A guide for the perplexed: a novel Read online

  “Books that don’t exist are invariably better than those that do.”

  “That’s why we kept looking for the Syriac Gospels. Surely the language Christ spoke would have been better than the Greek. One must admit that the Greek of the Gospels is really rather horrid.”

  “Heresy, Agnes!”

  “Margaret, it is hardly heretical to note that a warmed-over and poorly executed version of a literary text is horrid, when it clearly is. One simply cannot deny that the Syriac Gospel is in every aspect superior to the Greek from a literary point of view.”

  “I would agree, Agnes, except that the Syriac text says that Joseph begat Jesus. I consider the omission of the virgin birth to be a rather significant deviation from the Greek.”

  “Well, I suppose that is one demerit in the Syriac text.”

  “That, and the fact that the Syriac version omits Christ’s resurrection.”

  “Oh, Margaret, must you always be so negative? It isn’t ­omitted, Mr. Schechter. The text simply terminates with Mary Magdalene entering Christ’s tomb and finding his body missing.”

  “Precisely, Agnes—implying that Christ’s tomb was merely robbed. There is no suggestion whatsoever of Christ rising from the grave.”

  “It’s quite possible that the text was fragmented. Most likely it was a scribal error.”

  “Scribal error? The very next line reads, ‘Here endeth the Gospel of Mark’!”

  “Margaret, please, take the long view for once, would you? We’ve discovered the greatest biblical manuscript in church history, and here you are harping on the details.”

  “Forgive me, Agnes, but I do not consider the resurrection of Christ to be a detail. The text we found suggests that there was no virgin birth, and no resurrection. You’ve become so enamored of our grand discovery that you scarcely seem to have read it. Do you not find it even slightly disturbing that this manuscript we found in the Sinai, which is surely older and closer to the lives of the apostles than every other version of the Gospels in existence today, gives almost no indication of the divinity of Christ?”

  “I think the poetry of Christ’s teachings in Syriac is utterly unsurpassed.”

  “If all we care for are Christ’s teachings, then we might as well be bloody Jews!”

  Schechter coughed. The twins looked at him, one with a deep blush creeping into her wide pale face. He tried to think like Matilda, to say something that would put others at ease.

  “I don’t think you need to be concerned about the Lewis Codex replacing the Christian Bible,” he finally said, his tone carefully managed. He made a point not to say “New Testament.” He heard his little daughter singing a nursery rhyme in some rear bedroom of his mind: Make new friends, but keep the old—one is silver and the other’s gold! His daughter’s perfect native English was his own family’s newest friend. He considered the words of the rhyme, and the testaments old and new. Halevai, he thought in Hebrew. If only.

  “Agnes would surely be delighted if the Lewis Codex replaced the Gospels,” the blushing twin remarked. Schechter noted to his relief that her complexion was returning to its usual pallor.

  “Margaret, you must admit that the poetry is unsurpassed.”

  “Unsurpassed,” the other woman sighed. “And blissfully devoid of any mention of gazelles.”

  Schechter leaned over the table, examining again the shred of parchment before him. No matter how many times he read it, his conclusion was inescapable. But it was impossible, simply impossible. He read it again, pondering the blessing of the father, the curse of the mother, the probability of angering the Creator. Seek not what is hidden from you … You have no business with the secret things.

  “Ben Sirah is quoted in the Talmud quite a few times,” he declared, as if he were giving one of his lectures at the ­Faculty—though it was clear that these women could teach at the Faculty themselves.

  “Of course, we’re familiar with his work in Ecclesiasticus,” one twin remarked.

  “Yes. He’s a woman-hater.”

  Schechter smiled. “But no one has ever seen a copy of Ben Sirah’s original text. Even the Greek versions of it are corrupt. In the original Hebrew it no longer exists.”

  “Our favorite kind of book,” one of the twins said. The women shared a smile.

  But Schechter didn’t notice; he was still staring at the Hebrew letters on the table before him. “Professor Margoliouth at Oxford gave his inaugural lecture about Ben Sirah,” he muttered. “He argued quite forcefully that the Syriac version was the original, that the man had never written completely in Hebrew at all.”

