Tremble (32 page)

Come on, Aaron told himself now, this is the civilized world, shit like
that only happens in bad films, surely? But his accelerating walk betrayed his fear. Sucking the wind in between his teeth, he tucked the file he was carrying farther under his arm. As he descended into the steaming subway entrance he deliberately switched his thoughts to a pleasanter image: Miriam, his wife, waiting for him at home. Married for only one year, just to sound out the word
wife
made Aaron, a corpulent man who tended to disguise his shyness with aggression, smile.

The tight-knit Lubavitch community in Crown Heights had all but despaired of seeing the only son of their oldest matriarch—ninety-year-old Myra Gluckstein—married. At fifty-two years of age, Aaron’s timidity was legendary. It was rumored he never took his clothes off in front of another person, even at the Mikvah in front of other men. Of Hungarian descent Aaron stood at six foot five inches and weighed in at twenty-five stone. He was blessed with a jutting chin and the kind of nose you could imagine leading an army, but Aaron seemed only to employ his testosterone for business. He was useless in the pursuit of women. He also displayed an unfortunate revulsion for women pursuing him—of which there had been many. After all he was a desirable male: a God-fearing Jew who took the Rebbe at his word, knew his Gemara backward and his Mishnah off by heart and, most importantly, was a man of means. In short, an honorable individual; a mensch. And an unmarried mensch living with his ninety-year-old mother in one of the largest brownstones in Crown Heights was naturally an attractive commodity.

By the time Aaron had reached thirty the community was rife with rumors that he was (a) maybe homosexual, God forbid; or (b) a virgin.

Luckily for him, by the time he hit forty most of the mothers had forgotten he was single at all. Even the widows had stopped pointing him out from the women’s balcony at temple and the supply of loaves of fresh-baked challah ceased appearing on his doorstep. Aaron Solomon Gluckstein had become invisible…until Miriam.

His meeting with Miriam was a secret arrangement Myra Gluckstein made for her son via the Internet. The community had their own special Website, www.mitmazel.com, for such needs. Peering through her bifocals the matriarch screened dozens of profiles until she arrived at Miriam. Myra stared thoughtfully at the black-and-white photograph of the mousy thirty-year-old whose dark eyes seemed cursed with the same painful shyness as her son’s. The fact that the young woman listed
poetry as her hobby and Rilke as her favorite poet clinched it for the older woman, who, in the 1930s, had taught philosophy and European literature at New York University. She was still a radical atheist then, before Abraham Gluckstein seduced both her body and her soul into Orthodoxy.

“If she likes Rilke she’ll be a romantic, and if she’s a romantic she’ll see only what she wants to see, which, with God’s blessing, can only be a good thing in the case of my son,” Myra, a pragmatist, muttered as she jotted down Miriam’s mother’s number in Chicago.

A week later the reluctant candidate flew to New York (only her second ever trip there); a month later Miriam and Aaron were married. And much to everyone’s amazement, not least of all Aaron’s, it turned out to be a union of great love as well as great bashfulness.

And so it was, on that bitterly cold evening in November, that Aaron Solomon Gluckstein found himself hurrying to the front door of his house on Union Street, Crown Heights. The warmth of inside shone through the stained glass of the door and the smell of roasting meat wafted out. He glimpsed the shadow of his wife busily passing by. I love her, he reflected, and his happiness caught in his throat like a tickle, an effervescent sensation that immediately evaporated at the thought of the file tucked under his arm. Aaron kissed his fingers, then touched the mezuzah that hung over the front door for good luck.

Miriam gazed at the rotund figure of her husband as he leaned back content, the plate before him wiped clean of everything, even the gravy.

“And I thought I married an intellectual,” he said, smiling.

“An intellectual who could cook, of this I made sure,” his mother chipped in, perched at the other end of the table like a sparrow.

“Now don’t get comfortable. We’re due at the shriebel in half an hour—there’s discussion group on tonight,” Miriam announced, already clearing away the plates.

Aaron, who was far less enthusiastic than his wife about the informal synagogues that had sprung up spontaneously in houses around the neighborhood, sneaked a look at the file he’d left on the heavy oak dresser his father had hauled out of occupied Hungary some sixty years before.

Miriam, who noticed everything, followed his gaze. “Oh, do you have to work?”

“No, but there’s something I have to think about.”

“If it involves ethics you should come to the group—the topic is the issue of privacy and disclosure. I heard it from Jacov’s wife. The women, I think, will be discussing the same.”

Aaron looked sharply at her as if she had guessed his own mind. Miriam smiled sweetly back.

“Come, you know I love to think of you as a philosopher.”

“And I you,” he replied, unable to resist the mischievous humor that played in her eyes. His mother cackled.

“You know, once my Aaron was so shy he never raised his voice, now he’s a regular Trotsky. For the first time I realize he takes after me and not his schlemiel of a father,” she said, marveling at the transformation the inhibited young woman had wrought in the great awkward hulk of a man. Perhaps two shy halves make one proud whole, she thought, and wondered when she should expect grandchildren.

Children were the last thing on Aaron’s mind as he glanced once more at the ominous file. He knew that, were he to open it, the first page would be marked
Do Not Disclose
. The face of his superior, O’Brien, loomed before him. A striking man, always immaculately groomed, there was something inherently dangerous about him, an unpredictability that glittered under the impeccably polite veneer. Had he seen Aaron that morning coming out of the archives department?

