The Book of Jonah (38 page)

Now looking at it a second time, there was a second, passing disbelief, like a momentarily obscuring cloud. But she knew—this was her: standing on the lawn of the house she'd grown up in, at the party on the day of her graduation from high school. There was the unflattering white dress she'd worn, the garland of gardenias in her black, wiry former hair, her overlarge, unbroken former nose—all of it as it had been when Margaretha had pulled the camera out of her knit purse that afternoon in June 2001.

She thought of the hotel room in New Jersey, where she'd gone after leaving Princeton—the compromises she had made, had been so deliberate in making, in order to leave that room: The Septembers passed now without her noticing; she didn't suffer so much from the lack of companionship in her life; she had even made a fine career for herself, first sitting behind desks in Los Angeles art galleries, lately engaged in far-different activities. It was to that girl's credit all she had managed to leave behind in that room. She only wished she had held on to the journal she'd kept then. She would have liked to encounter that girl, at least one last time. She knew there were not many of these revenant Judiths left for her to run into.

She licked her thumb, and tried to wipe away Margaretha's dumb embellishments. She succeeded only in smudging the colors of the forehead beneath the crude crown of thorns. But even so: In the face of this girl—formal, somewhat self-conscious, looking back at her from across an ocean of years—she could see, could feel in the texture of the memory it elicited, not just the immediate pride of the moment, or the luxurious gratitude the girl felt for everything in her life, but most potently of all, the promise she sensed in everything to come: the unquestioned faith that ahead of her, beyond this afternoon, beyond the passing discomfort of posing for this picture—was so much more—

*   *   *

Jonah came out of the bakery, carrying two cups of coffee; he had packets of sugar in his pocket, in case that was how she took it. As he approached the bench, he saw she was shaking violently—at first he thought with chills, but then he recognized with sobs.

Here it was, then: everything she had never gotten over. And wasn't it like this for everyone? Scratch beneath the barest surface, and you found it—could see it: that gaping need.

And then Jonah saw the street before him—Amsterdam—engulfed in scorching sunlight—felt the furnace heat of it on his face—the sun burning the moisture from the air—heat rising in waves from the cobbles, the shingles on the rooftops smoldering—the canal dry, its stone bed cracked—the boats tipped sideways into it, ropes tying them impotently to their moorings. And she sat there in the midst of it—eyes sunken, tongue swollen, lips parted and cracked—her hair abuzz with flies—so thin the coat seemed to fold shapelessly against itself—shaking with tearless sobs. He sensed there were others—hidden in attics, huddled beneath the bridges—but he saw only her—the undulating waves of heat rising from the cobbles thicker, faster—distorting what he saw—she was there, she was gone—she was white as a pillar of salt—and before he could take another breath she had vanished—became indiscernible among the rising heat, the searing sunlight. Then the light became duller, weakened into the gray of the clouds—the canal grew placid and darkly green, and he saw people walking into the bakery behind him, carrying umbrellas across the half-moon bridges over the water. And there was Judith, crying.

He remembered her—he knew her. He had seen her before, in the photograph on the bookcase in Becky's apartment, the night of Becky's party. She was the woman he had thought of when it all began. This was Judith.

He knew it could have been anyone: an apocalypse could occur in any life, any two lives could meet in a doorway. But she was the one he had seen, she was the one sitting on a bench, crying—waiting for him. Go there, he thought. Go there and offer—something. Was she not, in her way, soaking wet, just like him?

He recognized he had come to this point again—was faced again, with this leap. He dropped the coffees and ran away up the street.

And in the only instance of moral judgment in the entire period of what might be called his prophecy, Jonah would conclude that if such a thing as sin existed, then this had been it.

