Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 7

July 18

I haven’t da’avened since I got here. Perhaps tomorrow, on Shabbat. I can’t do anything anyway, can’t cook, can’t row. Certainly, it’s the most important day that I pray. I took Shabbat into account when planning my itinerary. I figured I’d need a rest day each week anyhow. But I should be praying every day. I can’t make this trip without Hashem.

Really, I haven’t said Shemah, Shemonah Esrai, any of the prayers. I mean I figured I’d immediately give up on tznios; it’s not as if anyone here will see whether I’m immodest or not anyway. It’s not practical to wear a long skirt and long sleeves while pushing a boat into the waves, while paddling. And there’s no issue with shomrei n’giah. I have no one to touch, certainly no man to tempt me into any illicit behavior. I remember going to Rabbi Shem Tov sophomore year of college after a date and blushing when he asked whether kissing a boy made any of my life better. “Sara,” he said, “All of us have taivah’s, but they only bring us the illusion of pleasure in this life. The beauty of Yiddishkeite is that we’re not sacrificing the pleasures of this world for the pleasures of the next. We are discovering the true pleasures of this world that we may have them in the next as well.”

I blushed happily, so happily, because it wasn’t any fun competing for something I didn’t want, a date with some guy, I think his name might have been Jeremy or Rodger, I don’t remember, and then playing a cat and mouse game, and marking success in terms of what I was willing to give, what he earned taking. Give and take. The language of compromise, of negotiated treaties only kept out of fear, out of need, should not define love, the relationship between genders.

So why haven’t I been da’avening? Why haven’t I been praying? It makes no sense to shirk the pleasure of prayer. I’m not sure what’s changed, I made a point of at a minimum saying Shemah every day right up until the float plane dropped me off in the surf. There were those who said I’d lose faith after what happened, but clearly, I kept mine. I’ll start da’avening again tomorrow. I promise.

As soon as Eema would let him back into the city, Abba began volunteering at the rescue workers’ relief station in what had been Liberty Square. He would take the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station where he’d catch the IRT down to Fulton Street. From there, he’d walk up Broadway, forcing him to go past Trinity Church which had become a nexus for the tourists who began steaming downtown almost before building 5, Borders Books, gutted by flame but not collapsed, was torn down. This was well before the fire of a million burning computers had subsided. Large banners signed by well-wishing church groups and third-grade classrooms hung both inside and outside the colonial church. Apparently, they mounted a giant piece of poster board on the metal gates of their small graveyard whose center-piece declared “God Bless America’s Heroes.” Abba told me it was a zoo. Middle Americans with aw-shucks sensibilities posed for snapshots with death-weary firemen who were on their way to long sessions of alcoholic self-medication. The Baptists had prayer stations manned by out-of-state cheerleaders dressed in red T-shirts that said “Prayer Helps” and eagerly converted those open to suggestion and the power of larger than life experience.

What I have is more than that.

He called me every day, even the days that I called him, and wailed and railed that first of all, he wasn’t any fucking hero; he was as passive as a slaughterhouse cow. The worst part about everything was forced participation in an iconoclastic struggle between faiths he reviled. “And, Sarah, these bastard prayer stations with their cheery-eyed teenage Christ-wannabes. I could knock their blocks off for them. They’re like those bastard Mormons posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims, or like those Polish nuns who’ve set up a monastery at Auschwitz to pray for the Jews who died there. Fuck you and your insulting prayers.”

Of course I agreed with him about the Auschwitz nunnery and the Mormon baptismal project for Shoah victims, but at the same time I tried to point out that these were responses to Hashem’s chosen people. Prayer does help. And that now, more than ever he should turn back to the faith of his forefathers, as I had. He got nasty. “I forgot that I was talking to my own personal God-Freak, my recidivist daughter who’d like to trade in hundreds of years of progress for medieval customs, a veil, a head covering and second class status.” But I did not get angry back. It isn’t easy to see the world confront your comfortable, convenient beliefs with airliners full of jet fuel, businessmen exhaled by subexplosions a thousand feet up in the air and a massacre of firemen. He told me about the bodies cascading in clean lines against a back drop of shiny steel rails. He tried not to tell me what happens to a person when they impact on cement. But I know, already, I’ve seen it. And exploding bodies are simply that, exploding bodies. I’m sorry that Hashem made him confront his life; I’m sorry that it happened the way it did. It isn’t nice, it isn’t easy, but it is true. (Except when the exploding bodies are yours, Sarah; except then).

Do you remember, Abba, how before all that, long ago, when I asked you about death, about God, when I was just a little girl? Instead of answering, you took me on my first kayaking trip. There’s something strange, now, about my days paddling. I mean, yeah, sure, I was on the sound every day for a month before heading up to Washington, and then on Puget Sound every day for three more weeks; and I didn’t use the sail. Now, I’ve got the sail up, and yet every day, all three of them, I’m worried about having the will to make it through. It’s all I can do to not turn around and head back. Though here’s the thing. There is no back. If I arrived at the float plane drop off, I’d still be nowhere. In a sense, I’m racing home. And I love it—but. Maybe it’s the sun, which I’m getting used to now, always there, hovering, doing nothing, maybe it’s the absolute solitude. I’ve been in solitude before, but this is a whole new level. Me, you, Eema, Hashem and the animals, we’re all that’s here, but I’m the only one who speaks.