36 Arguments for the Existence of God (25 page)

“Mr. Seltzer,” said Klapper sternly, “perhaps you would like to go and join the young lady.”

Cass looked over at the Valdener Rebbe, who smiled and said, “I am glad to see you again, Chaim Yisroel, after all these years. God willing, we’ll meet again, next time before so many years have elapsed. Next time, too, I hope you can bring your brother, Yeshiya Yakov, and your mother, too, who will always be loved by the Valdener Hasidim. Please tell her how much I would like to see her, either when she comes with you or with Yeshiya Yakov or by herself. Tell her that her Rebbe will always be her Rebbe.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper spent another three-quarters of an hour holed up alone with the Rebbe, and the conversation that ensued between them must have compensated for the exasperating distractions created earlier in the hour. Professor Klapper emerged extolling Reb Chaim’s relation as an estimable descendant of the sanctified Ba’al Shem Tov.

“The Valdener Rebbe has the slyness of Socrates, and is to be compared perhaps more to the metaphysical fabulist Borges than to the heresiarchs of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ”

For their part, Cass and Roz had spent an enchanting time with the Rebbe’s son. They’d gone back to the windowless room where Roz had
first been shelved. Cass probably wasn’t allowed to be there, but nobody came and bothered them.

Azarya, away from his watchful older sister, was now able to indulge in his curiosity about these visitors, especially the lady whom he thought as beautiful as Queen Esther.

His first question to them was where they came from, fascinated to hear that they came neither from New Walden nor from Brooklyn nor from Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel. He could recount for them, and did, the seven generations of Valdener Rebbes and their wives and children, going all the way back to Reb Azarya ben Yisroel, who had been a direct descendant of the Besht. He knew exactly where he was situated on the family tree. But he didn’t know that the name of the country he lived in was the United States of America. Roz wanted to draw him a map of America. He’d never seen a map of anything, and once she explained the idea of a map to him, he grew so excited that he went running out of the room, his silky blond side curls flying, to go find something to draw with. He came back a few minutes later with a box of crayons and a few sheets of coarse white paper.

Roz got down on the floor, since there was no writing surface in the room, with the little boy stooping down near her so that he could watch closely, his hands clasped between his knees. She drew a reasonably well-proportioned and accurate map of the United States, using red and blue crayons. She also drew an American flag for Azarya and explained about its stars and stripes. She colored the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for him. He knew about the ocean because of the splitting of the Red Sea. He had no idea that he lived within fifty miles of an ocean. One of his older sisters had been to Brooklyn, but he had never left New Walden. He hadn’t realized that when his father had gone to Eretz Yisroel he had had to cross the blue water that Roz drew for him.

Azarya knew how to read Hebrew and Yiddish and Aramaic, but he hadn’t been taught the English alphabet yet. Nevertheless, Roz labeled all the states, saying the names aloud as she wrote, and labeled “New Walden” and “Cambridge.”

“This is where you live, and this is where Cass and I live. Maybe someday you’ll come and visit us. Would you like that?”

“With my sisters, too?”

“Sure, why not.” As long as they were dreaming the impossible anyway, they might as well make it to the child’s specifications.

“Are you married?”

Azarya had settled down cross-legged on the floor next to Roz. He was as comfortable with strangers as the Onuma brats, which was remarkable, given the insularity of the Valdeners. Being the Rebbe’s son, and a prodigy to boot, he’d probably been bathed in affection and powdered in praise his whole life.

“To each other? No.” She smiled down at him.

“To someone else you’re married?”

“No. We’re not married at all.”

“Will you invite me to the
hasana?”

“The wedding,” Cass explained to her.

“Of course we’ll invite you! Do you think we’d have our
hasana
without you?”

The child broke into his wonderful smile.

“Now I’ll draw
you
a picture!” He took another of the sheets and lay down on his stomach on the floor beside Roz with his box of crayons and got to work.

“It’s a surprise for you,” he told them. “I’m going to make one for each of you. For your
hasana
. Don’t look yet.”

