Jacob's Folly (8 page)

Tearful with longing, I turned toward the mirror, pivoting on the slick pump of the soap dispenser clumsily, still unused to all my legs, and surveyed my ugliness. My enormous convex eyes were the color of persimmons; their surface looked like the fine mesh on a fencing mask. My cranium was translucent, shiny. Yet I was prevented, mercifully, from looking into my own brains. There was perhaps some sort of skeleton holding up the structure of my head—there must be. My mouth was permanently agape. I could not bring my lips together. In my open gob, a hairy tongue lurked. I stretched it out, and a thing, like a furry cock with a flat pad at the end of it, emerged and reached all the way to the counter. It tasted something bitter and retracted, as if it had a mind of its own. My gray-and-black-striped trunk was covered by long, sparse hairs, as were my fragile, threadlike legs. Only my delicate wings held a shred of beauty. Other than that, I looked like one of the devil's minions. And yet I was a part of creation. The Old Bastard had fashioned this monstrosity and decided,
It is good
. What an egomaniac. At least I was never a maggot, but emerged fully formed like Athena, breached from the head of Zeus armed and ready for battle.

It was not astonishing to me that I had been cosmically revamped, though I found my form insulting; my cousin Gimpel, a Hasid, had told me all about
gilgul neshamot
, the transmigration of errant Jewish souls in order to atone for their sins. Some came back as Jews, or animals; but the spirits of the wicked returned as demons. Was I a demon? That at least would be interesting, because demons can converse
with humans. In fact, their main purpose, aside from stealing the breath of infants and the seed of sleeping men, was to derail the righteous and lead them into various temptations. That seemed like a perfect job for me. I decided to test myself. I took off and flew across the bathroom, landing on the rounded edge of the porcelain tub, inches from Masha's face. She was leaning back in the water now, watching a narrow column of hot water flow, amazingly to me, from the tap. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared on her upper lip. She licked them off with her tongue. I could taste the salt! Her eyes shifted. I saw what she saw: the soap. She needed it. She sat up to get it. Too fast. The pain, again. Each heartbeat rang with pain that echoed into the base of her throat.

Dong … Dong … Dong … Dong … she waited for the tolling to grow faint. She sat perfectly still, taking little sips of breath and staring at the shiny lozenge of soap. She glanced at the door. Pearl was gone to tend to the other children. Masha had to do this on her own. Once the pain had subsided, she began to move very slowly through the water, millimeter by millimeter. It was hard to tell she was moving at all. She reached the soap, clutched it, then sat back again, keeping her mouth shut tight, breathing through her nose. I waited for the pain to recede until I tried speaking in her head.

Scratch your head
, I commanded. Masha's head inched to one side, as if she were listening.
Scratch!
I said. Then I heard her thought, a feathery voice in my ear:
I wish I could just sleep in here
…

Scratch!
I implored. At last, miraculous to me as the parting of the Red Sea, a plague of frogs, a burning bush: Masha's strong, slender arm rose slowly from the water. Her tapered fingers reached into her hair, and … she scratched!

I perched at the edge of the tub, stunned by my capabilities. I simply couldn't believe it. Chills were going down my spine—if I had a spine. I felt flushed with power. It might take a long time, I vowed, but I would raise this girl up and out of her sanctified sleep of self-abnegation, raise her to fame. I would put her in that luminous story box she wasn't allowed to watch; I would destroy her obedience to the
old Tyrant, Humorist, Soul Recycler, Spy. And, somehow, I would bring Leslie Senzatimore, that pillar of goodness, down. Maybe Masha could even help me. I smelled the truth in these people; I needed to scratch until I found it. Two wounds, like a snakebite in the white thigh of Hashem.

A
side from the evening meal, every aspect of my married home life was to be maintained by Hodel. She prepared my ablutions in the morning, washed my linen, cleaned our room, and laid herself out on the bed for me each evening like a nightdress. Yet I had the impression, when we coupled, that she was holding her breath. The only time she seemed happy was when she took out her dolls and induced me to play house with them. It was a pathetic image: a young man and his bride feeding invisible porridge to a couple of rag babies. I was being sucked into her little world of the imagination, and actually began to feel paternal toward these poppets. We slept with them between us at night, made them speak in baby language, moving their heads and arms in a lifelike way. When we had intercourse, they lay with us, their bored button eyes fixed on the ceiling as if waiting for us to finish up.

