Choose Somebody Else Page 13

  Zipporah laughed. ‘I need only to look in the glass.’

  Here might be nice.

  Reish Laqish also said to his pupils: ‘A man should always first learn the Law and only then, scrutinise it’.

  In the grounds of the academy, the students began to quote his wisdom with increasing frequency. Reish Laqish said: ‘Come, let us be grateful to our ancestors, for had they not sinned we would not have come into the world, for it says, “I said, you are all angels and heavenly creatures, but because you have spoiled your behaviour, therefore like Adam you will be born and you will die.” ’

  Regarding repentance, R. Yochanan said: “If a man send away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, may he return unto her again? Will not that land be greatly polluted? For you have played the harlot with many lovers”.’ And then R. Yochanan quoted the most severe passage of Jeremiah, “and would you yet return to me? said the Lord”.

  Refusing to think there was no situation incapable of redemption, Reish Laqish countered, quoting Ezekiel: “Repentance is great, for it turns one’s vices into virtues, as it is said. And when the wicked one turns from his wickedness, and does that which is lawful and right, he shall live thereby!”’

  In this, as in so many cases, the judgement went in favour of Reish Laqish.

  Here? Why not!

  It was the Sabbath and the pale green skies of evening were split by silver veins of lightning. It was the hour before God would open His vault, releasing the stars so the week could begin anew. Silver thistle and crown anemone wove their purple and scarlet blooms through soft lawns, kindling the faded robes of the scholars to fragrance and light. They had spent much of the day studying and, after the third meal, were in that dreamy state of expectation which preceded the separation of the sacred from the profane, the Sabbath from the working week.

  And then R. Yochanan leaned against a tree. He had spoken little all day. His eyes were feverish, his skin hot with some malady that had inflamed his mood. All the scholars sat around him in the twilight.

  He asked: ‘A sword, a knife, a dagger, a spear, a hand-saw and a scythe—at what stage of their manufacture can they be judged unclean and have to be purified before they may be used? For we know they may only be used when they have been judged clean.’

  The students sighed, tired out from the day’s learning, but one summoned the energy to reply: ‘When their manufacture is complete’.

  Another student asked: ‘But when can their manufacture be said to be complete?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said R. Yochanan. ‘That is the question. I rule that they are complete when they have been tempered in a furnace.’

  ‘That cannot be right,’ said Reish Laqish. ‘Completion is only achieved when they have been furbished in water.’

  ‘Ah,’ R. Yochanan laughed in a manner strange and shot through with illness, ‘I see a robber knows his tools and a bandit never forgets his banditry’.

  His words seemed to suspend themselves in the air. The followers of Reish Laqish rose and came to sit around him in a protective circle. R. Yochanan’s students looked at their master askance.

  ‘If you are right, my teacher, and how could it be otherwise?’ said Reish Laqish, ‘then I must ask you in what way have my last ten years with you benefitted me? Here I am called master by my students, it is true, but there, among the brigands, I was also called master.’

  R. Yochanan’s flushed face grew pale. ‘From the time you entered the academy,’ he said, ‘and as a result of everything I taught you, I was able to bring you into the Divine presence. Without me how would you ever have learned the sacred Law? You had been a stranger to it for most of your life. How can you even think to ask me in what way your last ten years have benefitted you?’

  Deeply wounded by Reish Laqish’s question, R. Yochanan rose and left the garden, his steps unsteady with his affliction. And from that day forward R. Yochanan shunned Reish Laqish, blind to the role he himself had played in the dispute.

  Well here, I suppose, but that might be dispiriting.

  Now Reish Laqish took to his bed. He could neither eat nor drink and his skin began to hang about his huge frame. The children cried and begged to be allowed to play with him but their mother, terrified of how his pallor and his weakness made him look, would not allow them into the bedroom.

  In desperation, Zipporah fell to her knees before R. Yochanan. ‘Brother, I implore you, reconcile with him so that he might not die.’

