Flight from Ein Sof Page 6

  Safe in their pews, the faithful were being treated to the grand spectacle of a pre-dawn mass. “Dominus vobiscum,” said the priest. “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the faithful responded, mercifully unmindful, if only for a brief moment in their beleaguered lives, of the pervading godlessness that surrounds them.

  Around the corner, propped against a fence, a group of cripples flaunted their grotesque infirmities. Unruffled, passers-by, the faithful, the penitent, the aimless and the lost, the discarded and the redundant, stepped over them like so much rubbish. Across the street, a young woman sprawled on the ground breast-fed her newborn as three older daughters, sired by three different men, plied the beggar’s trade.

  Who are the mad, I reflected, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? As I pondered the question, I nearly tripped on the cadavers of several children. They lay prone, splotches of dried blood streaking their faces. They’d been bound and gagged and shot, gangland-style, in the back of the head. Even Gehenna has its pariahs.

  The only thing that separates “God” and its creation is a dissimilar perspective. Relativity prevents either from switching places. In Gehenna, as in Ein Sof, where heaven and hell coexist in perilous proximity, right and wrong are less sharply defined. For the powerful, the privileged, the favored, the free, the well fed who squander their freedom by abdicating to the tyranny of orthodoxy, truth remains the stronger of two or more conflicting views. For the poor, the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the unloved, the Dybbuks and the ghouls and the zombies that haunt the conscience of the Perpetuals, the truth is a useless paradox, like relativity. Don’t look for answers, I kept telling myself. Don’t look for reason. All you’ll find is nature, cruel and unmoved, further debased by the aggregate interests and avarice of the dominant power base.

  *

  It was now nearly dawn but the sun had yet to rise behind Gehenna’s battered ramparts. An ashen darkness still clung like a shroud over its higher elevations. Up since the cocks’ first crow, Gloria (I gave her that name to memorialize this fleeting apparition) raced down the sheer, narrow footpath leading to the murky waters of the creek below. Pressed to her bosom, swaddled in an old piece of cloth and still asleep, her infant daughter was oblivious to it all. The course is overrun with hazards but Gloria knows every crag, every loose pebble, every muddy ledge along the way. She’s made the perilous trek a thousand times or more since the birth of her baby, six months ago, and she negotiates each obstacle with the agility of a veteran climber.

  Laden with her precious cargo, a pail of water now balanced atop her head, she turned around and clambered back uphill. Midway, she stopped to catch her breath. She must manage her strength. She’s pregnant with her second child and she’s hardly eaten in the past three days. But Gloria is no stranger to privation. Pain no longer daunts her. She has her baby to care for. Another little one is on the way in five months or less, she’s not sure.

  Slowly, night’s inky mantle dissolved, baring a pale orange sky. A new day had dawned, bringing a fresh surge of anticipation and energy. Emboldened, she resumed her arduous climb.

  Gloria is fourteen.

  Reaching the summit, winded by the grueling ascent, Gloria wiped her brow and surveyed her surroundings. Before her, barely visible in morning’s timid glow, stretched, familiar and inescapable, an unobstructed view of utter barrenness, of squalor and malignancy and evil that the thick haze failed to conceal. Behind her, balancing precariously on the edge of a narrow bluff overgrown with stinkweed, rests the ramshackle hut Gloria calls home. Straddling a scaffolding of rotting wood pylons and corroded iron beams under which cower a small emaciated dog and a palsied cat, the windowless shack stands defiant in its vulnerability, a symbol of the paradox that is Gehenna.

  Gloria blows out the quivering flame of an old kerosene lamp and fans away the acrid emanations. She lays the sleeping infant on the floor, gently propping her head against a cardboard box where she keeps all of her possessions. There’s a rag doll, an old discolored dress, a small bundle of used baby clothes, an old photograph, a broken comb, a tin of cereal, a jar of brown sugar in which tiny yellow ants have taken residence, a cross fashioned from popsicle sticks, a faded prayer book frontispiece in which an enraptured blue-eyed blond Jesus is seen levitating above a sea of mesmerized disciples.