After a few weeks of marriage, Hodel began to have attacks of an explosive intestinal nature. Mornings were spent almost entirely in the latrine. Her gas smelled like rotten meat. She lost weight. Her skin became pale, her face gaunt. I was increasingly repulsed by her. I hawked my merchandise through the city day after day, spending extra hours working in order to stay away. At night I bundled myself at
my side of the bed and shut my eyes, conjuring delights of the flesh with plump, healthy women I had seen on the streets, and trying to ignore my wife's toxic night flatulence. When I overcame my revulsion and mounted her, I kept imagining necrotic stalactites of excrement clinging to the inflamed lining of her intestines. Her fits of homesick weeping rained down on my ears like needles. When I managed to fall unconscious, I slept fitfully in a slick of erotic dreams oozing one after another into my head. Often I woke sticky with nocturnal emissions. I would wash myself off and try to cheer up poor tear-stained Hodel by feeding her dolls their breakfast. Given the state my life was in, it's no wonder that I turned to religion.

My cousin, Gimpel Cerf, had come to Paris from Mezritch, in Poland, to try to make a little money selling merchandise with my father and me, and in order to raise awareness of a radical new type of Judaism. They called themselves the Hasidim, the holy ones. They were known for their dancing and singing, a joyous form of worship. They put less emphasis on learning than we Talmudic Jews. For them, the simple were most beloved by God. I first met Gimpel in my parents' apartment one Saturday. My mother liked me to come to eat the last Shabbat meal with her, my father, and my brother every few weeks. I was grateful for a respite from dinners at the Mendel household, and walked up the rickety stairs of our tenement the first Saturday of every month without fail. Hodel rarely accompanied me on these visits; either her bowels were liquefying, confining her to the latrine, or she said she needed to help her mother—who of course would have liked nothing better than to be rid of her for a day.

The first person I saw when I walked into the room was my little dumpling of a mother, the crisp lace of her Shabbat bonnet framing her scrubbed, full face, her small, upturned mouth and pointed nose giving her the look of a cheerful fox. I hugged her, drinking in her
intoxicating aroma until my sinuses were filled to the brim. My mother worked in a bakery. The nooks and crannies of her head—the soft cartilage valleys behind her ears; the neat crease where the solid flesh under her chin joined her neck; the downy nape—smelled of challah, every day of the week. It was her perfume. When I was a boy, I imagined that my mother was originally made of challah dough. Instead of being born like everybody else, she had been baked in the oven until she was the perfect mother. Anyway, I released my hold on her, and was very embarrassed to see a shambolic young man in a stained black caftan beaming at me from the kitchen table with a smile of benevolence and understanding, a fur hat set back on his head, plump hands open, palms down, on the table. One brown eye wandered in its socket; the other gazed at me with burning affection. His beard was sparse, his side curls long. When he saw me loosen my grip on my mother, he stood, opening his short arms, and exclaimed, “Jacob! At last!”

Reluctantly, I walked up to him. I felt the shock of his hug deep in my rib cage. His breath was hot and smelled rather pleasantly like a pond. The hug went on far longer than I had anticipated. There was rocking back and forth involved. My arms dangled crookedly, splayed out by the force of his embrace. I looked imploringly at my mother, whose hands were clasped at her breast as she watched, her neatly frilled head cocked.

“And this, of course, is your cousin Gimpel, who has come to visit all the way from Mezritch,” said my mother, who then walked over to the hearth, lit that afternoon by a gentile woman my parents hired for every Shabbat, and began to serve the stew that hung in a pot over the fire. Shlomo, my scholarly younger brother, walked in, shuffling his feet, a book under his arm. I noticed he was developing a faint dark mustache, like a smudge of dirt on his upper lip. He would be fifteen soon. I felt for him, thinking they would try to marry him off any minute. Then his life would be over, just as mine was.

