A guide for the perplexed: a novel Page 2

  “Put that away, Agnes. The humidity will destroy it. We shall show Mr. Schechter everything back at the house.”

  “Quite right, Margaret. I just wanted to be sure that Mr. Schechter understood what sort of material we’ve collected.”

  “Oh, I understand,” Schechter pleaded. “I do.” He could barely restrain himself from grabbing the paper out of the woman’s hands. He inwardly mourned as her long fingers folded back around the parchment, concealing it in some hidden pocket of her long black cloak.

  “The introductory bit is mainly letters and the like,” she said, patting her cloak with her pale hand. “Lots of ‘My dear pupil, I shrivel at your feet, in the name of the munificent Lord,’ and on and on, and then rhymed prose. Oh, endless horrid rhymed prose.”

  “Agnes can’t bear rhymed prose.”

  The women glanced at each other, sharing an identical grimace.

  “I can bear rhymed prose, Margaret. Just not horrid rhymed prose.”

  “Agnes, it is hardly appropriate for you of all people to judge the quality of twelfth-century rhymed prose. Mr. Schechter would surely agree, as an academician. What seems horrid to you may well have been—”

  “Margaret, you’ve fallen for the monks again, plain and simple. You’ve a weakness for musty rituals. But I for one am not afraid to declare that any rhyme that compares a lady’s lips to a ‘wine-dark cloud upon the moon’ is horrid, no matter in what century it was composed.”

  “But what about the bit with the gazelle? I rather liked it.”

  “That was horrid too.”

  “Did you really think so? ‘My soul leaps like a young gazelle,’ that bit?”

  “Trite.”

  “But in the twelfth century, it wasn’t yet trite.”

  “Yes, it was. Its triteness is timeless.”

  Schechter inched backward. He listened in a kind of rapture, unable to believe what he was hearing. It was as if he had happened upon his children engrossed in a discussion of the incorporeality of God. He stood before them with his mouth hanging open, his red beard brushing his academic robes.

  The women looked at him and laughed.

  “Please,” one of them said, “come with us.”

  Without a word, he did, proceeding past the medieval colleges on King’s Parade in the misty morning light, listening as the twins continued to argue the merits of rhymed prose.

  THE UNCANNY TWINS LIVED at Castlebrae, an enormous Tudor-style palace near Clare College, which they had built for themselves on the occasion of one of their marriages to a Cambridge librarian. The twins had money; Schechter assumed it came from one of their dead husbands. Not from the dead librarian’s salary, of course, but presumably from some sort of ancient inheritance, going back to whichever ancestral barbarians had most efficiently sacked the outposts of Rome. No one in Cambridge ever seemed to need to earn a living; making money was considered beneath the dignity of men of ideas. Among such people money was a novelty item, contemplated from behind glass. The entrance hall of Castlebrae was filled with display cases showing the deceased librarian’s vast coin collection. As Schechter followed the twins down the hall, he slowed to marvel at the ancient coins. He quickly spotted the one he remembered from his first visit to Castlebrae: a silver shekel minted in Jerusalem in the first century of the common era—or, as the coin itself declared, Year 5 of the Jewish revolt against Rome.

  “I’ve never fully understood how the two of you came to find the Codex,” Schechter ventured as they proceeded down the cavernous hallways of the house. He was itching for the manuscripts, but by now he had learned the unwritten code of the British upper classes: the elaborate dance of pleasantries, flattery, tea, liquor, remarks about the weather, more pleasantries, more flattery, more tea, more liquor—and only then, with perseverance and luck, could one enter an unlocked door to the inner vault of the mind. Already a servant had collected his coat. The twins were now gesturing him onto a velvet couch in one of the half-dozen sitting rooms, signaling to another servant to prepare tea. The two of them sat opposite him on a modern green velvet sofa, a happy couple in their lovely home. They were like a husband and wife.

