Visiting Professor (3 page)

“In America,” Rebbe Nachman declares zestfully, “male bonding is nothing more than a respectable way of hating women.”

Peering through a
magnifying glass, the Rebbe studies the fine print on the page of the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table. “Oy, IBM
is down seven and a quarter. I should have maybe sold short months ago. General Dynamics is up four and a half. Is this the
time to sell or should I maybe hang on? Explain me this, please, how am I going to set up a yeshiva if I don’t make a killing?”

A tinny rendition of Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand comes from an old Motorola balanced on a stack of books. Sighing, the
Rebbe goes back to shredding dried brown buds into a rectangle of cigarette paper. Observing him from across the table, Lemuel
helps himself to another lump of sugar from the pewter bowl, peels away the paper advertising the restaurant it was stolen
from and clamps the cube between his front teeth. Filtering herb tea through the sugar, he watches in fascination as the Rebbe’s
fingers knead the rectangle of paper into a perfect cylinder.

The Rebbe notices Lemuel noticing. “Before I was a longshoreman, I worked in a cigarillo factory in New Jersey.” He flicks
the spongy tip of his pink tongue along the edge of the paper and seals the cigarette. Frisking his pockets, he comes up with
a book of matches, also filched from a restaurant. He strikes a match and holds the flame to the joint. When the tip is smoldering,
he shakes out the match and takes a first tentative drag. Exhaling, he asks casually, “With a biblical name like Lemuel, which
signifies, correct me if I’m mistaken, ‘Devoted to God,’ you are maybe Jewish?”

“My father’s father, who was an ardent
Homo sovieticus
, called his son Melor, which stands for ‘Marx, Engels, Lenin, organizers of revolution.’ My father, who was a ardent
Homo antisovieticus
, claimed Lemuel stood for ‘Lenin, Engels, Marx, undersexed exhibitionist lumpen-proletarians.’ “ Coughing up a snicker, Lemuel
goes back to sipping tea through the sugar cube.

The Rebbe persists. “With a name like Falk, you are maybe circumcised?”

Worried that they are returning to the subject of male bonding, Lemuel offers an evasive grunt.

The Rebbe is not put off. Looking Lemuel in the eye, he demands,
“Do you believe in Torah? Do you fear Yahweh?” He articulates the sacred name of God, daring Him to strike him dead for the
transgression of pronouncing it out loud.

“What I believe in,” Lemuel mutters, in no mood to be drawn into a theological discussion, “is mathematics. What I love is
pure randomness. What I fear, what I detest, is chaos, though on a theoretical level, I admit to being fascinated by the possibility
of discovering a seed of order at the heart of chaos.”

“So tell me this: If you do not believe in Yahweh and Torah, in what sense are you a Jew?”

“I never said I was a Jew.” Lemuel shrugs. “I am a Jew in the sense that should I happen to forget, every twenty or thirty
years the world will remind me.”

The Rebbe takes a serious drag on the joint, holds the smoke in his lungs before breathing out. “If you are Jewish enough
to be reminded of it that easily,” he says with a shrewd glint in his eye, “how come you did not wind up in Eretz Yisrael?”

Lemuel grimaces. “For me, America, not Israel, is the Promised Land.” He snorts under his breath. “I have a friend in Moscow
who swore me the streets here were paved with Sony Walkmans.”

“My father’s grandfather, may he rest in peace, came over from Poland in 1882 thinking they were paved with Singer sewing
machines.” The Rebbe sucks smoke into his lungs. Holding his breath, he offers the joint to Lemuel.

Lemuel shakes his head. “I am allegoric to cigarettes.”

The Rebbe exhales. “This is not a cigarette. Cigarettes I gave up for Chanukah, after smoking two packs a day for sixteen
years. This is what they call a reefer. A joint. Dope. Marijuana. Mary Jane. The lady who supplies me calls it Thailand truffles.”

