The Visiting Professor Read online

  “Books maybe,” Lemuel replies in a voice that conveys remorse.

  Matilda Birtwhistle flashes a supportive smile. Lemuel grins back uncertainly.

  Perkins, huffing, slides in behind the wheel, raises the earflaps on his mackinaw cap as if it is a preflight requirement, adjusts the hearing aid hooked over an ear, works the choke and guns the motor. Snow chains on all four tires set up a rattle that renders conversation difficult. “So where is the visitin’ professor visitin’ from, huh?” he calls over his shoulder. “And when he gets his act together, what is his act?”

  The Director twists in his seat and blinks his eyes rapidly—his way of apologizing for the egalitarian nature of American society that permits chauffeurs a degree of impertinence. “He has come from St. Petersburg,” he shouts to Perkins. “As for his act, he happens to be one of the world’s preeminent randomnists.”

  “I can’t promise I know what a predominant randomnist does for a livin’, but if it’s got anythin’ at all to do whit snow, he’s come to the right place, huh?” remarks Perkins. “What whit all this snow we got, we got us a randomnist’s paradise. Hey, professor from Petersboig, in case yaw the athletic type, the village staw under Tender To rents out lightweight cross-country skis.”

  D.J. rolls her eyes to the tops of their sockets. Matilda Birtwhistle suffocates a smile in her Tibetan glove. Lemuel, mystified by the conversation—why would a randomnist need skis? And what or who is tender to?—stares morosely out a window. Now that he has finally gotten where he is going, he finds himself struggling against a persuasive postpartum depression. His first glimpse of America the Beautiful does not help. The minibus rattles down a wide, bleak main street paved with cracking volcanic tarmac, not Sony Walkmans, past mountains of plastic garbage sacks that look as if they have washed ashore on a tide. Long stalactites of ice trickle from lampposts and store signs and the giant clock over the revolving door of a bank at an intersection. The minibus, making its way between drifts of dirty snow, crosses a bridge with rusting girders, passes darkened, dead gas stations and supermarkets and cut-rate furniture stores and an all-brick drive-in savings-and-loan next door to a gray-washed wooden church with a movie marquee advertising CHRIST SAVES, without specifying what. Lemuel spots an illuminated billboard at the side of the road that makes him wonder whether he can get by with his Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual English.

  He leans forward and taps D.J. on the shoulder. “What does it mean, ‘Nonstops to the most Florida cities? How can one city be more Florida than another?”

  “Hey, professor from Petersboig, take a gander at them trees,” Perkins calls before D.J. can dredge up a Serbo-Croatian translation for the billboard’s message. ‘They all been turned into weepers, huh? We just had us the woist ice storm since 1929—rained cats ‘n’ dawgs mosta yesterday, huh? Last night the temperature went an’ plummeted on down to five.”

  “Five degrees Fahrenheit,” Sebastian Skarr notes, “is the equivalent of minus fifteen degrees Celsius.”

  “Cats? Dogs?” Lemuel, bewildered, asks.

  “That’s an American idiot,” Charlie Atwater explains. He hiccups sheepishly.

  Up ahead, a pulsating light atop a vehicle sends tiny orange explosions skidding across the ice-lacquered pavement. The minibus catches up with a truck spewing sand over the highway. Squinting through his window into the night, Lemuel begins to make out the branches and power lines coated with ice and sagging under its weight. Slipping into a tantalizing fiction, he conjures up a night moth batting its wings somewhere in the vast wasteland of Siberia. The trivial turbulence created when its wings flail the air sets off tiny ripples that amplify with time and distance to produce the swirling tempest of ice paralyzing the east coast of America the Beautiful.

  Another footprint of chaos!

  D.J. points out the road sign planted at the spot where the countryside ends and the village begins. The sign, encased in ice, reads: “Backwater University—founded 1835.” Underneath is a smaller sign: “Home of the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies.” Moments later Perkins eases the bus to a stop in front of a green clapboard house with a wraparound porch set back from Main Street. A gust of icy air invades the bus as Perkins, his mackinaw buttoned to his jawbone, his earflaps down, opens the door and, gripping the rope handle of Lemuel’s cardboard valise, picks his way along the sanded path toward the house.

  The Director twists in his seat. “What with the cold et al., I think I’ll pass up the chance to go in with you.” Leaning toward Lemuel, he lowers his voice. “Who cuts your hair? You don’t mind my asking?”

  “I cut my hair. In a mirror.”

  The Director slips an envelope into a pocket of Lemuel’s faded brown overcoat. “Some cash to tide you over until you deposit your first paycheck.” He clears his throat. “Uh, you won’t resent a suggestion?”

  “If you please.”

  “There’s a barbershop in town over the general store.” He treats Lemuel to a conspiratorial wink. “It’s open mornings until noon.” The Director speaks again in a normal voice. “The professor you’ll be sharing the house with is expecting you. Tomorrow there’s a faculty luncheon in your honor, after which I’ll show you your office and introduce you to your girl Friday.”

  “That’s what we call a secretary,” D.J. explains in her Serbo-Croatian.

  Wondering who will take his letters Monday through Thursday, Lemuel makes his way up the aisle, mumbling his thanks, shaking hands right and left, thinking, as he approaches the door, that he is about to parachute from a plane into an icy abyss. He gives his khaki army-surplus scarf another turn around his neck, tightens the straps on his Red Army knapsack and steps into the void. Making his way up the footpath, he crosses Perkins duck-walking back to the bus. Perkins attempts to high-five Lemuel, but gets only a puzzled look for his trouble.

