The Judges Read online

  Bernard was shaken by her words. He turned pale, swallowed, and said nothing. As he looked at the actress, he saw she had dropped her mask and was regarding him with open hostility—and, worse still, as a stranger. He spoke very quietly. “OK. I see that humiliating someone is for you a way of loving him. I can’t argue with that.” Whereupon the other actor in the scene protested angrily, “Say, who’s the director here, you or her? I don’t see my character that way at all. Yes, I can be humiliated by love—but not on a whim!” “No one asked your opinion!” Jacqueline yelled.

  With a helpless gesture, Bernard had stopped the rehearsal and called it a day. Dumbfounded and embarrassed, the actors went home and Bernard shut himself in his dressing room at the theater. He took a long time to answer when Claudia knocked on the door.

  “I don’t want to talk,” he said.

  “But I do,” said Claudia.

  She had never seen him look so lost, so dejected, he who thrived on directing, giving orders, getting what he wanted.

  “I knew she was vain and arrogant,” said Claudia, “but not to that extent. It beats me why she got mad at you, unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you two are having an affair.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Maybe, but not stupid. That tantrum of hers suggested a kind of bitter intimacy. Maybe disappointed love. She sounded like an unsatisfied woman who has some claim on you.”

  Bernard laughed out loud: a nervous, destructive, sick laughter. “For God’s sake, do you really think she’s my lover? You’re crazy, I tell you.” And he began crying. “I’ve never slept with her,” he said, after a moment.

  Claudia was on the brink of saying, but you’d have liked to. In other words, you’re in love with her, and she knows it.

  Bernard was shaking his head. “Look, I’ve never slept with her. Nor with any woman. I’ve never even tried.”

  Is he gay? Claudia wondered. Surely not. Robust, virile, he was a man made to love women. Bernard answered her unspoken question.

  “I’m not gay, you know. I’ve never had an affair with a man. But women just don’t like me. I guess I’m worthless; nobody wants me.”

  Claudia walked over to him. This man, neither young nor old, was someone she admired for his talent and his integrity. He sat with his head in his hands, racked by sobs. Nothing was left of his authority, his charisma. His sacred fire, his enthusiasm, his passion were extinguished. All that because he had never known a woman’s body? That’s stupid, she said to herself; it makes no sense. And she stroked his tousled hair, covered his face with light, delicate kisses, and whispered kind, soothing words . . . and in the end proved him to be a man.

  But she did not love him. And she no longer loved Lucien. Without a love of her own, she was ready to meet David.

  Bruce Schwarz felt a pang of anxiety: Even if it was a game, he did not want to die without once more seeing Stacy, the young student in psychiatry—without having explained to her the reasons why he kept going off the deep end; without begging her forgiveness for his shameful conduct, toward her and toward women in general. If I die, he wondered, will my death be an expiation? Will all my sins be washed away?

  In fact, for more than a year, ever since he had met Stacy, Bruce had been traveling around the world, looking for all the women he had deceived, scorned, and abandoned as if he needed their understanding, their forgiveness. There were a lot of them: young and not so young, intellectuals and artists, rich heiresses and poor orphans, beautiful women and homely ones. He had not been choosy. Was he nostalgic for some love affair in his youth, some woman who had scorned him?

  Driven by irrational and perhaps subconscious forces, he had considered it his duty to seduce women, one after another, to conquer them, to keep them for a time before casting them aside, with the excuse that he was not good enough for them. They deserved someone more mature, he said, more sensitive, more moral: in a word, more human. A sweet talker, he had great faith in his powers of persuasion. He believed he was sufficiently convincing to spare them suffering. He was wrong, of course. Even those who hid their despair from him would shut themselves away to weep at home where they ran no risk of being disturbed. Deep down, he knew this but, cravenly, he would manage to forget. Affairs were for him like pages to be turned: The new one makes the preceding ones disappear.

  Until the day of awakening. Having fallen in love, body and soul, he first suffered the pangs of rejection. The young woman, Stacy, was neither more beautiful nor more attractive than the others. But in his eyes she was different, singular, unique. The sober elegance with which she dressed; the way she compressed her lips when she was thinking; her proud carriage as she walked down the street, upright and self-confident; her dark eyes, where all the suns in the world took fire and faded in each of her glances. Stacy reproached him for his lack of faith, for his lack of contact with God. She believed in God. Without God, life makes little sense, she would say. For her, human love could not be dissociated from the love of God. “And the other way around?” Bruce asked her mischievously. “Yes,” she replied gravely. He tried in vain to shake her convictions. She remained inflexible. It was Stacy who had given him the red scarf. He wore it always, even in summer.

  How easy it had been to hoodwink the others. . . . Bruce still remembered his first conquest with a pride that now did not quite tally with the feelings that were so new to him: remorse and anguish.