  “How did you even begin to learn Syriac, and all of the other languages that would have been required?” Schechter asked, though his wife surely could have told him. Flattery was required now, he knew. He would never have made it from a starved Jewish town in Romania to Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge if he hadn’t known, intuitively, in every country and in every city and at every footfall along the way, which language was required.

  “Our late father was a barrister in Aberdeen,” Mrs. Lewis said. Or was it Mrs. Gibson? The one who hated rhymed prose, whichever she was. It did not help that their widow’s frocks, as far his untrained eye could tell, were as identical as they were. “We didn’t have any brothers,” she continued, “so he raised us like sons.”

  “He started us on Latin when we were six years old, and then we went on to Greek and Hebrew, so that we could read the word of the Lord,” the other twin said. “Of course I don’t need to tell you, Mr. Schechter, that Hebrew is rather simple once one masters the verbs. But oh, one could slit one’s throat over the verbs!”

  “Especially the hufal conjugation,” her sister added. “It generated many a private hapax legomenon when we were ten years old.”

  The sisters laughed aloud as though this were a brilliant joke. Schechter remembered one of his university classes on biblical scholarship in Berlin, where he had first encountered the term hapax legomenon. It meant any word that only appeared once in the Bible, and which no one could therefore fully understand. He had laughed when he learned it; he had noticed such words since he was a child. Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra and Onkelos—his dearest friends, scattered across centuries and continents but always gathered at the margins of his favorite books—had never failed to explain them.

  “Our father was quite wealthy,” one twin continued.

  “Not at first,” the other interjected.

  “A distant cousin of his passed away, and it happened that this cousin had inherited a vast fortune from his brothers in America. When he died, he had no one else on whom to bestow it. Once our father inherited the money, he offered to take us on holiday to any country we liked, on the condition that we were willing to learn its language first.”

  “French and German are required merely to qualify as being alive.”

  “But Agnes was dying to go to Italy, and I wanted to go to Spain, so we learned Spanish and Italian as well.”

  The servant had returned to the room with a teapot and teacups now, but Schechter declined. He was hypnotized. He knew the lure of languages; learning them had come to him, too, like an addiction. In Berlin ten years earlier, he had learned English solely in order to read George Eliot, and then French solely to read Voltaire. George Eliot had been well worth the language, but Voltaire had been a taunt, a wrenching at his soul. “You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” wrote Voltaire—father of the Enlightenment, creator of the modern mind, diamond in the crown of Western civilization—of Schechter and his family. “You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny.” And another bon mot from the philosophe on the Jews: “They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and Germans are born with blond hair.” This raging fanaticism left the red-haired Shneur Zalman (for in reading Voltaire, he once again became Shneur Zalman) wishing he had followed his twin brother to Palestine to drain a malarial swamp. To purge the university libraries of Europe of disease would be impossible.

  Instead, he inoculated himself with Torah. He was not the first Jewish instructor at Cambridge, but he was among the first to take up his post without breaking the covenant with God. He walked down King’s Parade with his head covered in humility before the king of kings, never entered the glorious college chapels, and arranged dispensations for the handful of unconverted Jewish students who would otherw
ise be required to kneel and bow before their professors in order to receive their degrees. At Christ’s College, where Schechter’s patrons had hosted him in 1894, the manciple in charge of formal dinners had trained the cooks in preparing kosher food. One of the twins, forgetful, was now offering him a plate of biscuits from the servant’s tray, likely baked with lard. “No, thank you,” he said. And, not wanting to embarrass her: “I’ve just had tea at home.”

  “Yes, perhaps better we should skip tea,” the other twin said. “We don’t want any damage to the manuscripts.”

  “The manuscripts,” Schechter repeated, hoping they would notice. But the sisters were proceeding with their story, unimpeded by his boiling curiosity. He leaned forward, clutching his knees to keep himself from jumping out of his chair.

  “More recently Agnes learned Syriac on her own.”

  “With some help from Mr. Kennett at the Faculty. Privately of course, since apparently it would be absurd for a woman to attend lectures.”

