Jephte's Daughter (38 page)

It was a brutal, savage story. A history of martyrdom and suffering, of unbelievable achievement and scholarship. And throughout, there was the constant, shameful role of the Church in persecutions, in forced conversions, in inquisitions, expulsions, and massacres—a constant, unflagging determination to degrade and wholly destroy the very people and culture that had spawned it. Why, in this very city, he thought, less than nine hundred years ago, the Crusader Godfrey de Buillion had rounded up all the Jews into a synagogue and set it on fire, destroying the entire Jewish population. He saw the flames in his mind’s eye, and smelled the burning flesh, and in his imagination a beautiful dark-haired woman looked out with tortured, accusing eyes, a small child cried out in anguish.

It was late when he finished reading. He closed the book with trembling hands and touched his face. It was burning with shame and humiliation. How is it that I never knew, never understood? It was as if one had found out one’s own dear and loving mother had in her youth been a camp guard at Auschwitz. For the Church was his mother, he thought. He had always thought his attachment to it was a striving for something higher, something full of goodness. Then how was it possible, this terrible, incontrovertible evidence of unbridled cruelty? He thought of Batsheva. How could she love him, knowing what the Church had done, his own people had done, to her people? It was good that he had left her. He was not worthy of her.

But then all his old loyalties surfaced. My terrible thoughts about the Church are a blasphemy. He was again in an agony of split feelings, of uncertainty. He had a sudden, irrational urge to go down upon his knees and beg forgiveness. But from whom, and for what, he could not really say.

“I say, old chap, don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit?” Jean-Paul sat by his bedside. David looked up at him. What did he want? He pulled the covers up over his head. Jean-Paul pulled them down again. “You haven’t been to matins or to class in a week. Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s none of your business. Please go away,” David pleaded with him, too weak to argue. He had not spoken to anyone of what he had been going through. It was as if he had found something out about his own family, his parents, that filled him with incredible shame, and he wanted to hide it, to deny it.

But suddenly he felt this man was his brother. He sat up and gripped his arm. “I have been reading the history of the Jews…” He hesitated. What did he want to say? He was again confused.

“Sad business, that.” Jean-Paul shook his head. “But what d’you want to read that for? Too depressing.”

“Then you’ve read about it. About what the Church did.”

“Of course, I’m no expert. I know that the Church has made every effort to save souls. I admit it hasn’t tried hard enough with the Jews. Sad, a whole country full of people who deny their own salvation. But it’s their own stubbornness. A ‘stiff-necked’ people, eh? Salvation is theirs, but they refuse it.”

“‘Has made every effort, hasn’t tried hard enough…”’ David ran his hand through his hair. I am going mad, he thought, totally furious. “If we had made any more effort, we would have wiped every last Jew off the face of the earth long before Hitler even took his shot at it.”

The other man got up, stiff with offense. “I don’t know what your problem is, David. I was just reaching out to you in Christian charity. You should also know Father Quinn has been asking about you. I think you’re in for some trouble. Why don’t you come back to class?”

David lay down again and hugged himself. I must get out of here, he thought. Get out or go crazy. And then, in a flash of sudden inspiration, a plan formed out of the formless chaos of his troubled soul. The desert, he thought.

He bought a backpack and filled it with crackers and cans of food. He packed a flashlight and, as an afterthought, a few candles. He took canteens of water and a sleeping bag and a hat and then boarded a bus to Beersheba. Only when the vehicle actually began to move did a sense of panic hit him. He had no clear idea where he was going, or how long he would stay; no solid, mapped-out series of steps that would lead him from point A to point B. He, a man of intelligence and careful planning, who had envisioned his life piece by piece ever since his earliest childhood, now found himself adrift, rudderless on a vast, chartless sea.

He watched the landscape change, the thin foliage finally erased by the desert’s merciless desolation. And yet, it provided a landscape that was without distraction, the awesome monotony of sand, cliff, sand, rolling hills, dark-gray granite, repeating itself like a visual incantation that lulled the mind of the beholder into a trancelike stillness and expectancy.

He got off the bus alone at a stop in the middle—as far as he could tell—of nowhere, somewhere outside Beersheba, although how far he could not tell. Other stops had had too many people, or boasted a small roadside stand with soft drinks that spoke of tourist buses and little clicking cameras. He looked around him at the steep cliffs of gray-white stone, bare except for random tufts of stubborn foliage harshly nurtured between the rocks. By the side of the road someone had thrown down a neatly chiseled staff. He picked it up, feeling its good weight, the friendly warmth of its sanded surface, and took it as an omen that he had come to the right place.

He made his way slowly at first, climbing and pulling himself up with the help of his staff, or sometimes with just the pressure of his strong hands on the unyielding stone, still hot from the incredible strength of the waning desert sun. The sweat, which had bathed his body in a fine mist at first, began to run, streamlike, down his arms and back in endless rivulets until his thin cotton shirt and jeans clung to him as if he had jumped headfirst into a pool of water. Imperceptibly, the light began to change, going from white-hot steel gray to buttercup yellow and finally to a burnished copper glow, like dying embers.

His body, at first welcoming the diminishing strength of the heat that had pummeled it and squeezed it dry, suddenly felt its loss as a fine shiver of cold ran down his spine. With a suddenness that was incomprehensible, the heat and light vanished without a trace as the earth became colder and darker than he had ever dreamed possible. With icy fingers, he searched for his sweater and unrolled his sleeping bag. He lifted his canteen straight up, draining its last drops, and took a few ravenous bites from his dry crackers. He was starving, he realized, his overstrained body crying out for replenishment. But he just didn’t feel he could get involved in the opening of cans, in tasting and swallowing. He wanted his body to leave him alone, to be quiet and undemanding; to leave him totally free to think and feel about more important things. He took another handful of crackers and ate quickly and without pleasure, simply to be done with it.

