In the Beginning

  I finished the passage in the Ramban and closed the book. The trolley car clattered around Crotona Park and into Boston Road, turned into Southern Boulevard, and came alongside the zoo. Two stops beyond the corner where Saul and I used to get off, I climbed down and went quickly to the sidewalk. I stood on the sidewalk waiting for the trolley to pass. Behind me was the stone wall of the zoo. I crossed the boulevard and walked the two blocks to the apartment house where Mr. Bader lived.

  There were trees on the street, tall bare sycamores with the vaguest beginnings of April buds on their boughs. But the chill air mocked the new life of the trees. The wind was raw, a memory of the dark months of winter. And the sky, massed with clouds, seemed to promise snow rather than spring.

  I walked through the furnished and carpeted lobby of Mr. Bader’s apartment house and climbed the staircase to the second floor. He opened the door to my knock and took my coat. “You look frozen, David. Would you like a cup of tea and lemon? Mrs. Bader is not home. Let me make us some tea.” Carrying our tea, we went through the hallway to his study. There, I sat in a chair at his desk, the same dark mahogany desk on which I had first seen the photograph so many years ago, and we studied grammar and Torah.

  A week ago I had sat at this desk and he had smiled at me in his gentle and urbane way, adjusted his maroon smoking jacket, put a finger to his dark red cravat, and had explained to me why he had undertaken to teach me. “Your father’s father once did our family a favor. He saved our lives by getting us across the border out of Poland. I am now doing your father a favor by teaching his son Torah in a way that he will not learn it in most yeshivas. I did your uncle the same favor when I taught Saul. People exist by virtue of the help they give to one another. That’s what I believe. Helping people improves the helped person’s life and keeps the helping person human. I know how much rottenness there is in people. If I thought only of the ugliness in human beings, I would despair. So I try also to remind myself of the many people in this world who help one another. And I try to find myself a very bright student from time to time in order to study Torah with him and add a little bit to the good things going on in this world. This year my bright student is David Lurie.”

  He had smiled and sat back in his tall dark-wood chair. Behind him the dark velvet drapes had been drawn across the two tall windows. The Persian rug and the glass-enclosed bookcases were in shadows. A lamp burned on the desk, casting a vivid circle of light upon my notebook and grammar and the volume of Mikraot Gedolot We would begin with a little bit of grammar, he said. Grammar was dull, he said. But it taught us about the building blocks of a language. Without grammar I would never be able to understand the Torah, he said. And the best way to learn grammar was to practice and memorize.

  “I don’t think grammar is dull,” I said.

  He looked at me from behind his desk.

  “I like the book you told me to get. But I don’t understand something on page forty-two.”

  “Forty-two,” he said, looking at me and touching his cravat. “Yes. Well, your cousin warned me. All right. What don’t you understand on page forty-two?”

  “It has to do with the construct state,” I said, and asked my question.

  We spent an hour on grammar.

  “It’s like mathematics,” I said when we were done.

  “Oh?” he said. “In what way?”

  “I like it. You can build the main groups of words from just the first simple rules.”

  “I suppose you can,” he said. “I never quite looked at it that way.”

  “Some of the things in this book I learned in school. But I like the way the book teaches it better.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” he said. “I will tell the man who wrote it.”

  The phone on his desk rang, startlingly shrill in the quiet study. He lifted the receiver and said, “Yes?” He listened a moment and said, “We are fine. Yes. Indeed I shall.” He looked at me as he hung up the phone. “My wife apologizes for not being here to greet you and sends you her regards. Her sister is ill. Now let’s leave grammar and go to your Chumash. You’ll do the exercise for Wednesday. And don’t rush too much, David. Don’t be in such a hurry to learn everything. Here, let me show you what a page of Mikraot Gedolot is really all about. I don’t think you learned this in your yeshiva.”

  He was right; I had never been taught Bible that way in school. For my teacher, the words of the Bible and Rashi were simply there. Our task was to understand, to memorize, and to give back what we had learned. When Mr. Bader was done with that page it quivered and resonated with life.

  Mrs. Bader came in a few moments before the end of the second hour and brought tea and cookies into the study. She was a tall handsome woman, well-dressed and well-mannered. Her smooth skin was flushed from the cold air outside.

  “It isn’t April outside,” she said cheerfully. “It’s February. Have a cookie, David. Take a few cookies for the ride home.”

  “How is Edna?” asked Mr. Bader.

  “Well, it isn’t pneumonia, so we have to be grateful for that. But she’ll be in bed for a while. Are you two men almost done?”

  “Almost,” said Mr. Bader.

  We had arranged to meet together for two hours. After two and a half hours he let me go.