*   *   *

It had started to rain again by the time Jonah arrived back at the houseboat. He heard music from below as he descended the steps at the bow, sounds of laughter. He came down into the main living area—a rectangular room with a low ceiling, filled almost to the walls by a great central table of rough-hewn wood. Max was seated at this table with two young women Jonah didn't recognize—and even if one of them hadn't been absently leafing through a copy of
Lonely Planet Europe
, even if they hadn't both been wearing North Face jackets (red and blue, respectively), he believed they would have been easily identifiable as American tourists. He detected a distinctly American freshness, an eagerness, in the frank prettiness of their faces, in the practicality of their pulled-back hair, even in the cheerfully colored Post-its sticking out of the guidebook.

“Rabbi!” Max cried amiably. He and the young woman nearest him at the table—round-faced, her hair brown with blond highlights, wearing the red North Face jacket—were playing a card game, an ashtray with two burning joints between them. An iPod dock on the table filled the room with something light and poppy. “Joints and Uno, Rabbi,” Max said. “What could be better? Deal you in?”

The woman in the red North Face jacket regarded Jonah with amusement. “He's not actually a rabbi, though, is he?” she asked.

Max frowned at Jonah with concern. “You didn't do any ritual bathing in a canal, did you? And what happened to the
Battleship Potemkin
coat?”

Jonah looked down at himself. His sweater and jeans were soaked; he touched his beard and felt water dripping from it. It must have been raining harder than he'd noticed. “I…” he began, but didn't know what he was trying to say. He saw that his hands were shaking. He sat heavily in a chair at the table, shoved them under his thighs.

“He's not actually a rabbi, though?” he heard the red North Face repeat as he stared down at the grain of the wood table, the undulations and swirls of the darker lines across the surface.

“Not technically,” Max answered. “But he suffers from a rare affliction. He believes in God.”

“I believe in God,” the red North Face said.

“No, no,” Max corrected her. “He doesn't believe in the warm feeling you get after you do yoga. He believes in God in the old, obsolete way: old white man, long white beard.”

“Okay, so he's just, like, really traditional,” the red North Face said, satisfied. Then she added, singsongy, “Draw two, skip you.”

Jonah wanted to reach for one of the joints, but he could feel his hands even under his legs shaking violently. How long would she sit on the bench? Was she still sitting there now? He thought of the alley—the coffeeshop. But spending a day getting high, eating
Stroopwafels
, contentedly watching pigeons in the square—these now seemed like someone else's idea of time well spent, amusements borrowed from some other life. He might as well call up Sylvia and tell her he wanted to live with her on Bond Street after all.

“Is he okay, though?” asked the woman in the blue North Face jacket, looking up from her guidebook.

Jonah had been hoping they wouldn't notice his agitation, or at least would ignore it. This, of course, was wishful thinking. And next he felt like crying—clenched his teeth to stop it—because whether he drank Scotch until he passed out on the floor of his apartment, whether he bargained with Becky's marriage and the details of his career, whether he spent weeks (weeks! It seemed incredible now) hiding in a cloud of marijuana smoke in Amsterdam—it was all the same: rationalization piled upon rationalization, fear tied in knots of fear until he could believe it was something else. All of it was wishful thinking. In the end, these visions—the Hasid—Judith—they would always find him.

“Should we get him, like, a tea or something?” the blue North Face continued.

“I'm sure he'll be alright,” Max answered her—maybe for once showing some sympathy for Jonah. “He's well acquainted with the costs of religious life. What are you learning about Europe from your guidebook?”

“Just looking for places in Germany that aren't too touristy,” she responded.

“The last thing a tourist wants is to be around other tourists,” Max said. “Too bad they all use the same guidebooks to decide where not to go.”

“Ha-ha,” the blue North Face replied, unamused.

Never one to be deterred by the unamusement of others, Max asked, “So what non-touristy places will you be visiting next?”

“We already did England, Spain, and France,” the red North Face answered, putting down her cards and pointing in the air, as though indicating an invisible map. “In two days we take the train to Germany, and then it's Switzerland, Italy, and all around Eastern Europe. Then we'll do Turkey, Israel, and maybe Egypt, y'know, depending.”

“Obviously,” Max said.

