’s), and my father rebuked me as though I’d just broken a very precious object and then made me pick it up off the floor and kiss it. My sister’s fiancé, in hushed tones, explained to us that Rabbi Scheinberg was the only rabbi in the world to wear so many tales at once. Why does he do it? I asked, whispering. My sister’s fiancé smiled with condescension. Perhaps he welcomed my question. There are many different opinions among rabbis about how the tales should be worn, he said, and how the tzitzit should be tied. What’s that? Tzitzit, he said, are the knotted strands at the end of the tales. These, he said, showing me his. Right, I muttered. Rabbi Scheinberg, he said, wishes to respect all the different views on how to wear a tales and how to tie a tzitzit, and that’s why he wears so many tales when he prays, he explained, all those tales, a tales for each view. He fell silent and I kept staring at the old man’s pale little head. He looked as though he were in need of air. He looked as though he were suffocating. He looked as though he were drowning in all that cloth. He looked as though he were being buried beneath that which should have saved him. I felt pity, and fear, and perhaps a certain humility. Suddenly, my brother, who had said nothing up to that point, whispered: So what you’re saying is that rather than take a stand, he wants to get in good with everybody at the same time. But my sister’s fiancé either didn’t hear him or decided to ignore him. This is a privilege for you, he said. I wanted you to experience this. This is my gift to you. I’m going to stay and pray, but you two can go, he said, and he was swallowed up by the black sea of men.