At such moments he always remembered himself as a small boy, standing on the football pitch behind the Russian children’s foster home outside Paris which his grandparents had run during the war, and where he had spent the whole of his childhood. And once again he was standing inside the tattered rope squares of the goal where they sent him, the youngest, when they had no proper goalkeeper, and he waited, terrified, knowing that he would be unable to stop a single ball.
EIGHT
Irina clapped her hand to her forehead: “Jesus, I completely forgot that was Saturday evening! I thought it was tomorrow morning!”
Leva threw up his arms, then remembered the rabbi standing beside him. The rabbi’s face was both stern and curious; he didn’t know a word of Russian.
Maika stood by the table holding a paper plate with a large slice of pie, and stared at Leva. He charged at her like a wild boar and grasped her head: “Hi, mouse!” He kissed the head of this grown-up girl who had lived for two years in his house, whom he had sat on the potty, taken to nursery and called “daughter.”
“He’s shameless, completely shameless,” she thought, holding her head tensely in his stony grip. “I used to miss him so much, now I couldn’t care less. They’re morons, the lot of them!” She jerked her proud head and Leva sensitively released his grip.
The rabbi was dressed formally in a worn black suit of a perennially old-fashioned cut, and a huge fancy-dress silk hat, which you could tell was fated to be sat on by every new arrival. Beneath its crooked brim, two thick, unharvested sheaves of hair dangled luxuriantly from his temples, refusing to lie in neat spirals. He smiled into his music-hall beard, and said in English: “Good evening.”
“Reb Menashe,” Leva introduced him. “He’s from Israel.”
Just then the bedroom door opened and Father Victor came out in his surplice. He was pink and sweating, his eyes sparkled.
Nina threw herself at him. “What happened?”
“Don’t worry, Nina. I’ll come back … Just read the Gospel with him.”
“He’s read it, he’s read it. I thought you’d do it for him now!” Nina was annoyed; she was used to having her wishes carried out immediately.
“Right now he’s asking for another Margarita,” Father Victor smiled ruefully.
Seeing the priest, Leva gripped Irina’s wrist. “What is the meaning of this? Is it some kind of joke?”
Irina recognized this ferocious look and understood before he did his sudden desire for her; she remembered how lovemaking with him was always best when she annoyed him first with some taunt or slight.
“No, it isn’t a joke, Leva.” She gazed serenely into his eyes, holding back her smile and the wicked urge to lay her hand on his crotch.
Hating himself for his feelings, he became even more irritable. His face went red and he turned away from her. “How many times do I keep telling myself not to get mixed up with you! It always ends up as a circus!” he hissed, his beard trembling with rage.
It wasn’t true, it was just that she had hurt him terribly by leaving him, and his perpetually tired wife was bored by her marital duties; he kept vainly hoping to hammer some of Irina’s music out of her, but it wasn’t there, however hard he shook.
“She’s not a woman, she’s a bed of nettles,” he snorted.
Reb Menashe looked enquiringly at Leva. He knew no Russian, and nothing about Russian emigré life; there were plenty of Russians living in Israel now but no emigrés in Tzfat, where he lived. He was a sabra, his mother-tongue was modern Hebrew. He had studied the Judaeo-Islamic culture of the Spanish caliphate, he could read Aramaic, Arabic and Spanish, and he spoke English fluently, with a strong accent. Now he listened to these people’s soft speech, and they seemed very pleasant to him.
Nina went over to the two bearded men. Seizing the rabbi’s hands in hers, she tossed her shining hair and said to him in Russian: “Thank you for coming. My husband very much wants to talk to you.”
Leva translated into Hebrew. The rabbi shook his beard and glanced at Father Victor, who was taking off his surplice. “It amazes me how quickly the priest gets here in America,” he said. “A Jew hasn’t even had time to call the rabbi, and he’s already arrived.”
Father Victor smiled across the room at his colleague from an inimical faith; his benevolence was indiscriminate and unprincipled. When he was younger, he had lived for over a year in Palestine, and he understood Hebrew well enough to give the appropriate response: “I too am one of the guests.”
Reb Menashe didn’t lift an eyebrow; either he didn’t understand or he didn’t hear.
Valentina pushed a glass containing a muddy-yellow drink into Father Victor’s hand. He sipped carefully.
Out of habit, Reb Menashe averted his eyes from the naked limbs, male and female, just as he did in Tzfat when guffawing foreign tourists piled out of their buses on to the stones of his holy town, repository of the lofty spirit of mystics and kabbalists. He surveyed the people in the room. He had turned away from this life twenty years ago and had never regretted it. His wife Geula was now bearing his tenth child, but had never been naked before him so shamefully as these women here.
“Baruch Ata Adonai …” he began the blessing out of habit, giving thanks to the Almighty for having made him a Jew.
“Maybe you’d like something to eat first?” Nina suggested.
Leva raised his hand in a gesture that indicated simultaneously alarm, gratitude and refusal.
Alik lay in the bedroom with his eyes closed. On the inside of his lids, bright yellow and green threads coiled against a flat black background, making rhythmic, intelligible shapes. But although he had studied the ancient language of carpets, he was unable to grasp the basic elements of this moving pattern.
“Alik, you have guests.” Nina came in, followed by the rabbi. Lifting his head, she wiped his neck and chest with a wet towel, then pulled the orange sheet off him and waved it over his flat, naked body. Yet again Reb Menashe was startled by this American shamelessness; it was as if they didn’t understand the meaning of the word. Out of habit he turned his mind to the place where it was first uttered. Genesis, Chapter Two: “They were both naked and were not ashamed.” Who were these children? Why had they no shame? They didn’t look sinful, on the contrary they looked innocent. Maybe we had forgotten how to read the Book? Or the Book was written for other people, capable of reading it differently?
Nina raised Alik’s legs and joined them at the knees, but they flopped back.
“Leave it, leave it,” he said without opening his eyes, looking at the last spiral of the pattern.
Nina pushed a pillow under his knees.
“Thanks, Nina,” he replied, and opened his eyes.
A tall thin man in black stood before him with a quizzical look, tilting his head to one side so that the brim of his gleaming black hat almost touched his left shoulder. “Do you speak English, don’t you?” he said.
“I do,” Alik smiled, winking at Nina.