The Mystics of Mile End (28 page)

She studied him a moment longer, ashed the joint, then opened the car door. Smiling uncertainly, Lev led the way back to the house.

In the bright hallway, as he took her coat, he noticed how pale and tense her face was, how her eyes—red, swollen—twitched faintly at the corners. Suddenly, he had the impression that he was looking at his mirror image. The woman was younger than he'd thought; there couldn't have been more than five years between them. “What's your name?” he asked.

“Val. Valérie.”

“I'm Lev.”

Val smiled then—a strangely knowing smile, Lev thought. He motioned for her to come into the kitchen, and when she did, he followed her gaze to the untouched bottle on the table.

“Can I get you a drink?” he said, to be polite.

“Why not?” She shrugged. “
Un tout petit peu
.”

He poured them each a little wine. They sat down and sipped it in awkward silence.

“So,” Lev said. “How well did you know my dad?”

“What?” Val spluttered. A bit of white wine dotted her black dress, and she wiped at it with the back of her hand.

“I mean, were you one of his students or something?”

“Yes. His student. He was a great teacher. And he was my thesis advisor, too, so—so that's why—so I saw him a lot,” she finished, taking a gulp of wine.

“Oh.”

A moment passed. Then Val said, “Your sister, she's not here?”

Lev's eyes widened.

“He said—your father said—he told us he had a son and a daughter,” she explained. “In class. He was always talking about the two of you.”

“Oh.” Lev looked at his hands. “She's not here. I haven't seen her in a long time.”

“Me neither,” Val said, and immediately her cheeks began to crimson. Her head dipped down for another gulp of wine.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What do you mean, ‘me neither'?”

“I mean . . . I just mean . . . you know, after the funeral. I didn't see your sister after that.” Val stood abruptly. “I'm sorry,” she murmured. “I—thank you—but I really have to go now,” she said, rushing out.

Before Lev could even make it to his feet, she was halfway down the hall.

From the front door he watched her headlights illuminate the falling snow, then recede into the darkness.

T
hat evening brought the first real storm of the season. All night long, the winds howled, the sky creaked and groaned. Glassman listened to the frost-laden boughs scraping the bedroom windowpane.

His wife, hooked up to a feeding tube, breathing independently but shallowly, lay very still with her eyes closed. The home health nurse who usually stopped by to check on her vitals, change her catheter, and turn her to prevent bedsores would not be coming this evening as planned. Peering through his binoculars, Glassman found he couldn't really blame her. Subzero temperatures and knee-high snow had chased everyone inside, at least until the snowplows could do their work. In the meantime, everything—
roofs, lampposts, Katz's tin can tree—was bedecked with icicles. And still the snow kept falling.

Minutes passed. Then hours.

Wind hurled itself at the walls, threatening to rip the roof right off the house. The power lines went down. Thrown into darkness, Glassman fumbled around for matches and a candle, and, having lit the candle, watched its tiny blue flame cast shadows on the bedroom's sloping walls. Then he sat at the ancient rolltop desk and rummaged in its drawer until he found the book.

Samara's copy of
King Lear
was a dog-eared paperback scarred by weeks of jockeying for backpack space with a seventh grader's pencil case, calculator, bagged lunch, and other juvenilia—yet Glassman handled it like a sacred text. He opened it to one of his favorite passages. He had never fully understood its meaning, and was still perplexed by the use of the word
germens
—which, being one himself, he had always known, or believed himself to have known, was spelled
Germans
. But the rhythm of the verses—that was fantastic, that he loved.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man!

Glassman read on, smiling, until the candle sputtered and went out.

Cast into shadows, he was forced to put aside the text—but not
the storm. No, for the hundredth time his memory dragged him back to that terrible day—to that other storm—late last summer, when he had gone out into the streets, railing against the world. It was the day after he'd found out that his wife's illness was not going to go away, that her atrial fibrillation was resisting treatment, that she could suffer another stroke at any moment and that, if that happened, he might well be forced to live in this world without her. His wits began to turn. Half-blind with despair, he'd rushed out bareheaded, with nothing but a thin black trench coat to shield him from the clouds rolling in overhead. Soon rain pelted his skin, wind whipped at his white hair, but it was all so much nothing. He was being stripped of everything that had made him who he was. Was man no more than this? He would outstorm the storm!

It was in this frame of mind, thoroughly shaken and shaking his fist at the heavens, that he had turned the corner onto Hutchison and seen what he had seen: a man, collapsed in a heap on the ground, clutching at his heart and gasping for breath. Glassman raised a hand to shield his eyes from the rain, squinted through the downpour, and recognized—his neighbor. David Meyer's body, like a giant spider overturned on its back, was all abuzz in a fit of spasms, arms and legs twitching grotesquely. Glassman suppressed a shiver of disgust and, seeing no one else around, moved to help. But by the time he reached the body, the spasms had already passed over it and left something else in their place, something wondrously different from the arachnid creature he'd just seen flailing so desperately on the cold, hard pavement.

In death, his neighbor's features had been transformed. They now bore the sort of beauty they'd never borne in life. Forehead relaxed and smooth as marble. Lips tilted upward in the suggestion of a smile. A calm so deep and pure and perfect that Glassman felt a surge of envy.

And then a shout, and harried footsteps, and bodies pressing in
on all sides—strangers bursting in with their cries of “Oh God!” and “Call an ambulance!”—and then the rush of noise, the roaring of sirens . . .

In all this hubbub, Glassman managed to slip away unnoticed. Nobody wondered who the strange old man hovering over the corpse had been. Nobody observed, in his changing expression, the shift from shock to envy to ironclad resolve. And nobody suspected he had just decided that, should his wife fall prey to the dreaded lethal stroke, he too was determined to die.

