Читать книгу Flight from Ein Sof - W. E. Gutman - Страница 13

ONE

I arrived this morning after a brief and uneventful journey. I have scant recollection of this crossing. I may have suppressed it. I was eager to leave, disembark and settle in, and I paid little attention to the featureless landscape that unrolled before me. Unlike my travels of yore, when every ripple on the open sea, every cloud, every blade of grass, every flower picked along the way enthralled me, this voyage elicited only impatience. Not so very long ago I had dawdled, happy to suspend the moment as ports-of-call sang their siren song in the distance. Meandering to the antipodes and back had helped quell boredom, quench recurring pangs of wanderlust. I likened these expeditions to hitching a ride on a time machine that defies the sameness of immovable space: I sought in transience an antidote against immutability.

Wars, migrations and expatriations (or was it ruthless heredity?) had predisposed me to the meanderings that would highlight much of my life. Suitcases, always at the ready, were to me what wings are to birds, devices by which one takes flight, instruments of escape.

In a rare moment of controlled frustration, my mother had once astutely remarked, “When you’re here, you're restless and melancholy, so you go there. And when you’re there, you can’t wait to move on. Where in this vast creation can you ever find contentment,” she asked. I remember blurting out, unconsciously, what must have been a self-evident truth.

“In between, mama, in between.”

Time moves on with unrelenting swiftness. With it comes change, some unforeseen, some unmanageable. “Time,” said Henri Bergson, “is what hinders everything from being ceded all at once.” His was an optimist’s perspective. Time is a thief: it takes back everything it cedes -- itself included.

It was in haste and with a feeling of relief that I now proceeded toward my final destination. If you recall, it had been a year of gloomy forecasts and apocalyptic omens. Crops were dying, ravaged by torrential rains, droughts and cyclonic winds. Starvation was spreading across the globe and those who were not yet dying rioted in the streets and paid with their lives at the hands of crazed constabularies and vigilantes gone mad. Dark passions, political and religious, threatened to envenom societies already weakened by decaying economies, corporate greed and unregulated capitalism. Everyone, even the most sanguine, privately conceded that a menacing morrow lay ahead.

*

Despite my protestations, friends and relations had gathered to see me off, some armed with useless offerings, others so moved by my imminent departure as to shed a few ceremonial tears. The tears, I knew, would soon be stemmed. Life has a way of dimming surplus memories. You can always count on those most given to mawkish displays to recover from the deepest sorrow. Time heals everything. And life goes on.

My instructions had been clear: No crying, no lofty words, no banalities, no expressions of regret, no outpourings of maudlin sentimentality, no long-drawn sendoff, no flowers -- especially no flowers. I’d always hated goodbyes, not because “parting is such sweet sorrow” but because I had detected, even as a child, a troubling insincerity in the effusiveness of the farewell ritual. I’d seen too many congealed smiles of regret and tear-imbibed handkerchiefs; I’d heard too many words of staggering triviality when silence would have spoken volumes. I’d witnessed too many gestures that bordered on hysteria but broadcast no sadness to know that people are capable of Oscar-worthy performances.

“Hate to see you go.”

“Take care.”

“We’ll miss you.”

“Have a great trip.”

“One more hug for good luck.”

“Love ya. Don’t forget to write.”

Oh, shut the fuck up! They all did what people do when they sacrifice tact and discretion at the altar of convention and vulgarity. I endured these theatrics until I could endure no more. I thanked everyone for their solicitude and bid them adieu.

*

My parents were there to welcome me. They looked well rested and beaming, their ghastly urban complexion now healed by a radiant tan, the kind of otherworldly glow that people acquire after a few months of retirement in the sun. We spoke about this and that -- hurried and disjointed bits and pieces snatched out of the blue. Life. The weather. The economy. The greed of the governing elite. The imbecility of the governed. Aunt Ernestine’s goiter. Little Adam’s Bar Mitzvah. We would reprise it all in greater detail as we relaxed, just the three of us, late into the long night ahead.