  “Oh, you poor man,” Razziel’s strange friend and Master, old Paritus, the sad, mocking mystic, had cried out to him in a dream. “You and your dreams of making the Redeemer come. You make me laugh. Do you really think he is still alive? Do you really think he’ll appear one day, just like that, to please you? Seriously, my boy, I knew you were naïve and mad, but not to that extent. Can it be that you long to be a prophet too? Do you really think that the Savior we have been waiting for so long will materialize out of thin air tomorrow or next year to bring you his light and grace? Don’t be stupid. Stop waiting for the end. We’ve passed it already. The end is behind us. The Redeemer is not going to come now. And if he ever comes he’ll need our pity more than we need his. Anyway, he’s lost all his powers, believe you me. I know what I’m talking about. He’s taken too long to get here. He’s missed his opportunity, let it slip through his fingers. The artist has forgotten his art, and now he’s nothing anymore. He’s just a poor soul, like you or like me, which comes to the same thing.”

  Razziel had woken that day with a start, oppressed by a feeling of panic. What was this rock crushing him from inside? He recalled the true Paritus, the melancholy dispenser of consolation. Why is he grinning now? Why and how long has he been making fun of me? When he laughs, one half of his face lights up and the other half remains dark, plunged in shadow. O wonderful Paritus! thought Razziel. He pursues me even in my sleep. Will he help me recover my lost memories? Is he my unique salvation? But what if he were my utter downfall instead?

  For years now Razziel has been pursuing Paritus, searching for him. After their release from prison he had met him several times. Once in Paris, among the homeless people beside the Seine. Once in a lecture hall at Oxford University. And a third time on the morning of Yom Kippur at the court of the Rebbe of Kamenets in Brooklyn, reading from the book of Jonah. Most of the time Paritus was nowhere to be found. On each occasion when Razziel thought he had unmasked him, or at least located him, he vanished once more—so often that Razziel felt he now knew him not nearly as well as in the old days. Had he really lived in the fifteenth century? Had he really encountered Rabbi David ben Gdalya beside the Wall in Jerusalem? And why had he spoken of meeting Samuel Saportas, the famous repentant heretic, who came to the Holy Land to show that for him nothing was sacred? And why had Paritus spoken of redemption just now in Razziel’s dream?

  Automatically, his arm reached out, searching for Kali, but encountered only emptiness. How long had the only woman in his life been dead? Lying on his right side, Razziel knew he ought
to get up, his duties awaited him at the yeshiva, but he had no desire to do so. Razziel was no longer the same man. He still knew the goal but not the road that led to it. Should he begin a new day, only to go to bed again at the end of it? What was the point? Why not lie in bed until tomorrow? Razziel felt tired, heavy. The smallest movement cost him considerable effort. Even his mind was sluggish; it was impossible to drag it from its starting point and launch it in pursuit of imaginary friends or enemies. His depression was pushing him toward the abyss. Oblivion would be a blessing. Can I be dead? he wondered. What’s certain is that someone has died within me. Who? The man I was? The man I might have been?

  Razziel shook himself. Outside, a gray dawn had appeared. Was it an autumn day or a day in spring? Would it bring happiness or sorrow? What did it matter? It would be a day like any other. Words spoken, words held back. Children hungry, people betrayed. Anonymous visitors. Hand-shakes, smiles, courtesies. A meeting with . . . with whom? What if he did not go to it? Better still, what if he ceased doing anything? I’m fifty. What if I threw in the towel, simply announced that I’ve had enough? So long, students: Someone else will guide you toward the heights. So long, future masters: Don’t follow my example. So long, everybody: good night. And as for all the rest, go home, with all your fantasies and your weaknesses, your wives and mistresses. This player no longer wishes to entertain you. This player is content to have no more desires.

  Was I nothing but an actor? Razziel wondered, nothing more? Was I simply wearing different masks: the prodigal son, diligent student, husband, pilgrim? And now? The last mask, Paritus used to say, is the one death lays on your face, what’s more, there is a touch of death on all faces. At that, Razziel became irritated: Get away, you old learned devil! You’re disturbing me; you’re irritating me. What a bore you are! Why don’t you go annoy someone else for a change? I need some respite.

  It was true: Razziel needed a rest. Like a man who has lived too hard, endured too much, he deserved to be left in peace. To find his bearings. To renew himself. Razziel was suffocating. Caught in a cold and comfortless stranglehold, he felt he was a prisoner without knowing whose. But he knew why. He had committed grave errors. He was guilty of having entered the orchard of forbidden knowledge. Guilty in the eyes of God and men, guilty toward his father— whom he knew no longer, or did not know as yet—and above all guilty of having wasted a life: his own.

  Once upon a time, everything was simple. There was an established order that all creation respected. The sun shone in summer, and in winter the snow fell softly and covered everything. You got up in the morning, you spent the day studying, praying, working, eating, and in the evening you went to bed.

  Once upon a time. . . .

  Did Razziel like sleeping when he was little? Was slumber for him a way of dying? Was he afraid of never waking up? When he opened his eyes in the morning did he quickly cover his head with his kipa to recite the first prayer of the day, Thank you, for having rendered my soul unto me, O God? And later on did he say, The soul you have given me is pure; it is you who have created it; it is you who have breathed it into me; it is unto you that I will surrender it?

