Endless Things (20 page)

Their success was huge, and not so surprising; for after all the Ass, or his inhabiting spirit rather, had begun his writing life years ago with what? A play. A comedy in fact,
Il Candelaio
. And ever after he had set people to talking in his works, in his dialogues, and in his poems—fools, philosophers, pedants, gods, and goddesses.

Then the wind began to blow from another quarter. Maybe they should have been more cautious; maybe they should have avoided Apuleius, that infamous magician; maybe they shouldn't have become so far famed so quickly.

No no, they told the authorities who questioned them. No no, not magic, no none of that. Just ordinary stage tricks, sleight of hand,
Jahrmarktsgaukelei
. The Ass stood meekly silent before the tribunal as one of the company showed how the trick was done,
ventriloquia
, nothing forbidden about it. They were lucky to be only driven out of the parish and the town.

But it was hard for him to be silent. The more he wrote and spoke and thought, the more he seemed to himself the man who had once been, and the less the ass he was. For the first time he was ashamed of his nakedness. From patient he grew ill tempered, from gentle to surly, and at last became melancholy, would neither think nor write, finally not speak, not eat.

What to do? His fellows vowed to help him, do all they could, but there seemed only one possibility: he must hope for a further transformation, and somehow become a man entire. As Lucius Apuleius the Golden Ass does.

One certainty consoled me then in my darkest hour,
says Lucius,
that the new year was here at last, and the wildflowers would soon be coming out to color the meadows; and in the gardens the rosebuds long imprisoned in their thorny stocks would appear, and open, and breathe out their indescribable odor; and I would eat and eat, and become once again myself.

—But I
am
myself, said the Ass. I am an ass not figuratively, or platonically, or cabalistically, or in disguise or in effect, but actually. There is no rose for me to feed upon that will change me back; there is no way back at all.

—Ah, said the players, who pitied him, even though it would surely reduce their income if he were somehow made a man.

—I can't return, he said, to that Pythagorean way I chose to tread, and take the other way.

—No, said his fellows sadly, for neither could they.

—Very well then, said the Ass, and the players lifted their heads, for they heard a new note, as players are quick to do. We can't go back. No one can. What we were is not, but what we will be, we cannot know.

—Yes, said his companions.

—There is one place I could go, said the Ass after long thought. A city of wise workers, a city where transformation is not only possible but likely.

—What city?

—I was there. I was summoned to counsel the Emperor. I, I.

—Yes! said his companions. The little ass seemed in their eyes to grow in stature as he spoke, to a noble height, a proud determination.

—We'll go on, said the Ass. Go on by going back. To Prague.

—Prague! They rose as one, and looked on each other with gay resolve. Actors can do this, too: more than once they had got themselves in awful trouble by suddenly, and convincingly, pretending to grand emotions, a ringing curtain line. Eagle-browed Ass! Winged Ass! they sang. To Prague! they sang, and they set to, and packed their bags and their properties, and loaded them on the back of the Ass and into the bright new wagon that his mute cousin the mule pulled, and set out. Soon the road unrolled before them, running ever on. Over the hills and far away, sang the players.

Tom he was a piperes sonne

He stole a pipe and awaye he ronne

And the onlie tune that hee could play

Was Over the hills and farre away.

They all sang the chorus, and even the Ass hee-hawed like the famous ass musician of Bremen:

Over the hills and a grete way off

The wind shall blow my topknot off.

Behind the
gallimordium
, the old royal brothel, up a winding alley, were the gates of the great Jewish quarter of the city. Each evening those who had been out and about the city hurried within before the gates were shut, artisans and laborers and peddlers in their caftans marked with yellow circles and their tall pointed yellow hats with curious balls atop them, the richer men's caftans of silk, their hats brimmed with fur. The Ass and his two companions, Tom and another who best knew the German tongue, went in through the gates with them, looking neither right nor left, and into the crowded streets, some of the streets so narrow that the housewives could touch from window to window above the heads of those who passed or struggled to pass below. Other streets were closed above altogether, the buildings joined above them and turning them to caves or tunnels that went up and down stairs in the dark before debouching again into the day.

