I stepped out of the family compound this morning, in need of fresh air and eager to reconnoiter this latest anchorage to which I had so hastily retreated.
Fabian’s incessant weeping, touching at first, louder and more dramatic when assured of an audience, had by now become unbearable. I can put up with tears only for so long. Heartfelt at first, empathy turns to impatience, annoyance and resentment.
At the far end of the hallway, Meema and Shmiel were at it again, with Schmiel hiding behind a wall of silence and apathy and Meema icing over in catatonic rigidity in her rocking chair, her lips pinched, her eyes ablaze and darting with fury at anyone who crossed her path.
My grandfather was oiling the barrel of his revolver and buffing the muzzle with a chammy.
On the verandah, Lazar spoke to the kitten he had adopted as if to his own son.
“You can grow up to outshine old Fékété. It’s up to you. Eat heartily. Follow your instincts. And one day, when you’ve caught your share of mice, you too can retire and nap to your heart’s content.”
Abraham, statuesque, transcendent, almost godlike in his gold-fringed prayer shawl and white lionesque mane, quoted from Samuel:
“But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you, as it was against your fathers.”
Néné Jan, in rare form, a cigarette holder screwed between his teeth, recited a poem by Hungary’s poet laureate, Sándor Petöfi, as Tante Yetta napped on the damask settee, her alabaster hands resting on her lace-garlanded bodice.
How many drops hath the ocean sea?
Can you count the stars?
On human heads how many hairs can there be?
Or sins within human hearts?
Néné Buby, Fanny’s husband -- I was still a child when he emigrated -- played canasta with my mother. A jovial, burly man sporting a Chaplinesque mustache, he suffered from a mild form of Tourette’s that triggered intermittent facial twitches followed by pig-like grunts. Hard as I tried, I’d never been able to suppress a burst of hilarity which the gallant Néné Buby forgave with equal doses of stoicism and benevolence.
Kibitzing, Aunt Lucy, a fake chignon adorning her nearly bald head, tapped the floor with her cane. Having reached the venerable age of ninety-four, she suffers from chronic flatulence and the sound of the cane striking the parquet floor, she believes, covers the machine-gun-like barrage of farts she emits every few minutes like clockwork. I remember when she merely used to clear her throat, or move her chair, a stratagem that my father never failed to lampoon.
“O.K. Lucy, the sound effects are quite convincing. But what are we to do about the fragrance?” Aunt Lucy always pretended not to hear my father’s wisecracks and kept on clearing her throat.
Across the drawing room, Lucy’s baby sister, my maternal grandmother, now, 90 and nearly blind, read Amok, by Stefan Zweig, one of her favorite authors, with the aid of a large magnifying glass. A woman of great beauty, charm and wit, my grandmother had always been an avid reader. She enjoyed history and great literature -- Toynbee, Gibbon, Josephus, Flaubert, Balzac, Hugo, Du Maurier, Vicki Baum. It was a shame to see her struggle as she shifted the magnifier from one spectacled eye to the other. A confirmed Atheist, she often quoted Vicki Baum:
“To be a Jew is a destiny.”
She distilled from this epigram more than just an axiomatic truth. She lived long enough to see destiny at work.
*
“Don’t say too much. Don’t ask too many questions,” my mother counseled as she accompanied me to the door. Several pairs of eyes followed me with suspicion. “Neither be a chatterbox nor a snoop. Mind your own business,” she said, adjusting my upturned collar. Typically, such injunctions would have annoyed me, prompting me to demand an explanation and, contrarian that I am, to flout it. But coming from my mother, who had always encouraged free thought and intellectual curiosity, and helped give wings to some of my more harebrained schemes, the advice seemed as much out of character as it was out of place.
“And don’t venture too far off. Not everyone and everything in Ein Sof is worth knowing,” my mother added, her brow arching in a frown that telegraphed apprehension and pleaded for caution.
“What do you mean?”
She looked away. “Do what I ask, please.”
“Explain yourself.”
“Oh, It’s the Dybbuks,” she answered dejectedly, looking at the ground.
“The Dybbuks?”
“We call them that. Others give them different names. Stay away from Gehenna.”
“Dybbuks? Gehenna?”
She placed a forefinger against my lips.
“Shhh. Just don’t wander off too far. And be home by suppertime. I’m preparing your favorite dish.”
“Escargots in butter, garlic and dill?”
“Don’t be silly.”
*
It is in this genteel, lily-white section of Ein Sof where old-moneyed gentry and vulgar nouveaux riches coexist in mutual disdain along tree-lined lanes and neatly manicured lawns that I got a good look at this pastoral sanctuary. Red tile roofs. White picket fences. Pastel-colored communal houses. Flower and vegetable gardens teeming with fragrant blossoms and succulent legumes. An ivied gazebo at the center of a verdant public square. Tidy, freshly paved lanes radiating from the main drag to the housing complexes in a star-shaped pattern. An air of everlasting spring wafting on an island of apparent serenity. And nary a soul to be seen anywhere, save an occasional, furtive, specter-like figure scurrying about in great haste, as if in fear of being seen or fleeing the scene of some impending disaster.
In spring, summer and fall, I am told, crews of Perpetuals get together early in the morning to landscape large tracts of gently sloping meadows, the obligatory golf course and the park at the center of which rises a bronze statue of Zeno, the father of Paradox. They mow grass, trim hedges, prune trees and plant annuals. In the dark pre-dawn hours of winter, they plow mountains of snow, sand icy driveways and alleyways. No one has actually seen them perform these patriotic travails. Most everyone assumes it’s all done by civic-minded individuals in the dead of night. Others know better.
Getting lost in a place I hardly knew was not on the agenda that morning. Out of prudence more than inclination, I followed one of Ein Sof’s secondary arteries, a long, straight roadway paved with cobblestones, flanked on each side by willows whose branches met midpoint above it to form a shady dome of green and extending, as far as I could tell, to the horizon line.
I kept walking, passing row after row of multiple-occupancy dwellings each set on a cul-de-sac on either side of the main road, some flying oversized flags, others proclaiming their religious affiliation with statuary and sacred icons, others yet professing their loyalty to God and country by warning intruders that their homes were fortified with all manner of automatic ordnance.
Rising in the distance, faint at first, clearer as I continued toward it, a massive billboard straddled the roadway. It read:
YOUR ARE LEAVING EIN SOF
AND ENTERING GEHENNA
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN PERIL
The road ended abruptly in a rubble of shattered rock and splintered cobbles a foot or so past the sign. Beyond it a yawning incline ended in a sheer drop. Extending from the base of a deep abyss, a steamy chasm stretched below as far as the eye could see.