The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (2 page)

The closest was a village of several hundred people. I set out the day after the funeral. In my rented sedan, I was conspicuous. Was I lost? Why had I come? In my adult life, I’ve never felt as dumb as I did then, when, as if by way of explanation, I mumbled the name of a man who’d supposedly lived there centuries before.

I was met with incredulity. Silently, I was brought to the tavern by the villagers who’d found me, and poured a draft of beer. They repeated my words to the aged barkeep. Her voice, barely audible at first, gradually recovered youth as she told me an old folktale, localest of local legends, about a fool with that name.

I missed my return flight, rescheduled twice. I lived in that village for weeks. I asked all the people who’d ever heard the legend to relate it as they remembered it. I asked each of them if they knew any of the other names on my list. I asked if they’d ever heard of Yaakov ben Eleazer. They had not. Yet when I told them the tradition of the Lamedh-Vov, they didn’t find surprising the inclusion of their local idiot, whose foolishness, they believed, brought the village wisdom.

Naturally, I was familiar with the idea that the Lamedh-Vov were people who appeared insignificant. The beauty of the tradition, perhaps its lesson, was that saintliness, unlike heroism, is quotidian. The Lamedh-Vov were said to be chimney sweeps and water carriers, humble folks untutored in ethics.

Why not also an idiot? Thoughtless deeds, even acts deemed wicked, may do right, though the merits may never be apparent. Talmud instructs followers to praise God for good and evil alike. I was not one to judge a Lamedh-Vov. With copious notes and a hastily arranged sabbatical, I traveled to the next village on Yaakov’s numinous itinerary.

In every town the beer was differently brewed, yet the response was similar when I named a Lamedh-Vov. People didn’t think of these figures as saintly: One was a thief, another a whore, and yet another, God forbid, a false Messiah. I was sometimes unable to discern the good in their deeds, yet the villagers, hearing for the first time about the list of thirty-six, always did. And, after all, the stories had sustained them. I was merely a folkloric tourist, rolling through in a rented sedan.

Twelve villages in twelve months. I intended to return from my sabbatical with material to write an academic study of folklore and history. I thought I’d examine the epistemological status of collective memory, the ontology of living myth. I would reinvigorate my career, revive my field. My pen went dry. I had no theories, only stories.

In these pages are the dozen that I’ve collected, as I remember them being told. They came to me gradually, one at a time, and perhaps that is how they should be read. I’m somewhere in the world searching for others now. I have resigned my academic positions. Some will accuse me of slipping into mysticism. Others will dismiss me, itinerant that I’ve become, as a wandering Jew. I accept these epithets, and request only to be let go. Do not seek me. I cannot say if I’ll ever return. I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing, but I will follow my calling.

The reader will observe that I have omitted the saints’ names. Instead I identify them by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet—alef, beit, gimmel, dalet, heyh, vov—once used to count. Perhaps I’m as touched as my poor father. These saints are long gone; others survive today. However, these old names, the fleeting knowledge of them by one man, nearly brought the world to an end. As Yaakov ben Eleazer discovered, the secrecy is sacred. These are the Lamedh-Vov. Their lives are passages in the book of the unknown.

J
AY
K
ATZ
, P
H
.D.
February 2008

ALEF THE IDIOT

Everybody knew that Alef was a fool. By trade he was a fisherman, but folks had seen a lowly carp outsmart him. Even the fish that Alef landed seldom made it past his fellow sailors, who took turns at snookering him, to decide who among them was smartest. One might lead him to believe that the rock cod in his bucket would dry to stone, and generously offer to trade it for a worm with which to try his luck again. Another might persuade him that his flounder was no odd fish, but rather the castaway face of a diver gone too long underwater, and graciously volunteer to return it to its rightful owner. To all these propositions, Alef eagerly agreed, blessed to have friends who accepted his dim wit, and looked after him.

Alef’s wife, on the other hand, was less forgiving of his shortcomings. Chaya was the daughter of a rabbi celebrated as a sage in the town where she was raised, and, while she had her mother’s dark hair and stormy eyes, she’d inherited her father’s luminous mind.

Since no one else in the rabbi’s village had been bright enough to comprehend him, least of all his wife and sons, the rabbi had taken little Chaya into his library and taught her the sacred tongue, to have someone with whom to study all that was holy. She’d mastered Hebrew with alacrity, and had learned to argue fine points of doctrine by the time she was ten. A year later, she’d trounced her father in a dispute over laws governing seminal discharge when the Sabbath sundown was occluded by a solar eclipse, from which she’d deduced that she was wiser than anyone, and, therefore, no longer had to obey her mother.

That had resulted in arguments of an altogether different order, fought in shrieks and fits and, more than once, with a hurled pot of boiling water. Scarcely his daughter’s height, and half the weight of his wife, the rabbi had studiously avoided these disputes, and even Chaya’s brothers, muscular thugs several years older than she, had learned to slip out the door whenever the stormy eyes of mother and child met.

Many times while his wife was away at market, the rabbi had tried to persuade Chaya to show compassion for her, or at least to respect her, as required by law. But Chaya had contested his interpretations, and even the ancient commentaries on which he based them, with such furious logic that the rabbi had been forced each time to concede defeat. Finally he’d gone to his wife, the rebbetzin, to explain how Chaya was different from other girls, and why obedience shouldn’t be expected of her. His wife hadn’t needed any fancy wordplay to reply. She’d simply accused the rabbi of loving his daughter in lieu of her.