  “And we both learned Arabic years ago, so that we could travel without a dragoman.”

  “The first dragoman we used on the Nile was horrid. He was a Maltese, and he called himself a Christian, though he hardly would have qualified as one in the eyes of Christ. He had no thought but to drain our pocketbooks.”

  “Learning Arabic is actually easier than finding a trustworthy guide in the Levant.”

  “Lately Margaret has been reading the Koran, while I’ve been working through some of the Hebrew philosophers and poets. Ibn Gabirol and so forth.”

  “We’ve had considerable trouble with the Judeo-Arabic dialect, though.”

  “Perhaps simply because the rhymed prose is so horrid,” said one of them—the one, he had thought, who liked the rhymed prose. Were they joking? Or was he confused? The twin sisters laughed. On the velvet couch in the grand sitting room, Schechter sensed an absence beside him, longing seeping into his body like a forgotten smell. He remembered sitting at a wood-planked table in the hovel that was once his home, long ago: studying with Srulik, arguing with Srulik, laughing with Srulik, hearing his own laughter echoed in Srulik’s laugh.

  “When our father passed away, we were only twenty-three, and neither of us had married,” one of the twins said. “Normally his estate would have been held in trust until at least one of us secured a son-in-law to inherit it from him. But our father was very frightened that a husband might someday take advantage of either of us. In his will, he stipulated that the two of us would inherit all of his wealth, but only on the condition that we never live apart from each other.”

  “And we never did.”

  “Even when we were married, though unfortunately our husbands predeceased us.”

  They were like duplicates, Schechter thought, a cosmic error. They had lived together since the womb. If he and Srulik were ever reunited, would they become one person again? Or had they been severed from each other forever, each condemned to live only half a life? He thought of one of Srulik’s letters, written in a Hebrew that he still recognized as his identical twin’s voice: Shneur Zalman, here’s a story for you! Last week I was digging an irrigation ditch for the groves in the new town we just founded, Zikhron Yaakov. I stopped to rest, and then the ground opened beneath my feet and I fell into a hole in the earth. When I managed to light a match from my pocket, I saw that I was in an ancient cistern, with smooth stone walls and dark rings marking the water levels. I made a torch out of an olive bough that I found on the floor, and then I could even see the chisel marks where the cistern had been carved from the rock. Hours passed before someone found me and pulled me out. While I was waiting to be rescued, I wondered how old the cistern must have been. On the floor I found the answer: a bronze coin from the time of the Maccabees, lying at my feet. I’m sure you make all kinds of important discoveries in your fancy library every day, his identical twin wrote in Hebrew script, but I doubt you will ever fall through a hole in the floor and land in the memory of God.

  “After our father died we were quite distraught, and we decided it would lift our spirits to go to Egypt,” one of the twins continued.

  “And our dragoman was so horrid that we had to learn Arabic.”

  “Margaret, we already explained about the horrid dragoman.”

  “Did we? He was a Maltese, and called himself a Christian, but—”

  “The point, Mr. Schechter, is that when Margaret’s husband passed away, we decided to fulfill our dream of going to Mount Sinai, to the monastery there. Because we had heard wonderful things about their manuscript library.”

  “The manuscripts—” Schechter tried to interject. But the twins had abandoned him at the door of the present, entering the past as though it were a tastefully appointed room in Castlebrae.

  “We knew modern Greek, you see, so the monks befriended us quite quickly. They didn’t see us as instruments of the Empire, as everyone else sees Britons in the Levant.”

  “Though in fact we were instruments of the Empire, in a manner of speaking.”

  “In no manner of speaking, Agnes! We didn’t even take the manuscripts back with us! That German professor von Tischendorf did, and they called him a thief. They told us he was no better than Lord Elgin, the one who took the sculptures from the Parthenon for the British Museum. The monks are all Greek, you see, so they are quite sensitive about the Elgin Marbles.”

  “The blasted Elgin Marbles,” the other sister groaned. “As if anyone had even glanced at them in the twenty centuries before they arrived in London.”