  R. Yochanan, who was making notes on vellum, did not look up and did not reply. Now she wept before him. ‘If you cannot resolve this matter, then forgive him for my sake and for the sake of my children.’

  At this, R. Yochanan finally raised his eyes, and for a moment, Zipporah felt an unsteady glimmer of hope. It was dashed as soon as he spoke the raging words which the prophet Jeremiah had flung at the nation of Edom: ‘“Leave thy fatherless children! I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me.”’

  ‘You dare compare Reish Laqish to Esau, to the father of the nation of Edom?’ Zipporah demanded.

  ‘Of Esau it was said, “You shall live by the sword”,’ R. Yochanan replied. ‘And the same is equally true of Reish Laqish.’

  ‘He no longer lives by the sword. Ten years ago he came here at your behest, following you.’

  ‘He has only exchanged his sword for words and those he uses with equal devastation. How did I not see it before?’

  ‘You did not see it because it was never there,’ Zipporah said.

  ‘I should never have married you to that brigand, but that mistake is on my head. Whatever happens to him, you and your children will be my responsibility.’

  Zipporah could see there would be no reasoning with her brother. She ran from his room and back to the bedside of Reish Laqish. She held his hand and did not relinquish it until long after he died.

  And it was at that very moment that R. Yochanan awoke, as if from a nightmare-plagued sleep, into a reality even more appalling. He could find no peace from the loss he was suffering. Within weeks his dark brown curls turned white and he wandered the rooms of the academy calling, ‘Where is Reish Laqish? Where is Reish Laqish?’

  The sages asked, ‘Who shall go to ease his mind?’

  ‘Send R. Eleazar, son of Pedath, whose disquisitions are very subtle,’ suggested one of them.

  So, R. Eleazar went and sat before R. Yochanan; and on every dictum uttered by R. Yochanan, R. Eleazar observed: ‘You are right. There is a legal precedent which supports you’.

  At last R. Yochanan challenged him: ‘Is this what I require? When I stated a law, my brother used to raise twenty-four objections, to which I gave twenty-four answers. That always led to a fuller understanding of the Law, whilst all you can say is, “You are right”. Do I not know myself that my judicial assertions are correct?’

  So, he continued rending his garments and weeping, ‘Where are you, my brother, where are you?’ and he cried thus until his mind was completely turned.

  Thereupon the sages prayed for mercy for him, and he died.

  The story stops here.

  NEIGHBOURS

  Vale Sholem Aleichem

  Awhile back, before Acland Street was taken over by the buskers and the bikies, the dopers and the smokers and, of course, the hippies, it was a wonderful place to visit. On the other hand, it was not such a wonderful place to live.

  Why do I say this? Because too much was always going on there. Back then you could go and find out whether or not Mottl Rosenberg, the rag-trader king, who everybody knew was shtupping his secretary, had been kicked out by his wife yet. You could hear how Feingold’s daughter was coping since her no-goodnik of a husband left her like you’d leave a plate of cold soup. And you could join the crazy mixture of arguments and hot air with the over-seventy, ex-firebrands, more hair in their ears than they can keep on their he
ads. In their youth they had all been socialists, that is, until their factories started showing a profit. But even so, without their debates, Acland Street would lack its spice and its fire.

  Headquarters was at the Scheherazade (RIP, 2008), smoke-filled—when having a puff indoors was not a felony—noisy and full of gesticulators. They ordered pancakes, latkes, cheesecake—anything that would send their cholesterol sky-high. And whatever they ate they washed down with enough coffee to fill an oil tanker. An outsider would have called it a death wish, but what do outsiders know?

  If you came in alone, chances were that you wouldn’t be alone for long. There was always someone who would approach you and strike up a conversation—the way that Abie Symons did with me, a while ago now, on just such a typical Sunday morning.

