The Beautiful Possible (24 page)

“Better now, baby girl.” His chin drops to his neck and he begins to snore.

“I was named for her,” Maya whispers. “For your Sonia.”

She watches him sleep and thinks about the story that circles around in the past, addled and confused in an old man’s mind, yet perfectly clear. Two men had loved Sonia and Sonia chose Walter and then she was killed. Rosalie had loved two men and she chose both; her mother built an entire life around that choice. Maya doesn’t know if she loves Jase and what she longs for is greater than what any man can offer. The world is an immense garden of desire, a tangle of muddled love stories that wind around each other in an endless spiral.

She thinks of Paul’s story as soft clay between her fingers, history that changes shape under her touch. Where would it end? Touch the web any place and it ripples and flows like an ocean current, beginning with the story of one person who longed for another, body and soul.

Maya tears a page out of a notebook and writes:

On Maya’s flight back to New York, she dreams of Walter in his studio, lean and fit, practicing headstands. He offers her a whiff of sweet coriander and she sniffs. Then she places her palms flat on the floor, steadies herself, and slowly pulls up her legs. Walter grabs Adelaide and Liberace and places them on the soles of her feet and laughs.

Maya wakes up thirsty. She longs to pick up the thread of Walter’s life that was torn away by a car on a Bombay road in 1987. Had he lived. Had he made it back to America for an airport rendezvous with her and her mother.
I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine,
Rosalie would have said
. Walter, this is Maya. I know
, she would have said.
I met you before.
This time Walter would have been wearing shoes and she would have looked at his face and understood. The dream of their reunion would have been real this time, not like the dreamlike encounter that seems so hazy to her now. And this time Walter would have asked her to read something he had written.
What do you think of my newest work on the sacred?
Or maybe he would have brushed his eyes with the back of his hand because he wouldn’t want Rosalie to see that he was crying. Or maybe he would have reached out to touch Maya and she would have flinched and said,
This is awkward, please understand
. Or then. Or then. There were so many routes her imagination could take. She could no more finish their thoughts than she could create a quilt out of the frayed threads of their lives. All she could do was touch the edges and listen.

Maya remembers sitting in her father’s study when she was small. He had taught her some Hebrew letters and then she handed him her copy of
The Velveteen Rabbit.
“Read it, Abba,” she said. He read to her slowly and when he closed the book she covered the
T
on
Rabbit
with her little finger.

“That’s Velveteen Rabbi,” said Sol.

“That’s what I’d like to be when I grow up,” she said. And Sol looked into her eyes and said, “You will be a very real rabbi,
Maya. But I am the original Velveteen Rabbi. Not real unless loved into existence. I need people to listen to my sermons, purchase my wares, feed my ego. Don’t tell this to anyone—let it be our little secret.”

And it happened. Maya fell in love with the texts, with every word that began as a seed and then flowered into sentences, paragraphs, tractates, commentaries—infinite interpretations that spiral around each other in a symphonic web. Its authors are long dead but the words in the web are always alive, thriving with possibility, begging for connection. And Maya wasn’t velveteen at all; without a congregation, she was free to travel through the web, explore its underbelly, welcome its seductions, dance with its mystery. Free to choose the people whose lives are woven into the filament. Free to unravel the storylines and follow each thread back to its kernel. For her first time out she would begin with her parents. All three of them. A woman and a man and another man, braided together.

Back in New York, Maya keeps the box open at the foot of her bed. She sleeps fitfully and then wakes up with a burning question—
Where was my mother when? And what did Sol know?—
and forages through the box to search for clues. But the box only contains fragments. Maya calls Madeline and asks if she has anything else.

“I have some journals. Quite a few, actually. It’s overwhelming.”

“I’d love to read what you wrote about them.”

Madeline hesitates. “I could make photocopies, but it’s just so—”

“Personal?”