This, too, he’d been unable to deny: Chaya’s body was as lithe as a serpent’s, and his weakness for dark hair and stormy eyes had already, of course, been established. He’d nodded and dumbly looked on while his wife had sent for the matchmaker, to get rid of the little nuisance.

In that village, the marriage broker was famous for coupling children the day they were born. Her trick was to know folks’ fortunes, and to reckon love economically, according to the supply and demand of dowry. But the rabbi had forbidden her from prematurely pairing his little Chaya: He couldn’t tolerate predestination from an omniscient god, let alone a know-it-all yenta. So the old woman, sturdy like a pruned tree, had come to the rebbetzin without a suitable man.

— There must be someone.

— The locals are all taken.

— Chaya is the daughter of a rabbi.

— She comes with no dowry.

— My husband is not a rich man. But our Chaya is a pretty girl, after all.

— A pretty shrew, if you’ll pardon my saying so.

— Then you see why she has to go.

— I do, I do. Perhaps I
can
help you. There’s a man I’ve heard of who lives by the sea, and for some years has sought a bride.

— Is he crippled? Is he cruel?

— Rebbetzin, folks say that he’s a fool.

The rebbetzin had laughed at that. She’d squeezed the matchmaker’s hand. She might even have kissed the old maid, had the rabbi not walked in, roused by the unfamiliar sound of mirth in his house. The rebbetzin had stood, then. She’d told her husband that a suitable groom had been found.

— He lives in this town?

— There isn’t a man in this village who deserves her.

— Then he is a great scholar?

— What man could be as wise as Chaya?

Naturally, the rabbi hadn’t had a response. And, because he was too frail to travel, the next morning he’d stood helplessly in his doorway while his wife had put their daughter in a carriage with a loaf of bread and a note bearing the name of her betrothed. He’d waved farewell, but the girl, wrapped tight in a black shawl, hadn’t even looked at him. Only out on the open road had she allowed herself, inaudible amid the horses’ clamor, to loosen the cloth and pour out her tears.

•   •   •

Alef’s fellow fishermen seldom saw his wife after their wedding. Chaya refused to mingle with the common folk, lest they mock her, cultured rabbi’s daughter, for being married to the village idiot. But, as much as she dreaded their jeers, what upset her more was to hear them tease her husband: Certainly Alef was a fool, as she told him whenever he was dumb enough to utter a word in her presence, yet cuts inflicted by others, which he was too dull to feel, pained her as if she were the one being gutted. Chaya might have thought that this was just one more symptom of her humiliation, were it not accompanied by another emotion—the insatiable urge to be held by him.

Alef was a large man, framed like a boat, into which slender Chaya fit as if he’d been hewn for her. Not that she believed those old romances that for every girl in the world a special boy was born: She could refute such notions historically, philosophically, and mathematically, to name but a few possibilities. Yet none of her arguments could hold up, even for a moment, to the force of a kiss. Every night came to the same conclusion. And every morning, lying in bed long after her husband had gone fishing, she’d wonder what, for all her reason, had happened.

By evening, she’d be seething, blaming Alef for taking away her sapience and saddling her with love. She never spoke to her husband in such terms, which would have been wasted on him. Instead, each night, when he returned to their home and confessed what had become of their evening meal, she’d drag him inside and squeal:
Are you a fool?
If he tried to respond, to justify his fishlessness, she’d recite her favorite proverb in the ancient tongue:
The ignorant cannot be righteous.
Since he couldn’t reckon what she was saying, he’d accept all blame and listen to her sputter and curse until, exhausted by her own fuming, she’d come to be embraced by him. Then he’d take her to bed, where their differences were what brought them together again.

Chaya’s behavior bewildered Alef. Why did her feelings for him turn with the hours of the day, while he adored her with the constancy of years? What could he do not to lose her each afternoon? What was wrong with him?

He pondered these questions at sea and on land. He asked the opinion of the carp he caught, but, knowing no affection outside of spawning, they didn’t respond. His fellow fishermen, on the other hand, were eager to assist him, if only he’d request their advice. Every day they asked about his wife. They inquired about her scholarship. Was she still intent to unseat the village rebbe, as she’d threatened to do following a doctrinal dispute on Alef’s wedding day? Did she plan to take the old maggid’s place? Or did she want to put Alef on the pulpit? At the height of his confusion, the fishermen would act as if he already were the village pontiff and ask him to deliver a sermon, and, when he stuttered that he didn’t know what to say, they’d applaud him for his wisdom.

Then one day a storm grounded every sailor except for Alef. (The weather didn’t bother him, as he never thought to fear it; sweeping the world of hubris, the torrents always took care to let his small vessel pass.) When he harbored in the late afternoon, the docks were all but abandoned. Only Yudel, one of the shrewdest fishers, was there, repairing his mast. He called Alef over.

— What are you doing on the water in this weather?

— I’m trying to catch some fish.

— Swells like these could swallow your boat, Alef. You’re a married man. What would your wife do without you?

— I’m sure she’d get along.

— She must love you, though.

— I don’t know.

— What’s the matter? You can’t satisfy her?

— I guess not.

— For some men, it’s like that. I can tell that you’re miserable. I know that you’ve been meaning to confide in me for a while. So I’ll let you in on a secret. There is a cure for your ailment. Would you do anything for Chaya, no matter what?

When Alef shyly nodded, Yudel told him where he must go and what he must do. He insisted that Alef not see his wife first, and made him swear never to tell her where he’d been: If he did, he might not see her again. Yudel accompanied Alef to the forest floor. Then he scurried to the tavern to tell the other fishermen about the fool’s errand.