Читать книгу Thicker Than Mud - Jason Z. Morris - Страница 10

Adam didn’t remember saying goodbye to Danny. He didn’t even remember driving home. He did remember the impact of Danny’s cheekbone on his fist, and the adrenalin that ran through him like an electric surge. He didn’t sleep much. Throughout the night, Adam’s mind kept racing back to the scene on the ground, to Calloway’s bloodied face lying among shards and particles of broken glass catching the light of the streetlamp where they weren’t stained dark red.

Adam felt underprepared and underdressed when he arrived at work, just before the start of his class. A tie had seemed out of place with his stubble and baseball cap, so he wore a dress shirt and jeans. He took a deep breath and forced himself to put everything else out of his head. He had taught this lesson before, he reminded himself. He’d be okay. But this wasn’t the impression he wanted to make on the first day of the semester.

Adam counted twenty-four students in the room, none familiar. Almost all were sophomores majoring in another field. Two others on his list might have already changed their schedules or else they’d be coming in late.

As the students’ voices died down and the rustling of paper gradually faded, Adam said, “Welcome!” His voice sounded clear, he thought. Authoritative. He could pull this off. “In case anyone is in the wrong room, I’m Professor Drascher, and this class is called Hebrew Scripture Through Jewish Lenses. This class fulfills a theology requirement for the core curriculum. More important, from my perspective at least, this course is designed to introduce you to the different ways in which Jews have read the Hebrew Bible, from early Jewish sects, through the rabbis and mystics to modern scholars. If you are looking for Christian perspectives, this class won’t help you, but our department offers plenty of other courses that also fulfill the core.”

There were a few scattered questions. Students asked questions about the course requirements. Adam pointed them toward the syllabus he had posted online. One student said that as a Christian, he believed the Bible was God’s word, and he asked if he should take a different class. Adam told the student he would expose him to different perspectives and that he if he stayed, he would be expected to apply the tools he learned in the class.

Adam looked around the room. There were no more raised hands.“OK,” he said. “Now, this isn’t a language class, and we don’t have time for you all to become conversant in Hebrew before we begin, but you will need some basic knowledge of how the language works if you are going to look at the texts the way Jews have always looked at them. The first thing you need to understand about Hebrew is that the language is really different from English or Latin or Greek. Accurate, unambiguous translation is impossible. Translating any language has its problems, but that’s especially true for Hebrew. Let me show you why.”

Adam went to the white board and drew a square root sign. “The Hebrew language is based on roots that are built from two or three consonants. The root gives the basic meaning of the word, but we get the specific meaning and a lot of grammar from vowels. The trick is, vowels weren’t part of the written alphabet in early Hebrew. For the most part, they still don’t appear in a Torah scroll. There’s no punctuation there, either. So you often have to make inferences about who is speaking and in what tense before you can even pronounce the words. Where one sentence ends and another begins is also up to the reader to determine.”

Adam gave the students a couple of moments to absorb what he had said before he continued. “Here’s an example,” he said. He wrote the word qds under the square root sign. “This root, qadash, has to do with separation or holiness.” He saw the students, most of them, anyway, copying his words into their notebooks. Next to the root, Adam began writing a column of words down the board. He was falling into a rhythm. He could feel the rising energy of the class.

“All these words appear the same in a Torah scroll and in ancient documents, but the vowels give them very different meanings,” he said. “Qadosh means holy. Qadesh means to be separated out for a sacred purpose. Be careful how you use it, though: the same word pronounced with a longer ‘d’ sound refers to the male prostitutes who worked the Canaanite shrines.” Some of the students laughed, not sure if he was serious. Adam put up the Boy Scouts’ salute and continued. “Qidush, with the long ‘d’ again, is either the wine drunk on festivals or the blessing over the wine. Qadish, the sanctification of God’s name, is the traditional prayer of mourning. If any of you took Professor Esposito’s composition course last year, you read Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”. That’s the same word.”

He stepped away from the board and walked toward the students in the front row. “I haven’t even touched on another aspect of the problem: let’s say I decide based on the context that the word means ‘sanctify.’ Is the text a command to make something holy? Is it a description of something a man did in the past? You can often make a sensible call, but just as often there are a number of choices that have different meanings. The rabbinic commentators played with this a lot. They saw this ambiguity as a virtue of the language, not a deficiency. They believed that by using Hebrew, God was able to impart multiple meanings in each word and in each phrase. An engaged and clever reader could discover something new on every reading, but that requires judgment and interpretation. Despite what many fundamentalists claim, there usually isn’t one plain meaning for a passage in the Hebrew Bible.”

A student raised his hand and Adam called on him. “Did the rabbis ever explain why God didn’t just reveal scripture in a language people could understand?” A few people in the class laughed.