“I’m afraid so. I was a shameless diarist in those days. I had a notebook for every occasion; I even wrote when I was sitting on the toilet. Your mother’s story claimed my imagination; at times it took over my life.”

“Yenta.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“I’ll forgive you on their behalf.”

“Are you still furious at me, Maya?”

“The cat’s out of the bag, Madeline. At times I wish you’d never told me but now I can’t concentrate on anything that isn’t about them. I don’t return Jase’s calls and I forget to buy groceries. I spend entire days in the apartment, unshowered, half-dressed, thinking about Walter and Sonia and how one thing led to another. And yes, I resent this intrusion terribly, but it’s too late now.”

“What’s your address?”

Within a week an envelope arrives from Mexico, stuffed with photocopied pages from Madeline’s journals from the ’60s and the ’70s, the words written out in tiny, perfect script, every detail of
he said, she said
etched on lined paper. She sorts through the unopened boxes of papers that had been stored in Charlie’s house and finds more letters between Sol and Walter and Rosalie. Maya pores over the purple binder filled with sermons and marginal aphorisms, and with Madeline’s journal as a navigation tool, she deciphers how these words were composed. She reads all of Walter’s books and academic papers, and buys her own volume of Tagore’s poetry and a translation of Hindu
scriptures. And she continues to delve into the
Mei HaShiloach
, trying to understand how the Ishbitzer’s teachings wove into her parents’ lives.

Philip mails Maya a book he found in their grandparents’ kitchen cabinet after Ida moved to a nursing home—a volume of the Song of Songs, translated into Yiddish, inscribed:

Maya calls Philip and asks if he ever told Rosalie about the book he found tucked away behind their grandparents’ dairy dishes. “I always meant to tell her,” he said. “But I forgot and then it was too late.” Was the Song of Songs a love poem for her grandparents, just as it was a love poem for Walter and Sonia? Why did they all get off on this ancient poem when she, an Ecclesiastes girl, never did? Every book, every letter, every piece of paper is a fractal of another story; every crack of light conceals a deeper mystery. Maya fills a notebook with questions and answers, each one labeled she’elah and teshuvah. She lies awake at night and thinks about how her three parents created something together that she could never understand.

In rabbinical school, Maya was taught that if she wanted to fully comprehend the Torah she would need to know seventy
languages. But even seventy languages would not be enough to truly comprehend the Torah of her parents. She would need to know how the words they carried and quoted and taught and translated echoed in their lives, just as Walter had written in his paper. She would have to know why her grandmother hid her inscribed copy of the Song of Songs in the kitchen cabinet—was it because of Ida and Shmuel’s own intimacy, or was it because Ida didn’t want Rosalie to know the language of desire when she was perched on the edge of her married life with Sol?

Maya would need to find Walter and Sonia in a Berlin bedroom—this Sonia whose name she carries, this woman whom Paul loved, this woman who might have lived instead of Walter had she not left the bed to look for crackers. Maya imagines herself walking in Jerusalem on a Shabbat afternoon, an elderly survivor named Sonia holding her arm for balance. The Sonia who would have survived would be wearing a tweed suit that covered the numbers on her arm and she would be on her way to her granddaughter’s house for lunch. Survivor Sonia would hold Maya’s arm and faintly remember the young man she once loved, how he soothed her with the words of Tagore and Whitman and the Song of Songs, just minutes before he was murdered.
Thank you for walking with me, Rabbi Maya
, survivor Sonia would have said, except that had Sonia lived and not Walter, Maya would be as fictional as survivor Sonia.

The details would matter: How the shade of the date palm trees soothed Walter in Shantiniketan. How the path of his dreams was somehow connected to the astonishments conjured by Madame Sylvie. How the thread woven on one side of the
story could surface on the other, peacock blue to the blue of her mother’s silk tallit. How a butterfly imagined by Tagore could emerge in Walter’s description of a haiku, in her grandmother’s pet name, in a style of chair in her brother’s room. How the smells of turmeric, coriander, and cardamom wafted through their lives—sometimes hidden, sometimes pungent—just like they filled Kalustyan’s Spices and Sweets on Lexington Avenue on the afternoon Maya went there to buy turmeric root so she could understand Walter and how he woke up to life in Bombay.

