The Fifth Son Read online

  They had been difficult years of adaptation and integration: he had to forget everything, erase everything to start again from zero. Without money or connections, he earned a meager living as a traveling salesman, insurance agent, employee of a cosmetics company. He was hired everywhere but also fired everywhere because of a pathological shyness which arose from the fact that he expressed himself poorly in his new language, perhaps because he respected it too much. Every sentence he spoke had to be correct, well-constructed, flawless. People lost patience and threw him out. He would return a day later or a week later: “You again?!” He would apologize, say thank you and slink away in shame. In the evening, my mother would denounce his failures: “Why can’t you be like everybody else? Everybody accepts financial aid from this Jewish agency or that charitable organization, but you have to refuse!” “I don’t want to beg.” “Is this the time to act proud?” “That’s not the point.” “Then what is the point?” “It may have been a mistake for us to come to America. Here, we have nobody.” “And there?” “There neither, but it’s not the same.” My mother agreed on that point: it was not the same.

  “There are times,” he continued, “when I question whether I did right to rebuild a home, whether I had thought it through when I decided to start our lives over again. Of course, being a Jew bound to his tradition and rooted in its history, I had no choice: others have started over before me, perhaps even for me. What right had I to separate myself from them?

  “And yet I continue to have doubts: why didn’t I draw the line and end it all? It would have been so easy, so comfortable to let myself be carried by the current of death, to glide into nothingness. Yet I held on. Why? To preserve my name? And ensure the continuity of ancient stock? Or did I wish to rehabilitate my despair by conferring upon it a meaning? Words, words: and they’re not even mine. If I am to believe our Sages, we are responsible for ultimate redemption. Ask Simha, he will explain it to you: every one of us can bring forth if not the Messiah then perhaps the one who can make Him appear. Is that why we decided, your mother and I, to embrace once more? To entrust you with a messianic mission? With your help to perhaps curb human suffering? Words, more words. We embraced because we were unhappy; we embraced and we were still unhappy.

  “And you, my son, what are you doing, what can you do to be happy? I fear that one day you will reproach me for my naiveté and call it weakness. A thoughtless act? No. Rather an act of faith on our part, believe me. Your mother and I told ourselves that not to give life was to hand over yet another victory to the enemy. Why permit him to be the only one to multiply and bear fruit? Abel died a bachelor, Cain did not: it falls to us to correct this injustice. But we did not take into consideration your desires, your judgments, your impulses: and what if one day you tell us, you tell me; ‘You were wrong to take me into this game you seem to be playing with fate and history! Haven’t you learned anything? Don’t you, didn’t you know, that this earth and this society are inhospitable toward Jewish children? Didn’t you know that the game was rigged? We had no chance of winning! The enemy is too powerful, and we not enough. One thousand children are helpless against one armed assassin! And so, for you, it was a matter of starting over in the purest sense, wasn’t it? Well then, couldn’t you start over without me?’ This is what worries me, my son: that your judgment of our survival may be harsh. And if, God forbid, you give in to despair, my own will be seven times as black. How is one to foresee, how is one to know?”

  And as he talked, I listened to him with my head bowed, afraid to meet his gaze. I who so wanted to share the events he concealed, now admitted to myself that they were too much for me. What to do? How could I show him that I loved him even more for it? What could I say to alleviate his pain? I kept silent and listened, I listened long after he had finished speaking.

  My father, in fact, behaves and expresses himself freely only with his friend—and mine—Simha. Simha-the-Dark. A soothing, familiar presence. Simha alone knows how to make my father unwind. He brings grace into our home. We are fortunate: he spends all Jewish holidays and many a Shabbat with us. He is never intrusive. I look forward eagerly to his visits, and wish only that they were more frequent. He never comes empty-handed. Everything I own—my watch, my fountain pen, my wallet—I received from him.

  His presence reassures me I feel closer to him than others do to their “close” relatives. I know many things about him. I know that he is a widower; that he lives in a huge apartment that is off limits to strangers, meaning nearly everybody; that he is a familiar figure in a variety of circles; that he sometimes disappears for weeks at a time without a trace. What else? God only knows what else I know about him. My father thinks of him as a kabbalist. Mathematician and philosopher, a specialist in the theory of possibilities, his free evenings are spent calculating the time that separates us from messianic deliverance.

  Where did he get his nickname? He is a nocturnal character attracted by darkness and its ghosts. He calls himself, don’t laugh, a merchant, yes, a merchant of shadows. I know it sounds childish, but that is what he claims as his occupation, his profession and, believe it or not, his source of income. He buys and sells shadows, recruiting his clients in every imaginable sphere of American society. It seems that a great industrialist was observed visiting him secretly. As was a movie star. And even a corrupt politician.

  One day, he explained his trade to me:

  “In America everything is for sale because anything can be bought. Some people cannot live without shadows so they come looking for me. I have what they need. Shadows of every kind. Large and small, opaque and transparent, strong and tired ones, I even have them in colors.”

  Surely I must have been gaping foolishly because he pretended to be annoyed.