He didn’t get the chance, though, since the rail-thin woman who had taken Azarya and Roz into the Rebbe’s study soon came to fetch Azarya. She, too, had some words of gentle chastisement for him, apparently having to do with his being on the floor. She glared at Roz, who was sitting there beside him. Azarya got up quickly and then handed the sheet of paper to Roz, telling her sadly that he hadn’t had time to finish.

“The last one isn’t finished. When you look at my drawing, you’ll see many different
maloychim,”
he said to her, for the first time looking a little bit shy. “I’m sorry,” he said to Cass, “that I didn’t make a drawing for you.
Ble nadir
, I’ll make one for you next time.” As he was being led away, he looked back over his shoulder and smiled the smile of a cherub, lifting his little hand and opening and closing his fingers to wave in the manner of the very young. Bye-bye.

“That’s not only the most extraordinary child I’ve ever met,” Roz
said to Cass and Klapper as they walked back to the car in the quickly falling dusk, “I think that might be the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”

Klapper stopped walking and looked at Roz.

“I think he must be some sort of idiot savant. The Rebbe spoke feelingly of the problem with genetic disorders that they have. It’s the price of their marriage purity.”

“Idiot sa
vant
! Are you
kidding
me, Jonas?” Cass winced at the many liberties Roz was taking. At least she didn’t call him “the Klap” to his face—not yet. “If that kid’s not a genius, then I’ll eat his father’s fur hat. Turn on the light, Cass.” They were in the Lincoln Continental now. “I want to see that drawing he made for me.”

Azarya had folded the sheet once in half. When she unfolded it, she saw a bunch of numbers written down, arranged in clumps that were somewhat triangular in shape, and that he’d written with different-colored crayons.

“Let’s see,” said Cass, and Roz held Azarya’s picture up so that both Cass and Klapper could inspect it.

“Perhaps it’s gematria,” Klapper said, showing a momentary interest.

“What’s gematria?” asked Roz.

“I’ll explain it to you as soon as Reb Chaim turns off the interior lights and turns on the heat. When I say my teeth are chattering I am not speaking figuratively. Gematria, from the same Greek roots that give us ‘geometry,’ is an ancient anagogic means of extracting the hidden meanings out of sacred texts, by assigning numerical values to letters and then computing the values of a word or phrase. The Greek isopsephy, the Muslim
khisab al jumal
are examples of similar techniques, but the most intricately and cannily developed is the gematria of the Kabbalists. Take my name, for instance, which is a rather fascinating one.”

“ ‘Klapper’?” Roz asked, and Cass felt a buzz of alarm. It would be catastrophic were the conversation to yield revelations of Klepfish.

“No, I refer to my given name, Jonas Elijah. In Hebrew, my name is Yonah Eliyahu, and if you take the gematria of my first name it adds up to thirty-five:
yod
is ten,
vav
is six,
nun
is fourteen, and
heh
is five. If you then add the first letter of my second name,
aleph
, you get thirty-six—or in Hebrew,
lamed vav
, which is a number with profound mystical significance.
The Lamedvavniks are the thirty-six people of impregnable purity who live in every generation and for the sake of whom the world is not destroyed. Their identity is kept so secret that even they don’t know who they are. The name Yonah means, literally, ‘dove,’ but also can mean, paradoxically, ‘the Destroyer,’ as it also means ‘a Gift from God.’ And in Hebrew the name of Yonah,
yod vav nun heh
, is almost identical to the one and only true name of God,
yod heh vav heh
, or Yahweh, the Divine Tetra-gram. The only letter that distinguishes between the two is the letter
nun
, which is a letter known as the ‘winged messenger.’”

Boy, you never knew what Krap the Klap was going to throw at you. Roz almost had to admire him.

“Azarya’s drawing had a bunch of zeros in it. Does the zero mean anything in gematria?” she asked him.

“Nothing at all. I’m afraid that the child’s drawing has no Kabbalistic significance whatsoever. An indulged and, I’ve no doubt, much-tutored child has learned to write his numbers without having much grasp of what they mean and drew you a picture out of them.”

“I bet there’s more to it than that. That child is something wonderful.”