Sniffing delicately at the smoke hovering like a rain cloud over the stock-market pages, Lemuel discovers that marijuana has
a surprisingly pleasant odor. “No offense intended …”

“Ask, ask.”

“I am curious what kind of a rabbi smokes dope.”

“Ha! No offense taken. Fortunately for mankind, for womankind too, the happy few are always tempted, like Eve in what the
Prophet Ezekiel called the Garden of God, by forbidden fruit. In the sense that Eve defied God in Eden, I smoke dope. It permits
me to better know wrong and right.” The Rebbe’s eyes glaze over as he again offers the
joint to Lemuel.
“ ‘Ta’amu ure’u,’ “
he mutters. “I’m talking Psalm 34:8. Roughly translated, it means Taste it and see.’ “

Lemuel waves the cigarette away along with the smoke.

The Rebbe tugs at the top button of his shirt, loosening the collar, runs a finger between the collar and the welt on his
neck, takes still another drag on the joint. “Oy, oy,” he murmurs, his head rolling from side to side in agitation, “this
Eden, this Garden of Yahweh, what is it but a swamp of randomness? How come Adam is molded from
adamah
or clay, and Eve from rib? Explain maybe why Adam and Eve can remain in the garden on condition they do not eat from one
particular fruit tree? What in God’s name does fruit have to do with good and evil? And what could have been going on in that
head of His that Yahweh had to invent murder?”

“Yahweh invented murder?”

“The first recorded death in what we Jews call Torah and goys call the Old Testament comes when Yahweh slays an animal so
Adam and Eve can hide their bodies. I’m talking Genesis 3:21. ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats
of skins.’ Come at the problem from another direction: What coded signal is God sending to the resident scholars and visiting
professors at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies when He identifies Himself to Moses at the
burning bush?”

Lemuel, who sharpened his
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
English on the King James Bible, Raymond Chandler and
Playboy
, remembers the standard King James translation for Yahweh’s answer to Moses. “I am that I am.”

“Ha! In Hebrew, ‘Yahweh’ is written ‘yod-he-waw-he,’ which is derived from the root letters for the verb ‘to be.’ What Yahweh
tells Moses at the burning bush—
‘ehyeh asher ehyeh,’
which is the future tense of the verb ‘to be’—is a play on words based on His name.” Nachman rambles on excitedly. “Yahweh
should maybe be translated I will be that I will be.’ I am personally reading this to mean ‘I will be when and where I will
be.’ So who is this Yahweh who refuses to be pinned down to a specific time or a specific place? I will tell you who He is.
He is the incarnation of randomness. And what is randomness—how did you put it in your paper on entropy?—what is randomness
but a footprint of chaos? What does it tell us about the Lord God that He created a universe governed by the laws of chaos
and peopled it with us?”

The Rebbe uncrosses and recrosses his legs. Lemuel catches a glimpse of pale, hairless skin glistening above his lace-up high
shoes. “Ha! After the destruction of the Second Temple, Rebbe Judah ha-Nasi, may he rest in peace, is said to have asked,
If God really loved man, would He have created him?’ “ Pulling at his beard, the Rebbe rocks back and forth in a kind of delirium.
“It is not only a good question, it is maybe the only question.” Wincing, he brings his hands up to his temples. “Oy, in the
words of the illustrious Rebbe Akiba, my head is spinning from all these questions without answers.”

“Your head is spinning from all the marijuana.” Lemuel leans forward. “Are you all right?”

“I am not all right, but I will be all right. You maybe know the Jewish proverb: If you want to forget questions without answers,
put on a shoe that is too tight.” The Rebbe’s bulging eyes flick open and focus intently on Lemuel. “Do not make the mistake
of thinking you can tell a rebbe by his cover any more than you can a book.” He melts back into his chair. His lids drift
closed. When he speaks again, his singsong voice is barely audible. “You maybe know the story—the famous Vorker Rebbe, may
he rest in peace, said you could distinguish an exalted person by three things.” Rebbe Nachman thrusts a fist into the air
and raises a finger for each item. “One: He weeps without making a sound. Two: He dances without moving. Three: He bows down
with his head held high.”