Up the little city past the Town Hall, whose clock was set out in Hebrew letters and whose hands ran backward like the eyes of Torah readers, past the synagogue called the New Synagogue that was as old as almost any church of the city (for the Jews, so the Jews asserted, had been in Prague from its founding): black and small it was, though, not great, and inside the walls were black too with a thousand years of candle smoke, the cantor ululating softly in the almemar as they went by.

Up farther, under another gallery, past a market now closing, cooped ducks, geese, and doves; a further tunnel of darkness, drip of cisterns, branching alleys to choose from, all different but indistinguishable; and at last to the house they sought, the most famous house of the quarter, before which a small crowd was as always gathered.

From surprise at their appearing there with the little ass beside them without lead or halter, the crowd let the players pass through, and go into the court within. Tom and his comrade went through an inner door and up a stairway, along a lightless corridor, Tom reaching before him with his hands to find the door; going first through a room of women and girls whose pale faces took light from the evening candles, who spoke and laughed among themselves as they passed, and then into a farther room, the
bet ha-midrash
, where the Great Rabbi taught, and men and boys listened and read.

He was Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the most famous of all the famous wise men of Prague. Jews from Rus and Damascus and Fez and Venice came to consult him. Doctor John Dee when he had lived here had heard of his wisdom, his
rabínská moudrost
, and had come here to learn with him. The Emperor Rudolf himself had been in awe of it, and once summoned the Rabbi to the Hradcany to question him; the Rabbi's son-in-law Isak Kohen wrote later that the Rabbi was brought to a small room, a curtain was pushed aside, the Emperor came in, asked the rabbi several questions, and then retired. What questions? What answers? Isak Kohen wrote:
what they talked of must, as is the imperial practice, not be revealed
.

Whatever the actors said to the rabbi, what craft of their own they exercised on the great still figure in the crowded room, it was enough to bring him down the stairs to the courtyard; there the little ass stood patiently, big head looking from side to side; and the rabbi sent away the other supplicants who waited there, and bent down, with his hands upon his knees, toward the Ass, and waited for it to tell its tale—as the two actors had said it would do, and all by itself.

And so it did, from beginning to end, supplemented by the human persons who had come with it. The rabbi, who considered it an affront to the endless invention of the Most High to be astonished by the speaking of an Ass, listened in silence to the end. Then he asked what it was the beast desired of him.

—I wish, said the Ass, to be transformed from the shape I now hold, and acquire a shape more suited to the spirit within me. For I can't go into the places of men in this form. I would be spurned, or burned for a devil. Burned again.

—And why is it, the rabbi said then (speaking in his own Jewish tongue, which an ancient secretary translated into German for the Ass and his companions) that you have come here to me? Why do you think I have a remedy for you?

His visitors looked at one another, each unwilling to be the first to speak, for they all knew why here, why him. He was the Maharal, not only wise but good, and able, out of his learning and holiness, to accomplish wonders. It was well known that he had once made a golem: a figure of earth, sculpted on the ground like a dead man or like the figure of dirt that God's fingers first made, which the rabbi then, by prayers and other rituals few know about and fewer would have dared repeat, caused to stir, awake, rise. To sit up groggily on his elbows, dropping clods, looking about himself in wonder (or was he an unthinking lump still, with no more consciousness than the Emperor's
Uhrwerk
figures, which seem to obey the Emperor's orders like courtiers and knights, but were only metal pins and springs—earth too?) and at length stand up on unsteady earthen legs, not very well formed but not the less amazing for that, and ready to obey the Maharal's instructions, until the wise rabbi drew from its muddy mouth (or ear, in other accounts) the
shem ha-meforash
, the capsule containing the Name, that had animated it, whereupon the big fellow broke apart into clods again. Or—in another story—until the rabbi erased one diacritical mark of the sacred word Truth,
emet
, that he had inscribed upon the creature's forehead, leaving the equally sacred word
met
or Death.