  “What, you don’t understand? What is there to understand? Business is business. Business is the same everywhere. Some industries sell light, so surely I have the right to sell shadows, don’t you think?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Why should there be dream merchants, image, illusion, happiness and even death merchants and no shadow merchants?”

  I still didn’t know whether he was serious.

  “Makes sense,” I said to show I was not entirely unsophisticated.

  “Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects; the truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories. The most exalted faith, the most inspired songs have their share of shadow. God alone has none. Do you know why? God has no shadow because God is shadow, hence His immortality. For there exists an ancient belief that man is inseparably and irrevocably linked to his shadow; whosoever separates himself from it would do well to prepare for the great voyage.”

  Simha and his darkness; Simha and his problems. Once one of his clients wanted to sue him, claiming that Simha had sold him defective merchandise. The second-rate, sickly shadow had vanished after only a week.

  “I offered to exchange it. Nothing doing! The client had become attached to his shadow; so help me, he loved it. How can one love a shadow that has disappeared, a dead shadow? People are strange. My client had the audacity to send over a police inspector. Listen, I told him in Yiddish, if you don’t clear out this minute, I’ll open my warehouse, and unleash my shadows, and they will overrun the town, the country, the continent and that will be the end, the end of the world!”

  The two friends are in the habit of meeting regularly on the last Thursday of every month, in our house, in the living room, to study ancient history or current events from which they always glean accounts of capital punishment: the process is always the same, so is the speech. They search heaven and earth to justify a particular act of vengeance against an acknowledged enemy. Watching them as they sit around the big table covered with documents and press clippings, listening to their discussions, one might suspect them of being involved in a conspiracy or plotting a putsch. Isolated from the noises of the neighborhood, they seem to exist in a world all
their own, in a time all their own.

  “Let us consider the case of our Master, the Master of all of us, Moses,” says Simha. “Let us reread the text, shall we? Moses is a prince but through his origins and his soul he is linked to his oppressed brethren. One day he notices an Egyptian overseer striking his Jewish slave. In a fit of rage, Moses kills the Egyptian. The question I am asking you, Reuven Tamiroff, is one you can guess: what right had Moses to execute the overseer? True, the man had struck a Jew, but did that crime deserve capital punishment? Tell me?”

  As for me, I sit there quietly beneath a worn medieval map of Jerusalem and listen to the prosecution and the defense, the reading of the same Biblical or Talmudic sentence at the first or third degree, and I am spellbound: they are dealing with the incident as if it had just taken place right here on Bedford Avenue, and what is more, as if they had just discovered it.

  “Whatever Moses did, he was compelled to do,” affirms my father. “You see in him only the prophet impassioned with legislation, poetry, teaching, but in fact, he was also a warrior, strategist and military leader. A hero of the resistance. A commander of a national liberation army. He sees an enemy soldier interrogating a Jew; he eliminates him and he is right. Why did the Egyptian abuse the Jew? Possibly to extract secrets from him. Or else to humiliate him and make him into an example to frighten other slaves. Just let them raise their heads and they would suffer the same fate. A killer, once started, will go on killing. A torturer free to torture me today, will turn on you tomorrow. In other words, Moses had to kill the killer to protect not only the present victim but also all future victims.”

  Logic, one of my father’s strengths. He dissects thoughts like a surgeon opening an abdomen to extirpate a disease he alone can see. A method Simha opposes vigorously: every living thought necessarily contains its share of disease, that is to say: its anti-thought. Better not to tamper with it.

  “What troubles me in this particular instance,” says my father, “is our vanity: we compare ourselves to Moses. No more, no less. However, what is permissible for Moses is permissible only for Moses. If Moses decides to eliminate a swine, and a dangerous one to boot, that’s his right, which does not mean that we are granted the same right.”

  “Why not? Moses’ Law is our Law! It belongs to all of us! Since Sinai …”

  “Indeed. Since Sinai, the Law does not distinguish between Moses and any simple, anonymous man. But the incident we are considering took place before Sinai! In pharaonic Egypt, killing was not a crime. A prince could kill with impunity; no one could guess that this would change.”

  “But then, how is it that God, in order to make His Law known, had recourse to a man with blood on his hands?”

  “Wait a minute! God forgave Moses and you don’t? Do you consider yourself more just than God?”

  “Right you are. Moses’ ‘murder’ does not count, does not affect the scheme of events. It is not part of any great pattern because it was Moses who committed it. Had it been you and I, God surely would have put us through the mill.”

  “Careful there! The Talmud claims that Moses could not enter the Promised Land precisely because he had shed blood. Even Moses had no right to kill. In other words, God did not forgive, not completely. And yet, at the moment it took place, the murder seemed necessary if not indispensable, thus justified.”

  “Justified perhaps, just never.”

  “Because?”

  “Because, and this is the essential point, we have not yet established premeditation on Moses’ part.”

  “Premeditation? Impossible! One instant before the murder, Moses could not foresee it. He didn’t even know that he would see an Egyptian torturing his Jewish slave.”