“For the winter it's India and Southeast Asia, like Thailand and Vietnam, then Australia, New Zealand, some islands in the South Pacific, Hawaii, and finally home to California.” Reciting this list seemed to build up some momentum of joy in her, and as she finished she burst out laughing.

And Jonah could picture the two young women, in all these places: in a gondola in Venice; strolling the Old Town Square in Prague; posing before the Taj Mahal; in a tuk-tuk in Bangkok; hiking up to Angkor Watt; river rafting in New Zealand; wearing matching bikinis—red and blue, naturally—on the beach in Fiji. Travel was such a rite of passage for Americans of his generation—and in the end, where did it take you? How far had Judith traveled, to break down into sobs once again? How far had he gone, to end up back in this place?

“It's all about having experiences,” the red North Face said. “And that's what I feel like right now, y'know? This is one of those crazy experiences that we'll always look back on.”

The blue North Face closed the guidebook. “You want to go to the bathroom, Bonnie?” she asked her friend.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, right,” she answered, standing up.

“It's through the door on the left, though you'll find it's a bit cramped for girl talk,” Max told them. The two women left. Max smiled placidly at Jonah. “This is the ‘If you're going to do it, then do it already, because I'm getting bored' conversation. The fact that you're such a terrible wingman might actually work in my favor, Rabbi.”

“Will you stop fucking calling me that…” Jonah said, his shaking hands still shoved under his legs.

“What did happen to you today?” Max asked. “Did they try to drown you for a witch? Or did you accidentally take a bite of a ham-and-cheese sandwich and from out of the whirlwind—”

With sudden ferocity, Jonah shouted, “What the fuck do you want from me?” He lurched forward, swinging his hands up to bang them on the table—succeeded only in smacking them against the bottom. The stinging pain of this only intensified his wrath as he repeated, this time almost screaming, “Tell me what the fuck you want from me!”

Max had a look on his face as if an unpleasant odor had entered the room. The jolt of fury drained away; Jonah leaned back slowly—sat on his hands.

Max took a moment to rearrange the disrupted piles of cards. It appeared that, for once, he didn't know what to say. Predictably, though, this was not a condition that persisted for long. “You know, Rabbi, as King Kong said to Fay Wray, we actually have a lot in common,” he began. “The same college, mostly the same friends. And I'd say we both see a little more of things than most people do. The difference is I could never believe all the nonsense you do. And the truth is, Rabbi, I envy you. You really think that out of the thousands of millions on this planet, God chose to whisper in your ear and say, ‘Here I am.' Do you know how many people wish they could think something as preposterous as that? So of course it disgusts me the way you skulk around this city in sackcloth and ashes, draped in the cowardice of your convictions.”

Whether any of this was meant to be taken seriously or not, it struck Jonah that he had always envied Max, too—for how comfortable he seemed, in his chameleon's skin. “Yeah, you'd see it differently if the situation were reversed,” he mumbled in reply.

“We'll never know, will we?” Max answered. “I'd like to have been a believer for a minute or two. But I just don't have it in me. We all suffer what our faith demands, Rabbi. Or else we suffer from the lack. Or did you really think you were the only person on the planet with no fucking clue how to live?” They heard the North Faces coming back down the hall toward the room. “Anyway, try not to screw this up for me. I've been playing Uno for the last two hours.”

The two women reentered the room. The North Face in the blue jacket sat down at her guidebook, but the red North Face remained in the doorway. “This ship is really cool,” she said.

Max grinned. “Would you like a tour?”

“Okay, yeah, sure, yes, that sounds great.”

Max got slowly to his feet—making a show of savoring the moment—winked at Jonah, and they went out. Well, Jonah thought: She was having an experience.

Jonah and the blue North Face didn't speak for a few moments. Eventually she said, “He shouldn't be too proud of himself. She does this all the time.”

She was brunette, with an olive complexion, her face narrow, freckled, her eyelids resting low on close-set eyes, giving her a somewhat sleepy appearance. Something in this face surprised him, though he couldn't say exactly what; maybe simply that it had the specificity of any face—a specificity he'd ignored until now. “What's your name?” he asked her.