Adam smiled. “What qualities would you expect to find in the language of a sacred text? A computer language is perfectly clear and subject to only one interpretation, but it is very limited. Hebrew is a language of ambiguity and nuance. Unfortunately, too many translators see ambiguity as a problem to solve rather than a complexity to preserve. They say ‘A’ and ‘Not A’ cannot both be true, and so they lock in one meaning. That’s not the traditional Jewish approach. For Jews, the different readings are in conversation with each other. None of the readings is viewed as excluding all the others. For Jews, the obligation isn’t to memorize Torah or submit to Torah, but to engage with it. It’s more like a wrestling match or maybe a dance than anything else. That actually gives us a good transition to looking at our first text. Turn to the first page of your handouts. We’ll look at the first words in the Torah and explore how they have been translated and interpreted . . .”

The rest of the class passed quickly. The class seemed like a strong group, Adam thought. A few of them had already asked good questions, and Adam had already learned some of their names. Back in his office, Adam wrote himself a few quick notes on which prompts sparked the best comments and where he wanted to pick up at the start of the next class. He also left himself a reminder in his calendar to write a quiz based on the week’s reading. It was best to start off the semester letting the students know he wasn’t bluffing about keeping up with the syllabus.

When he was done, Adam leaned back in his chair and took a breath. He sent Claudia a quick email asking her to get in touch with him as soon as she could. He was anxious to hear about the tablet, and he didn’t want to wait, but he knew better than to expect Claudia to call him on her own. What he wanted or needed was never going to be uppermost in her mind.

Before he left, Adam looked up the number of the superintendent of his grandfather’s building and called to ask about clearing out his grandfather’s apartment. The super asked if Adam could come by before one o’clock, so Adam grabbed a couple of books he needed from his office to prepare for the next day’s class and he headed out.

He poked his head into the departmental office on his way to the stairs. Teresa, the department’s administrative assistant, was there, ensconced at her desk between a picture of her granddaughter and a small Puerto Rican flag. She was in her early fifties, confident and capable. She had worked in that office for decades, running it day-to-day as department chairs had come and gone. Teresa was the first person Adam had met when he interviewed for his job, and she helped get him oriented after he was hired. He still often relied on her advice when he had to deal with departmental politics.

“Welcome back, Adam” Teresa said. She smiled, but didn’t look up from her typing. She had on a blue V-neck sweater and the gold crucifix she always wore. “How was your class?”

“Not a bad start,” Adam said. “Listen, I’ve got to head out, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning for my class if anyone needs me, okay?”

Teresa must have heard something in his voice. She glanced up at him, stopped typing, and pulled a strand of her gray-streaked hair from her face. She leaned back from the typewriter. Adam could see the concern in her eyes. “Are you all right, Adam?”

“I’m fine. I’ve just got an errand to run. No big deal.”

“You didn’t shave. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you teach in a baseball cap before. What’s going on?”

“Oh.” Adam felt the brim of his cap, embarrassed. “I’ll shave soon. Tomorrow night. It’s a Jewish custom. I buried my grandfather this week.”

“I’m really sorry, Adam. I had no idea. I’ll let John and the others know.”

“Please don’t, okay? I don’t want to make a thing about it. I’ll be back to normal after tomorrow. Let’s not make a fuss.”

She tilted her head as if to get the measure of him from a different angle. She nodded. “If that’s really what you want, okay, Adam. But I think people would want to know.” After a moment, she asked, “Can I pray for you and your grandfather?”

Adam smiled. “Thanks, Teresa. I’m pretty sure that he’s all right, but I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

Dealing with the super didn’t take long. Rent on the apartment was paid through the end of the month, but the super let Adam know he’d appreciate it if Adam closed it out early. He was sure he could rent it out for the first of October if he had time to paint it and fix it up a bit.

Adam took the elevator to the third floor and got out his keys as he walked down the long hallway. The ceramic tile hadn’t changed in at least thirty years—not since Adam had first moved in with his grandparents, anyway. The walls had been painted, but in almost the same color every time. Even the sound of his footsteps felt familiar. When he unlocked the door, Adam had to resist the impulse to call out to his grandfather. The apartment was silent, of course, but nothing looked different. His grandfather had changed almost nothing since Adam’s grandmother died, back when Adam was still in high school. Everywhere was the same wallpaper, the same furniture, the same pictures in the same places on the walls.