Watching Cousin Gimpel eat was a diverting experience. He took ravenous bites, hunkering low over his bowl, then hummed as he
chewed, gazing up at the ceiling, entranced. My parents ignored him as he did this, though the muscles in my father's jaw were standing out like cables as he chewed, and my brother shook his head in disapproval several times. At one point Gimpel stopped humming, looked down from the ceiling, and saw me staring at him. He smiled, half-chewed noodles peeking out from between his teeth.

“I am releasing the sparks,” he explained, his
s
's spraying a little shower of kugel across the table at me. “From the food.”

“The sparks?” I asked.

“The spiritual life in the food,” he said. “That's what produces the taste.” I looked at my father. Impassive, he took a helping of cabbage. ‘“And they saw God and they ate and drank,'” continued Gimpel, smiling, holding up his small wineglass. “Exodus 24:10. The rebbe says that when a man eats he should free his mind so that it can soar to think on God while each mouthful is being swallowed. This is how we will right the universe and bring on Moshiach. Bit by bit.” He took a gulp of his wine, then started humming again.

“By eating?” I asked.

Gimpel stopped humming and looked at me. He seemed shocked. I wondered if I had angered him. But he laughed, his open mouth packed with chewed noodles, his belly shaking. He laughed so hard his eyes were watering, and he dried them with his napkin. “By eating!” he kept repeating to himself hoarsely. Finally, when he had recovered, he looked at me with a serious, loving gaze.

“In time, I'll tell you all about it,” he said.

The following day, Gimpel followed me on my rounds as I lugged my peddler's box up and down the streets energetically trumpeting my wares, the leather strap cutting into my neck. As I chanted the contents of my box in a singsong voice, my bearded cousin followed silently, his beaver-fur hat gleaming atop his head, sidelocks drooping, caftan fluttering behind him like a black sail, the gaggle of iron pots and kettles slung over his arm clanging with his every step. Walking ahead of him in my elegant pointed shoes, I imagined I was leading a
couple of heifers to market, such was the bell-like ringing of his merchandise. Gusts of his pond breath enveloped me whenever my pace lagged. Mortified by his absurd getup, I tried to keep a few paces ahead, proclaiming up into the balconies, “Ladies' lace collars! Pocketknives! Snuffboxes! Wonderful prices!” I sold nothing. By noon, sheer fatigue forced me to sit down on the step of an equestrian statue. Gimpel sat beside me, swiveling my peddler's box to face him and opening each of the smooth-action drawers with the intent curiosity of a chimpanzee.

My box was a mobile shop, meticuously organized. I had bought it cheap from a man in dire need of funds, about to be deported from Paris on charges of selling without a passport. Made of rosewood, it had four drawers. Arrayed in the first and thinnest of my drawers were small personal items: snuffboxes, shoe and belt buckles, watch fobs, and other trinkets, depending on what I had come across in the markets or fairs. In the next drawer down I kept gloves, napkins, lace collars, handkerchiefs, epaulets, and leather portfolios. In the third, I kept razors, hunting knives, and charming little pocketknives. In the bottom, largest drawer, I kept chisels, kitchen knives, small axes, inkstands, and other bulky items.

“You are not strong enough to carry all this,” said Gimpel, after his long, simian examination.

“I do it every day,” I said breezily.

“You will ruin your back,” he exclaimed. “You should let me carry it.”

My neck and shoulders were permanently sore; it was a tempting offer. Yet he was driving my business away just walking behind me.

“Thank you,” I said. “But I think it's better if, after today, we sell separately. You might do better in our neighborhood.”

Gimpel nodded, smiling, his good eye on my face. I felt suffused with shame.

“On the other hand,” I stammered, “if you really don't mind, I would be relieved if you—just for an hour—” Gimpel's face brightened.

He stood, took off his hat, revealing a yarmulke embedded in a greasy mop of hair, and heaved the heavy box up, drawing the yoke around his neck. He then replaced the beaver-fur hat delicately, as if it were his crown.

“I will take your things,” I said.

“No,” he said, reaching for a kettle. “Today you will walk free. You do the yelling and the selling. I will be your ox.” We set off. I couldn't help feeling he looked better carrying a Jew's box, oxlike figure that he was, his untamed beard and sidelocks drooping, than I with my slim hips, pale hands, and tethered hair.