  Gloria strikes a match, ignites kindling in the hollow of a cinder block and stirs a thin gruel of rice and water into a pitted metal bowl. She stopped breast-feeding her daughter when she became pregnant with her second child. Underweight, her ashen skin pocked with mosquito bites, the baby girl suffers from malnutrition. Gloria looks at her daughter with a mixture of tenderness and apprehension as her own childhood, barely tasted, irretrievably lost, comes back to haunt her.

  Gloria is the embodiment of innocence undone, childhood compromised and corrupted by poverty, neglect and hopelessness. Soft-spoken and unassuming, she reluctantly relives the nightmare by evoking it at my urging. Her narration, despite the horror it inspires, is childlike and flat. Her voice betrays neither anger nor sorrow. She smiles timidly instead, perhaps to hide the shame and pity she feels, not for herself, but for those who so sadistically deprived her of love and dignity.

  I asked her what she desired most and felt instantly shamed by the vacuity of my question. Fixing a gaze of unfathomable emptiness at some distant point in space, giving me time to ponder my lack of tact, then turning tenderly to the toddler nestled in her arms and patting her own belly, the child-mother replied, “I have nothing and I have everything. I can’t ask for less or for more.”

  In the world of Dybbuks, nothing and everything are usually too much to bear.

  Morning alit, or something akin to morning. A faint gray glow crept out of an overcast horizon. The glow was not bright enough to disperse the misty tendrils of fog that hung like wispy ghosts over the desolation.

  *

  Gehenna, like fungus, has spread tentacle-like, sprouting squalid slums along muddy ridges and down the slopes of dank garbage-strewn ravines.

  It’s in one such slum, nicknamed Limón by the locals because of the jade-green stream of sludge that runs through it, that I came across Angela. I found her sitting at the edge of a cot, her feet pitted by insect bites and glistening skin lesions, in a shed under a leaking corrugated sheet metal roof held up by rotting wooden beams.

  In a corner of the room, under the pallid rays of a bare 40-watt bulb around which a squadron of flies and moths kept circling, propped on a table littered with rags and old newspapers, rested a tall, garishly painted plaster figurine, a Madonna and child whose introspective, tortured gaze, frozen skyward where God is said to dwell, exuded pain and disillusionment, betrayal and stupefaction. Every once in a while, almost mechanically, the girl cast a forlorn glance at the holy icon, perhaps for reassurance. But in her large brown eyes all I saw were false hopes and broken promises.

  This time I said nothing. Assailed by a jumble of emotions, I just looked at her cherub face. I wanted to hug her and, in so doing, to absorb her within my being for warmth and reassurance. But I didn’t dare. I took her little hand in mine and kissed it. Angela blushed, looked at the bare concrete floor and sighed.

  “Take her away from this place,” her mother pleaded.

  Take her? Where? How? What do I know about the transmigration of souls? When was the last time I rescued anyone from a nightmare? What if this was a trap? What if this Dybbuk was an incubus, an evil spirit? I understood what sophistry can do to distort judgment, to cripple reason, to inspire fear, to justify cynicism. And as I looked at Angela’s innocent face, I chose discretion instead of valor. I ran out and burst into tears.

  Outside, the vultures, the ever-present vultures, resumed their abominable vigil, gliding overhead like black-winged demons at a Witches’ Sabbath, awaiting death, smelling it, almost tasting it. Surely I reflect, even God must find Limón a very bitter fruit.

  ELEVEN

  “Fabian is a weakling, a coward. He was a miserable, weepy child who shun
ned responsibilities, recoiled from physical exertion and took pleasure at fomenting intrigues that deepened the chasm separating me and his mother. Tears came easily to him, the way they do to an actor or a charlatan.”

  That’s how Abraham described his son to me during a hastily convened secret meeting. Abraham had slipped a note in my pocket when no one looked.

  “Please come to my room at noon. You must know what I know.”

  Careful not to arouse suspicion, eager to know what Abraham knew, I left the communal lunch table on some pretext and made my way to my great-great-grandfather’s room.

  “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I can’t keep this secret any longer. It’s consuming me, poisoning my days, haunting my nights. Please hear me out.

