The first time that the doors had been flung open during the adoration and all of the congregation had looked in upon him, Leviticus had become filled with shame, but that quickly passed when he realized that no one really thought anything of it and that the attention of the elders and the congregation was not upon him but upon the sacred scripts that one by one the elders withdrew, brought to the podium, and read with wavering voice and fingers while Leviticus, hunched over naked in an uncomfortable fetal position, could not have been there at all, for all the difference it made. He could have bolted from the ark, flung open his arms, shrieked to the congregation, “Look at me, look at me, don’t you see what you’re doing!” but he had not; he had been held back in part by fear, another part by constraint, still a third part from the realization that no one in the ark had ever done it. He had never seen it happen; back through all the generations that he was able to seek through accrued knowledge, the gesture was without precedent. The tenant of the ark had huddled quietly throughout the term of his confinement, had kept himself in perfect restraint when exposed; why should this not continue? Tradition and the awesome power of the elders had held him in check. He could not interrupt the flow of the services. He could deal with the predictable, which was a term of confinement and then release, just like everyone who had preceded him, but what he could not control was any conception of the unknown. If he made a spectacle of himself during the adoration, there was no saying what might happen then. The elders might take vengeance upon him. They might turn away from the thought of vengeance and simply declare that his confinement be extended for an indefinite period for apostasy. It was very hard to tell exactly what they would do. This fear of the unknown, Leviticus had decided through his nights of pondering and imaginary dialogue, was probably what had enabled the situation to go on as long as it had.
It was hard to say exactly when he had reached the decision that he could no longer accept his position, his condition, his fate, wait out the time of his confinement, entertain the mercy of the elders, and return to the congregation. It was hard to tell at exactly what point he had realized that he could not do this; there was no clear point of epiphany, no moment at which—unlike a religious conversion—he could see himself as having gone outside the diagram of possibility, unutterably changed. All that he knew was that the decision had slowly crept into him, perhaps when he was sleeping, and without a clear point of definition, had reached absolute firmness: he would confront them at the adoration now. He would force them to look at him. He would show them what he, and by implication they, had become: so trapped within a misunderstood tradition, so wedged within the suffocating confines of the ark that they had lost any overriding sense of purpose, the ability to perceive wholly the madness that they and the elders had perpetuated. He would force them to understand this as the sum point of their lives, and when it was over, he would bolt from the synagogue naked, screaming, back to his cubicle, where he would reassemble his clothing and make final escape from the complex… and leave them, not him, to decide what they would now make of the shattered ruins of their lives.
The long period of confinement, self-examination, withdrawal, and physical privation had, perhaps, made Leviticus somewhat unstable.
Just before the time when the elders had appeared and had taken him away, Leviticus had made his last appeal, not to them, certainly not to the rabbi, but to Stala, who had shared to a certain point his anguish and fear of entrapment. “I don’t see why I have to go there,” he said to her, lying tight in the instant after fornication. “It’s stupid. It’s sheer mysticism. And besides that, it hasn’t any relevance.”
“But you must go,” she said, putting a hand on his cheek. “You have been asked, and you must.” She was not stupid, he thought, merely someone who had never had to question assumptions, as he was now being forced to. “It is ordained. It won’t be that bad; you’re supposed to learn a lot.”
“You go.”
She gave a little gasping intake of breath and rolled from him. “You know that’s impossible,” she said. “Women can’t go.”
“In the reform tradition they can.”
“But we’re not in the reform tradition,” she said; “this is the high Orthodox.”
“I tend to think of it more in the line of being progressive.”
“You know, Leviticus,” she said, sitting, breathing unevenly—he could see her breasts hanging from her in the darkness like little scrolls, like little scrolls, oh, his confinement was very much on his mind, he could see—“it’s just ridiculous that you should say something like that to me, that you should even suggest it. We’re talking about our tradition now, and our tradition is very clear on this point, and it’s impossible for a woman to go. Even if she wanted, she just couldn’t—”
“All right,” he said, “all right.”
“No,” Stala said, “no I won’t stop discussing this, you were the one to raise it, Leviticus, not me, and I just won’t have any of it. I didn’t think you were that kind of person. I thought that you accepted the traditions, that you believed in them; in fact, it was an encouragement to me to think, to really think, that I had found someone who believed in a pure, solid unshaken way, and I was really proud of you, even prouder when I found that you had been selected, but now you’ve changed everything. I’m beginning to be afraid that the only reason you believed in the traditions was because they weren’t causing you any trouble and you didn’t have to sacrifice yourself personally, but as soon as you became involved, you moved away from them.” She was standing now, moving toward her robe, which had been tossed in the fluorescence at the far end of his cubicle; looking toward it during intercourse, he had thought that the sight of it was the most tender and affecting thing he had ever known, that she had cast her garments aside for him, that she had committed herself trustfully in nakedness against him for the night, and all of this despite the fact that he was undergoing what he took to be the positive humiliation of the confinement; now, as she flung it angrily on herself, he wondered if he had been wrong, if that casting aside had been a gesture less tender than fierce, whether or not she might have been—and he could hardly bear this thought, but one must after all, press on—perversely excited by images of how he would look naked and drawn in upon himself in the ark, his genitals clamped between his thighs, talmudic statements by the rabbis Hill and Ben Bag Bag his only companions in the many long nights to come. He did not want to think of it, did not want to see her in this new perspective, and so leaped to his feet, fleet as a hart, and said, “But it’s not fair. I tell you, it isn’t fair.”
“Of course it isn’t fair. That’s why it’s so beautiful.”
“Well, how would you like it? How would you like to be confined in—”
“Leviticus,” she said, “I don’t want to talk to you about this anymore. Leviticus,” she added, “I think I was wrong about you, you’ve hurt me very much. Leviticus,” she concluded, “if you don’t leave me right now, this moment, I’ll go to the elders and tell them exactly what you’re saying and thinking, and you know what will happen to you then,” and he had let her go, nothing else to do, the shutter of his cubicle coming open, the passage of her body halving the light from the hall, then the light exposed again, and she was gone; he closed the shutter, he was alone in his cubicle again.