After I recovered, I rode the elevator to my floor. I had broken up with Liza for good, and I thought, So many people are satisfied with one wife, why can’t I be, too? In comparison to Liza, Celia now seemed decency itself. She had studied and was trying to find a job, a profession. I had an excuse ready for Celia as to why I had come home in the middle of the night. A man who lives with several women becomes an expert at telling lies. I was fool enough to think that Celia believed my lies. It’s a rule that those who deceive others also deceive themselves. Every liar is convinced that he can fool the whole world. Actually, he is fooled more than anyone else.
I had a key to my apartment, but the front door was bolted and chained from inside. I rang the doorbell, but Celia didn’t answer. I rang again and again, ever more firmly and insistently. I kept on ringing. Celia had apparently sunk into a deep sleep and I would have to wake her, although she was normally a light sleeper. I began to fear that some tragedy had befallen her. Our apartment had two entrances, a front and a rear. I had a key to the back door. A door led to a corridor running from the passenger elevator to the freight elevator where the garbage was put out. I opened this door and saw the back door to my apartment open and a man come out. I knew him—he was one of the professors supervising Celia’s thesis. Behind him stood Celia in her nightgown. My dear friend, there occurred in my house that which is shown in all the melodramas and cheap films: the husband coming unexpectedly home and the wife sneaking her lover out the back door. I grew so ashamed that I closed the door again. Maimonides says somewhere that Gehenna is shame. In that moment, I experienced the shame that is Gehenna.
In the melodramas, the husband assaults the lover and they fight to the death, but I was in no mood to wage combat against this elderly lecher. I waited until I could no longer hear his footsteps on the stairs, and in the meantime, Celia opened the front door for me. Then she ran and locked herself in the bathroom. That night, I drained the cup of misery to its very dregs, as the phrase goes, and I knew what I must do: put an end to the kind of life I’d been leading, sever for once and all my ties with everything and everybody in my environment. I had been dealt a blow that I could not ignore. Actually, I had known right along that my life was a shame and a disgrace—all that chasing after money, my affairs with women, being part of a society that was corrupt from beginning to end and whose justice was the encouragement of crime.
Celia took her time in the bathroom, which gave me the opportunity to collect my things and to pack the most necessary ones. Fortunately, I found a passport that was valid for a few more years. I also had a bankbook and a number of important documents that I kept at home. I heard Celia coughing in the bathroom. From time to time, the water ran as if she was washing. The whole packing took me some three-quarters of an hour. I was afraid that Celia would rush out and start all the talk and justifications that are employed in such situations, but she was silent. I had the feeling that she guessed I was packing my things and had decided to wait until I was gone.
I took my two satchels and left. I walked down the stairs and was soon out in the cold street again. I knew that not only was I leaving my house but I was beginning a new life. I couldn’t remain out in the street. The frost was biting and an icy wind blew. A taxi came by and I told the driver to take me to the first hotel I could think of. I signed the register with the first name that came to my mind. I had lost my wife, my mistress, and my business as well, because I no longer wished to remain in New York or even in America—but I felt no sense of loss. I lay down in bed and slept the sleep of total resignation. When I opened my eyes the sun was shining. I decided to turn everything I owned into cash, and whatever couldn’t be quickly liquidated, I would simply abandon. I wouldn’t say that I felt reborn; it was more the feeling of one who has just died and whose soul has entered a strange body.
My first impulse was to take a bath or shower, and go down to the restaurant or coffee shop for breakfast. I even considered ordering eggs with ham or bacon. But I quickly reminded myself that last night in the cab I had decided to be a Jew, and a Jew didn’t eat pork. At the same time I knew how fraught with problems my decision would be. To be a Jew, to adhere to the laws of the Shulhan Arukh, one had to—as you said before—believe in the Torah and the Gemara, and that everything that all the rabbis wrote was given by Moses on Mount Sinai. But I didn’t have this faith. I had read much, first in Warsaw, later in Russia, and later still in America, and somehow it wasn’t easy for me to accept the notion that along with the Ten Commandments Moses had received all the interpretations and all the restrictions of the rabbis of all generations. I hated the modern world and everything it represented—its barbarism, its licentiousness, its false justice, its wars, its Hitlers, its Stalins, everything—but I had no proof whatsoever that the Torah had been given by God or that there even was a God. True, there had to be some force that moved the universe, I told myself. I had never been a materialist who contends that the universe was created by an explosion and that everything evolved on its own. I had read a history of philosophy, and although I’m no philosopher, I saw how foolish, how weak and unconvincing all their theories were. Actually, all modern philosophy has a single theme: we don’t know anything and we cannot know anything. Our small brain isn’t capable of grasping eternity, infinity, or even the essence of the things which we see and touch. But to what did this lead? Their ethics weren’t worth a fig and committed no one to anything. You could be versed in all their philosophies and still be a Nazi or a member of the KGB. I hadn’t been only physically stripped that day, but spiritually bared as well.
Such was my mood that morning when I went down to the restaurant for breakfast. I bought a newspaper, and as I turned the pages I found everything there that I wanted to escape from: wars, glorification of revolution, murders, rapes, politicians’ cynical promises, lying editorials, acclaim of stupid books, dirty plays and films. The paper paid tribute to every possible kind of idolatry and spat at truth. According to the editors, if the voters would only choose the President they recommended, and put into effect this or the other reform, all would be right with the world. Even the obituary page was made to seem somehow optimistic. It listed all the accomplishments of those who died, and displayed their photographs. A theatrical producer had died and the account enumerated all the trashy plays he had produced, all the smut he had presented on stage. The fact that he had died relatively young was glossed over. The emphasis was on the fact that he had accumulated a big estate, which he left to his fourth or fifth wife.
That day a murderer was arrested, one who had been charged with the same crime several times before but each time had been freed on bail or paroled. His photograph was printed, too, along with the name of his lawyer, whose function it was to teach this murderer how to avoid punishment so that he could kill more innocent people.
Yes, there was much to escape from and to reject. But escape to where? There was religious news in the paper too. It told of two Christian organizations that were merging like two firms on Wall Street, and of some rabbi who was getting a medal. He stood there among ladies who smiled sweetly at him for the camera while he smiled back and displayed the medal. He looked vulgar, and although supposedly a Jew, he had the most Gentile name that an assimilated Jew could pick out.
But what would my religion be? What could I believe in? …
The waitress came and I ordered breakfast. I watched someone at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since come to the conclusion that man’s treatment of God’s creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised, dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn’t give a second’s thought to the fact that the pig was made of the same stuff as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste its flesh. I’ve thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi. I had pondered this often, but somehow I had never come to any resolution. I myself bought a fur coat for Liza made from the skins of dozens of creatures. With what rapture and enthusiasm she stroked the fur of those butchered animals. How she poured out praises for skins torn from the bodies of others!
Yes, I had always felt these things, but that morning they literally hit me on the head like a hammer. That morning I realized for the first time what a horrible hypocrite I was.