36 Arguments for the Existence of God (41 page)

“I was hoping that maybe you could help me answer that. Because that is your specialty, psychology of religion, no?”

“No. This question is meant for you alone, Azarya.”

“As I’ve always feared,” he said softly.

“Let’s think about it together, then. Let’s say you leave and the community suffers for a while, then disintegrates and disperses to other Hasidic groups; maybe even—because of the trauma of your leaving—the members become assimilated into the modern world. Tell me what’s lost? A few fewer false beliefs knocking about in the world? The Valdeners end up being like my mother and me? Is that so bad?”

Azarya stared down at the table a while before he spoke.

“It’s tragic, a diminishment, when a people goes out of existence, a way of life, a culture, a language.” He spoke slowly, either from emotion or because he was thinking out his line of reasoning as he went. “But that’s not even the heart of it. No. The heart of it is the story of
this
people,
my
people,
my
Valdeners. You are who you are.” Cass saw with horror that Azarya’s eyes were welling. “Had my grandfather Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer not fought with all his life to bring over as many Valdeners as he could in 1939, then there would be none living now, and even so he wept on his deathbed for the lives he hadn’t saved. That bloodline that every Valdener child can recite as easily as Shema Yisroel”
—
“Hear O Israel,” the iconic Jewish prayer—“would have ended in that burning shul if not for him. So how can I, Azarya ben Rav Bezalel ben Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer, decide to be the executioner now? How can it be by my hand?”

He’s sixteen, Cass was thinking. Look at the quantities of agonized thought he’s poured into his paradox, and look at the living agony twisting
itself out on his face right now, welling over in his eyes and making his upper lip tremble.

It was enough for one night, more than enough, and Cass said so. As they were getting up from the table, he couldn’t help putting his hand gently on Azarya’s shoulder, remembering, as he did so, how the Valdeners had kissed their prayer shawls and touched the child with them as if he were a living Torah as he was bounced around on his dancing father’s back.

“Azarya, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.”

“It’s for me wonderful to be able to share this with somebody. It’s a gift that you are taking my decision so seriously. Often I think maybe I’m taking it too seriously myself, that the world will go on whatever Azarya Sheiner decides to do. Still, a person takes his life seriously. A person has to live his life. Who else’s life is he supposed to live? Maybe together we’ll figure out how something that’s necessary but impossible can happen. We’ll collaborate on a solution.”

“It would be an honor to be your collaborator. And we’ll bring Professor Sinai on board, too, as a collaborator. Why don’t you bring him here tomorrow for dinner? I’ve still got piles of food from Tirza’s Batampte Kitchen. I’d like to meet the man whom Azarya Sheiner calls a
gaon.”

Pascale was up in her study and Cass was in the kitchen, warming up the barbecued chicken and the potato kugel, when an excited Azarya arrived home with a burly man in heavy black-framed eyeglasses, his wavy black hair awkwardly mounding on random places of his head. He had the shy, uncomfortable grin that had probably not been revised since he was a child. He wore a green flannel shirt and an air of unkemptness, but it was hard for Cass to take him in because of a transformed Azarya beside him, holding three bunches of green-tissue-wrapped tulips in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

Before Cass had gotten a word out, Pascale came sashaying into the room, balanced on a spiky pair of red shoes that matched her lipstick. Her long black hair, the color of the rest of her outfit, was piled high on her head. She stopped cold at the sight of them.

“But is it you?” she asked Azarya with the directness of a small child, and he laughed.

“But where are your”—she curled her index fingers beside her ears— “your
baguettes à cheveux?”

Azarya, who didn’t know French but couldn’t help getting Pascale’s drift, pointed to the Red Sox baseball cap he was wearing. He lifted it off his head with a flourish, and two dark-blond
payess
came flopping down.

Pascale shrieked with laughter, which cracked them all up, Gabriel Sinai joining in with a high whinnying noise.

