Paradise Park

  “Gary,” I told him in the afternoon, outside—since he was afraid to be seen with me in private—“there’s this kooky woman every morning, and it’s like she thinks praying is some kind of competition or something. And she keeps giving me the stink-eye because I’m winning.”

  Gary gasped at me. He said, “Sharon!”

  I threw up my hands. “What did I do now?”

  “Loshon hora is a terrible sin.”

  “A sin of what?”

  “Speaking ill of other people,” he said.

  “I wasn’t speaking ill,” I told him, “I was telling you the truth. You can come see. She tries to pray as slowly as she can, but she just can’t cut it.”

  So Gary launched into this whole speech about how you had to guard your tongue, and never say a word about other people’s flaws.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry I mentioned it,” I said. “Look at the sty in your own eye. I got the picture.”

  He looked puzzled when I mentioned that saying about the sty, and I was glad. Ha! I know something you don’t know! Then he said to me, “Shouldn’t you be at your class? Aren’t you missing the afternoon session?”

  “I was just taking a break.”

  “A break! You’ve been here less than a week!”

  “A little fresh air.” I leaned against the damp and grimy stone wall of the building. The whole neighborhood was stone. The streets were cobbled, the shops were little dark holes in the wall. We were right near the gates of Meah Shearim, which was such a religious enclave that there were big placards up everywhere in Hebrew and in English that you should not enter the area if you were wearing immodest dress, and you should not do anything to desecrate the Sabbath. All around us men in black suits and hats were scurrying by. It had been raining on and off all day, so they all wore clear plastic bags over their black hats to protect the felt. The air wasn’t all that fresh, given the buses coughing up smoke, the crowds, the cooking smells, not to mention the occasional donkey.

  “You came here to learn,” Gary was chiding me.

  “Yeah, but not from Morah Zipporah!” I said, referring to my prison warden, fanatical dictator, instructor. “Have you ever taken a class from her?”

  “What’s the problem?” Gary asked. Thoughtfully, he was pulling at his beard.

  “She’s a Nazi.”

  “Sh!”

  “It’s true! She starts every class announcing her agenda of converting us. Then she lectures about kashrus, brachas, midos—half the words I don’t understand. And then, if you want to ask a question, she says no. If you say, excuse me, Morah Zipporah, I’d like to ask what the purpose of all this stuff is, and maybe have some dialogue here about our origin and our Creator, then she says, ‘You are again sidetracking the class.’”

  Gary kept telling me I should be more patient learning the details of the Jewish religion, because, essentially, God, or rather, Hashem, was in the details. He kept saying the point was to learn, not to get caught up in ego. “Sharon,” he said to me, pulling at his beard, “it might seem hard, but I believe in you.”

  And I looked at him in his black suit jacket and his black velvet yarmulke and his face all pale, since he didn’t seem to get outside unless I dragged him, and I watched him pull his beard, and I thought, Wow, he catches on fast—since all the Torah Or rabbis pulled their beards. Or maybe, since his was kind of thin and scruffy, he just pulled his beard to make it grow. And I looked at him, and I thought, Are you my old boyfriend? Are you the dancing, idealistic, environmental, horny guy I used to know?

  He was the crow-black shadow of his former self. Thin, wispy, and ethereal. Yet it turned out, as he explained to me over the next few days, that a lot of his defensiveness against me came from my sudden arrival during his learning process. And naturally it had been quite a shock to him when I’d called and when I’d flown in so suddenly. He hadn’t expected that. “I felt we were just beginning to reconnect in our correspondence,” he said.

  “You’re right,” I told him. “And then I barged in on you with my whole academic crisis. I’m sorry.”

  “I only wish I could be a better channel for you to Hashem.” When Gary said that I could see that a lot of the sweetness and spirit of his letters was still with him.