  Now I know Abie. In fact, he lives only a ten-minute walk from my place, but close you could never say we were. Mind you, his Ruthie and my Tamara (such a beauty compared to—well, never mind) were good friends. Although my Tamara is married with two children and a prince of a husband, she still found time to quite often have a coffee with that poor girl and try to convince her to use some lipstick occasionally or at least shave her legs.

  Tamara told me some incredible things that this Ruthie confided in her. Anyway, I was still surprised when Abie seated himself—no hello, no nothing—and said, ‘Moishe, I’ve got a problem’. To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed. Why come to me? But the very long story he told me would have been enough to make Stalin cry. (All his teeth should fall out except one to make him suffer). What chance did someone like me have—my wife is always telling me I’m everyone’s shmatte—against such a miserable tale?

  And that’s what I meant when I said that Acland Street is a good place to visit but not to live. Who could stand the pressure?

  Still, I forgot entirely that incident until one Friday morning at breakfast a few months later when my wife was as usual doing her forensic inspection of the Hatch, Match and Despatch pages of the Jewish News.

  ‘Moishe, look! Ruthie Symons is engaged,’ she said to me. ‘Now I’ve seen everything. If that piece of Shmaltz can catch a man, there is no such thing as a wallflower.’

  I did not answer her. I very rarely answered her. Instead, a picture of Abie Symons’ sad and harassed face rose up before my eyes. I could almost smell the gefilte fish on his breath. Then my imagination painted his face all of a sudden being taken over with smiles, with laughs. Loud, deep chortles punctuated his words the way a rabbi interrupts his sermons by every two minutes heaving his prayer shawl back onto his shoulders.

  His whole monologue repeated itself in my mind. Where he had been stuttering and stumbling, I could now figure out for myself what really happened. And what really happened could only have happened in the suburb of Caulfield, where we live, which is really just the domestic arm of Acland Street. Everybody knows everybody’s business here, too. My Tamara told me some details you wouldn’t believe about Ruthie’s habits at home: how she studied and what she did where she studied. She also told me how the story ended, which was not something Abie could have known when he sat down with me that day. But I am raving like a fool. Come, listen. Maybe if I tell you all of it, you’ll see what I mean.

  The street that Abie Symons lived in contained only houses: no units, no apartments. A quiet street, friendly. The children could ride their bicycles without their mothers always worrying about accidents, and the little ones could play unsupervised in the back gardens. All the houses had beautiful, big back gardens.

  But there was a funny thing about the two blocks at the end of the street: numbers 22 and 24. Although they were about 70 metres deep or long—a nice size, no?—they were only 12 metres wide. Which is not wide. Not for Caulfield, anyway. And the only thing that stopped two solid brick houses from being semi-detached was the wooden fence bisecting the miserly, not quite two metres, of land that separated them.

  Now, as you can imagine, this had certain drawbacks. Freda Symons—who lived in number 22 with her husband Abie and of course with their 27-year-old unmarried daughter, Ruthie—complained that the sound of next door’s vacuum cleaner was driving her crazy. And why was Genya Horowitz keeping the carpet so clean, anyway? Who was she expecting, the Queen?

  Abie Symons was a light sleeper, and had been ever since the birth of their daughter. Freda had always insisted he keep at least one ear open in case she, a heavy sleeper, should miss the baby’s cries. A peaceable man, he did not complain whenever Freda prodded him awake with her long, sharp toenails. He rarely complained about anything.

  But even he found it too much, the way Bolek Horowitz farewelled the constant stream of visitors he and his wife seemed to entertain. (Now we know why Genya needed to vacuum so much).

  ‘What does that Horowitz want from my life?’ he grumbled.

  Which was as close as Abie came to aggression as he was woken yet again by the jovial bellows of his wise-cracking, well-wishing neighbours.