The Rebbe’s fist drops back onto the table, his head nods forward onto his chest, the joint slips out of his fingers. Lemuel
scoops it up from the stock-market pages, passes it under his nose as if it were a Cuban cigar. He is tempted to follow the
Rebbe’s example, to come at the world of chaos from another direction. In the end he decides he has had his ration of chaos
for one day and stubs out the joint in an ashtray that bears the name of the hotel it was stolen from.

Removing his shoes, glancing over his shoulder at the Gnostic chaoticist snoring fitfully in his chair, Lemuel pads softly
out of the room.

Like every insomniac, I have learned to use the night. When St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, I would pace my room into
the early hours of the morning, contemplating the whiteness of the night, scribbling differential equations
on the backs of envelopes, squaring circles, following elusive threads of randomness to their chaotic origins on the off chance
of stumbling across a single example, one would be enough for a lifetime, of pure, unadulterated randomness.

I did some of my more imaginative thinking in man-made near-randomness during these insomniac patrols, discovering, to give
you a for instance, the idea of programming a computer to dip almost randomly into the infinite chain of pi decimal places
in order to create a three-number key which, in turn, generated ciphers that came remarkably close to being random and thus,
for all practical purposes, unbreakable. But this is not something I want to go into in any detail right now.

All this is by way of saying there was nothing extraordinary in the way I spent my first night in Backwater. Inspecting my
American living room furnished in what I took to be Mexican modern, there was a great deal of straw, I tipped a wicker rocking
chair forward and observed it swinging back and forth. It reminded me of several applications of the mechanics of the pendulum
I had worked on years before; it reminded me also of my mistress leaning over my body, her sagging breasts swinging like pendulums
as she coaxed erections from my reluctant flesh. Suddenly memories of Petersburg I had been hoping against hope to leave behind
invaded my brain cells: Faceless men were spilling out of doors and windows; thick-soled, steel-toed shoes were kicking at
figures on the ground; a little boy I did not recognize was cringing in a corner. Oy!

Proust, Marcel, somewhere said the only paradise is paradise lost. Or words to that effect. Petersburg, lost, still did not
seem like a paradise to me. Nor, for that matter, did Backwater, found. Which left me, like the Rebbe plying between two shores
in his
traghetto
, en route …

Now that I think of it, it is probably true what my mistress said me about my being more interested in the going than the
getting there. Arrivals give me migraines. If only someone would invent a journey without an end.

Feeling out of place, out of time, out of sync, I prowled the apartment over the Rebbe’s head, stepping off the distance from
wall to wall, from window to door, from bookcase to fireplace, from one end of the corridor to the other,
from toilet to tub, calculating square meters, almost swooning when I came up with 120, which was twice the size of the apartment
I had shared with two other couples in Petersburg. I explored closets and nooks and the crawl space under the staircase leading
to the attic, all the while flicking switches—I turned on the toaster, the microwave oven, the dishwashing machine, the electric
knife sharpener, the electric can opener, the Toshiba T3200SX computer. On a bookshelf I came across a Sony hi-fi that would
have cost me a year’s salary on the Petersburg black market. I pushed buttons, I twirled knobs. A radio came on. What turned
out to be a local early-morning call-in show was under way, with a host who talked so rapidly I had to shut my eyes to follow
what he was saying.