  We went for a walk together on the city walls. The sun was beating down, and Gary finally had to take off his suit jacket and make do with his long-sleeved white shirt. I took off the borrowed sweater I was wearing over my old tank dress. I was running my hands along the stone of the walls. I was saying, “My God. These walls are so thick. Oh, my God, they’re so old.” And you could see from the walls all the houses and apartment buildings of the new city of Jerusalem covering the outer hills of the city. But what left you in awe was those ancient stones, and those gates enclosing and cherishing old Jerusalem. The real Jerusalem. The city of David, the one you read about, the Bible place nestled together. The citadel.

  “I can’t believe we’re standing here,” I said.

  And Gary said, “I know.” Then all of a sudden Gary’s worrying, and his prudishness, and his rabbinical mannerisms, seemed to melt away. Then it was as if finally he could speak freely. He told me about his ecstasy when he found his calling to be a Jew. “It was a moment of terror,” he said. “It was a moment of sheer terror. That’s the only way I can describe it. I was standing in Anne Frank’s house, and I felt deep in the pit of my stomach that my identity was her identity. Her fate was my fate. We shared one blood. We were of one flesh and one spirit. I was a Jew! I felt like walls were closing in on me. I was gasping for air, and I was crying out. And the security guards came for me, but I couldn’t stop screaming. I could see it all happening, but I couldn’t stop. They began to drag me away, and …”

  My eyes welled up just listening to Gary. I almost couldn’t bear to listen.

  “I felt what she felt being dragged down the stairs. I, a forty-three-year-old man, felt what she felt. A thirteen-year-old girl. They were dragging me away, and I was sobbing.”

  He couldn’t go on. I put my arms around him, and he didn’t pull away. He let me. The sun warmed us on the wall of Jerusalem. I hugged him for a long long time.

  I didn’t want the moment to end, yet I couldn’t help it—this one small niggling comment escaped me: “But, Gary … I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?” He tensed right up again. He drew right back, and put on his jacket for good measure.

  “I mean, I’m sorry. But I mean, how could you have not realized be fore you were a Jew? You always knew you were a Jew. Your name is Gary Levine. How could you forget? You knew you were a Jew way back as long as I’ve known you. That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Sharon,” he started. He shook his head. “No, see, I knew I was a Jew, but I never knew I was a Jew.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You didn’t know you were a Jew.” And I took that in, and I nodded, and I looked out to the distant hills with the white New City, and I lifted my eyes to the immediate hills—and what took my breath a moment—there was an actual shepherd walking there on the land, with his flock. There was a shepherd and he had a bunch of brown and black goats. “And you discovered you were a Jew,” I said again slowly. Then I turned to Gary again. I felt terrible doing it, yet I had to ask. “But isn’t that a little bit like finding out you were speaking prose all the time?”

  “No!” Gary burst out. “No, Sharon! Don’t you see? Before, I had no history. I had no knowledge. I had no learning. And at that moment. In one split second in the Netherlands. My history came home to me. That was what happened.”

  “Oh, Gary,” I whispered. Because now I saw what he meant. You could be a Jew in name, but not in spirit. Maybe that was me; I didn’t even know. But mainly I was wishing we could go back to where we’d been before, in our embrace.

  Too late. Gary had turned all testy and rabbinical again, and he was in a rush to get back to Torah Or to meet with his havrusah, which was his learning partner he studied with—and that couldn??
?t be me, because I was a woman, and a beginner at that, so I might taint the atmosphere with ignorance and lust. Not that I minded that Gary had turned into such a model of piety, but he’d gotten so exclusionary about it. Dealing with him—not to mention the whole Torah Or program—was this experience of mounting frustrations.

  And it wasn’t like I didn’t try. I went every day to class. Every day I sat there for as long as I possibly could. Yet Morah Zipporah’s classes kept bringing me down. She was this small lady in a wig of short bristly black hair, and she had a chiseled little face, and her veins were purple in her pale-skinned hands as she thumped the table. She spoke with a thick German accent, yet she’d been born and raised in Alexandria before her family had emigrated to Palestine. She was about two hundred years old.

  “Miss Spiegelman,” she said. My first name didn’t seem to ring a bell. “Miss Spiegelman, you have what to prepare today to do? And so.”