  “Legends sprout new limbs with every retelling but lies never die. They grow stronger and more difficult to refute. Fabian mastered the art of pretense long before his mother passed away, and he exercised it with malicious skill well after I remarried. Truth be told, my first wife was a shrew, a coarse and irritable woman who punished me for much of our marriage because I didn’t match the grotesque blueprint of the perfect husband that existed only in her mind. I took it on the chin for as long as I could. I said nothing to kin or relations. I didn’t even confide in my rabbi. Only Fabian knew the inner turmoil that consumed me, only he heard the shouting matches, the ugly words, only he witnessed my sleepless nights, my moments of despair so profound, so devastating that I often contemplated suicide.”

  Abraham paused, besieged by memories, overwhelmed by the weight of words rehearsed but never spoken.

  “The boy was incapable of saying a kind word; he never put his arms around me. And he never saw the tears I shed when no one looked.”

  “But you did engage in an extra-marital affair, didn’t you,” I ventured with staggering hypocrisy. “Surely that was bound to envenom your life.”

  “Yes, I began to see another woman, young, vibrant, attentive, loving, and in her arms I recaptured my own waning youth and discovered that I possessed undiminished reserves of love that needed to be shared. When Fabian’s mother died, I married her. I was the happiest man on earth. All the years of conflict and turmoil dissolved in one magnificent, cathartic, rejuvenating burst of euphoria. Instead of sharing my joy, Fabian proceeded to spoil it for us from the start. He criticized her cooking, ridiculed her childlike exuberance, mocked her amorous nature and conspired to destroy our relationship.”

  “He was jealous. He felt slighted. His mother had died and you now lavished your love and attention on another woman.”

  “Fabian never really loved his mother. He resented her tyrannical governance and loathed me for cowering like a dog and surrendering to her aberrant whims. I will never forget when, enraged by something his mother had said, he lunged at her, grabbed her by the throat, lifted her off the floor and pinned her against the wall. I thought he was going to kill her. I just stood there, stunned, elation secretly coursing through my being.

  “One day, when Fabian caught my new wife and me in a tender moment in the kitchen, he lounged at her, pulling her away from me and screaming, ‘You’re not my mother! Get away from my father.’”

  “What about the attic? He told my father that he was forced to...”

  “Repeated often enough, lies take on the appearance of truth. Fact is it was his choice. He could have slept in his own room, under the thick eiderdown we had bought him. But bedding down in the attic reinforced his self-inflicted sense of martyrdom. Besides, in winter, with the wood-burning stove on all night, the attic was the warmest part of the house. And in summer, with the bull’s-eye windows ajar, the attic was breezy and cool.”

  “Fabian also alleged that he was being fed leftovers.”

  “Nonsense. There was always a setting for him at the table but he refused to eat with us. When hunger finally tugged at his innards, he’d devour the odds and ends we had set aside.”

  “Is it true you sent him away, miles from home?”

  “I had no alternative. He was surly and combative. He made my new wife’s life miserable. So I apprenticed him to a friend of mine, a candle maker because he had no disposition for anything else. He was fired twice for laziness and insubordination, and I had to beg my friend to take him back. He grew up, a morose, pugnacious, unmotivated individual who blamed the world for his own shortcomings and sought refuge from imaginary affronts in confrontation or tearful lamentations.”

  Abraham looked at me, his eyes ablaze, shaking his head as if to say, “Do you get the picture now?” Then he looked down at his feet, sadness turning to shame.

  “The apple never falls far from the tree. Fabian’s own son, your grandfather, also a candle maker, did not amount to much. Seldom gainfully employed, he had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Zohar -- or strolling up and down Main Street, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely paid for.

  “So now you know. Not a word to anyone, you hear! Let the others believe what they wish. I’ll do without their sympathy as I have all these generations.”

  I took Abraham’s wizened hand into my own and held it for a moment.

  “You can count on me.”

  I then put my arms around him. He wept.

  TWELVE

  Gehenna. Something keeps pulling me back. Is it what the French call “le goût de la fange,” literally “a taste for muck,” that sudden and inexplicable craving to forfeit all civility and refinement, to leap headfirst into a pit of filth and depravity where humankind’s most repulsive down-and-outers congregate?