In the coming weeks, we became companions. We shared the weight of my peddler's box, and some of my profits. Gimpel loved Paris, and kept exclaiming about the proportions of the buildings, gesturing broadly with his free arm.

Due, I think, to Gimpel's flamboyant appreciation of the Pont Notre-Dame, coupled with his super-Semitic attire, Inspector Buhot, the police inspector in charge of the Jews, stopped us on the bridge one morning. Buhot was a gaunt man with a chapped face who carried a notebook everywhere, jotting down the comings and goings of each Jew in Paris with persnickety attention to detail. Buhot knew us all, and had us individually pegged, good or bad, honest or dishonest. He arranged to have us deported and imprisoned regularly, like a stern mother sending her child to sit in the corner, then welcomed us back after a few months with a cool smile.

“Good morning, Jacob,” Buhot exclaimed with edgy affability, the skin beneath his eyebrows red and flaky, his lips chapped. “Who is your friend? I don't recognize him.”

“This is my cousin, Gimpel Cerf,” I said. “Gimpel, may I present to you Inspector Buhot.”

“
Beau—beau!
” exclaimed Gimpel in what was perhaps the only French word he knew, his unruly eye floating upward, his free arm sweeping wide to include the bridge built up on either side with shops
and houses, the clusters of ragamuffins, peddlers, nobility, and tradesmen swarming by us, the glittering Seine below. Inspector Buhot assessed him warily. Gimpel's caftan, wild beard, and long sidelocks were of interest to him.

“Gimpel doesn't speak much French,” I explained. “He is here from Poland. Mezritch.”

“Ah—Poland. Is this how they look in Poland these days?” he asked me. I blushed. “You are always so tidy, Jacob,” said Buhot. “You should teach your friend how to present himself. He will make a lot more money that way. Parisians aren't used to shaggy Jews. And teach him some French,” said Buhot.

“We will teach him.” I said. “Give him your papers,” I instructed Gimpel in Yiddish. The penalty for being a Jew without a valid passport was deportation or imprisonment. Smiling like an idiot, Gimpel handed the tall, bony Buhot a wrinkled paper covered in florid script. Buhot squinted, attempting to read the tiny writing. I noticed a faint tremor in his fingers.

“It's in Polish,” I said helpfully.

“He should have reported to me when he got here,” said Buhot, handing the paper back to Gimpel. “He's here illegally.”

“He only just arrived. We were going to pay a visit to you this afternoon.”

“What is your business in Paris?” Buhot asked Gimpel, his eyes two crystalline points of inquisition. I translated his question into Yiddish.

“I have some pots, some pans …,” said Gimpel with a shrug. “I would like to sell them.”

“How long do you intend to stay?” asked Buhot.

“That depends on you,” said Gimpel, with a servile bow. “I must return to Poland within the year, anyway.”

“You'll be back in Mezritch a good deal sooner than that, my man,” said Buhot with a fatuous smile. Then, turning to me, he announced, “I will be in my office at the Châtelet in two hours. Bring him in, I'll
give him three months. Your father is a pillar of the community, Jacob. It's for him I am being so lenient. Normally I would send this fellow back out of the city tonight.” I nodded, proud of my swift translation. My French was better than I'd realized.

When the inspector left, Gimpel chuckled and poked me in the ribs.

“You were ashamed of me,” he said without rancor.

“No, I wasn't,” I said, irritated.

“It's true what he said,” Gimpel said, looking over at me. “You don't look like a Jew. You look like a Frenchman. That's the problem with the Jews in Paris. They all want to be French. How many—two hundred and fifty males in the whole city, your father said? In Mezritch we have more than a thousand people! We have schools. We have a synagogue. You don't even have a synagogue. It isn't right.”

“They only let a few of us into the city at a time,” I whined, “to lend them money and sell them what they need. They love to borrow money from us but then they blame us for lending them money. What are we supposed to do? We aren't allowed in the guilds, we have to carry everything around all day on our backs. We can't own land. The Portuguese Jews, they do better. I don't know why …”