—Those are untrue stories, said the Maharal. Such things can be done by the cunning, but the truly learned refrain from them. To press light into darkness, to mix clean and unclean? Those who do so are brave perhaps and have great knowledge perhaps, but may the Holy One, blessed be he, protect me from imitating them.

—I don't ask that you do those things that are forbidden, said the Ass. Only that you help me to learn what I must, to do it for myself. I ask for what anyone ignorant may ask of you: instruction.

The rabbi regarded the beast before him. If it was not forbidden, it seemed to be required; it would be a mitzvah to help any being in the condition this one found itself in. The animal looked up at him with his great moist long-lashed eyes in supplication, and the rabbi had an irresistible impulse to scratch its head.

This too, then, would become one of the stories told of the Maharal, in some worlds at least; how he used to walk sometimes in the town with an ass by his side, without lead or halter, an ass that would stay obediently by him like a nobleman's dog, and look up with doglike attention to the Maharal, who seemed to speak to it confidentially, though surely (observers supposed) his words were for himself alone, or were for God's ear, for who else could hear?

—The Torah has six hundred thousand faces, the Maharal said to the Ass. One face for every Jew alive at the time
Moshe rebiana
revealed it. Some faces of the Torah are turned toward us, and some away; it is these turned-away faces we seek through
Hokhmath ha-Tseruf
, or, as it is said,
gematria
.

—This is the art by which form and substance may be transmuted, said the Ass.

When the rabbi said nothing in assent, the Ass added: So I have read in ancient authors.

—All the beings in the universe have come into existence through the work of the twenty-two letters, said the rabbi. By combining their different kinds, the twenty-two make, in all, 231 gates. Through these gates have come, in their troops and legions, all the things that have names, in all the three realms, that is, the World, the Year, and the Soul.

—Did they, then, precede the saying of the
Fiat lux
?

—Perhaps they did, said the rabbi. A midrash says that the Holy One, blessed be he, asked for workers to make the world, and the Torah replied: Take these twenty-two, of which I am made.

He spoke in simple terms, not only because he spoke in a language not his own, but also because he spoke to a famously simple beast, whose hooves clattered on the cobblestones beside him, whose long ears twitched and pointed as though in search of wisdom.

—Even so, the rabbi went on, it took several attempts to get a creation that would sustain itself at all: earlier creations preceded this one, coming to be and going out like the sparks thrown off by a smith's hammer as it strikes the iron on the anvil.

The Ass hee-hawed, for the idea of a Jove or Jehovah laboring over an infinite smithy, spoiling his work and beginning again, suited him very well: it was as though he'd thought of it himself.

The rabbi (not noticing the interruption) went on to explain that those first universes emanated entirely from his Power, his strict Justice; each was too difficult to maintain, and destroyed itself; only when balanced by the smile of his other aspect, Wisdom, Mother, and Spouse, was the world able to remain alive and persist in the place it had been summoned to.

—Yet even now the creation is not completed, said the rabbi. It is said that this world grows up through a succession of Years, or
shemitah
, each different in kind. The present
shemitah
emanates from the
sefira
Gevurah, judging Power: that is, the left hand of the Holy One. Anyone can see that this is so. And if this is so then the former age must have been that of the
sefira
Hesed, sweet Loving-kindness.

—And the age to come? asked the donkey.

—Rahamim: Beauty, Compassion, Mercy.

For a moment he paused, and lowered his head, and so did the beast beside him: as though to await that age, so long in dawning.

—Each Year, the rabbi then said, is seven thousand ordinary years long, and at the end of each, all things begin again, but differently.

—All things?

—Some say that in former
shemitah
, even the Torah did not contain the possibilities it contains now, and in the
shemitah
to come it will not contain them again, but will contain others it does not now. There are those who hold that there is a letter not present in the Torah in this age, a letter that the next age will reveal. A revelation that must of course change everything, however slightly.