But determined he was. That was why he could not allow Alex entrance into his world. A youthful pull back into life? That was the last thing he needed. He was careening toward death, full throttle, and nothing could stop him.

Nothing—except two problems.

First: How would he do it? He needed to depart at the same time as his wife—he hadn't followed her across decades and continents only to be parted at the last moment by something as trivial as death—and he needed to do it in a proper way. A way that fit in with the narrative of their life together. With the terrible story they'd signed on to years ago, at dawn, by a fountain, in a place far away.

The second problem was this: How would he make sure that, before he died, he would succeed in rectifying that old mistake—that dreadful blunder that had gone unrecognized for decades but that now, in the crushing silence of his wife's last days, demanded to be seen for what it was? Until he found a way to make that right, he would not be able to depart. Because, however desperately he might yearn for death, he was not yet worthy of it.

T
he next morning, Alex picked and pushed his way through the slush-lined street, nervous but determined. He held Samara's letter in his hands like a talisman. Compulsively, he folded and
unfolded the paper crane as he walked, and the air filled with the noise of flapping wings. The temperature had risen slightly, a soft rain was falling, and he was wearing a yellow raincoat that stood out sharply against the gray. As he reached the Glassmans' stoop and knocked on the door, he suddenly felt self-conscious. For one wild second he considered running home and changing into a suit. He wanted to make a strong impression. But it was too late.

Scowling, Glassman yanked the door open and shaded his eyes against the sudden light of the outdoors. “You again!”

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Glassman. I was wondering . . .”

“What?”

“Well, I was hoping . . .”

“What, what? Speak already! Don't you know it is rude to keep an old man waiting?”

But the angrier Glassman looked, the more tongue-tied Alex got. He blinked at the old man with woeful, desperate eyes. Eventually, Glassman threw up his hands and grumbled, “So come in already, if you won't speak!” before turning his back and walking into the living room.

Alex closed the door behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. But as soon as he entered the living room, Glassman seemed not only angry but afraid. Eyes bulging, he raised a trembling finger and pointed.

“What is this? What are you wearing?”

“Um, a raincoat?”

“Where did you get this?”

“At . . . the mall?”

“Take it off!”

“What?”

“Take it off! Take it off immediately!” Glassman shouted, covering his eyes and turning his back on Alex.

Alex's heart sank. He should have worn the suit! He stripped
off the offensive coat, folded it into a ball, and half hid it beneath a couch cushion. “All—all done. Sorry about that.”

Glassman turned. He seemed calmer, but he still looked like he'd just seen a ghost. “So?” he barked. “What does the young kabbalist have to say today? Have you grown a long white beard overnight, like Eleazar ben Azariah? No? Then I'm afraid I cannot help you!”

Alex stammered, “Actually, that's what I've come to talk to you about. The whole age restriction thing.”

“What about it?”

“Well, for one thing, I think it's all a bunch of—of—well. I don't think it's true at all.”

“I see. And what
authority
do you have for saying such things?”

“Well, it's not my authority actually, it's Abraham Azulai's? The famous seventeenth-century kabbalist? Do you—”

“I have heard the name once or twice, yes.”

“Well, so, he thought the ban on mystical study should be lifted. Like, entirely. He wrote that . . .” Alex closed his eyes to summon up the quote he had committed to memory. “That ‘from the year 1540 on, the basic levels of kabbalah must be taught publicly to everyone, young and old'—that's a direct quote, young and old, that's exactly what he says—because ‘only through kabbalah will we eliminate war, destruction, and man's inhumanity to his fellow man.'”

Glassman's eyebrows had risen so high on his forehead that they were in danger of disappearing into his white hair. “Where did you find this information?”

“The Internet.” Alex shrugged. “Also, that whole thing about needing to be Jewish?”

“Yes, now, now that—that is a big problem.”

“Not really. I mean, didn't the great Vilna Gaon say, ‘There was never any ban or enactment restricting the study of the wisdom
of kabbalah; anyone who says there is has never studied kabbalah, and speaks as an ignoramus'? And, I mean, that was the Vilna Gaon! So, like, how do you top that, right?”

“Very good,” Glassman conceded, the glimmer of a smile flitting across his face. “But you are forgetting one thing. Mystical matters cannot be taught—”

“I know, I know, unless there are at least two students present. That comes up in Tractate Hagigah. But then, just a bit later, we're told that the chapter headings of such matters can be taught. The teacher reads the headings of the chapters, and then the student's allowed to read to the end of the chapter. Rabbi Hiyya did it that way.”

“Yes, but Rabbi Zera says that even the chapter headings can only be communicated to an honored and established sage. A person who is the head of a school.”

“I'm top of my class in McGill's physics department.”

“Very nice, but I do not think that is what Rabbi Zera had in mind.”

“Well, there's always your wife.”

Glassman's face drained of enjoyment. “My wife?”

“Sure. I mean, she's just upstairs, isn't she?”

“So?”

“So she could be the second student in the room! And, now, before you start—just listen—before you start listing all the reasons why women aren't allowed to—”

“My wife is—not well.”

Alex blinked.

“She is not ever really awake anymore.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“So she would not make a very good student. That is what I am telling you. Not at this minute. But when she was young, you know, she—” He broke off. Silence fell between them. Immediately, the
old man pressed the heels of his hands into his ears, as if being subjected to a frequency that was the sonic equivalent of murder. It was to put an end to this private torture, perhaps, that he suddenly looked down and, doing so, noticed the letter in Alex's hand. Between its well-worn creases, beneath its scribbled words, a drawing of the Tree of Life was visible.

“What is this?” Glassman asked, his voice deathly serious. “Who is this from?”