  “Mr. Schechter, you know Professor Rendel Harris at the Faculty, of course. He told us that the monks at St. Catherine’s had a closet full of manuscripts in Syriac that he hadn’t had time to see. When he heard we were planning to return, he taught us how to use the photographical equipment, and he also told us precisely where we ought to look.”

  “In a great big wooden chest in the abbot’s bedroom. Rather intimate, in fact, although Father Galakteon was surprisingly welcoming. He even kissed Margaret’s hand. Quite shocking for an Orthodox monk.”

  “Don’t believe her, Mr. Schechter. He was a lovely gentleman, and entirely respectful.”

  “Margaret, you and your monks! Good gracious, Mr. Schechter, she positively swooned at them. You see, Margaret’s late husband was a minister.”

  “I fail to see how that is relevant, Agnes.”

  “It is quite relevant, Mr. Schechter. Because it was the monks’ fondness for Margaret, as the distraught widow of a man of faith, that made them so willing to share the manuscripts with us.”

  “That is untrue, Agnes. They simply appreciated that we spoke Greek. And that Agnes could read Syriac.”

  “Can you imagine, Mr. Schechter? None of them read ­Syriac, even though they live inside the greatest archive of ­Syriac manuscripts in the world. Would it have been so hard for them to learn Syriac? Honestly! What else are they doing with their time?”

  “Agnes, you forget that not everyone is so gifted with languages.”

  “Nonsense. It’s a mere lack of will. I myself would have offered them a correspondence course, simply to prevent them from destroying the treasures they had in that place. They were using manuscripts as kindling.”

  “Yet your main method of befriending them was to make disparaging remarks about the Pope.”

  The pleasantries phase of British upper-class conversation, Schechter had learned, generally attained terminal velocity when someone mentioned the Pope. His patience had run out.

  “So what manuscript did you want me to see?” he finally asked.

  The twins jumped from their sofa. One of them hurried to a cabinet near the window, from which she withdrew a small leather briefcase.

  “My sister and I recommend that you read the manuscript yourself,” she said.

  The other twin seated Schechter at a card table, as the first twin began drawing out long strips of parchment from the leather case and laying them before him. It was a poem, he saw, written in a clear Hebrew scrip
t:

  The blessing of a father settles the root,

  But the curse of a mother plucks up the plant.

  For he who despises his father deals presumptuously

  And he who curses his mother angers his Creator …

  Seek not that which is hidden from you!

  What is permitted, think thereupon,

  But you have no business with the secret things.

  The letters were inscribed in dark brown ink. As he read them, they burned in his brain like black fire on white fire. Was it possible?

  “This is puzzling,” he admitted aloud.

  “We agree.”

  He drew in his breath. “If I were forced to conjecture—”

  “We force you to conjecture,” a twin interrupted.

  “Conjecture!” the other cried.

  “If I were forced to conjecture,” he repeated, “I would say that this is a Hebrew version of part of the biblical ­Apocrypha—the book that Christians call Ecclesiasticus. The Wisdom of Ben Sirah.” He gave the final h the guttural it deserved. He enjoyed making the sound; his Gentile students could never quite do it.

  “Precisely, Agnes. Just as I said!”

  “Margaret, I believe I noted it first.”

  “No, you thought it was a much later translation from the Greek.”

  “That was only a supposition, Margaret, based on what is known to exist of Ben Sirah.” She pronounced the guttural h precisely.

  The two women turned back to him. “At any rate, Mr. ­Schechter, we are in complete agreement,” the other twin announced. “My sister and I concur that this is the original Hebrew version of Ben Sirah.” The guttural, once again, was exact.

  Schechter looked again at the script, bending down over it, breathing in its letters. “But that would be impossible,” he said. “It’s a book that doesn’t exist.”

  The twins laughed.

  “Books that don’t exist, Mr. Schechter,” one of them said, “are our favorite sort of books.”