  In the past few years Professor David Margoliouth had burrowed into Schechter’s mind, a grain of sand caught uncomfortably in his consciousness around which he formed pearls of thought from a slick of envy. Margoliouth was Schechter’s new twin in his new life, the chaired professor of Hebrew at Oxford. Margoliouth was appointed at a far higher level than Schechter, and naturally enjoyed much higher esteem. Margoliouth’s parents were Jews who had converted to Christianity, the father even becoming a missionary, and they had raised their son in the Anglican Church. Professor Margoliouth was ensconced among the enlightened.

  “Perhaps Professor Margoliouth was insufficiently informed,” one of the twins offered.

  “Perhaps all of us are insufficiently informed,” her sister said.

  Schechter remembered the translated words he had dropped in the gutter on King’s Parade: You have it in your power to strengthen that bond, if you choose to do so, or to weaken it gradually until it breaks.

  “Where did you find this,” he said, his voice low. He tried to make it a question, but couldn’t. His hands were shaking.

  “Cairo,” one twin offered, though this was well beyond obvious. Except with each other, they were impeccably polite.

  “Yes, yes, certain,” stuttered Schechter. Was it the adjective “certain,” like the Yiddish zikher? Or should it have been “certainly”? He was forgetting his English now, flustered. He was never flustered. He had reverted to thinking in Yiddish, in Hebrew, in Syriac. “But—but from whom? How?”

  “As we mentioned, Mr. Schechter, we purchased them from a Hebrew gentleman in the souk,” one said, without the slightest trace of impatience. The twins’ courtesy was bottomless, reverberating in the depths of their souls.

  “He had a stall around the corner from Shepheard’s,” the other twin added. “An antiquarian merchant.”

  “Antiquarian merchant, indeed. Goodness, Agnes, the man wouldn’t even let us leave without buying a rug.”

  Schechter interrupted. “You bought these on the street?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” one of the twins replied.

  “Agnes, it isn’t a manner of speaking. Yes, Mr. Schechter, we did buy them on the street. Or at least from a street merchant who later followed us back to our hotel.”

  “‘Margaret, really. ‘On the street’ suggests that the merchant was disreputable. There was absolutely nothing disreputable about Mr. Maimoun.”

  “A reputable merchant of antiquarian manuscripts would not have insisted that we also purchase a handmade rug for eleven pounds sterling.”

  “But it’s such a lovely rug.”

  A nursery rhyme of Schechter’s youth returned to him: God suspended the earth upon a void. The manuscript was in his hand now, floating on air.

  “Did Mr. Maimoun say where he found this?” he asked.

  “He was rather coy about it. His entire enterprise was quite dodgy, no matter what Agnes might suggest.”

  “He implied that he was the manuscripts’ sole proprietor. He told us quite clearly that we could search all of Cairo and would find no one else with access to such manuscripts as his.”

  “Agnes, you know perfectly well that was rubbish. He just wanted us to buy more manuscripts. And preferably another rug.”

  Schechter was ignoring them now, contemplating the script in his hand. “Archibald Sayce,” he said, thinking aloud. “Sayce brought back some
thing like this.”

  “Professor Sayce at Oxford?” one of the twins asked. Sayce was another Hebraist, a Christian one, and an expert on Apocryphal texts. There was no one, and perhaps nothing, the twins did not know. “What do you mean?”

  “He recently came back from Egypt with nine leaves of a Ben Sirah manuscript,” Schechter said. “He’s about to publish an article about them in Britannica. Professor Robertson Smith showed me a draft of his translations, to ask me if there were any errors he had missed. In the introduction Sayce said he had bought them from an antiquarian in Cairo.”

  The twins laughed, snorting identical snorts. “Mr. Maimoun has been very busy, I see,” one of them said.

  “I suspect that Professor Sayce is now the proud owner of a lovely new rug.”

  One twin stopped laughing, pointedly. “Oh, but Mr. Schechter, Mr. Maimoun was an honest man. Really, he was. He even told us he was a beadle at one of the synagogues there.”

  Schechter frowned. “A beadle,” he repeated.

