Gospel (97 page)

It was soon five o'clock, time to get back on the road and hit the Jerusalem rush hour.

“I think I speak for all of us,” said O'Hanrahan, revived after a cup of coffee, courtesy of his interrogator, “when I say it is time for a
drink.
”

*   *   *

After relaxing with some wine in a New City bistro, they went to a deli restaurant run by Parisian Jews where the rabbi, as if determined to show a softer side, picked up the check and ordered one of everything generously, and promised O'Hanrahan the best chopped liver in the city.

“This is as long as I've ever gone,” said O'Hanrahan, returned to ebullience, “without an Israeli chopped-liver fix. I was on the verge of a
crise de foie.
”

Lucy groaned and the rabbi pretended to ignore him.

“Some coffee?” the waiter asked. “French roast.”

“A
consommation
devoutly to be wished.”

“I see you're back to normal, Paddy,” said the rabbi.

Then they trudged to a dessert café in the New City along Ben Yehuda, a pedestrian zone perfect for people-watching. Lucy, more paranoid than she was yesterday, wondered aloud if there was a chance of someone hurling a bomb in such a populous, much-enjoyed place.

“Of course there is,” said the rabbi, pouring the three of them another glass of chilled South African white wine. “But we cannot live in fear. We must trust in God. We will not…” But the rabbi scrapped the inevitable manifesto to follow. Enough for today, already!

He changed the topic to more mystical, escapist topics: the
gematriot
of the Sephardim. The rabbi unfolded a napkin and wrote out the ten
sefiroth
and twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alephbeth, singing as he wrote them, as if they were the ABCs: “… qoph, resh, sin, taw … and I've run out of song,” he concluded at the 22nd and final letter. “Now each letter has a value. Aleph to yodh is 1 through 10, on to qoph is 10 through 100 by tens, and the last three are 200, 300, and 400.”

“No values for vowel sounds?” checked Lucy.

“What vowels? Who taught you Hebrew? Can you read it without points?”

“Not very well,” she confessed, needing the marks that gave away the vowel sounds between the consonants.

“Not very well, she says. You read it with points, it's not reading,” the rabbi pronounced. “This is how they teach Hebrew at Chicago? Who was your teacher?”

Lucy pointed at O'Hanrahan.

“Paddy, you should retire all over again,” said the rabbi.

“I can't help it,” said O'Hanrahan, “if she didn't do her homework.”

“I showed up for more classes than you did,” said Lucy. Turning to the rabbi, she asked of
gematriot,
“Isn't this Jewish word-magic stuff all just coincidence? I mean, if you play with all words long enough can't you get them to signify something?”

“Yes,” said the rabbi slowly, “but too many of these kinds of parallels and coincidences show up in Torah. Here's an example from
Habakkuk,
one of my specialties. “In
Habakkuk
3:2 it says, ‘In wrath remember mercy,' or
rachem
in Hebrew, which comes to a value of 248. There are 248 Mosaic laws. The Law given to us by God is His greatest mercy.”

“Do you think,” asked Lucy, “that the Babylonian masters who compiled the Bible invented this word-magic and planted it in their revised editions?”

“Could well be,” said Rabbi Hersch. “Can you imagine the effect that rediscovering this sort of thing had on a learned man in ancient times or the Middle Ages? It was all the confirmation one needed to see that Hebrew was the very language of God, in and of itself magical, spiritual. It was not a long step to imagine that the letters and words themselves had magical powers. God, it is said, created the world by pronouncing his name. The Jewish custom of wearing phylacteries—you know what a phylactery is?”

Lucy said yes, remembering one of her great embarrassing moments when referring to a phylactery in Old Testament History at St. Eulalia's as a “prophylactic.” She afterward pretended to have done it on purpose to anger Sister Miriam.

“The
thephallin,
the
mezuzah,
a prayer cylinder that can be affixed to doors … this reinforces the belief in the power of the words of the Torah. The name of Yahweh, the four consonants, the holy tetragrammetron, the 42-letter name of God, the 72-letter name of God, whatever, were powerful spells to conjur with, hence, the necessity of the commandment not to take thy Lord's holy name in vain. This commandment may have less to do with disrespect than it does with the unknown, unpredictable powers of those letters. Moses killed the Egyptian with the
schem ha-mephorasch,
the spoken name of God,” the rabbi noted. “And early mystical works kind to Jesus assumed he knew the
schem
to raise up Lazarus. But, little girl, don't pronounce this word unless you are pure of soul, perfectly chaste of body.”