  That’s how it went. This is a sample of their sessions which, very seriously, they labeled “official.” They continued into the night and sometimes until daybreak. And now, as I recall them, I have the feeling of living in a faraway region shrouded by a dream that disfigures the living and their words. And I hurry away in search of another place, another time, another dream.

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of his friend from Davarowsk, my father sees few people. In New York that is easy; you can live in a building for ten years and not know your next-door neighbor. The city is made to order for misanthropes.

  For entertainment, we look out the window. Friday nights we go next door to attend services. I do find the Rabbi appealing: I like his beard, his bushy eyebrows. His entire being radiates kindness. His gentleness is legendary, as is his inflexibility. His kingdom is limited but filled with light.

  How can I explain the attraction he holds for my father? He reminds him of the old days, the Old World. On Friday nights, carried by his prayers, my father reenters his childhood. As for me, I do not pray; I watch and I listen.

  I alternately look at my father and the Rabbi, and I look for a sign from one or the other, a sign meant for me, for me alone.

  I like to observe the Rabbi. Mostly he holds himself still and straight as a pillar. When he sways back and forth, he resembles a father trying to soothe his anxious child.

  Even though he is demanding, he is loved and respected by his faithful. For he does not push them to saintliness or perfection, only to fervor. One evening he said:

  “Whatever I wish to obtain from you, I wish to obtain with you. I wish to see you united so that we may lift ourselves up toward God.”

  He bowed his head. After a moment he continued:

  “You will ask me: how is it possible and what good is it to lift ourselves up to God who is everywhere and not only high above? Well, I don’t know the answer but I shall continue to encourage you to look for it.”

  I remember: I was as moved by his humility as by his determination. I also remember that this was a thought he had put forth more than once. And I who do not like repetition was never troubled by his.

  After my father, it was he I loved the most. For his piety? And his wisdom? Undoubtedly. But also for his sense of humor. One holiday eve I heard him speak of misery and suffering:

  “The Almighty, blessed-be-He, is a kind of banker. He takes from one man to lend to another, except when it comes to worry, pain, disease: of those He has enough for everybody.”

  Another time, he commented on the Biblical verse: “And you shall love your fellow man as you love yourself for I am your Lord, your God.”

  “At first glance,” he said, “the sentence is badly constructed: where is the connection between beginning and end? Well, this question has already been posed by the great Rabbi of Rizhin himself. And by way of answer, he told a story: in czarist Russia, there lived two Jews who had vowed to remain friends unto death. And so, when one of them was accused of subversive activities, the other hastened to exonerate him by taking the charges upon himself. Of course they wound up in prison together. The judges were obviously confused: how could they condemn two men for the same crime? The case attracted the Czar’s attention. He ordered the two Jews brought before him and this is what he said to them: ‘Don’t worry, I am going to set you free. The reason I asked to see you is that I wished to meet two men capable of such great loyalty. And now,’ continued the czar, ‘I have a favor to ask of you: take me as your third partner.’ Commented the Rabbi of Rizhin: This is the deep and beautiful meaning of that Biblical verse: when two people love one another, God becomes their partner.”

  I remember: I was a youngster when I heard our neighbor tell this story. And I told myself: when I grow up I shall love him as I shall love myself. And even more, if possible.

  “Father, may I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “My schoolmates, for the most part, have grandparents; I don’t. Where are they?”

  “Dead,” says my father.

  “Why?”

  “Because they were Jews.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Neither do I,” says my father.

  Oh well, one more question that will go unanswered. My father is working; I won
’t disturb him any further. I go away, come back.

  “Do you have any photographs?”

  “Of whom?”

  “Of my dead Jewish grandparents.”

  “No,” says my father.

  All right, I shall go. No, not yet:

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “I can try.”

  “Tell me what they were like.”

  My father turns thoughtful.

  “Different,” he says. “Totally different from each other.”

  “But you just said that they were Jews so they were not different. If they had been, they would not have died. Do you want me to believe that dead Jews are different one from the other?”

  “Their life-styles were different. My parents were outgoing and exuberant; your mother’s parents preferred understatement. My parents spoke Yiddish, your mother’s spoke Polish and German. My parents recited psalms all day long, your mother’s did not even know the Aleph-Beth. My parents strove to become better Jews, your mother’s didn’t like Jews; I mean to say: they didn’t like the Jew inside them. In truth, they were not pleased with their daughter’s choice. They would have preferred a totally assimilated lawyer or even a Gentile of good stock. You must not hold that against them, they were not the only ones. Those were times when people like them said: the world does not tolerate Jews and ultimately will eliminate them. Conclusion: to live, to go on, it was necessary to give up that which had helped us survive two thousand years of exile. Don’t you understand? I told you: I myself was briefly tempted, seduced by assimilation. But all I had to do was to remember my father’s face—to imagine his despair—in order not to commit the irreparable.”

  All right, I’ll leave you now. To summarize: I had grandparents who wanted to be Jews and grandparents who did not. But they were all killed. Because they were Jews. One last question:

  “Since we are Jews, how come we are not dead?”