  But Ruthie complained the loudest. She was writing her thesis for her Masters Degree. Tamara said it was something to do with Mediaeval Poetry—whatever that was—and the Search for Love. Mediaeval meant the Dark Ages, Tamara also said, and I couldn’t help thinking that if that was where Ruthie was searching, she might not have too much luck finding it.

  So anyway, Ruthie liked the privacy of the lavatory where she could read in peace. She powered through about five books a week that way, which might also explain why she wasn’t married. If you have to read so much, Freda was fond of telling her, at least do it where the boys can see you. Generally, Ruthie ignored her, but once the Horowitzes moved in next door, things changed. The kitchen was the centre of the Horowitzes’ existence. Nothing much happened outside it. And it was directly opposite the Symons’ bathroom which created a real problem. If Ruthie left the window open, the noise from next door’s kitchen distracted her from her reading. If she closed it, well I don’t have to tell you…

  But old habits are hard to break. Just because the Horowitzes (I forgot to mention their son Benny: twenty-eight, still has acne, loves his mother) had noisy sessions in their kitchen, Ruthie could not move away from the place that had become, quite simply, a home within a home. It meant losing the one place she had been able to feel perfectly safe as well as absorb a great deal of material that was useful to her thesis. But without even noticing it, she began reading less and eavesdropping on her neighbours’ private lives more.

  Prime reading time for Ruthie had always been in the hours following the evening meal. This now became prime listening time. It was then that the Horowitzes gathered around their kitchen table for dinner and discussions which often continued long after Ruthie let her last cigarette drown a sizzling death and went to bed.

  Ruthie became very involved in Horowitz domestic affairs. Tuning out to read any time the subject moved towards the family business (Horowitzes Laces, Trimmings and Buttons), or the state of Tante Frayne’s nerves after her latest operation, she tuned back in whenever Benny’s voice could be heard above his parents’ arguing. This went on until eventually Ruthie was not reading even a little bit. She would walk in, sit down, light up and listen. The book would lie unread on her thighs which, by the way, could have supported a small library. She was totally obsessed by a private, unsponsored soap opera of her own.

  ‘Oy, I don’t know what to do with you, Bennyle,’ Ruthie heard Genya Horowitz sigh one evening. ‘Say something, Bolek. You’re the boy’s father. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Hm? Huh? What?’

  ‘Bolek, for heaven’s sake, listen to me when I’m talking to you. It’s Benny’s birthday tomorrow.’

  ‘Mazel tov. He should have a wonderful day.’

  ‘Bolek, he’ll be twenty-nine tomorrow.’

  ‘Bis hundert un tsvantsik, amen. He should live to be one hundred and twenty!’

  ‘Bolek!’ she raised her voice a few decibels above
its normally shrill pitch and finally got his attention.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Bolek, what about the grandchildren?’

  ‘We haven’t got any.’

  ‘What stupidities are you talking? Of course, we haven’t got any. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Your son is twenty-nine tomorrow and he doesn’t have any children.’

  ‘No good serving the cake before the chicken soup, my little dove. He has to get married first.’

  ‘Bolek!’ Genya screeched at such a piercing level that even Ruthie jumped, her unread book sliding off her knees to land with a thud on the tiles.

  ‘Bolek, that’s what I want to discuss with you. What are you, deaf or something?’

  ‘If I’m deaf it will be your fault. Who can listen to such screaming? You think you’re a parrot or…or…a cockatoo? I’m going to bed. When you get rid of this…this rooster in your throat, you can come too.’

  ‘But Bolek,’ she said weakly, ‘the grandchildren’.

  ‘I told you, we haven’t got any.’

  It seemed for once that the little dove had met her match.

  ‘Mu-um,’ said Benny who had been silent up to this point. ‘I’m going to watch some television. Can you cut me a piece of apple cake?’

  ‘Of course, my poor baby. Have a glass of milk with it, too.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Go on, sweetheart. It’s good for you.’

  ‘Oh, all right. A small one.’

  ‘That’s my good boy.’