The image of Hinkel arguing behind the glass door of O’Brien’s office suddenly flashed into Aaron’s mind; an event he’d accidentally witnessed just days before Hinkel’s disappearance. Hinkel had been gesturing wildly, like some silent, terrified clown, while O’Brien just stood there, his face an impassive mask except for his eyes. Those pale blue eyes that always reminded Aaron of Hollywood Nazis. It was hard to trust a man whose eyes were paler than his hair. What if O’Brien had seen him with the file? What then? Again, anxiety trickled down his spine to fasten itself around his stomach.

The shriebel was in an attractive three-story brownstone sandwiched between the yeshiva and a community center. Already the room was
crowded with men in their formal black coats and yarmulkes. Ranging from twenty-year-olds barely out of religious school to forty-year-old patriarchs, the discussion group sat in a semicircle in front of a radiator. A photograph of the leader of the Lubavitch community, the Rebbe himself, stared down at them, the face with its white beard, gray shock of hair, and piercing eyes as familiar to them as that of the president. The chatter of the women in an adjoining room was audible through the thin wall. As with all activities in the community the sexes were segregated.

Aaron surveyed the familiar faces: Mr. Farras, Adam Rosen, Jacob Lowenstein, his brother Moses, the young rabbi whose fervor was infectious and whose Sephardic name Aaron always found unpronounceable and forgettable, and then the usual flotsam that had drifted in—visitors from Israel, family from other states. The claims assessor positioned himself in the largest chair in the room; even then his mass sprawled out below the armrests and took up the space of two men.

“The issue this evening is that of disclosure,” the rabbi began. “On many occasions as a rabbi you will face the dilemma of whether it is ever acceptable to break the code of privacy. As an adviser to the community, people confide in you but there are situations when you might consider it your duty to disclose information for ethical reasons. For example, if a woman confides in you that she is having an affair, do you tell her husband? Or the case in England now, where a rabbi is being sued because he told a man that his wife was not attending the mikvah. In an event like this, what does one do? In the Talmud we read how…”

The fledgling rabbi’s voice droned on and Aaron, contented by dinner and the heat of the radiator, struggled to keep his eyes open. As he began to doze off a car part floated across his vision; he recognized it immediately.

“…Should one conceal information for the greater good?”

At the word
conceal
Aaron’s eyes flew open. “N-no, I think n-not,” he stammered, “even if it means the demise of that individual, even if the short-term profit of the institution in question is in jeopardy, for surely it is b-better to act in the greater good even if that means demotion, b-bankruptcy, the end of your career.”

In the ensuing silence Aaron blushed furiously; he’d interrupted
abruptly and out of context. The rest of the men searched each other’s faces, confused. Aaron’s close friend Ira Weinstein spoke up.

“I think what Aaron means is that, unlike Marx, the means justify the end. In other words, it is better to be a Judas to save a nation than stay silent to save a village.”

The rest of the group nodded politely, still not understanding a word of Aaron’s outburst. As Mr. Farras, a closet Darwinist, launched into a tirade about the evolutionary advantages of favoring individual survival over that of the collective, the claims assessor fell into a painful reverie.

Should he act on the contents of the file? For years he’d fought to defend the reputation of his company, and now this—a vital piece of information that entirely undermined not only his own stance but his confidence in the company itself. He had been lied to, used as a stool pigeon. How could they do that to a religious, morally upright man such as himself? His most secret fear, the idea that he was inherently naive against an ethically bankrupt world, rose up before him like a relentless black obelisk. They’d sought him out as a student, homing in on all that youthful gullibility, then exploited him ruthlessly. Aaron Gluckstein was a sucker. The fall guy. The fat buffoon in the corner.

This was the company that prided itself on its policy of placing people over profit. That was their byline; the phrase,
Let Us Cradle Your Life in Our Hands
, was printed on every insurance policy they sent out. Aaron had never felt less safe in his life. The deep-rooted cynicism of the act he’d uncovered made him shiver. Whatever the company’s motivation, it was a profound betrayal and one that wiped out twenty years of unquestioning loyalty, but the real issue was: what should he do now? Now that he had in his possession a piece of information that could save thousands of people’s lives and cost the company millions?

“Aaron?”

Drawn back into the moment Aaron looked around wildly. The young rabbi put his hand gently on his knee.

“I think it would help the group if you shared the specifics of the moral dilemma you were talking about? Because surely one cannot separate the needs of the individual from the community—”

“No, no, that would be impossible,” Aaron replied aggressively, suddenly fearful his mind might be read. He stood, pushing his chair back, his bulk suddenly filling the room. “I’m sorry.”

He stumbled blindly to the back of the room, then, without knocking,
opened the door to the women’s meeting. “Miriam,” he said sharply, interrupting a heated debate on fertility cycles, the moon, and religious law. He peered short-sightedly into the array of seated women, a jarring medley of colorful long-sleeved sweaters and headscarfs punctuated by several rather glamorous wigs. There was a flurry of activity as everyone turned to see who the audacious intruder was.

Worried, Miriam rose to her feet. “Aaron, is everything okay?” she asked, aware of the whispered disapproval around her.

“Yes, but we are leaving now,” Aaron announced, indifferent to the women. Flushed, the new wife mumbled her apologies as she pushed her way past the seated matrons.