  “Yes. He used the Hebrew term, shamash. I imagined it was rather like being an altarboy.”

  “More like a custodian,” Schechter said.

  “He said the synagogue where he worked was built on the site where the infant Moses was placed in the basket and floated down the Nile,” her sister added. “The building is over a thousand years old.”

  “He offered to take us there, but at that point we no longer had much time, and it didn’t seem worthwhile. And in any case I simply didn’t trust the man, even if Agnes did.”

  “If he’d only been a monk, you’d have believed his every word!”

  Outside the twins’ palace it had begun raining in earnest. One of the twins produced a matchbook and lit a lamp on the wall above Schechter’s head. The smell of the match struck in the dimming room, the edged scent of phosphorus and ash, ignited a memory that had long darkened in his mind: his father lighting a tall woven multi-wicked candle and holding it aloft in the darkness in their tiny three-room house in Romania, watching, entranced, as each of the wicks ignited, one by one, from the first flame. A thought entered his mind, a match struck in a darkening room.

  “Every synagogue has a storeroom in it called a genizah—a hiding place,” Schechter said. “A place for keeping damaged books and papers that contain the name of God.”

  The twins looked at him, their blue eyes alert, eager. He had reached the border of a new country: this was something they did not know.

  “An archive, you mean?” one of them tried.

  “Like the one the monks were maintaining at St. Catherine’s,” the other mused.

  “You mean like the one the monks weren’t maintaining at St. Catherine’s,” her sister huffed. “Mr. Schechter, do you know why we decided to look for Hebrew manuscripts in Cairo to begin with? Because we had seen them at St. Catherine’s. The monks were using them in the refectory as butter plates.”

  But the other twin remained transfixed. “Every synagogue has one of these?” she asked. “How on earth do they manage it? Wouldn’t that require every congregation to have its own librarian?”

  Schechter shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that. These books are rubbish, you see. Complete rubbish. Torn, worn, burned, damaged by water or smoke, illegible in too many places—and also irreparable. And in the case of printed matter, replaceable. You must understand the importance of documents in the Jewish world. In the case of the Pentateuch, the physical parchment itself must be perfect, undamaged in any respect, or else the text itself is no longer considered functional. I’m referring to books and scrolls and papers that can no longer be used.”

  “So why keep them at all?” one sister asked.

  “There are rabbinic laws that forbid the destruction of any object inscribed with the name of God, in observance of the commandment against taking the name of God in vain.”

  “That seems rather extreme, doesn’t it?”

  Years earlier, Schechter might have cringed. He had winced at his first dinner at Christ’s College two years before, when the college master said to him at high table, in the spirit of genial scholarly reflection, “I’ve always found it rather pathetic that so much of Christianity is based on Judaism.” That this was intended by an educated person as an opening for intelligent conversation in 1894—not, Schechter noted, in 1492, or even 1789, but 1894—was nearly as dismaying as reading Voltaire. Yet he also knew by now that some of these comments were meant not to condescend, but rather to explore terra incognita—part of the British thirst for venturing off to someplace exotic, where they could observe the natives in their natural habitats and then help themselves to the local treasures. The twins were adventurers, and Schechter was pleased to oblige them.

  “Not nearly as extreme as what happens to these books and papers,” he told them. “At first, they are stored in the genizah room in the synagogue. But eventually, they are buried in a cemetery, with a funeral. Like a person.”

  The twins looked at one another. Schechter could see that they were unsure whether to continue. They looked at him as if he had just told them that he sacrificed goats—as many people had innocently asked him, upon meeting him in Cambridge. When he gently explained to them that Jews had not sacrificed animals for nearly two thousand years, they were visibly disappointed.

  “How often does this sort of funeral take place?” one of the sisters asked.

  “Very rarely,” Schechter answered. “Usually it would only be arranged if several scrolls of the Pentateuch needed to be disposed of, which would likely only happen if the synagogue had suffered a fire. Or if the genizah were completely full, I suppose. But many congregations never even bother to empty the genizah. Here in Britain the weather would degrade the documents eventually. But in a dry climate, papers and parchments could accumulate for centuries.”