And Maya would need to understand Sol, how he lost his hearing in one ear when he was a boy—
easy to imagine because he told her the story—
but she would need to imagine—
impossibly
—how he loved Walter and what exactly transpired in the upper geniza and what lay behind the words she could barely make out behind a closed door. She would need to hear the secrets that Charlie and Philip taught Lenny before he died and how they pummeled one another into the grass in the backyard—
easy because they told her
—years before she was born. She would have to understand the ways Rosalie and Sol loved each other, and the ways Rosalie and Walter loved each other, listening to the words they spoke and the silences between the words—
impossible.

And she would have to find herself in the story too: in the scenes she didn’t remember (meeting Walter in the airport lounge when she was two), the scenes that didn’t make sense when they happened (Walter, barefoot; the gift of a silver bracelet in the clothing store), and the scenes she could never recover (did she lose that bracelet on the subway, or was it tossed out with the garbage bags when they cleaned out the house?).

No doubt she would make an unsalvageable wreck of things. What kind of daughter would permit herself to imagine her parents’ most intimate secrets? What kind of rabbi would trespass in a geniza and sew its scattered scraps into a haphazard crazy quilt? She is the intruder, not Madeline. But it’s too late; she is already crawling inside this web, wrapping her fingers around its sticky tendrils. The path is partly illuminated: here is a slice of lemon cake in a Jerusalem courtyard, a sil batta burnished with spices, ash from burning sheet music, a brown felt hat, and scattered around the margins of a girl’s birthday wishes and Tagore’s poetry: a flower, a doorway, a footpath.

Just like at shul on Kol Nidre night, everyone is here, perched on the edge, waiting. They gather around; their eternal silence prompts her to listen.
It’s okay
, they say.
We grant you permission. Our lives are over; we lived as best we could. You own the copyright now. Rearrange the fragments, invent a new art form, compose a song without words. It’s your turn to make the beautiful possible. We are your parents and maybe we can show you the way
.

December 2008

Just the other day a backpacker with a faint Dutch accent knocked on my door and asked me if this was the correct address for an elderly French kabbalist who dispenses astonishments.

“Same address but she’s long gone,” I said. “The generations come and go.”

“. . . but the earth remains forever. Ecclesiastes.”

“You’re a good student.”

“Too bad I missed out on all that kabbalistic magic.”

“There are still plenty of astonishments to go around,” I said.

Jerusalem is the only place in the world where this can happen. I can pluck fresh dates from a tree that grows in my garden and meet a kid who knows his sources, searching for his place in the order of the universe. Everything here is layered with history and imbued with a challenge. I live in a crazy city where old dreams are translated into new ones—twisted, rerouted, corrupted, and quite often saturated with beauty. I believe Jerusalem has something to teach me, and I’m learning all the time.

I make a living leading meditation retreats that weave together Hasidic
texts, world poetry, and my own conjurings. I’m the lead singer of Besamim, an Israeli-Arabic–South Asian fusion band. My boyfriend Gil plays sitar and oud, and Jase—who now lives on a yishuv with his wife and four kids—joins us on banjo when he’s not leading American kids on hikes through the Sinai Desert. It’s taken us awhile to gel as a band but we have quite a following now and we’re about to record our first CD. I’ll send you a copy.

Every Rosh Hodesh I join the Women of the Wall and we read Torah at the Western Wall—the Kotel—at the same spot where you first saw my mother slip her note between the stones. We are often harassed for leading our own Torah service and I find it helps to wear a tallit that doesn’t remotely resemble the traditional one my father wore. My tallit is sewn out of a cotton batik tablecloth that I bought during a rabbinic service trip to Ghana. The batik is patterned with scrolling vines, textured with a border of blanket stitches I embroidered myself. It’s rather immense and I love how it encompasses all of me. When I drape it on my shoulders I feel as if I’m the queen of a vast wadi.