“Well, that leaves me out,” mumbled O'Hanrahan.

“What happens?” asked Lucy.

“You die, of course. I'm not sure a woman can employ the
schem
in any event…”

(What of Lilith, first wife of Adam, Mordechai? For centuries rabbis held that Adam's first mate was not Eve but Lilith, a not-so-great creation who coupled with Adam frequently, giving birth to the demons that plague all women today. She was banished from Eden because she decided she wanted to be the boss and proved her defiance by speaking the
schem.
Then three angels ran her out of Eden and into Egypt where Lilith threatened to be nearby for every human birth to provide pain, make for stillborn infants, deformities, and deaths of the mother. That's why an amulet with the three angels Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangeloph is still worn by Sephardic Jews in some lands. And there was another woman who used the
schem,
a Babylonian Jew named Ishtahar. The Angel Schamchasu had this plan to make her a prostitute—mortal man cannot comprehend the wickedness, the silliness, the bother of most of Our angels—and Ishtahar spoke the
schem
and was allowed to hide in a Lower Heaven.)

O'Hanrahan interrupted by signaling for the waiter and ordering another bottle of Johannesburg Riesling.
“That,”
he insisted, “was word-magic.”

The rabbi: “I was raised as a child by my uncle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a strong distaste for this word hocus-pocus, because it was one more thing the Hasid believed and we didn't. My uncle said what you say, little girl, that you can prove anything with it if you try.”

O'Hanrahan interrupted. “The name ‘Jesus' and the word ‘Messiah' both come to 74, which proves very inconvenient for the
gematria
crowd.”

“‘Jesus' is Greek,” reminded the rabbi. “It doesn't work with his Aramaic name. Anyway, in Brooklyn I heard the story from a Hasid about Rabbi Nehemiah who lived in a muddy little town by the name of Lodzuk in Poland. A Cossack-style raid in the early 1800s left the town burned to the ground and the people without a kopek. They turned to Nehemiah, their
tzaddik,
their Hasidic guru, if you will, and begged to know why God had allowed this to happen. The rabbi responded that it was God's purpose that they should be brought low so they might see the wonders of Torah. Ludzuk, L-D-Z-W-K came to 67, he explained, and when added to “Torah,” 611, one got 678, which corresponds to Aravot, the Seventh and highest Heaven. Since
aravot
is also ‘fields' he suggested the town return to them and begin planting their crops anew.”

“Wow,” said Lucy.

“As a kid in Brooklyn, I also heard tell of a nearby
tzaddik
who moved his whole congregation from the Sudetenland in the 1920s because of a chance remark an elder made that Hitler coming to power represented the writing on the wall. In Daniel, you'll recall the finger of God comes down and writes
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsim,
whose letters have a value of 1776, the year of the birth of America. On the basis of that, he told the village to pack up for America and good thing he did. Would that
that gematria
had been the rage in Middle Europe!”

“Claptrap is claptrap,” said the doubting O'Hanrahan, “be it Roman Catholic relic nonsense or Jewish word-game nonsense. You gonna show Lucy how to make a golem, Morey?”

Rabbi Hersch began an explanation of how to create life:

“
Job
28:13, as discussed in Midrash Tehillim, suggests that Torah was not in the exactly correct order, a letter or two out of place, chapters rearranged. If someone could reassemble it in the order God created it, then they too could create worlds and bring the dead to life.”

Lucy was reminded of what little she knew about Jewish mysticism. “And this is what kabbalists through the Middle Ages were trying to do?”

“You could make a man,” explained the rabbi with a straight face, “if one recited the Hebrew and the other 21 Divine Alphabets—there were many formulas—but your man-made creature, though alive, could never talk or think or speak. That alone was for God to accomplish. However, if one stumbled upon Torah in the correct order, one could make a man who could talk and have the gift of language. Solomon ibn-Gabirol did in the 1100s and he created a woman who cleaned his house and cooked his meals.”

O'Hanrahan: “Cheaper than buying one of those blow-up dolls, wouldn't you say?”