  “So who would be responsible for maintaining such a storeroom?” one of the twins asked. “Not a librarian?”

  “No, not a librarian,” Schechter replied. “Usually it’s just the custodian.”

  He watched as the sisters smiled.

  THIS IS WHAT JOSIE would like to forget.

  When they reached the pit it was twilight: a summer mountain twilight, thick with the smell of wet wood and encroaching darkness, the twilight fragrance that children imagine to be possibility and adults know to be regret.

  Future software titan Josephine Ashkenazi, thirteen years old, leaned against an enormous poplar tree, inhaling the twilight air along with compressed albuterol from a handheld pump. The mountain atmosphere was supposed to do her good, but hadn’t. Earlier, closer to the campsite, she had had a full-on attack, sucking air out of a paper bag. Her sister Judith, one year older, stayed with her while the others kept walking, shaking Josie’s inhaler with a practiced rattle of her wrist as she crouched on dead leaves and counted Josie’s breaths.

  “I’m so lucky you’re here, Judith,” Josie breathed, when her voice returned. She squinted through fogged glasses. “I couldn’t do anything without you.”

  Judith twisted her own dark curly hair into a knot behind her head, letting out a soft snort. “Josie, don’t be ridiculous. You could do all this yourself if you had to,” she said. She passed Josie the inhaler, and stood. “Come on, I want to catch up.”

  “Can’t we just sit here a little longer? They won’t notice.”

  “They’ll notice,” Judith said.

  The group of girls had been sent out to collect kindling for the fire, and had wandered very far from the campsite, intentionally. Everything girls her age did was intentional, Josie had noticed, a subtly calibrated collective thinking whose mysteries she could never penetrate, though Judith could. Judith ran ahead, and Josie sprinted behind her, laboring in the foreign mountain air. On the first night all the girls had compared their weights, and when asked, Josie had given hers in atomic mass units. There was no hope for her after that. She had hardened in the past year, building walls of facts around herself since her father’s departure. But here
she only had Judith, who was staring straight ahead as she hurried through the woods.

  When they caught up with the other girls, Josie saw them standing with their backs to her, still and silenced. She slinked up behind them, craning her neck beside Judith, until she saw what they saw: the forest suddenly interrupted, giving way to a wide deep pit in the ground.

  The pit was almost invisible until you were upon it, but then it opened up like a natural cellar in the earth, as deep and wide as an underground room. Its walls were sheer mud and rock. The sudden majesty of it hushed them, as though the earth had opened its mouth and breathed. The blue-gray air rattled with crickets as the girls stood at the pit’s edge, their young bodies trembling against the futures within them. They circled the rim, wordlessly peering into the abyss, until Josie spoke.

  “It’s a sinkhole caused by glacial melt,” Josie announced.

  A girl huffed, exhaling contempt. “Yeah, ’cause it’s freezing here.” All the girls gleamed with sweat, balanced on the precipice.

  “I mean during the Ice Age,” Josie said. She felt it starting, the wave of information building to a crest within her, rising behind her diseased lungs and her slight suggestions of breasts, and she knew it would do nothing but hurt her more, but she couldn’t help it, she never could help it. Like she couldn’t help breathing. “The whole Berkshire mountain range was covered with glaciers for millions of years. When glacial ice melts, it forms crevices, and when gas that was trapped under the ice is released, sinkholes can form in certain kinds of—”

  Someone shoved her.

  “Look what I got,” a girl called. She was fourteen, Judith’s friend. Josie looked up and saw her inhaler, held high in the heat. “The glue sniffer!” The girls let out loud happy laughs, the silence splintered into whoops.

  “I need it,” Josie said. Her voice was hoarse. Breathe in slow, she thought. Slow. “Give it back.”

  A mistake, she saw immediately. She shouldn’t have said anything, should have laughed herself. But it was too late now. The older girl was backing toward the pit, hoisting the inhaler higher into the haze behind her as the other girls laughed. Josie breathed in again, her eyes locked on the girl’s hand. She watched as the fingers on the hand slowly spread open. The inhaler fell.