Slowly, he raises the little boy to his chest and rocks it; he is a dancing bear, beneath coloured lights by the river.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX. Shabbat
More and more often these days, Pontus Beg looked at the grey sky of snow, and thought of God. This was a thought beyond his control, but not an entirely useless one. Firm faith, he felt, was based on cast-iron repetition. Repetition forced you to your knees.
He often thought only on the word ‘god’, because he didn’t really know how to think of God himself, the Jewish god of countless pseudonyms, nor did Beg know how He truly differed from the Christian-Orthodox god of his countrymen, other than in His special preference for the Jews.
He noticed that he had gradually come to imagine Him in a different setting — not the jubilant pomp of Orthodoxy, but the blistering heat of the desert; his god wandered among eroded rock formations, pillars of red granite, the restless plains of sand.
The rabbi had said that the Everlasting was not subject to questions of shape and definition. He was unlimited — a statement, the rabbi said, that limited Him, too, which meant it couldn’t be true either.
To his regret, Beg was unable to herd his image of godliness towards the immaterial; his god always assumed a human shape. Even more disappointing was that he seemed unable to think of Him without a beard. In the face of these childlike projections, he stood powerless.
Beg’s blood was what riveted him to the God of the Torah, which — as the realisation of being Jewish became more firmly anchored in him — also removed many senseless doubts. He was a Jew, consisting of one part coincidence and two parts resignation. He learned to pray in Hebrew, and entered into the exalted universe of repetition. He knew that repetition could summon up ecstasy, and that ecstasy brought the mystery just that much closer. He had no Jewish life in his surroundings, no exemplary lives. He had only his rabbi to follow, but the rabbi himself no longer held services, and had stopped sticking so closely to many of the directives. He was tired. The yoke of repetition had fallen from his shoulders, and all he waited for was death.
‘You will have to say Kaddish for me,’ he told Beg. ‘Those are all things I still have to teach you.’
‘You’ll go on living for a long time.’
‘Longevity is hardly a virtue. Spare me. Have you ever seen a happy old person? A contented old man? Age is a precarious business. It’s as though all the disasters are waiting to pounce on you at the same time.’
With his right hand he formed a claw that snatched at thin air.
Before the evening meal, the rabbi shuffled into the depths of the mikveh. Beg waited in the synagogue. The door to the bath stood ajar; a stripe of yellow light lay across the floor.
The curtain before the Sacred Ark hung in shadow. In the candlelight, the gold-and-silver brocade glistened. Angelic hands bore the Ark up to heaven.
From out of the shadows, figures approached him. Mother, why are you hiding from me? Why don’t you say something? Grandmother, where do we come from? But they passed him in silence — he sat in the pew, bent at the waist, his head in his hands. His fingers felt their way across the skullcap, slid over the seams where the cloth was hemmed in, the half-crumbled velvet. He felt so ridiculous at times, a bad actor before an audience of centuries — an audience that didn’t even deign to laugh in his face. Staring into the half-light like this, he was a Jew made of one part doubt and one part shame.
The door swung open. The rabbi bustled around the room first, and then after a while came and stood in front of Beg.
‘Aren’t you going in?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Into the mikveh.’
‘I can’t do that … I …’
‘Why not?’
Beg was confused. He’d thought that definitive proof of his Jewishness had to come first, before he could descend into the pool.
‘It’s the Shabbat,’ the rabbi said. ‘Lots of Jewish men enter the mikveh before the Sabbath arrives.’
‘I’d rather wait,’ Beg stammered. ‘I hadn’t realised that I could already … Better some other time.’
‘Whatever you like,’ the rabbi said. ‘There’s no obligation.’
Beg stared at the tips of his boots. He thought again about the time the rabbi had asked him how he cleansed himself of the world’s filth, how he became clean again. Then, before he had known about the holy place deep in the earth, he had still thought that some filth could never be washed away. Maybe it wasn’t like that.
But he wanted to wait for the right moment to undergo his immersion, perhaps until news came from the rabbi at Brstice (he had been waiting so long already). Maybe until he had stopped seeing his transition as a fraud.
The bread was in a basket. It was normal, unbleached white bread, not the usual braided kind. Still, Zalman Eder had blessed it. They ate soup, spoons ticking against porcelain, the rabbi bending over with his mouth just above the bowl. That was how they celebrated the start of the Shabbat. Beg’s lips had moved along with the song of blessing at the start of the meal. The rabbi’s voice grated; the melody hovered:
Shalom aleichem, malache hashores
malache Eilyon,
mimeilech malche hamlochim
Hakodesh Barech Hu.
If I hadn’t been here, Beg thought, no one would have known he was still around. But then the old man would still have been sitting here, by the light of two candles — a phantom, having grown translucent in his loneliness. One day someone would have thought about the old Jew, and they would have found him in his bed or at the bottom of the steps leading to the bath … and no one would have known that, with this, an end had come to six hundred years of Judaism in Michailopol.
For the second time, he helped himself to Chinese noodle soup from the terrine and said: ‘The woman died last night. Fortunately, I had a chance to talk to her — she wasn’t much more than a shadow. But her child seems healthy. His mother lived off of air and earth, she bore it all … I can hardly imagine it, it seems like too much for any one person. But she saw that it was good, that her child was going to live.’
‘Because of her sacrifice, the world started all over again,’ the rabbi said. ‘The Talmud says that he who saves a life, saves humanity. It actually says “a Jewish life”, but why shouldn’t that apply to the goyim, too?’
Beg thought about the boy-child who had cried so loudly in his arms and wouldn’t stop. Only when Beg, at his wit’s end, remembered about the nursing reflex in calves, how they clamped down and sucked on your hand with their slimy, toothless mouth — oh, that suggestive sensation, down to and including the shiver that ran through your scrotum — had he stuffed the tip of his little finger in the child’s mouth, and suddenly all was still. The woman looked at him, too exhausted for any expression. Her sharp cheekbones and pointed nose were already those of a corpse. She had come through the thicket of horrors, but had delivered her child safely to the other side.
Beg used his foot to slide a chair up beside the bed and sat down, so the baby could be close beside her. He slowly rocked the little bundle in his arms. Sometimes the woman’s eyes closed, but she forced herself to open them again. This was all the time she had with her child.
Finally, she lost the struggle to exhaustion, and slept.
Beg sat with the little boy in his arms and rocked him.
The rabbi had blessed the wine, too. Beg was not used to drinking wine. It pinched his cheeks from the insides. The level of the bottle descended quickly. Beg had slid his legs half under the table, and he saw the reflection of candlelight in the silver belly of the samovar. He said: ‘You told me that the Shabbat is also meant as a reminder of the flight out of Egypt …’