I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to be introduced to my maternal grandfather. He’d left Yesod the day I was born, never to return. I also met for the first time my paternal grandparents, both of whom had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers. They seemed none the worse for their ordeal, just older and grayer than they appear in the sepia-tone family portrait, the neat taupe three-piece suit and fedora my grandfather wore and the graceful beige silk and lace attire my grandmother sported a bit faded, their former crispness dulled by time.

They in turn presented me to my paternal great-grandfather Fabian, the one who carried bitter memories of his childhood well into adulthood, “Fretful Fabian,” who, sobbing, had told my father of the indignities he suffered at the hands of his own father, Abraham, and the sly and wanton young woman Abraham took for a wife a month after Fabian’s mother died.

Abraham, a prayer shawl wrapped around his shoulders and a skullcap cockily perched on one side of his head, smiled at me reflexively, the way strangers part their lips in token civility when first introduced. We did not shake hands. With five generations separating us, the blood that flowed through his veins and mine, the blood of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, of David and Solomon and, who knows, maybe even that of the Jew named Jesus, seemed stripped of all dynastic relevance. Relegated to mythical status, the reviled patriarch examined me from head to toe with a mixture of languid amusement and detachment. He might as well have been gawking at a monkey in a zoo. He followed me with his eyes but said not a word.

As I weaved through this genealogical conclave, I also became re-acquainted with a host of long-lost uncles and aunts and cousins, many I’d never met before, others with whom I’d socialized on very rare occasions before I left Yesod for the golden shores of Ein Sof. They too displayed cursory interest in my person, uttering token banalities easily acknowledged with a nod, a grin or one-syllable grunts. Thankfully, they spared me the tedium of small talk.

That evening, we all gathered around a large table festooned with plates of sliced stuffed derma and sizzling latkes, saucers brimming with gefilte fish, kishka and vine leaves filled with rice, large platters of fried mamaliga squares daubed with sour cream, and tureens overflowing with piping hot cholent, an indescribable but savory mishmash of potatoes, barley, beans, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fried onions. We drank fermented cider, schnapps and plum brandy. And this being Purim, we also scoffed hammentash, bite-size raspberry, apricot, and prune tartlets shaped like the ears of the dastardly Persian vizier Haman, the appendages by which, according to legend, he was hanged to avenge his genocidal plot against the Jews.

Jews celebrate victory or flight from persecution by eating. They mourn catastrophe and death and expiate sin with a fast. Our history is filled with feasts, abstinence and famine. Every calamity is seen as divine retribution, God’s payback for the debauchery and impiety of his people. No disaster, no torment, however inscrutable and cruel is deemed trivial because every event, every setback, every tragedy is the manifestation of Yahweh’s will. Upheavals and grief and misery are tolerated, if not subconsciously longed-for, precisely because they herald purification and redemption and are encoded by God himself. God has decreed that Jews may not defy their own destiny by repudiating Moses’ legacy without unleashing upon themselves the fires of hell. This is why Jews, to this day, live in a state of controlled anxiety, the Diaspora’s assimilated ones subliminally, the new Canaanites with greater urgency.

“When will it ever end,” asked my great-great-grandfather Abraham rhetorically, his eyes fixed heavenward, his right fist softly hammering the left side of his chest, unaware that his grandson, grandson’s wife and several of their children had perished, that they were now mere statistics in the nihilistic calculus of the Final Solution. No one had had the heart to tell him. Or he had forgotten. This form of induced amnesia spares weak men the trauma of storing up too much knowledge which, everyone knows, can render them mad. People at the table looked quizzically at each other for a moment then continued to eat.

“Never,” I replied, breaking a leaden silence. “We are the Chosen People.” My father, who caught the bitter irony of my words, smiled and poured himself another jigger of brandy. My mother looked at me, a grown man, as she always had, like a hen admiring her newly hatched chick. It was a look that had caused me great embarrassment as a boy but in whose reassuring tenderness I now basked.