If I understood the situation correctly, the host was in the process of interrupting the program for the hourly news bulletin.
I remember some of what he said. A clerk transcribing the number of the winner of the South Dakota lottery had made a typing
error, a seventy-seven-year-old man was informed he had won twelve million dollars. The next day, when the error was discovered,
he died of a heart attack. On the local front, residents protesting against the construction of a radioactive-waste dump in
the county were assured by a state commission that the dump site posed no health hazard. Federal law required every state
to have a place to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, hospitals and industry by 1993. Residents opposing the
dump site claim that radioactive waste would seep into underground rivers, eventually polluting the county’s water supply.
And this item just in from the tri-county newsroom: State police today discovered the body of the latest victim of the serial
killer who has been stalking the tri-county highways and byways. The most recent victim, a thirty-seven-year-old septic-tank
cleaner, brings to twelve the number of people mysteriously murdered in the last sixteen weeks. A police spokesperson stressed
there was no pattern to the crimes; the age and occupation of the victims, the sites of the murders, the intervals between
the crimes were never the same. The only thing connecting this grisly series of killings, aside from the .38 caliber dumdum
bullet rubbed with garlic and fired at point-blank range through the victim’s ear into his or her brain, was the signature
of the killer—which
is to say, the lack of a signature, the utter randomness of the murders. “And now,” the host rasped into the microphone, “we’ll
take some more calls.” He repeated a telephone number several times.

Without thinking I snatched the cordless telephone off the hook and punched in the number. I could hear a phone on the other
end buzz. A recorded announcement informed me I was seventh on a waiting list. You must understand that for someone who has
spent half his life queuing in Russia, being seventh in line is as good as being next. After a while the recorded announcement
informed me I was second, then first. A moment later the voice of the host came over the phone and the radio at the same instant.

“Hallo.”

“Yes. Hello,” I shouted into the phone. A staticky voice that sounded vaguely familiar echoed back at me from the hi-fi speakers.
“Yes. Hello,” it said.

“I just now arrived in America,” I shouted into the telephone.

“I just now arrived in America,” I heard myself shout over the speakers.

“Turn down your radio. That’s better. What’s your handle?”

“Handle?” “Handle?”

“What’s your name?”

“Yes. Falk, Lemuel.” “Yes. Falk, Lemuel.”

“Which of the two is a first name, Falk or Lemuel?”

“Lemuel.” “Lemuel.”

“Well, now, Lemuel, welcome to the U.S. of A. So, uh, where did you say you hailed from?”

“I am not for sure.” “I am not for sure.”

“What you are is not for real. Ha ha! Only kidding. How’s that, you’re not sure?”

“I was born in Leningrad …” “I was born in Leningrad, but I came here from St. Petersburg. Physically the two occupy the same
space. Emotionally they are light-years apart.”

“St. Petersburg, that’s, uh, in Russia, right? So what brings you to America, Lemuel?”

“Chaos brings me to …” “Chaos brings me to America.”

“Are you running away from it or toward it? Ha ha ha ha!”

“Both. I thought your chaos …” “Both. I thought your chaos was greener. Dumb as it sounds, I thought your streets were paved
with Sony Walkmans.”

“Well, Lemuel, you are one funny son of a gun. What are you doing, trying out a comic routine on me? Or have you had one too
many for the road? Only kidding. So tell me something, Lemuel, as someone fresh off the boat, so to speak, what hits you as
the biggest difference between America and Russia?”

“First, your towns, the distances …” “First, your towns, the distances between them, even your citizens are smaller than in
Russia, though maybe they only seem smaller because I expected larger than life. Second, your apartments do not smell of kerosene.”

“Mine smells of cat litter. Ha ha! If you’re listening, I was only joking, Charlene, honey. Okay, so Lemuel, what’cha wanna
get off your chest?”

“Off my chest?” “Off my chest?”

“Why didja call in for? What’cha wanna talk about?”

“I want to talk about …” “I want to talk about the serial murders. I want to say you this—the crimes may look random, but
this seeming randomness is nothing more than the name we give to our ignorance.”

“If I read you right, you’re saying there’s a pattern behind the murders the police aren’t aware of.”

