A Paler Shade of Red Read online

  My father and I had often chatted long into the night about religion. We were not in pursuit of salvation; our tête-à-têtes were simply exercises in pure reasoning. We agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to free him. We acknowledged the outwardly chivalrous but simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) but pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theo and Allah. We quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” We read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, we turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

  But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” we surmised, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”

  This dichotomy would be astutely dissected two decades later by journalist Christiane Amanpour in CNN’s God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing in August 2007, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.

  Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.

  This is the bare face of religion, my father and I had concluded. This is how religion transforms men into zombies, societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of heretics -- those who, according to the Vatican, ”hold different beliefs” or grant themselves the inalienable right to hold none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma. In the final analysis, my father and I had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two directives to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.

  This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations in which only Yahweh, Theo or Allah could triumph: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh rivalries in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

  *

  It was soon after my father’s death -- I was 50, he was 83 -- troubled by his stormy apostasy and anxious to jettison some of my own dismissive preconceptions that I ventured for the first time in the Kabbalah’s arcane realm. Enthralled and bewildered at first, often driven to mental exhaustion, I eventually tired of its multilayered circularity, contradictions and maddening esotericism. I was not being ushered into some liberating “beyond.” Rather, I was being shoved and jostled and inveigled to probe the “nothingness” that dwells within. I found such mental pirouettes more taxing than I’d imagined. Faced with the imponderable -- the very essence of Kabbalah -- I bowed out, humbled by the magnificence of paradox. All in all, my brief but intense foray into Kabbalah was not in vain. Careful, measured readings yielded fresh insights on the magnitude of the Mosaic ideal and the depth of Jewish thought. I would later marvel at the influence it would have on the works of Pico Della Mirandola, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. I would also discover that the root of Kabbalistic doctrine had been enunciated, much earlier and in considerably simpler language, in the Tao and other Buddhist teachings. No matter the originality of a concept -- “There is nothing new under the sun” (King Solomon; Ecclesiastes, 1.9) I must believe that I too was transformed, however imperceptibly, by the Kabbalah’s awesome and wrenching cerebral exactions.

  When the distinction between material reality and mysticism become muddled, faith loses its mythical pretenses and one quickly dispenses with God.

  *

  Imagination is not inventive; it only perceives the latency of an eventuality.

  JOURNALIST OR GRAVEDIGGER?

  It was a winter dawn heavy with clouds the color of pewter. Frost had formed overnight and patches of rime speckled the railing where I stood, an unknown emptiness now claiming a share of my jumbled emotions.

  I’d awakened early and gone up on deck to see the Statue of Liberty, ready to weep with ritual if unfelt reverence, eager to surrender like a pilgrim at a holy shrine to its symbolism and physicality. But the androgynous, vacant-eyed stone-faced monolith had loomed across the bow; it had risen against the drab grayness of New York’s concrete piers, fuming smokestacks and decaying wooden hangars, then receded on the port side.

  To my dismay, the titan elicited none of the prescribed passions or susceptibilities. I found it stiff, almost intimidating: it lacked the stirring vigor or mythic grace I had envisioned. I’d often glimpsed its diminutive twins, one under the chestnut trees in the Jardin du Luxembourg where I played as a child, the other perched on a battlement overlooking the Seine. Both, I thought -- my sense of observation now in doubt -- exuded more charm, if not splendor, than the square-jawed icon with the sphinxlike gaze towering above New York Harbor.

  “America! America!” cried out a man as he surveyed the unfolding scene. He was at my elbow by the railing. I’d not seen him draw near. His hands were clasped against his chest the way people hail a miracle or flinch before a great calamity, and he was shaking his head from side to side as if his eyes and his soul were not yet in sync. Gaunt, weather-beaten, a week-old ashen stubble adding age to his years, he seemed to be inhaling the colossal spectacle, the unimaginable enormity that is New York. Every pore, every crevice on his brow spoke of life endured, hopes deflected, fears surmounted and, now, it seemed, dreams fulfilled.

  I would have given anything to know his exhilaration, to share in his feelings of redemption, to consecrate with tears of gratitude my own ascension to the Promised Land.

  “Yes. America,” I echoed without joy, startled and dismayed to find myself at its gates. Idealized and reinvented, perhaps as a hedge against its unfathomable essence, half lusted, half feared like a forbidden fruit, America had been but one of a thousand islands in a huge archipelago of youthful fantasies. Yesterday, in the unbroken vastness of the steel-blue sea, America had been the future. Yesterday, there was a tomorrow to anticipate, a reality as yet unconsummated among a stockpile of nebulous expectations. It was an indwelling, irreducible now that I faced as the colossus dissolved into a nether realm of vapor and shadows and ghostlike vessels heaving in the channel’s inky waters.

  The man grabbed my wrist and repeated, “America. Can it be? I’ve waited so long.”