He went into his old bedroom. Many of the books from his adolescence and even from his childhood were still there: the worn copies of d’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths his parents had bought for him when he was still much too little to understand them, the illustrated children’s Bible stories, The Boy’s Book of Poems. Adam smiled at the memory of his grandfather reading those to him before bed: “A Man’s A Man For A’ That,” “Invictus,” “Gunga Din” . . . Adam always thought of them as The Manly Poems. He opened the book to “Death Be Not Proud,” and as he read the words, he could almost hear them recited in his grandfather’s voice, strong and low and reverent. Adam put the book into his bag. The bookcase was filled with treasures: King Arthur stories, a bunch of science fiction and fantasy, a semi-scholarly book of Irish myths and folklore that Adam had tried and failed to read when he was a teenager. He took that one, too.

Adam went to the living room. His grandmother’s beloved books had been given away long before, and Adam still had quite a few of them. The top shelf of her bookcase was filled with photos now. Adam, Danny, and Henry were all well represented. The next two shelves now held videos. On the bottom there was a shelf of old-time detective stories by Spillane, Hammett, and Chandler. Those had been his grandfather’s. Adam smiled. When he was a kid, before his grandmother died, his grandfather sometimes went around the house narrating his life like a noir detective . . .”As soon as my wife came out of the bathroom, I knew she was trouble. She wore pink fuzzy slippers and a robe that barely covered her knees. I took one look at the expression on her face and I realized right away that I had forgotten to take out the garbage . . .”

At the end of the bottom shelf was an ancient prayer book, all in Hebrew, that Adam’s great grandfather had brought with him from Ukraine. Adam’s grandfather would never have used it. He rebelled against his orthodox family when he was very young, and he never learned much Hebrew. When Adam saw the book, even before he picked it up, a wave of memories flooded over him. He used to sit on the floor, just staring at the shapes of the letters, wondering what mysteries they could reveal to someone who knew how to read the magical writing. He remembered the feel of the soft, worn leather binding and the smell of the pages. That book might have been the single biggest reason Adam later studied Hebrew, though he had rarely opened it since he had learned enough to read it. Adam took the prayer book from the shelf. The binding was loose. He would have to have it redone. He felt something hard and lumpy inside the front cover and when he opened the book, an audiocassette fell out of it. He picked it up off the floor. It was labeled “Adam.”

“What’s this?” he asked out loud. He wondered it if might be a practice tape for his bar mitzvah or some songs he’d recorded from the radio when he was ten years old. His grandfather’s cassette player was on top of the bookshelf. Adam popped the tape in and pressed play.

He jumped at the sound of his grandfather’s weary voice. He had never expected to hear that voice again. “Adam,” the voice said, “it’s me.” Adam’s knees felt weak. He sat down.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying, Adam,” the old voice continued in a low rumble, “and I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m afraid. Not of dying. My life has been . . . well, there’s been a lot of good and a lot of bad and I never thought I’d last forever . . . I’ve been pretty sick for a while now. The doctors say I have advanced heart disease and they aren’t sure how much time I have left. I asked about surgery, but . . . anyway, I didn’t say anything. You should be living your life, not worrying about an old man.” There was a pause. Adam’s grandfather cleared his throat. “I’m afraid because there are some things I should have told you, things you should know.” He paused again. “I hope you don’t think I’m a coward, Adam. I’ve never thought of myself as a fearful man. I have to admit I don’t like it. But here I am talking into a machine instead of calling you on the phone.” The voice paused. “I love you, Adam. That’s not news, I hope. I’ve always been able to tell you that, thank God. But I wanted you to hear it from me again, for the last time, I guess. Your grandma and your mom and dad loved you too, you know. So much . . .” The voice grew thick and choked for a moment. “We haven’t talked much about them in a long, long time. It’s still very painful. But I wanted to say that straight off.”

Adam stopped the cassette player. It was too much to take in all at once. His mind flew back to the tablet they had found in Tel Arad. “Come to me, Healers,” he thought, but he didn’t feel ready for this. He hadn’t invited this visitation. He walked to the kitchen and washed his face. He took his time drinking a glass of water before returning to the living room.

Adam held his breath as he pushed play again. The voice was distorted for a fraction of a second before the tape got up to speed. “I never told you, Adam, that your parents’ marriage had problems.” Adam swallowed hard. “Your mom was a terrific person. I really liked her from the very beginning, but she and your father were never very compatible. They argued all the time. It wasn’t like how your grandma and I used to argue almost for fun. They really had trouble getting along. They even separated for a few months. You were less than two years old. While they were separated, your father made some choices he wasn’t very proud of. There’s no easy way to say it. He had a brief affair with Marsha Blumberg. Danny’s mom. They had dated in high school. She had been married for a few years, too, and they were also having trouble. They ended things and your father went back to your mother and Marsha stayed with her husband, but when Danny was born, your father strongly suspected that he was his son. I don’t think he told your mother. I told him he shouldn’t. Marsha never said anything, and I didn’t think either marriage could take the shock, anyway. I wanted you to grow up in an intact family. Danny too.”