“Non, non
, you must put them back
tout de suite!
It is so much better like that.
Oui, comme ça! Plus beau!
You are a beautiful boy! It is amazing how the beauty comes out. Better, why don’t you just snip, snip?”

She ran with her frantic movements, the high heels clacking on the wooden floor, to the kitchen drawer, and pulled out the poultry shears— Cass was surprised she knew where to find them—and advanced toward Azarya, in a pretend menacing way, moving her black-sheathed legs like a stalking panther. She jiggled the poultry shears beneath Azarya’s right ear. Cass uneasily wondered what Pascale was capable of in such an antic mood.

“I’m not quite ready for that.” Azarya was laughing back at her, not looking worried himself—but, then, he didn’t know Pascale. “One thing at a time.”

“One thing at a time,” she echoed back. “But of course! We will snip first the one and then the other!”

They were all laughing, Pascale most of all, suddenly thrust into one of her high-spirited moods. In one of those quick reversals that Cass had seen in her before—in fact, to which he owed his marriage—she now liked Azarya with all the savagery of her certainty. Pascale was kind, as Cass had always known, but with the kindness of a child. She’d been repelled by the sense of his strangeness, perhaps believing that his appearance entailed a rejection of the world outside his own, a smug assertion of superiority. But as soon as she had been able to recognize a fellow human being and see that he was a citizen of a wider sphere—or in any case longed to be—her natural kindness had blossomed.

Azarya handed Pascale the tulips, and with a happy little exclamation she tore off the paper from the bunch of purples and pinks and yellows.

“Very beautiful,” she said, gathering them to her narrow chest. “The colors of spring.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Also the colors of the poet.” He then presented her with the bottle of wine.

“I hope it’s good. You can imagine how little I know about French wines. The man in the wine store said this was a good one.”

“Bordeaux! Oh, it is very good! You are being civilized
rapidement
. Only now let me cut off the unlovely baguettes!”

Cass had never seen Pascale this animated. It occurred to him that having mathematicians around was probably familiar and therefore wonderful for her, reminding her of her girlhood in the idyllic Bures-sur-Yvette, which she’d spent benignly ignored by her distracted father and hanging upside down on the jungle gym with other mathematical offspring, who were “not so annoying as other children.” Gabriel was fluent in French and clearly enjoyed speaking it, so he directed most of his comments to Pascale and in her native tongue, which put her in a jollier mood still. Gabriel knew Claude Puisssant very well and thought that he might even remember Pascale as a young child, sometimes playing piano at gatherings.

“I did not play so well!” she said.

“That’s true,” he agreed, and she shrugged and poured some more of the Bordeaux for herself and Cass. Gabriel and Azarya were sticking to the Carmel.

But the real treat was to come after dinner, when Gabriel loped over to Pascale’s baby-grand piano. There was sheet music on top and Gabriel looked it over for a while, and then sat down and, without any sheet music, forcefully played the famous third movement of Mozart’s
Turkish
Sonata. He immediately launched into something else, sounding vaguely familiar, though it was Azarya who got it first, laughing gleefully, and explained to Cass and Pascale that Professor Sinai was playing the same movement from the
Turkish
Sonata, only “upside down”—that is, inverted.

Azarya was elated with Gabriel’s inversion of the Mozart and asked
him if he could try something that he, Azarya, thought was possible, though he didn’t have the technical proficiency to do it.

“The idea is to combine the harmonies from the Prelude in C Major, the first in Volume I of Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
, with the arpeggios of the first étude from Chopin’s Opus 10, also in C major. I can hear it in my head, but I can’t play the piano well enough to do it.”

“I’ve never studied the Chopin,” Gabriel said, but despite that disclaimer he instantly launched into the challenge, and played the entire Chopin étude from start to finish, with all the Bach harmonies substituted for the original ones, and then, without pausing, he did the reverse, combining the harmonies of the Chopin étude with the more reserved but beautiful figurations of the Bach prelude.

Azarya, who could follow much more closely than Cass or Pascale, was beside himself.

“This has been an impossible dream! It’s as beautiful as I had imagined—more beautiful!”

