“It’s good for him to express his doubts.”
He glared at her. “To express blasphemy?”
Temimah lowered her eyes.
“And you,” the rabbi turned back to Lemmy, “remember who you are! Our people need certainty, not misgivings. They look to us for answers, not for more questions. Do you understand?”
“I’m not a rabbi,” Lemmy said.
“Not yet! And if you don’t think before you speak, you’ll never be one!” He left the kitchen, and a moment later, the front door slammed behind him.
Lemmy collected the plates from the table and placed them in the left sink, which was dedicated for meat dishes. His mother turned on the faucet and soaped the sponge. “For people like us,” she said, “your father and me, the Holocaust is a demon. It’s a terrible monster that’s still haunting us.”
He knew they had both lost their entire families in the Holocaust. That’s why he didn’t have grandparents, uncles, aunts, or cousins. Temimah had survived a mass execution by pretending to be dead, dug herself out, and was taken in by a Catholic nun who hid her in the basement for four years. After the war and two more years in a displaced persons’ camp in Italy, she had arrived in Israel and found a distant relative in Neturay Karta, where a marriage was arranged with Abraham Gerster.
“And we’re too small to question God.” She caressed his cheek. “We have to accept His judgment, His decision to collect all those innocent souls to His paradise.” She sighed. “It’s a wonderful thing to know that I’ll meet my parents and siblings again. It makes me so happy to imagine our reunion.”
Watching his mother’s face, suddenly aglow with inner joy, he held his tongue. How could he argue with her about the meaning of the Nazis’ murder of those she had loved? How could he express doubts, when God’s powers provided his mother with hope?
“Go now,” Temimah said. “You should be with your father.”
Lemmy took his coat and hat and went to the synagogue for evening study. Many of the men were back, swaying over open books. Cigarette smoke swirled up to the ceiling. But there was no sign of his father.
E lie Weiss leaned against the wall by the entrance to the public restroom. The beggar’s cloak was not thick enough to deflect the bitterly cold wind, and he was shivering. Abraham had called for an emergency meeting-the first time ever.
He appeared out of the darkness in his long black coat and wide-brimmed hat. Elie led the way to his car. The alley was deserted, no children playing outside at this time of night. The dark interior of the car provided privacy against prying eyes. Elie considered turning on the engine for heat but gave up, not wanting to attract attention.
Abraham did not waste time. “Did you reach Tanya?”
“She’s a Mossad agent. I can’t just pick up the phone and call her.”
“Is she in touch with my son?”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“He accompanied her home that Saturday, a couple of months ago. And now he’s talking about things he couldn’t possibly know from studying Talmud all day inside Neturay Karta. It occurred to me that he might be communicating with her, maybe even seeing her in secret.”
“Unlikely. Why would she waste time on an ultra-Orthodox kid?” Elie rubbed his hands. Abraham must not find out about his son’s relationship with Tanya. “I’ll sniff around my Mossad buddies. Maybe they’ll tell me how to reach her.”
“Do it!”
Elie had never seen him so anxious. “Still, a little exposure to the real world will give your son better tools as a leader.”
“That’s my decision! What if Jerusalem loses his faith in our teachings?”
“You could always expel him from Neturay Karta. He’s practically an adult.”
“He’s my son!” Abraham’s heavy hand grasped Elie’s forearm. “And he has a mother too. He’s everything to her. If he continues down this road, it’ll kill Temimah. He’s the focus of all her hopes.”
“What if she has another child?”
“No! I can’t even look at children, so similar to our siblings in the shtetl. Every time I see a child, I think of what happened to them.”
The image appeared in Elie’s mind, the sight from the crack in the attic’s floor, where he and Abraham had hidden above the butcher shop. The Germans had separated the children from the older Jews and herded them into the corral outside. Elie’s father had kept his knives in a wooden rack, sharpened daily to perfection, as Talmud required a shoykhet to slaughter an animal in a single pass of a smooth blade, causing no pain. But the SS men got bored with slicing the children’s throats, so they started stabbing their bellies. Elie could still hear the screams, punctuated by the shooting in the street, where the rest of the Jews were being mowed down in groups of fifty. It had been the first time Abraham’s unique talent emerged. The rabbi’s son had an eerie ability to combine cold thinking with hot-tempered action. Abraham had waited until the four German soldiers were occupied with a girl, who wriggled and fought while they tried to undress her. Abraham slipped down from the attic through the flap door, collected two long knives from the rack, and stabbed the four soldiers in rapid succession. But there was a fifth soldier, who had been out of sight, smoking near the door. By the time Elie followed Abraham down, the German grabbed his machine gun, which was leaning against the wall. Elie managed to swing a knife at the man’s wrist, a passing cut that separated the tendon connecting the muscle that operated his trigger finger. The German’s momentary bewilderment about why his finger wasn’t functioning gave Elie a chance to swing the blade a second time, separating his vocal cords and windpipe. Before the Germans upfront noticed that something was amiss, the two of them slipped through the rear of the shop into the forest. And for months after that, through hunger, danger and more killings, Abraham had continued to bemoan their failure to save even one of the children.
“And tell Tanya I want to see her again.”
“You’re the leader of Neturay Karta.” Elie tapped the steering wheel. “Wasn’t her first visit risky enough?”
“We’ll meet in secret, just like you and I meet.”
“You can’t revive the past, you know?”
“That’s not your business!”
“You are my agent, and therefore you are my business.” Elie pulled a cigarette from a pack. “That son of yours won’t be ready to lead Neturay Karta for another ten, fifteen years, if ever. There’s no retirement from your job. You knew it from day one.”
“I gave twenty years!” Abraham put a finger in Elie’s face. “Find Tanya and tell her that I’ll be free in one or two years. Do it!”
Elie lit the cigarette, keeping the match burning so that he could watch Abraham’s reaction. “It’s not so simple. She has feelings for others.”
“What are you saying?”
Elie drew long on the cigarette. “Could I speak any clearer? Tanya has a reputation in the spy world. She’s a very passionate woman. Highly sensual. Surely you remember?”
Abraham leaned closer, his wide shoulders filling the tight space in the car. The flame of the match danced in his eyes, and his bushy beard trembled as his lips pressed together. His left hand rose and rested on Elie’s neck, almost encircling it. The hand tightened, four fingers at the nape, a large thumb pressing the windpipe.
Elie dropped the match, and the cigarette fell from his lips. He tried to undo Abraham’s grip, realizing he had underestimated the intensity of Abraham’s love for the woman he had thought dead for two decades. Reaching down, Elie’s hand fumbled with the beggar’s cloak, trying to reach the long shoykhet blade that was strapped to his lower leg.
The world fogged up.
His hand found the handle of the knife and tried to pull it from its sheath, but the folds of the cloak entangled it.
“One day,” Abraham said, releasing his grip, “you’ll push it too far.”
His breath shrieking through his constricted airways, Elie watched through the windshield as Abraham walked away, his black coat and hat melting into the dark of the night.