  And so was a complete derogatory sentence. It meant listen up, and get your ass in gear.

  “We shall today discuss again kashrus. What we shall see. Laws of separation. Milch.” She divided the air with one karate chop of her hands. “Fleish.”

  Everybody sat around the seminar table taking notes. Nine North American fellow travelers—including the dame who was jealous of my extended morning prayers—nine grown women totally cowed. And then there was me, raising my hand. The black sheep, and the troublemaker. The one who roused Morah Zipporah’s ire. Everybody hated me. It was like third grade—I was making the teacher mad at the whole class. But I raised my hand in any case. “Morah?” I asked, with all the respect and politesse that I could muster. “Would it be possible, since we’ve been studying milk and meat for so long, and since some of us are actually vegetarian anyway, to maybe have some dialogue on other subjects as well?”

  And Morah Zipporah, not being a product of the postwar American public school system, said, “No. Another subject will be another day.”

  Some support from other students would have been nice. Some class spirit! Yet we were all cows in that class. Milch cows. That seemed to be the real point of Morah Zipporah’s instruction. That was what I took away from ten days of seminars. There was a realm that was dairy, and there was a realm of meat. There was cow and there was blood. There was Kitchen Woman and there was Rabbinic Man (being the one who’d invented the realms in the first place).

  I sat there during Morah Zipporah’s lectures, and I had my dog-eared photocopied text before me. Hebrew on one side, English on the other. All the fine print on milchig and fleishig pots and pans. I felt lightheaded. I felt confused. Because this was not what I had come for! I’d come looking for the truth. The truth about God, not cooking utensils.

  I grabbed my backpack and I stood up in Morah Zipporah’s class, and she said, “Miss Spiegelman.”

  And I said, “Sorry. Excuse me.”

  The other women stared at me. All my classmates: The lady who was jealous of my prayer capacity knit her brow under her razor-sharp crew cut. The lady who woke early to do her daily AA meditations. The widow from Passaic. The former English teacher from Oxnard. The gay divorcée. They all watched me walk out.

  I started to run down the hall. I was looking for Gary. I was running up and down the decrepit staircases, poking my nose into classrooms, startling pairs of men from their learning, just barging in on them engrossed in text.

  At last I found him. He was hunched over in an empty classroom fixing his glasses. Trying to pop the little screw back in the hinge.

  “I give up,” I said.

  He looked up, startled. He held the tiny screw between his thumb and his forefinger.

  “Sharon!” he exclaimed. “You’ve been here just two weeks! Sharon, how can I make you understand? Without learning you have no basis. You have no foundation.”

  “Learning! You call those classes learning? I came here to delve, Gary.”

  “To delve into what?”

  “To delve! Just to delve, okay? I came here for truth. I came here for the truth about the Creator, not home ec!”

  “Home ec?” He looked at me in disbelief. “You’re talking about the kashrut shiur? Sharon, those halachos are the holiest—”

  “I don’t give a shit!”

  So then he did his old passive-aggressive thing and he said he wouldn’t listen to that kind of language, and he turned away.

  I took a breath, then I rephrased my point. “Don’t you think perhaps these seminar topics are just slightly narrow? Look, all I’m trying to say is I’ve been on the road of my personal journey for a long long time, and I’ve crossed some pretty serious thresholds—and not through studying, but living—being initiated into some pretty intense practices! And I probably don’t know much. In terms of learning I’m probably way behind, but I have learned one thing, and that is—I am seeking God. And to me that is not about silverware, okay? To me that is a matter of life or death!”

  Then Gary said in this quiet voice, “Sharon, you don’t even know who you are.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No,” he said, his voice even quieter, “you really really don’t.”

  For a moment I felt the truth in that. I was taken aback. Then I shook myself. I said, “No. No, see, that’s backwards—because I know who I am, obviously. I’m right here! I’m here all the time. It’s God that’s the enigma to me. It’s like He’s this mystery and I can glimpse Him for just a moment, and then He’s gone. And not that I’m a great visionary or something, but I know Him when I see Him. I do! Or at least I know when I’m getting warmer. And when I’m cold. And in that women’s class I’m ice. Antarctic!”