  “We should call Ruth and tell her the child will be late,” Mrs. Bader said at the door.

  “We don’t have a telephone,” I said.

  “Is there a neighbor with a telephone?”

  “Yes. He lives upstairs. He’s an Italian.”

  “I will speak to him in Italian. What is his number?”

  “He understands English.” I gave her the number and she went off to make the call.

  “My wife is a very punctual person,” Mr. Bader said with a smile. “I have a tendency to lose myself in my work at times.”

  “Does the export-import business take a lot of time?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, and gave me a queer look.

  “Will you be traveling a lot again this year?”

  “No,” he said. “My work in Germany is done. The Nazis have informed me that they would not look kindly upon my presence in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany for that matter.”

  Mrs. Bader came back into the hallway. “He will give your father the message.”

  “Mrs. Bader?”

  “Yes, David?”

  “Do you know German, too?”

  “Why yes,” she said. “I know German.”

  “I was wondering if you would mind if I brought a German book with me and asked you things I don’t understand.”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind, David.”

  “My mother understands German but I found some things in her books that she doesn’t know too well.”

  “By all means, you may bring the book here, David.”

  “Or I could copy out some of the very hard words and show them to you if my mother won’t let me take the books. She doesn’t like some of the German books to leave the house. They belonged to my dead uncle.”

  The two of them looked at each other. Then they looked at me. Somewhere in the apartment a clock whirred and struck three musical notes in an ascending scale.

  “It’s late,” Mr. Bader said. “You had better go home, David.”

  “Be careful crossing the street,” Mrs. Bader said and opened the door for me.

  I had gone down the staircase and through the large lobby, pausing for a moment to look at myself in the vestibule mirror. I saw an undersized and very thin youth in a dark wool hat and a dark winter jacket. His face was very pale and decidedly unpleasant in appearance, with gaunt features, dark sunken eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, two reddish pimples on his chin, a weak mouth, and a crooked nose. I had a memory of once having had a different face, one that I had enjoyed watching gaze back at me. I did not like this face and I looked at it as infrequently as I could. I had buttoned my jacket and gone out into the wintry April night.

  The cold weather had continued through the week
and now I sat again in Mr. Bader’s study. He was teaching me the cohortative and jussive extensions of the imperfect tense. We went rapidly through some exercises. Then he taught me the vav consecutive, which I already knew, and stative verbs, which were complicated enough to be interesting. Then we did the niphal, piel, and pual forms of the regular verbs, and he told me to memorize the conjugations. I told him I had memorized them during the week.

  He smiled faintly.

  “I have a question on page seventy-four,” I said. “I don’t understand how one of the words is accented.”

  “Yes?” he said. “Which word?”

  Later we studied the words of Rashi and Ibn Ezra on verses six through nine and he outlined for me some of the points made by the Ramban. I was finding the Ramban difficult to understand. “Be patient, David. Forty-year-old men find the Ramban difficult to understand. There will be things in Rashi you will not understand. Be patient.” We read a little segment of the Ramban. There was a tap at the door. Mr. Bader looked at his watch and blinked. “So fast? My God. All right, Miriam.”

  At the door I said to Mrs. Bader, “Can I just show you these lines in my notebook? I copied them from one of the German books.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  She translated the lines. There was something I did not understand. We stood in the hallway near the door.

  “Take your coat off, David,” she said. “You will get overheated and catch cold.”

  When we were done with the passage I asked her a question about the es sei and es seien forms in German and wondered if they could be compared to the cohortative and jussive in Hebrew. Mr. Bader, who had been standing by patiently and listening, now joined the conversation.

  I put my jacket back on and thanked them. Mr. Bader asked me to wait a moment, went away, and came back in a moment with a package in brown paper. “For you,” he said. They were dictionaries of German and Hebrew. “They aren’t the best,” he said. “But they will suit your purposes for the time being. Let’s see how long it will take you to outgrow them.”

  “I think I ought to call your Italian neighbor,” Mrs. Bader said. “I am getting a great deal of practice with my Italian, David. But we will see to it from now on that you are not late again. Your mother becomes upset when you are not home in time for supper.”

  I went out into the cold April evening and spent the trolley car ride looking through the Hebrew and German dictionaries. The two and a half blocks of Washington Avenue from Claremont Parkway to where I lived were dark and deserted. I walked very quickly and came home in the middle of a supper of boiled chicken and potatoes, the leftovers from our Shabbat meals.

  “The scholar,” my father said wryly, looking up from his plate. “Wash your hands and come in before your brother eats your food.”

  “So late, darling?” my mother murmured. “Why so late?”

