She went out of the room, followed by Leva.
The rabbi sat on the stool, which was still warm from the priest’s buttocks. After hesitating a moment he placed his dusty hat on the edge of Alik’s bed, and sat doubled up as though folded in two, his beard falling on to his sharp knees. His huge feet in their worn rubber-soled slip-ons were positioned on the floor with their toes together and heels splayed apart. He was serious, concentrated. His small black skullcap was secured with an invisible hair-clip to his springy dome of greying black hair.
“The thing is, Rabbi, I’m dying,” Alik told him.
The rabbi cleared his throat and laced his long fingers together on his knees; he wasn’t particularly interested in death.
“You see, my wife’s a Christian and wants me to get baptized. To become a Christian.” Alik went on, and fell silent. He was becoming less and less keen on this game, and speaking was increasingly difficult for him.
The rabbi too was silent. He stroked his fingers, and finally asked: “So how did this foolishness enter your head?” He hadn’t found the correct English word, having meant another kind of foolishness, and added: “Absurdity, I mean.”
“Absurd for the ancient Greeks maybe. But for the Jews isn’t it a temptation?” The speed of Alik’s reactions hadn’t deserted him, despite the dull numbness he had almost ceased to feel in his body, but had been feeling for the last few days in his face.
“Should a rabbi know the texts of your apostle then?” Reb Menashe flashed his bright, happy eyes.
“Is there anything a rabbi doesn’t know?” Alik parried.
They went on, throwing out questions and not getting answers, as in a Jewish story, understanding each other better perhaps than in reality they should have. They had nothing in common, their upbringing and experiences had been quite different, they ate different food, spoke different languages, read different books. Both were educated people, but the spheres of their education barely intersected. Alik knew nothing of Kalam, the speculative Muslim theology which Reb Menashe had studied for the past twenty years, nor about Saadia Gaon, on whose works he had written his painstaking commentaries; and Reb Menashe knew nothing of Malevich or De Chirico.
“You have no one but the rabbi to seek advice from?” Reb Menashe asked with proud, humorous modesty.
“Can’t a Jew seek advice before death from a rabbi?”
In their joking conversation everything was beneath the surface; both understood this, and their banter brought them to the serious point which occurs when people connect, a connection which leaves an indelible trace.
“I feel sorry for my wife, she’s crying. What shall I do, Rabbi?” Alik sighed.
The rabbi removed the smile from his face; his moment had come. “Ai-lik!” He wiped the bridge of his nose and shuffled his large shoes. “Ailik! I have lived in Israel practically the whole of my life without leaving it, I’m in America for the first time. I’ve been here three months and it shocks me. I study philosophy, Jewish philosophy—it’s a completely special thing. For a Jew, at the heart of everything is the Torah. If he doesn’t study the Torah, he’s not a Jew. In ancient times we had this concept of the “captive child.” If a Jewish child fell into captivity and was deprived of the Torah, the Jewish way of life, education and upbringing, he was not guilty for this misfortune, nor was he perhaps even capable of understanding it as such. But the Jewish world must take responsibility for the care of these orphans, even those in their advanced years. Here in America I see a whole world consisting entirely of captive children. Millions of Jews living in captivity with the heathens. Never in the history of the Jews has there been anything like it. There have always been apostates, and those who are forcibly baptized—the captive children weren’t only in the times of Babylon. But now in the twentieth century there are more captive children than actual Jews. This is a process, and if it’s a process, the hand of the Almighty must be there. I think about it all the time, and I’ll go on thinking about it for a long time more. You talk about baptism. In other words, go from the category of captive child to that of apostate? But on the other hand you can’t be an apostate, because strictly speaking you’re not a Jew. The second is worse than the first in my opinion. But then again I may also say that I never had the choice.”
How interesting that he had had no choices, Alik thought; I had them till they came out of my arse.
“I was born a Jew,” Reb Menashe continued, shaking his thick side locks. “I was a Jew from the beginning and will be one to the end. It’s not hard for me. You have the choice. You can be nobody, which I understand to mean a heathen. You could become a Jew, which you have every reason to be by virtue of your blood. Or you can become a Christian, take the crumb that falls from the Jews’ table. I won’t say if this crumb is good or bad, only that history’s source for it has been extremely dubious. If one is honest, isn’t the Christian idea of the sacrificing of Christ, understood as a hypostasis of the Almighty, the heathens’ greatest victory?”
He chewed his lip and looked quizzically at Alik again. “In my opinion you should at least remain a captive,” he concluded. “I assure you, there are some things which are for husbands to decide, not their wives. I can give you no different advice.”
Reb Menashe stood up from the uncomfortable stool and suddenly felt dizzy. He craned over Alik from his full height, and began to take his leave: “You are tired, you must rest.”
He mumbled some words in a language which Alik didn’t understand.
“Wait, Rabbi, I’d like to drink to our leave-taking,” he said.
Libin and Rudy carried him into the studio and sat him, or rather arranged him, in his chair.
“He’s very weak,” thought Father Victor. “How near the miracle is. We should call out to the Lord. Lower him through the roof. God, why are we incapable of that?”
He felt particularly sad, because he knew why.
Leva was in a hurry to take the rabbi away, but Nina came up and offered him a glass.
Leva refused firmly, but the rabbi said something to him.
“Have you paper cups and vodka?” Leva asked Nina.
“Yes, we have,” Nina was surprised.
“Fill them up,” he said.
Music drifted up from the street like the smell of drains. It was hot too, that New York heat which doesn’t diminish at night but raises the energy level towards evening so that many people are troubled by insomnia, especially foreigners, whose bodies carry in them the habits of other climates. This was the case with the rabbi: although accustomed to the heat of Israel, at least the part of it where he had lived in recent years, there the heat of the day would drop, giving people respite from the sun.
Nina brought over two paper cups and handed them to the bearded men.
“After this I’ll take you back to the university,” Leva said to the rabbi.
“I’m in no hurry,” the other replied, thinking of his stuffy room in the hostel, and the long wait for fitful sleep.
Alik sprawled in his chair. Around him were his friends, shouting, laughing and drinking. It was as though he wasn’t there, yet they were all focused on him and he felt this. He enjoyed the everydayness of life; like a hunter, he had spent his life chasing after mirages of form and colour, but now he knew there had been nothing better than these senseless parties where people were united by wine, friendship and cheerfulness in this studio with no table, where they laid a makeshift table-top on trestles.
Leva and the rabbi sat in two wobbly easy chairs; in the years when Alik was moving in, the local rubbish-tips had been excellent, and the chairs and the settee were all from there. Opposite Leva and Reb Menashe hung a large painting of Alik’s, depicting the Chamber of the Last Supper, with a triple window and a table covered in a white cloth. There were no people seated at the table, just twelve large pomegranates, drawn in meticulous detail in delicate shades of lilac, crimson and pink, rough and full of seeds, their jagged, hypertrophied crowns and vivid dents evoking their internal partitioned structure. Beyond the triple window lay the Holy Land, seen as it is now rather than in the imagination of Leonardo da Vinci.