  “Now look, sir,” I wanted to tell the man, “it’s adventure I seek, not sanctuary. Yes, I’m nomad, restl
ess vagrant, drifter, a wandering Jew beguiled by locomotion, a gypsy craving new horizons, a vagabond enlivened not by landings but by ceaseless migrations, a wayfarer steering not toward the nearest port of call but chasing after the open sea on a journey without end. I’m all that, I grant you. Like my father before me, I roam, seeking both uniformity and self-regeneration through change, finding constancy and coherence in mutability, endlessly coveting a foretaste of the things only anticipation hint at. But I am no refugee, I tell you, no battered remnant of war, and I resent that I might be mistaken for one. Unhand me, please.”

  But I said nothing. I didn’t have the heart. A youthful insolence still percolating in my veins, traumatized by the inexplicable reality in which I’d suddenly been drawn, I wanted to distance myself from this tempest-tossed wretched refuse who like millions, had reached the golden door of America’s promise. I ambled instead to the starboard side, the overcoat my parents had purchased a fortnight earlier no match against the arctic chill. Manhattan’s skyline rose before me, a monochrome carcass, unreal, like a theater backdrop, grotesque in its breadth and bulk, and rendered all the more forbidding as memories of Paris, my beloved Paris, submerged my mind’s eye with tears. I blamed the wind. I didn’t want the man to think that they were tears of relief or elation.

  *

  Montmartre. Frame by frame, I relive the moment: A cobbled courtyard. Madame Muche, the concierge, is there, ruddy-cheeked, feinting peevishness but susceptible to gallantry. A blue denim apron girds her opulent rotundity. She is mopping the portico’s weather-worn stoop. A vague odor of fried onion wafts from her unshaven armpits.

  “Bonjour, Madame Muche.”

  “Bonjour, jeune homme. Alors, l’école, ça va?”

  “Tout va très bien, merci. And how are things with you?”

  “Bof, as you see, a million chores, little time, only ten fingers.” Josephine Muche props the broom handle against a broad, sallow cleavage and shows me the palms of her hands. “Just look at them. Have you ever seen anything so pathetic?”

  I mumble words of commiseration and offer her some chocolate. She blushes like a schoolgirl then scolds me softly.

  “You shouldn’t. I’m on a diet. My liver, you know.” But she takes the offering and devours it all the same and the sugar triggers another burst of irascibility, this time aimed at her husband, Maurice, a burly, warmhearted Paris gendarme, who is pumping air in their six-year-old son Lucien’s bicycle.

  “Some people have it easy,” Josephine demurs, raising her eyebrows. “He’s off today. You’d think he’d use his big muscles, the lunkhead, and help a little.

  “Pay her no heed, mon petit,” rejoins Maurice, grinning. “It’s pure theater. She should have been on stage, the woman. She’s got enough talent for two, n’est-ce-pas?” Maurice spreads his arms, draws two semi-circles in the air and cups his enormous hairy hands on the downward curve as if to enfold an imaginary pair of buttocks. Mortified, Madame Muche bites her lower lip, peers over her glasses and shakes an outraged finger at her husband. But outrage gives way to amusement and she surrenders a good-natured smile.

  “Ah, les hommes! Men. They’re all the same.”

  Emboldened, Maurice aims the bicycle pump at his wife’s behind.

  “We can’t let the air out of such talent, can we?”

  Little Lucien squeals with delight.

  “Do it, papa, do it.”

  His mother parries, raises the broom and threatens to hit her husband over the head.

  “Now, now, mon amour.” Maurice cowers with feigned terror. “Who loves his little Fifine? Her little Momo, non?” Madame Muche melts. They lay down their weapons and embrace. Monsieur Muche grabs Madame’s generous posterior and declares with Gallic showmanship, “if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is....”

  “Run for your life,” Madame Muche exhorts. “This man is incorrigible. I’m liable to.... Oh, la la!”

  I retreat, laughing, and scale four flights up a steep, creaking wooden stairway sagging from a century or more of clambering feet. Each narrow landing gives onto two small apartments with tiny rooms and eccentric plumbing. I’m embarked on a dizzying voyage up a spiral gullet resonating with discordant sounds and reeking with disparate exhalations, all vying for dominance. The fullness of their vitality haunts me still: I can smell Mademoiselle Vauclair’s Friday fare -- cabbage soup, chicken gizzards and fried leeks. Madame Jabois’ tremulous renditions of Mistinguett’s classic, Mon Homme, later reprised by Fanny Brice in My Man, echo as she sloshes twice weekly in her Empire brass tub. Monsieur Vacheron’s stentorian voice thunders like a summer storm as he barks at his eight-year-old daughter, Monique, over some petty infraction. Next door, Sylvie Lefèvre, unkindly favored by nature, stridently denies her husband's absurd accusations of infidelity with the butcher’s errand-boy. Eugène Lefèvre knows his wife is incapable of disloyalty but morbid suspicion sharpens his libido and they eventually bury their sham conflict in furious and sonorous make-up sex.