  He shook his head at me. It almost broke my heart seeing him without his glasses. Those brown eyes were still the same in that bearded face.

  I checked we were alone. I whispered, “Gary, let’s get out of here.”

  “What do you mean, get out of here?”

  “Let’s go. Let’s go hiking! Let’s hike Mount Sinai! Let’s leave this place. Gary, it’s just a little tiny school filled with little tiny questions. The big ones, they’re all outside. How can you sit here and read—”

  “You don’t understand,” he told me. “I’m learning how to live a Jewish life.”

  “So we’re Jews, and we’re living. What’s the problem? Can’t we go? Can’t we just get out?” He didn’t answer.

  “Gary, I feel like you’re slipping away. I feel like the person who wrote me letters, that person whose history I’ve shared, all that is somehow disappearing by the minute! I feel like you’re in the clutches of some kind of—some kind of cult!”

  “How dare you.” His face flushed. “I thought I could help you.”

  I gasped. “Oh, ’cause you felt sorry for me? Oh, right. Well, which part were you feeling sorry about? Leaving me? Or leading me on, pretending you wanted to get whatever we had back?” And I grabbed his glasses he’d been trying to fix and I smashed them to the floor. And I said, “You can let go the screw now, Gary,” since he still had that tiny hinge screw in his fingers. “You won’t need the goddamn screw.”

  And I ran down the stairs, and I could hardly see—it wasn’t even so much the tears, as my anger. And I ran down to the reception room, and started pushing out the door.

  Then the Israeli office lady suddenly called my name.

  “What?” I snuffled.

  “Telegram has arrived.”

  So then I thought, On top of everything. I thought, Oh, God, now what. And there before me was this white telegram from my former life. And it was from Will, and it said:

  Marlon very ill. Feline AIDS.

  I took the piece of paper outside and I walked and walked with my backpack slung over my shoulder. I didn’t think about my feet touching the ancient stones or any of that crap. I thought about poor Marlon, home sick. Probably dying there alone. And I thought about his little cat body, and his paws all limp. And I thought how I’d let him down again, and I remembered his face when I got so excited about com
ing to Torah Or, his little wrinkled seen-it-all face; his baleful yellow eyes. He was so knowing. He saw right through me. Every time. He just never, due to the ancient eco-socio injustices of man, had the power to change my mind.

  I had no idea where I was going. I just kept walking on. And I walked all the way up the road, up the hill, and I got to this park with a building that was the Jerusalem Nature Conservation Office. And I sank down, too tired to walk anymore. I sat on a bench. Well, I thought. Now you’re all alone. Now your boats are burned in all directions.

  I shivered, I was so chilly. My bench was actually a huge stone from an olive press, a huge round stone lying on its side. It looked like stone money from Yap. I didn’t have a sweater. I just had my backpack at my feet, all full of notebook paper and doodlings from class.

  This thing I had about looking for truth. The truth about what? About God? About the universe? Who did I think I was kidding? Truth probably wasn’t meant for humans—not in such large quantities. Dosing on truth. That would be a dangerous game. That would be like breathing pure oxygen, and you would explode. Or sipping absinthe. You could become addicted to the true. You could become one of those lost souls in the boulevards and the cafés. The absinthe drinkers.

  The sky was starting to fade. The round olive press stone was so cold. I thought: Marlon knew the truth. I thought: You dilettante. It was actually cleansing to think so ill of myself. It was actually some relief.

  I opened up my backpack. I pulled out my loose-leaf papers and, in there with them, my hothead letter to Friedell. “The big phallus,” I’d called him. “Classical shit,” I’d called his course. Yeah, that would show him. Yeah, right. I looked at my letter and I saw all that anger. I saw exactly the kind of person Friedell thought I was—another shrill feminist anti-the-educational-system ranting about her ideas and her emotions.