  Alex was eating and reading a book. He did not seem to have noticed me come in.

  Later I sat at my desk reading and Alex slept in his bed, snoring. There was a chill in the air and after a while I had to go to the bathroom. Crossing the living room, I saw the light on at the desk in my parents’ bedroom. My father had converted the desk into a watchmaker’s workbench. Every day he brought home with him watches that he worked on into the night. Now he sat bent over a watch movement, a jeweler’s glass in his eye, a tiny screwdriver in his hand. At first it had fascinated me to see him take apart a watch and put it together again; the separated pieces of a watch lying on the desk top seemed incapable of being made into something as awesome as the object that marked the passing of time. I remembered him on the stallion and I could barely connect him to those hours in the past. Had that really been my father? All of that world seemed so dim and distant now. Even my trolley trips to that neighborhood had not called back sharply the memories of those years. I could not be truly certain who that horseman had been; but the watchmaker who took timepieces apart and put them together again so they would function properly—that watchmaker was my father. I remembered my uncle’s excited assurance that my father would one day decide what to do again with his life. That assurance had conjured up in my mind vivid images of swift decisions, gallant action—a warrior not a watchmaker. I did not know what to make of his decision. But everyone seemed content; there was a settled certainty about people now whenever they were in my father’s presence. Friends were once again dropping in. There was even some talk among them about starting a little synagogue of their own in a room in the yeshiva. My father did not like the bigness of the yeshiva synagogue where we now prayed.

  Every evening I studied at my desk, my brother studied at the kitchen table, my mother did her housework and wrote letters to her family, and my father repaired watches in the bedroom. Sometimes the canary would burst into song and I would look through my window and imagine I could see a maple in the dim light outside. But I was done with illusions and I knew it was shadows and cats lying among the garbage cans in the alleyway. When I finished my schoolwork I would turn to my Mikraot Gedolot, and my grammar, my notebook, my dictionaries. Inside the pages of my Mikraot Gedolot I began to move, with enormous difficulty at first, especially when it came to the Ramban, but then with increasing facility, through the centuries of voices. I shuttled back and forth between ancient Palestine and medieval France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I listened to them talking to one another about the words of the Torah. I saw the blue waters of the Mediterranean, the white cities of Moslem and Catholic Spain, the vineyards of France, the citystates and hill villages of Italy; for Mr. Bader had told me of the lives of the commentators. Through their voices the text of the Torah took on a luminous quality. I would read a passage of the Bible, read the commentary of Rashi on the passage, read Ibn Ezra, read the Ramban, read Sforno. I read every word and would not go ahead until I thought I understood each word I read. But the Ramban remained very difficult. Often I was happy if I could grasp his ideas in vague outline. I did not understand anything about his secret mystical doctrine. Ibn Ezra too was often very difficult. Sometimes I surrendered to frustration and would sit at my desk late into the night, loathing my ignorance and eager for my next meeting with Mr. Bader, when the difficulties would be explained and clarified. Then, exhausted, I would go to sleep.

  The weather remained cold. Spring that year seemed an indistinct copy of the malevolent winter rather than an authoritative time of its own. On the last Sunday in April I came out of Mr. Bader’s apartment house, walked the two blocks to the trolley car and, standing on the sidewalk, put my right hand into my jacket pocket and realized that I had lost my carfare. I searched through all my pockets. A trolley car pulled up at the corner, waited, then moved away. I watched it go down the boulevard. Then I walked back to Mr. Bader’s apartment.

  Mrs. Bader opened the door and looked very surprised. I explained about the carfare. “David, David,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Come inside.”

  I stood in the hallway and heard voices in the living room. The Baders had been alone when I had left them earlier that evening.

  “Let me take your jacket,” Mrs. Bader said. “I suppose I had better call our Italian friend again. Come into the living room.”

  Two men were in the living room with Mr. Bader. I had never seen them before. They looked to be in their middle forties, wore dark ill-fitting suits and open-necked shirts. They sat on the sofa across from Mr. Bader, who sat comfortably in an easy chair, his legs crossed. He looked up when I came in and said, “I thought that was your voice I heard, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “He lost his carfare,” Mrs. Bader said.

  “I didn’t take any more money,” I said, ashamed. “Just the carfare.”

  “Just the carfare,” Mr. Bader said, and smiled faintly.

  The two men looked on curiously.

  “I am going to call my Italian friend,” Mrs. Bader said cheerfully. “I’m getting to know that Italian very well. Did you know that he had once contemplated a career in opera?”


  I shook my head.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But there was a difficulty. He had no talent. He is a happy and honest man, our Italian.” She went into the hallway.