“There is a pattern …” “There is a pattern waiting to be discovered. Randomness, pure, unfortunately does not exist. At least
nobody has been able to come up with an example. I should know. I have been looking everywhere—”

“Well, I’m afraid I’m in over my head when it comes to anything pure. Ha ha ha ha. But we’ll be sure and pass your tip on
to Chester Combes, the county sheriff. Listen, Lemuel, we’re counting on you to keep an eye peeled for this pure randomness—it’s
got to be out there somewhere, lurking in the bushes, hiding in the shadows of an alleyway. Nice talking to you, Lemuel. Enjoy
your, eh, stay in America. I’ll take another call …”

I sensed he was about to hang up. “I need answers to (questions,” I shouted into the phone. “I figured out the high five.
You explained me
handle
, you explained me
getting
off your chest
. But how is it possible to wear a heart on a sleeve? What does it really mean, Nonstops to the most Florida cities? How can
one city be more Florida than another? My
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
, King James, Raymond Chandler,
Playboy
never used such an expression. Concerning which side is up, who gets to decide that in America? I have a last but not least,
here it is—what or who is
tender to?”

It dawned on me my voice was no longer echoing from the hi-fi speakers. Then I noticed the phone had gone dead in my ear.
On the radio, the host was saying, “If you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to WHIM Elmira, the station where talk is cheap
and sex is the number-one topic of conversation. Hallo.” He began chatting with a lady barber about something called the G-spot.

Feeling frustrated, unable to get a grip on this America, I hung up the phone and turned off the radio and switched off the
overhead light and the desk lamp and wandered over to stare through a pair of French doors opening onto an ice-covered sun
deck built over a garage. Outside, a brittle stillness had settled over the piece of America the Beautiful I could see. Above
the sun deck, the branches of a gnarled oak creaked like a ship’s rigging under the weight of the ice. Contemplating the winter
wonderland, the part of me that is theoretical chaoticist started fashioning questions. Should one take the accumulation of
ice on branches, like the serial murders, as yet another footprint of chaos? If the weight of the ice caused a branch to snap
off, should one interpret this pruning of dead wood as a random event or an act of God? Is there such a thing as God? Was
Eden, as the Rebbe claimed, really a swamp of randomness? If so, was the randomness pure and unadulterated? Or was it garden-variety
fool’s randomness, and thus nothing more than a footprint of the order we call chaos?

Assuming both God and pure randomness exist, what is the relationship between the two?

If God created man, should this be taken as evidence that He loathed man? Or was Creation simply a random event that went
unnoticed by everyone except man?

Oy—I heard the Rebbe’s voice in my brain—my head too was spinning from all these questions without answers.

Feeling drained for the first time since my arrival in America, I turned away from the French doors and made my way to the
bedroom at the back of the apartment. Kicking off my shoes, sliding fully dressed under the sheets, I quickly sank into a
fitful sleep. I dreamed the usual dreams: thick-soled, steel-toed shoes kicked at figures on the ground; faceless men began
to dismantle a piece of furniture; a little boy I did not know cringed in a corner, barely able to breathe. …

What seemed like minutes later, with the first rays of first light flecking the walls of the room, I was roused by the sound
of a car pulling slowly into the driveway. A door slammed shut. There were footsteps below in the Rebbe’s apartment, then
muffled voices, then for a long while absolute silence, then a hoarse cry that broke off abruptly, followed by someone moaning
“Oy, oy, oy.” Moments later a toilet somewhere downstairs flushed.

Intrigued, I padded over to the window in my stocking feet in time to see a woman wearing fox climb back into a car. She started
the motor, let it idle until the engine was turning smoothly, then pulled slowly out of the driveway.

Smiling to myself, I leaped to a conclusion: marijuana was not the only forbidden fruit the Gnostic chaoticist had an appetite
for. Again I heard the Rebbe’s voice in my head.
“ ‘Ta’amu ure’u,’ “
it said. “ Taste it and see.’ “