  Razziel had always loved these prayers. They reassured him. As long as he was praying, nothing bad could befall him. If someone had asked him what prayer meant to him, he would have replied: a shelter and a defense, a protection against rough winds and the wickedness of man.

  The heretic Samuel Saportas detested prayer. He considered it to be inextricably linked with flattery. “He who prays, lies,” he said, “and he who prays not, also lies. That is the tragedy of human life: man always lives a lie.”

  Well, perhaps he’s not wrong, thought Razziel. At any rate not totally wrong. The ones who don’t lie are the madmen, God’s madmen.

  Razziel had a great affection for these inspired madmen, these fugitive prophets, these dreamers of eternity; their rich imagination nourished his own. All those madmen on the street in his district—and those in Brooklyn and Manhattan too—they all knew his address. The gentle and the violent; the young, cursing their youth; the old, dreading their own decay—they would write to him or turn up at his yeshiva out of the blue, one fine morning or in the middle of the night, to confide in him or simply to offer him the fruits of their imagination. Between lessons Razziel would welcome them and listen to them patiently, intently, without ever getting annoyed, letting each of them feel he was expected, that his presence mattered, and what he had to say was appreciated.

  In the beginning, Kali did not understand. “You’re too available,” she reproached him. “Too accommodating. Too generous with your time. Absolutely everybody takes the liberty of stealing it from you. Don’t you think you ought to be a little more discriminating?” By way of a reply, he quoted to her from Paritus: “God gives to those who give of themselves. How can I withhold myself from people who have nothing?” Kali could not be angry with him for long. “But if Father did the same thing with his customers or his bank account he would have been ruined long ago,” she told him gently.

  Was Kali right? Razziel asked himself now. Have I paid too much attention to strangers and not enough to my own family? What has become of them? No doubt they despise me. And the fact that my memories run away from me and reject me is proof. What is harder to bear, the shattered memory of a beloved wife or the silent reproach of the child within me?

  As on the day of Yom Kippur, Razziel examined his life as a man. What have I done that I should not have done? What errors have I committed? When and where have I been unjust? The fifty years I have lived, will I see them slide into the hungry, yawning abyss? Will no trace of them or of myself remain? Where is Paritus in all this? And where is God? Will you, Lord, really allow everything that I have tried to write in your book, in your memory, to be erased?

  Outside, a voice can be heard. “Hurry. The service is about to begin.”

  “I’m coming, Father,” replies a young voice.

  The pious Jews of Brooklyn woke early, as they did every morning. In accordance with the Lord’s sacred injunction, each went to his place of worship to repeat the prayers composed by the Ancient Sages with future generations in mind.

  Razziel, too, should have got up, even earlier than everyone else. But that morning he did not have the strength: Kali’s absence weighed too heavily. He stayed in bed a moment longer, contemplating through half-closed eyelids the faces that had peopled his fragmented past; he spoke to them, but none of them replied.

  “So are you coming?” repeated the same voice, becoming impatient.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  “Hurry up! You could make an effort, after all! So God is waiting for you and you’re late? Aren’t you ashamed to keep God waiting?”

  The voice—a little boy’s?—is lost in the noise of the street, but within himself it is Razziel who replies: Yes. I’m ashamed.

  The center that Razziel directed was officially a yeshiva for “outstanding students.” People went there to study what is taught in all Talmudic schools: how to interpret biblical texts, to search for the deeper meanings of the midrashic commentaries; how to understand the laws, both simple and complex, concerning the commerce between men and their relationships with the surrounding world, sacred or profane. Razziel had appointed three masters to assist the pupils in grappling with the most impenetrable passages. He himself helped the final-year students to discover the glories of the Zohar; mysticism was his reserved, exclusive field. He taught late into the evening, until almost midnight: the mysteries of the Beginning; the secret of the presence of God within time; the significance of the klipot, or parings, that would explain the presence of evil in the creation; the agonizing questions connected with the promised coming of the Messiah. All these Aramaic texts that are meant to be explored and communicated in small groups, Razziel would translate for his pupils, chanting in a low voice in the half-light. Sometimes they would be disturbed by a stranger bursting into the little house of study asking for something to e
at or drink or just some attention, a human gesture. Calmly, Razziel would rise and invite him to go with him into the next room, where his needs would be met. At the beginning, his pupils did not hide their astonishment. And once more he would quote one of Paritus’s sayings: “Helping a man to overcome his sadness is more important than understanding the ultimate will of the Lord.” And he told them the story of Rebbe Levi Itzhak of Berditchev, who commanded his disciples to spend forty days and forty nights preparing to meet him at a secret spot in the forest. There they were to force God’s hand and precipitate the coming of the Messiah. Excited, stimulated by this challenge, they all set about purifying themselves, body and soul: They took no food (except on the Sabbath) other than dry bread and water. They spent their nights lamenting the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Shekinah. They did all that was necessary to be ready and worthy of their mission. The awesome day arrived. They all met in the forest, equipped with their prayer books and their ritual shawls—all except for their Master. Where could he be? He only appeared after several hours.