A Curable Romantic (101 page)

“They’re renovating at the moment.”

“And consequently, it’s closed to the public.”

“We’re sorry to have brought you all this way, gentlemen.”
clapped his hands together as though he were a tour guide at the end of a tour. “However Heavens One through Six are not nothing.”

“You may return to your homes content to have seen the greater part of it, certainly.”

The two angels shrugged at each other, as though they knew their bluff was as ludicrous as it seemed.

“In any case,”
warned, “there’s no way through the corridor of fire.”

Looking again at the twelve burning doors, I was inclined to take him at his word. There seemed little point in our proceeding. Even if we made it through the doors alive — and I assumed we would not — the Holy One (of this, I was certain) would never deign to answer our petition for clemency and mercy. This was the same deity, after all, who’d enlisted Ita as a special emissary to return to Earth for the purpose of destroying the Esperanto movement! Six celestial and one terrestrial level below us, children were freezing to death on the streets of Europe! If God could turn a blind eye to that, what good would the petition of two miserable Jews do, even though one of them was an Hasidic master?

Surely, the rebbe was on the point of conceding as much, and it was only a matter of moments before we turned back and descended to Earth. However, he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and scratched his beard, and said, “Dr. Sammelsohn.”

“Yes, my cousin?”

“Shelter with me beneath my talis and do not release it until we are through the corridor of fire. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you, yes. However …”

“Good.”

and
clucked their tongues and grumbled, as I sputtered out a litany of protests. Meanwhile, the rebbe simply and quietly withdrew his prayer shawl from some inner pocket of his outer coat. Does he keep the damned thing on him all the time, I wondered? Reciting the appropriate blessing, he whipped it into the air, wrapping it about his shoulders and his head. Holding it above him as though it were a tent, he beckoned me to join him beneath it.

What could I do? His insistence upon forging on had clearly consternated our angelic hosts; only the reverence in which they held him seemed to be keeping them from restraining us bodily. I hated to act against their wishes — surely, they’d already compromised themselves in bringing us this far — and I was equally loath to get myself into trouble. And yet I had to wonder: What’s the worst that could happen to me? Either I was already dead or the journey back to Earth would kill me, and if it didn’t, the Germans certainly would. All things considered, wasn’t burning up in the divine conflagration between the Sixth and the Seventh Heavens the preferable course?

The rebbe pulled back the sides of his jacket, and I saw that he had two rams’ horns, on either side of his waist, tucked into his belt. They looked like pistols and he, having tied his handkerchief over the lower half of his face, like a Mexican bandito. Why not go out in a blaze of glory? I thought.

“This isn’t your fight, Dr. Sammelsohn. You know that,”
said to me, as I joined the rebbe beneath his talis.

“But perhaps it is,” I said, tying my own handkerchief about my face. “Perhaps it’s everyone’s fight.”

“Ready, Dr. Sammelsohn?” the rebbe said.

“Ready, Your Holiness.”

“Now, when I give the signal, we shall charge forward. And whatever you do, do not let go of the corners of my prayer shawl.”

We huddled together, and the thought occurred to me that he would
probably never find the courage to give the signal, but once again I was wrong. Before I’d even prepared myself inwardly, the rebbe blew a blast on the ram’s horn and shrilled out the word “Now!”

I closed my eyes as we charged towards the first door. I could feel the heat of the flames scorching my skin. I crammed my fedora tighter upon my head, and the hair on the back of my hand was singed. Cringing, I moved closer to the rebbe, pressing in as near to him as I could. Nevertheless, I smelled smoke, and I worried that perhaps his talis was burning. Few must have passed this way before us, and certainly no mortals, because
corridor of fire
, as a description, turned out to be a gross understatement.
Long corridor of fire
or perhaps even
endless corridor of fire
might have been more apt. The smoke was so thick at times, and the heat so scalding, I assumed we’d suffocate before reaching its end.

“Careful, Cousin, careful,” the rebbe whispered. “Every step is perilous.” The ram’s horn he’d tucked into his gartl scraped against my hip. His mouth was so near my ear I could feel his breath through the hairs of his mustache. To quell my fear, I told myself again and again that what I was experiencing, what I imagined I was experiencing — the staircase, the angels, the various levels of Heaven, even the rebbe’s presence beside me — was a vision created from a lack of oxygen reaching my brain. Though I felt myself high above Warsaw in the corridor between the Sixth and the Seventh Heavens, reason told me I was lying in the mud and the snow, far below, dying, perhaps with a helpful bullet delivered to my brain by some passing soldier. However, before I knew it, we’d pushed through the corridor of burning doors and had entered a large and beautiful library.

IT WAS EMPTY,
except for one man, or one being rather. Even in comparison to the archangel Michael, this was an impressive fellow: tall — seven feet? eight? — extraordinarily lithe with a long flowing white beard. His arms were so muscular, they bulged inside the fabric of his sleeves. He was stationed behind a tall escritoire, the sort of writing desk at which one doesn’t sit, but rather stands. He put down his quill and looked over his glasses at us, trembling before him. He consulted his wristwatch and adjusted it and made a note in his ledger book. “Precisely on time,” he
said. With a great rustling of his wings — at one point, I tried to count the pairs, stopping at thirty-two — he moved towards us. In the meantime, the rebbe had released me from the shelter of his talis — I felt naked in the presence of this hierarch without it — and was adjusting it, as a shulgoer will, about his shoulders. I didn’t know what to expect. Surely we were poachers here, and I feared a fire might at any moment be exhaled from this being’s nostrils in which at least one of us — the one without the protective prayer shawl, I assumed — would be incinerated.

Instead, the archangel Metatron greeted us pleasantly enough. “Gentlemen, welcome, welcome! Your merits, Rav Szapira, and in your case, Dr. Sammelsohn, other arrangements, I see, have brought you safely through the portal of fire. That’s all to the good. I’d offer you a drink or even a meal, but” — he removed his eyeglasses and looked about the room — “I’m afraid we’re a bit understaffed at the moment. Permit me, however, to introduce myself. I am Metatron, King of Angels, Prince of the Divine Face, Chancellor of Heaven, Angel of the Covenant, Watchman of the Night, and Teacher of Prematurely Deceased Children.” He bowed his head. “At your service.”

I didn’t know what to say. Stunned into muteness, I took a moment to gaze about the room. I’m certain that, as time has gone by, I’ve forgotten much of what I saw there; however, I can attest to this: although the room resembled an ancient library with tall shelves and high ladders, and thick, plush chairs, upon closer examination, it all seemed to have been fashioned out of letters, words, sentences, a dense handwritten script that vibrated or even more precisely hummed continuously.

The rebbe finally spoke, and I was grateful that he did. I knew I didn’t possess words sufficiently supple or eloquent to address a hierarch of such exalted stature, and certainly not within the Heavenly precincts. It’s one thing to speak to
and his brother,
on our groaning little planet; quite another to converse face to face with God’s Personal Valet. Also, the rebbe possessed a solid religious education, something I sorely lacked, and had spent nearly all of his life in a mystical trance, meditating on the Powers That Eternally Be. I’m exaggerating, of course, but he was in his element here, whereas I felt far outside my own.