  Or is it something else, perhaps the urge to gawk at humanity in its most dismal state? The compulsion to touch it and be smeared in the process? Is it morbid pity or gruesome voyeurism? Do I revisit Gehenna to survey it or to cohere? Am I an intruder or the prodigal son reconnecting with his roots? Haven’t I seen enough shit and degradation and misery and despair when I ventured into the monster’s entrails during my years as a reporter? Having since confessed to a waning passion for humanitarian causes, what repulsive addiction entices me still?

  But I keep going back, anticipating the putrefaction and the decadence and the apathy and the endless struggles that crush the outcasts, the unwanted, the unloved. In the bleak and malodorous pit of despair that is Gehenna, when love and hatred are gone, all I stumble on is indifference.

  *

  My friend, the novelist William Lewis once wrote, “Children are like stars. They are lost in the flesh of the night; but they can be found because they shine. It is when they become the blackness that we cannot see them, that they cease to be children, that they are lost.”

  What I found in the eyes of a boy I chanced upon in Gehenna was blackness, the kind of burning ebony that exuded from my cousin Amos’ eyes as he lay dying. His star may be larger than life but its radiance is fading like that of an exhausted supernova. He will not be reborn from its embers.

  “Things could be worse,” the boy tells me with apocalyptic intensity. “Life could be forever.” Such blighted hope is inexplicable in someone so young. His cynicism is finely tuned, deeply felt. He has seen the dark side, endured the vulgarity of survival, faced the demons.

  He’s 12.

  By day the boy’s world is the carbon copy of a hundred Gehennas chanced upon in my endless peregrinations: Sweltering heat, a canvas of squalor and misery, teeming masses of world-weary, cynical, tired creatures trapped and swept by some unstoppable momentum. There is an unkempt shoreline and scum-covered canals in which float, half-submerged, the cadavers of apathy -- trash, human waste, broken-down appliances. Grubby side streets are lined with sleazy bars where locals sip warm beer and engage garishly painted harlots, darkened pool halls where drug deals are made, and fast-sex bordellos.

  Gehenna continues to spread, fatigued and imperiled, without a plan, without a v
ision, compromised by the elements, ravaged by age, neglect, apathy. Buildings are cracked, teetering on the brink of collapse. A few eventually crumble in heaps of worn brick and mortar, raising storms of acrid dust in their final agony.

  An incessant stream of Diesel-fueled vehicles emit lung-crunching fumes and produce a dissonance of intolerable pitch that assault the ear, grind nerves. Dodging each other, motorcycles, Lilliputian taxis and overloaded carts pulled by underfed mules jockey for space on crowded, unregulated thoroughfares. The frenetic pace only heightens the feeling of weariness and adds to the exhaustion that such momentum creates. It’s a place driven by reflex, surviving on hidden reserves of energy akin to frenzy -- or exasperation.

  It’s also a place that begs to be forgiven, for some of its people have endearing traits; but it also elicits impatience and revulsion. Small squares where young lovers meet to steal kisses are littered. Benches are encrusted with generations of baked-in guano. Loitering aimlessly, spitting dejectedly, old men wait for the passage of time, as if time were a destination instead of a conveyance. A pervasive smell of decay, excrement and death wafts on the wings of intermittent breezes.

  At night, after the sun’s copper disk has set the sea on fire, Gehenna turns into a den of depravity of Gomorrhan dimensions. No lust, however vile, remains unquenched for very long. Here, demand feeds supply. Human flesh is the commodity of choice, and purveyors abound.

  The boy knows all that. Deserted by his parents when he was six, addicted to Resistol, he succumbed to the vile commerce, to survive, to cheat reality. There is no shame and degradation when hunger beckons and hopelessness warps all reason. But he is paying the ultimate price for clinging so passionately to life. He is dying of AIDS, the same ravenous, diabolical scourge that claimed my cousin Amos.

  Illiteracy, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsible paternity are all at work in Gehenna. Some families have not a gram of conscience when it comes to procreation. Use of Resistol among the kids is widespread. It’s sold freely everywhere. Pimps and sex tourists often pay the children with cans of the deadly shoe glue. It’s a case of turpitude further debased by criminal negligence.