  “Don’t they high-five folks in Russia, huh, professor from Petersboig?” the chauffeur calls cheerily.

  Lemuel pauses on the front porch to watch the minibus pull away from the curb. The red brake lights flicker and vanish around a corner. In the stillness, Lemuel raises his right hand over his head and stares up at his fingers.

  High. Five. Ah! High-five.

  The whetted air knifes through Lemuel’s corduroy trousers, numbing his thighs. He turns and reaches for the corroded brass baseball, but the door flies open before he can rap the baseball against the corroded brass catcher’s mit. A hand shoots out from a starched cuff. Powerful fingers grip Lemuel’s khaki scarf and haul him inside. Lemuel gets a whiff of a vinegary deodorant, a glimpse of nicotine-stained teeth, a thick scraggly beard, coillike sideburns dancing in the air, bright Talmudic eyes bulging with carnal curiosity. The door slams closed behind him and Lemuel, pulled almost against his will into an outrageous fiction, decides he has come face to face with Yahweh.

  On the short side—his head comes up to Lemuel’s shoulder blades—but heftily built, Yahweh appears to be in his early thirties. He is decked out in scuffed black lace-up high shoes and a tieless white-on-white shirt buttoned up to a magnificent Adam’s apple. Where the starched collar chafes his neck there is a ringworm of a welt that makes it look as if he is sporting a dog’s collar. He has on baggy dull-black trousers, a rumpled vest, a loose-fitting jacket that droops open. Above a bulbous nose, black beetle brows sky-dive toward each other with delicious abandon. Defying gravity, an embroidered black skullcap perches on the back of his large head. Eyeing his visitor through perfectly round silver-rimmed spectacles, murmuring “Hekinah degul, hekinah degul,” backpedaling across threadbare carpets as his guest advances, Yahweh lures Lemuel through the vestibule into the overheated house.

  “What language is ‘Hekinah degul’?” Lemuel asks.

  “It is Lilliputian,” Yahweh says. “Roughly translated, it means ‘What in the Devil.’ I have a theory the Lilliputians, metaphorically speaking, are maybe one of the lost tribes of Israel.” He half circles Lemuel, sizing him up fr
om one side, then the other. “It’s me, your colleague and housemate,” he finally says in a singsong rasp. His bony hand closes over Lemuel’s gloved hand in an iron grip. “The bush, burning or otherwise, I do not beat around—it is not my shtick. In academic circles I am known as Rebbe Asher ben Nachman, the Gnostic chaoticist. In religious circles I am known as the Eastern Parkway Or Hachaim Hakadosh, the holy man from Eastern Parkway, which is in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. To situate myself in the rabbinical spectrum, I am what Jews from the Venetian ghetto would have called a traghetto—a gondola plying the murky waters between the ultra-orthodox and the ultra-un-Orthodox. To situate myself in the historical spectrum, I am the last but not least in a long line of rabbis who trace their lineage back to the illustrious Moshe ben Nachman, alias Ramban, may he rest in peace, who met his Maker in Eretz Yisrael circa 1270.” He nods approvingly. “You are trying not to smile at things which strike you as pompous. Your discretion is a tribute to the parents who raised you.”

  Dancing back a few steps, the Rebbe pulls an enormous handkerchief from the inside breast pocket of his jacket and opens it with a theatrical flourish; for an instant Lemuel is convinced his host is about to produce a white dove or another bouquet of roses. He is disappointed when Yahweh, deftly manipulating the handkerchief with one hand, noisily blows his long nose a nostril at a time.

  “Coming from Russia,” Yahweh says, his tone suddenly nasal, “you have probably not heard of me, believe me I am not insulted, but you have maybe heard of Brooklyn?” As he prattles on he inspects the handkerchief, looking for a bulletin on the state of his health. “Standing with your back to the Atlantic Ocean, sitting too, Brooklyn is immediately to the right of Manhattan.”

  Folding away the handkerchief, laughing at his little joke, the Rebbe dives for Lemuel’s valise, hefts it as if it is filled with feathers and starts up the stairs. “Before I became a rebbe and a holy man, I worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks.” He beckons Lemuel with a crooked finger. “Come. I keep a kosher house, I will not eat you. Upstairs is the apartment the Institute has put at your disposition.” He flashes a shy, asymmetric grin, transforming his face into something closely resembling a cubist guitar. “When you have settled in and down,” he tells his wary visitor, “I invite you for tea and sympathy.”

  Hefting his knapsack onto a shoulder, carrying his duty-free shopping bag, Lemuel trails after the Rebbe past waist-high leaning towers of books stacked, spine outward, against the walls. “Tea I take with a lump of sugar between my teeth,” he remarks gloomily. “Sympathy I take with a grain of salt.”

  Rebbe Nachman turns to stare quizzically at his housemate. “That we can become friends is within the realm,” he announces. “You have maybe heard of male bonding?”

  Lemuel stops dead in his tracks. He remembers his mistress criticizing him for thinking someone else’s chaos would be greener. Axinya turned out to be right about the Sony Walkmans. What did she know that he only suspected? “In Russia,” Lemuel notes in a voice that attempts to convey unflinching heterosexuality, “that kind of thing is definitely against the law.”

  “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 si
de 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?”