When I was small my mother and I would stay home from shul on Kol Nidre night, just the two of us. She would sit on the chaise lounge on the back porch and hold me on her lap. Together we would listen to the first notes of the prayer wafting from the shul and I would rest my head on her shoulder and close my eyes. What better Kol Nidre could there ever be? If a child is given a complete world, why ask how it was created? And if that world was created on a bedrock of secrecy, who was I to crack it open? I could nibble on hints for the rest of my life and tango with what I knew and what I did not know. And Madeline—that would have been enough for me.

Honest to God, it would have been enough.

But we can’t undo the past. I had buried both my parents and made my peace with the closed door of my mother’s life. And then you blew it all up when you spoke his name. I hungered for every word you gave me and I
sought out every seed of truth I could find. And at the same time I cursed you for leading me down that path. But no worries, Madeline. I’m a rabbi; I try to see life from all sides. You had no right to betray my mother, but you were brave enough to teach me what you believed I needed to learn. I never would have chosen you as a chavrusa, but sometimes our chavrusas choose us.

Once you gave me the bones of the story I had to find my way through it, interpret its code, make it my own. At first I thought I would create a source sheet of their favorite texts and simply meditate on the white space surrounding the words, letting the unspoken patterns speak for themselves. But without a narrative linking the texts, the tesserae would not form a mosaic, the words would be frozen in antiquity, and the story of their lives would be lost forever. My retreat students would show up for a dose of inspiration, but without a good story they wouldn’t stick around to find out what happened. The she’elah-teshuvah lines were easy for me to write, just like the contents of the purple binder were an easy assignment for Rosalie and Walter. Wisdom is easy, Madeline. It’s actual history that proves to be an unknowable, fugitive dream.

The writing of this half-imagined, half-true book about my three parents has been a comfort of sorts. Like all books, this is an inquiry, a game of blindfold in the dark, a whiff of spice, a forgotten prayer remembered. If I trespassed on their lives, I beg their forgiveness. My inheritance has many layers and unraveling is a messy, dangerous act.

I hope you will consider publishing
The Beautiful Possible
with your little press. My retreat students are always hungry for another book—a new seed—and our story may interest them in some way. As for my brothers, I haven’t decided if I will share this with them just yet, though I suspect they won’t be surprised that the milkman’s daughter is really the milkman’s daughter. I’m sure you know the Yiddish proverb
the heart is half a prophet
.

But I’m finished now, Madeline. This book is yours. It’s time to free myself to remember my mother and my father as I knew them. My father’s fingers pointing out the words in the Talmud, my tiny hand resting on top of his knuckles. My father standing on the bima, staring down at my mother and me, unable to hide his smile because we were alive in the world and we belonged to him.

I gave away all my mother’s clothes except for her white cotton Shabbat dress patterned with red bricks. I brought it with me to Jerusalem, along with my father’s books. At times I reach into the back of my closet and touch the satiny fabric, caress the huge flower-shaped buttons that I played with when I sat beside her in shul. The woman who wore that dress was my real mother. How I know and love her cannot be translated into the pages of any book. I am her daughter and she was my mother and I will miss her always.

On the last day of my retreats I invite my students to meditate on this:
Inside every story lies the hidden kernel of an infinite one
. We chant it together to a niggun I composed; you can hear a version of it on our CD. I came up with that line after I finished writing this book. I’m not sure I understand the essence of my own words, but I believe you will, Madeline. At least I hope so.

I often think about the day you met my mother at the Kotel, looking on as she tucked her note between the ancient stones. You told her that her words would not find their way to a geniza or to God but now I believe that you contradicted yourself. Her words were being watched over; the story was in your hands. And you carried it for all those years so that one day you could give it to me.

Yours,

Maya