Gabriel laughed in his high whinny. He was now completely comfortable, his rubbery mouth stretching into easy smiles, showing his full set of chaotic teeth.

“It’s a terrific idea. I’m going to add it to my repertoire. Any other combinations you’ve been impossibly dreaming?”

“I’ve got something I can sing for you. Here’s the idea. You take the thirty-two variations of Bach’s
Goldberg
Variations, each with thirty-two measures. You take one measure of each of the variations, always in diagonal fashion—in general, the
n
th measure of the
n
th variation.”

“Nice,” Gabriel said. “Let’s hear.”

The chimelike voice of the child that Cass still remembered was now a tenor, each note struck pure. Gabriel’s face was creased with concentration, and when Azarya had finished, he declared it a marvel.

“You’re basing it on Cantor’s diagonal proof, of course,” he said, and Azarya smiled, and Gabriel said, “That’s it. You’re coming to MIT.” Cass had known that Gabriel Sinai would be the ideal collaborator.

Gabriel launched into playing “Sheiner’s Diagonal Variation on Bach’s Goldberg Variations” for himself, more rapidly than Azarya had sung it, and was, by Cass’s count, on the eighteenth measure of the eighteenth
variation when Cass heard the phone ringing—nobody else noticed it— and quietly went off to answer it.

It was his mother. It was difficult to hear her over the laughing and music. He kept his eyes on the action at the piano, Azarya sitting there now and jamming with his
gaon
. Gabriel was playing the right hand of something that Cass didn’t recognize, and Azarya was playing the left. He seemed to know more about the piano than he had let on.

“Mom, can you speak up a little? I can barely hear you. Azarya’s here playing a piano duet with Gabriel Sinai. I wish you could see this.”

Pascale stood behind Azarya, proposing alterations. She had both her hands resting on his shoulders as she leaned over and watched the keyboard, and either he didn’t notice or she was his relative so it didn’t count as a strange female or he just didn’t care.

His mother said something that he didn’t catch. She barely sounded like herself.

It wasn’t like Pascale to make casual physical contact. It wasn’t only the faithful who couldn’t help themselves from leaning inward toward Azarya, that crush in the Costco House of Worship, with the tiers of yearning Valdeners straining downward to the child standing on the
tish
between the gigantic bowls of oranges and apples that the Rebbe would soon be tossing to the scrambling Hasidim.

“Mom, what’s the matter with you?”

She was softly crying. He listened to the strange sound of it. Not even his bubbe’s madness-sharpened needling could ever make her break down and cry.

“Mom?”

His heart was pounding now, terrified. Was it Jesse? Was it his father?

“Cass, the Rebbe had a heart attack. He died two hours ago.”

He must have fallen asleep at some point after dawn, since he’s being rudely awakened now into the full brightness of morning. It’s the telephone. He reads the caller ID and sees that it’s Roz and unplugs the receiver and turns over, Lucinda’s pillow muffling his head. The scent of her shampoo has faded over the course of the week.

Now his cell phone is tolling somewhere in the bedroom. With a sigh he gets up and traces the source to his jeans pocket. It’s Roz again. He’s up for the day now, but he doesn’t have the strength yet for Roz. He pulls on the jeans and a sweater and goes downstairs to put up the coffee. He’s feeling shaky from lack of sleep and has a moment of vertigo as he goes downstairs to pick up his
Times
. He tosses it on the kitchen counter as he pours himself a cup of the dark-roast brew, whose fragrance peps him up before he’s swallowed a mouthful.

His cell phone is vibrating again in his jeans pocket. Roz again, being relentless. He sips his coffee as he skims the headlines and then flips to the Op-Ed page.

His first thought is that he really has fallen back asleep, but now the cell phone is ringing again, and it’s Roz, of course, she must be going out of her mind with her need to reach him, and it only makes sense that she would be going out of her mind—at least, that is, if Cass is not at this moment fast asleep and dreaming bizarrely of the
New York Times
.