Rabbi Hersch: “Ignore this man.”

O'Hanrahan: “Maybe you can get Rabbi Hersch to make
you
a man, Luce.”

Lucy attempted to raise the tone. “And so, Rabbi, you've been looking in these medieval Kabbalah guidebooks for alphabets?”

“To go a long way around, yes, I've been looking in copies of the
Alphabet of Ben Zira.
Ben Zira was a man with a great reputation for making and unmaking golems. I'm trying to imagine what Rabbi Rosen looked at when he translated the
Gospel of Matthias
in 1949. Did you ever meet Rabbi Rosen, Paddy?”

“I glimpsed him at some dinner once. I knew who he was, and I certainly knew who his wife was.”

Both he and Rabbi Hersch chuckled about this.

Lucy asked, “What's so special about the wife?”

“She was 23,” said O'Hanrahan. “He was 84 or 85.”

“She was 22,” the rabbi corrected. “It was just a visa marriage, to get her out of the Soviet Union. ‘Mrs. Rosen' was one of the most beautiful women that I have ever seen.”

“She was 23,” O'Hanrahan insisted. “I spent an hour trying to communicate with her at a party. Sumptuous dark Russian features. Anyway, she stayed at Rabbi Rosen's house until accommodation could be assigned for her and the jokes … well, you can imagine the jokes. A 23-year-old-bombshell and an 84-year-old man.”

“Why do you keep correcting me?” Then Rabbi Hersch swallowed heavily.

“Something wrong, Rabbi?” Lucy asked. O'Hanrahan glanced up from his newspaper to see if the rabbi had become ill.

“No,” said Rabbi Hersch tersely, distracted. “Jesus,” he muttered to himself, “of course.”

He stood up.

“I forgot an appointment,” he added, seeming to curse himself. “I have stood this person up a hundred times—gotta go. Can't believe it…”

O'Hanrahan: “Why don't you make a phone call?”

“No,” he said, taking his sportscoat from the back of the chair and putting it on. “Gotta be running along here.”

Rabbi Hersch departed and O'Hanrahan and Lucy sat together in silence.

Lucy watched the rabbi shuffle through the crowd until she could see him no longer. Gabriel, she felt, had simply misjudged this man. Okay, so this spring he was in Rome where he wasn't supposed to be, seemingly working behind Dr. O'Hanrahan's back. He must have had some kind of reason.

“I've been meaning,” began Lucy, “to ask you a question, sir. About what happened in Rome this spring. You know, with Gabriel and all that.”

“Is this another attempt to get me to make it up with that worm?”

“No, this is a factual matter.”

He waved her to proceed, though he withdrew his hand quickly, clutching it, hoping to numb a sudden pain. Ah, the pains again!

Lucy: “That day in April when Gabriel stole the scroll in Rome and ran away? Were you with the rabbi on that trip?”

“No, he was back in Jerusalem.”

“You're sure?”

“I waved good-bye at the ferry terminal.” He clutched his arm, discreetly. “You know differently?”

Lucy shrugged.

O'Hanrahan sipped the last of his wine and decided to pursue Lucy's question. Maybe she had discovered something … but just then a shooting pain pierced his left hand. He quickly set down the bottle unsurely and clasped his hand in his lap. Was Lucy seeing this? He looked up to see her unaware, borrowing his
Herald Tribune
to read.

O'Hanrahan felt in his jacket. Oh just great, just fucking great: his Percodan was at the King David Hotel. His passport had been in
this
jacket and when he switched jackets at the hotel the Percodan remained in the one he'd thrown on the bed. Well, perhaps these damn circulation pains would stop. His left hand throbbed and the right joined it in sympathy.

It was getting worse, his condition.

In the mornings he'd wake up and his hands would be ice-cold, and on some mornings he would have pains in his hands and feet. He would get out of bed and stand so the blood would flow into his feet and then rub his hands under hot water, but lately that was not stopping the conspiracy of fouled circulation, arthritis, labile blood pressure, blocked arteries, and whatever it was that was plaguing his liver.

(Is that such a mystery, Patrick?)

He looked at his glass of wine and lifted it to his lips in defiance. If cirrhosis is going to take me out, so be it! It's too late now. No liver transplant for such an old man—