Using his flashlight, he gathered together some stones—moving them with enormous care lest he uncover a scorpion’s nest or a desert snake—to form a protective pillow around his head. A sense of the dangers surrounding him sometimes made a wave of shock run through his stomach like a sudden cramp, but his mind was curiously unalarmed. Fierce optimism? Indifferent fatalism? He wasn’t sure which.

He took out a single candle, lit it, and placed it upright between the stones. Silently, he watched its tiny flickering flame struggle bravely and foolishly against the overwhelming darkness, watching it so closely that even after the wax had melted and the flame had extinguished, its brilliant glitter still danced behind his eyelids.

He crawled into the sleeping bag and tried to get warm. He looked up at the crescent moon and the stars that had never appeared to him before so close and filled with light. All of his senses seemed amplified, almost drugged. There was a new clarity in his eyes that made vivid distinctions between rocks and little desert plants bathed in the silver sheen of moonlight; a new alertness in his ears that picked up and combined the keening of small desert birds, the rustle of rare branches, the tiny grating sound of windblown gravel, turning them into a kind of music. He smelled the dry, almost chemical-like dust of the barren, phosphate-rich earth and the salty, earthy odor of his own exhausted body until the smells became one: his and the earth’s. Adam, he thought, newly risen from the earth, a vessel prepared by God to hold a piece of godliness, a soul. He hugged his chest and clenched his eyes, suddenly afraid of the darkness, the wilderness alive with unknown and unseen dangers, afraid for the very body whose needs he so wanted, so tried, to forget. That was wrong, that urge to be pure spirit, he understood. To be pure soul, he realized, was to be an angel, was to be dead. To eat, to drink, to make love, were all means to an end, not to be despised, but to be cherished, to be elevated to godliness with pure intentions. His love for Batsheva was purely good, as upright and unblemished as the golden flame that illuminated the darkness. It is not good for man to be alone—God said this, he thought. He does not ask this of us. Even Moses, matchless leader and prophet, even Aaron, the highest priest in the holy temple, were married and had children. He hugged himself in an agony of confusion and fear and despair.

“They wandered in the wilderness in a desert way,” he prayed softly, his teeth chattering from cold and fear. “They found no city of habitation. Hungry and thirsty, their souls fainting inside them, they cried out to the Lord in their trouble and He delivered them out of their distresses. He led them on a straight path, saving them from all harm…He has satisfied the longing soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with good.” God, he whispered, please help me. I’m lost. I want so much to sit by Your side, to please You. But I can’t seem to find You, to understand what it is You want of me, to understand who You are. And then, searching for the perfect words to sum up his plea, he said: “Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.” Point my way, O Lord. Give me a sign…

His eyes began to relax, their harsh pinched lines smoothing into sleep. Wave after wave of calming darkness washed over him so that he no longer felt the hard ground, the individual pieces of unrelenting stones, pressing into his back and skull. He was conscious of nothing but his thoughts, almost free from the grip of his conscious mind, floating above him in curious objectivity. In the darkness, he saw a ladder that reached from just beside his head to heaven. He peered at it curiously as figures suddenly appeared, slowly climbing up. Then one turned and beckoned to him. He strained to see who it was. Father Gerhart. He beckoned with a lusty, insistent sweep of his vigorous arm. David felt no pull, no urge, not even guilt, as he lay watching until the figure finally shrugged and turned, continuing its solitary upward climb until it disappeared totally. And then he saw Batsheva and Gershon. They smiled down at him but did not beckon. He felt angry and rejected watching them climb away from him, leaving him so far below, but then he realized that, unlike Father Gerhart, they had left behind a trail of light for him to follow if he wished. But his body was paralyzed even as he strained to lift his feet. He felt someone had jumped on top of him and was wrestling him to the ground, pinning his hands and legs to the earth, immobilizing him. He wrestled with the dark, solid presence, his hands pressing into the heavy, muscular flesh that was suffocating him, until suddenly the pressure lifted and began hurrying away. But he grasped it by the leg and wouldn’t let it go. “Bless me,” he called out. “You tried to kill me and now you must bless me,” he said so loudly that he awoke to find himself shouting into the pale new light of dawn.

For almost two weeks he wandered, staff in hand, through the desert, stopping at roadside stands and hotels whenever his supplies or his strength ran out. His face turned a deep, rich brown and the skin of his arms turned almost leathery. He lost weight, growing leaner and stronger each day, and felt a similar lightening taking place in his overburdened soul. And yet, although he was totally alone and went days without speaking to another human being, he began to feel a strange presence accompanying him through the almost deathlike isolation, a companionable, unnameable presence that seemed as close to him as his own skin; as invisible and yet as unmistakably real as the wind. At times it seemed to be leading him, blanketing him with comfort and protection, and at times to be following behind him, allowing him to choose freely every step of the way. It was at times awesome, and at times as comfortable and familiar as the food that nourished him, the water that slaked his burning thirst. This was what she meant, he thought. To feel God’s presence when you brush your teeth, when you eat your breakfast. It was not filtered through anything else, not removed, but alive and almost palpable. He thought of the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness for forty years until they knew Him, until the bond was forged, the marriage consummated.

But out of the desert, would all the clarity leave him, the presence depart? What did he know now that he hadn’t known before? What answers would he bring back? His eyes filled with tears. Nothing. No closer really. But that, too, was simplistic. He knew he had to take the plunge and risk losing everything. He must go back.