  Mornings bring the redolence of croissants, evenings the aroma of freshly baked baguettes. Radios hum in cacophonous unison, summarizing soccer scores, blasting the latest popular hits or reporting on some faraway conflict. I can hear the Golaud children repeating their verses in an exhausting drone as the garlic in Madame Morabito’s ailloli and the commingling vapors of hearty wines and pungent beers waft and settle in mid-air.

  In this olfactory and sonic Babel also lived Wanda, her presence foretold by the heavy perfume she wore -- Mitsouko by Guerlain -- and the lugubrious wails she emitted at odd hours of the day and night, compliments of a mercifully discreet assortment of suitors. She had an unpronounceable Polish name so everyone called her “La Vanda” or “l’anglaise,” even though she hailed from Steubenville, Ohio, via Tangiers and other Byronic locales, all tested and abandoned in favor of Paris. Wanda was a tall, cadaverous middle-aged expatriate, the living caricature of many a castaway I would chance upon in Hamburg and Tegucigalpa, Marseilles and Port-of-Spain. Bedaubed with funereal make-up, she had an incurable American twang and a weakness for gin. I’d vainly tried to sharpen my English and often engaged her in conversation about Chicago and gangsters and cowboys and Indians and Hollywood and skyscrapers and the mighty Mississippi -- pretty much all I knew about America. But “l’anglaise” was either too drunk to contribute useful intelligence or she’d invariably insist on trading sex for the education I yearned. I never took her up on it. I’d often wandered what it might be like to fuck an American but a mixture of pity and revulsion made such commerce unlikely.

  There are women one hungers for even after; others from whom one is sated well before.

  Only the Bredoux brothers -- Bernard and Bertrand -- veterans of La Grande Guerre, never married and subsisting on their pensions, lived in unsettling silence amid the dissonance and ubiquitous effluvia. They were kind-hearted souls with gentle smiles and simple truths, not given to idle chatter but always ready to comfort or encourage. I could see them now, their tall, lanky frames bent by age, a vague mustiness exuding from their taupe-colored cardigans, as they read the papers by the window -- France Soir and old copies of Le Petit Parisien. They’d been generous with their baskets of green Normandy apples and steaming chestnuts. They’d offered me other gifts along the way -- a small plaster bust of Hector Berlioz, a tortoise shell cigarette case, a gold-tipped fountain-pen, an illustrated first edition of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth.

  I’d objected politely but they’d insisted. “It’ll be that much less to dust,” they’d quipped, winking at each other. “You’re doing us a favor, my boy.” It was a hint that held, in its subtlety, the promise of some impending finality I did not have the maturity to decipher. I continued to do errands for them on rainy days or when the pain in their joints flared up. They never spoke about the Great War. I never asked. All wars, I surmised, possess a prosaic commonality, a tragic redundancy that makes explication quite useless. It is the mark of great soldiers never to reminis
ce. Bernard and Bertrand committed suicide, I later learned, when life, irrelevant and joyless, ceased to be worth living. They were found in bed, their medals and ribbons lying at the bottom of chamber pots in which they had dutifully -- and with studied scorn for the military establishment, La République and posterity -- taken their last shit. It was a scene straight out of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: blasphemy exalted by contempt.

  Above the din and the scents, tucked away at the top of a narrow wooden corkscrew staircase, was home at last. It was in the nurturing silence of this sparsely furnished mansard that I withdrew after work and school. Delivered from the world below, I’d hasten to the dormer, part the chintz curtains and gape at my city the way a boy covets a woman. Under me were the streets. I could read in their cadence like from an open diary and I reveled in their pantomimes. In the distance, Paris spread like a tapestry of gilded domes, verdant parks, esplanades, and ancient spires, and I’d marvel at the loveliness, the grace, long after twilight had draped the city in a star-studded mantle of lilac and periwinkle blue.

  I’d then turn to my books. In their pages, I explored the unrevealed nature of things, unearthing strange and wondrous emotions, toying with enticing abstractions. I wanted to conquer everything that is known and, if possible, to understand all that is unknowable. Such quest, I would discover, was as self-defeating as it was all-consuming. Alluring as they were, the voices behind the words (or was it the echo of my own ruminations?) invariably raised more questions than they answered. Curiosity is a long hallway filled with an infinite number of doors. Most never swing open, even at the loudest rap. I would settle on the notion that to seek knowledge is to know. In prospecting the unknown, I would also later concede, I was not so much interested in acquiring new insights (I was even less impressed with their utility or application) as in how they played on my imagination, how they kindled certain longings. Once digested, essential knowledge and fresh perspectives opened up a world into which I withdrew the better to savor the transcendent realms they evoked. I was intent at all cost, and with each newly apprehended truth, to let my subconscious roam free. Knowledge was in vain unless it had the capacity to stir, touch, shock or stupefy.