“There was indeed something wonderful back there, young lady, and it is unfortunate for you that it passed you by. You are the sort who, should she witness the Messiah walking on water, would be impressed that his socks had not shrunk.”

Cass marveled at how well Jonas Elijah Klapper kept his temper with Roz. He just hoped she wouldn’t push it. His hope was in vain.

“I’m just wondering. Did you follow what he was talking about?”

Cass winced, waiting for the onslaught. But Jonas Elijah Klapper’s response was astoundingly mild.

“Are you questioning whether I have the resources to keep pace with the Valdener Rebbe? Granted, he is a daringly speculative charismatic, but I hardly think we are mismatched.”

“I meant did you follow Azarya.”

“Azarya?”

“The Rebbe’s little son.”

“What I am failing to follow is you, young lady.”

“I’m wondering whether you were impressed when he started talking about numbers.”

“You think it had some Kabbalistic meaning?”

“I don’t know about Kabbalistic. But the child had figured out—and, according to his father, all by himself—the concept of prime numbers. He’d figured out squares and cubes. He’s six years old. That doesn’t impress you?”

“No doubt he’s an unusual child,” Jonas Elijah Klapper conceded. His forbearance toward Roz verged on the miraculous. “He is, after all, of the royal line going back to the Ba’al Shem Tov himself. But, no, I’m not impressed by the slide-rule mentality. I remain unimpressed with the mathematical arts in general. What are the so-called exact sciences but the failure of metaphor and metonymy? I’ve always experienced mathematics as a personal affront. It is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the Supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind’s refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explanation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me? Or, as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shrewdly argues, ‘Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don’t like these laws, including the “two times two is four?”’ Dostoevsky spurned the hegemaniacal logic, and I can do no less.”

They drove back to Boston in near silence, though Klapper had perked up a bit when they stopped at a McDonald’s on the Massachusetts Turnpike, where he had expatiated on the parallels between the junk food on American highways and the junk ideas on American campuses, launching into the ludicrosity of English professors who study the evacuations from the posterior of popular culture—for example, a colleague he had had at Columbia who analyzed the lyrics of a musical ensemble called the Sex Pistols. Professor Klapper managed to expound even while he put away two Quarter Pounders with Cheese, a large order of fries, and a cup of cola the size of a cocktail shaker. “The fried potatoes are superlative,” he said, his lips glistening.

They dropped Jonas Elijah Klapper off at his house in Cambridge, which was on an exclusive cul-de-sac pocketed behind the Episcopal Divinity
School. The house was fronted by an iron gate and struck Cass as vaguely English. There was an old-fashioned lawn lamp shedding soft light on the ivy climbing the walls. He watched Jonas Elijah Klapper heavily mount the front stairs of his porch, unlock his front door, and disappear without a backward glance. He had sunk back into silence as soon as they had left McDonald’s, and Cass wondered whether it was because of distaste for Roz, or because his visit with the Rebbe had yielded a feast of insights upon which he was meditatively chewing. Or perhaps he had been lulled into the tranquillity of an infant by the large car’s effortless gliding through the darkness of night.

As tired as Roz had thought she was, she couldn’t sleep. The first thing she had to think about, and dispose of, was just how infuriating that gasbag of a Klapper was. Did he actually say, without irony, “I’ve always experienced mathematics as a personal affront”? How could Cass not see him as one of the most prominent, if not the pre-eminent, propounders of poppycock of our day?

Cass was asleep beside her, his arms around her. He was the only man she’d ever known who liked to cuddle so much that he did it in his sleep. Sleep-cuddling was all that he had managed tonight. When she got out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth, he had already dropped off.

It was just as well. She’d felt put out with him. He’d given no indication that he opposed his demented adviser’s ukase that Roz make herself as if she were not. Even the Valdener Rebbe had been less a misogynist than the Klap. In fact, she’d ended up liking him.

Poor boy. She predicted disenchantment of major proportions for Cass Seltzer. And if disenchantment never came, then its absence was an even more disturbing eventuality to contemplate.