LITMIR.BIZ

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would sit evenings at his table, drinking glasses of schnapps and wondering about the unpleasant young man. Had he found success in America? Had he woken his clay bride?

      Yehudah Schaalman was ninety-three years old. This fact was not common knowledge, for he had the features and bearing of a man of seventy and, if he wished, could make himself appear younger still. He had survived to this old age through forbidden and dangerous arts, his considerable wits, and a horror of death that drove all else before it. One day, he knew, the Angel of Death would at last come for him, and take him to stand before the Books of Life and Death, there to listen to the recitation of his transgressions. Then the gate would open, and he would be cast into the fires of Gehenna, there to be punished in a length and manner to fit his misdeeds. And his misdeeds had been many, and varied.

      When he was not selling love charms to foolish village girls or untraceable poisons to hollow-eyed wives, Schaalman bent every scrap of his will to his dilemma: how to indefinitely postpone the day of the Angel’s arrival. And so he was not, as a rule, a man given to idle reverie. He did not waste his time speculating about every customer who sought his services. But then why, he asked himself, had this hapless furniture maker captured his attention?

      Yehudah Schaalman’s life had not always been this way.

      As a boy, Yehudah had been the most promising student that the rabbis had ever seen. He had taken to study as though born for no other purpose. By his fifteenth year it had become common for Yehudah to argue his teachers to a standstill, weaving such supple nets of Talmudic argument that they found themselves advocating positions exactly opposite to the ones they’d believed. This agility of mind was matched only by a piety and devotion to God so strong that he made the other students seem like brazen heretics. Once or twice, late at night, his teachers murmured to one another that perhaps the wait for the Messiah would not be as long as they had expected.

      They groomed him to become a rabbi, as quickly as they could. Yehudah’s parents were delighted: poor, barely more than peasants, they had gone without to provide for his education. The rabbinate began to debate where to send the boy. Would he do the most good at the head of a congregation? Or should they send him on to university, where he could begin to teach the next generation?

      A few weeks before his ordainment, Yehudah Schaalman had a dream.

      He was walking on a path of broken stones through a gray wilderness. Far ahead of him, a featureless wall stretched across the horizon and reached high into the heavens. He was exhausted and footsore; but after much walking Yehudah was able to discern a small door, little more than a man-shaped hole, where the path met the wall. Suddenly full of a strange, fearful joy, he ran the rest of the way.

      At the door he paused, and peered inside. Whatever lay beyond was shrouded in mist. He touched the wall: it was painfully cold. He turned around and found that the mist had swallowed the path, even up to his own feet. In the whole of Creation, there was only himself, the wall, and the door.

      Yehudah stepped through.

      Mist and wall disappeared. He was standing in a meadow of grasses. The sun shone down and bathed him in warmth. The air was thick with scents of earth and vegetation. He was filled with a great peace unlike any he had ever known.

      There was a grove of trees past the meadow, golden-green with sunlight. He knew there was someone standing inside the grove, just beyond his sight, waiting for him to arrive. Eagerly he took a step forward.

      In an instant the sky darkened to storm-black. Yehudah felt himself seized and held. A voice spoke in his head:

      You do not belong here.

      Meadow and grove disappeared. He was released—he was falling—

      And then he was on the path again, on his hands and knees, surrounded by broken stones. This time, there was no wall, or any other landmark to travel toward, only the stones leading through the blasted landscape to the horizon, with no hint of respite.

      Yehudah Schaalman awoke to darkness and the certain knowledge that he was somehow damned.

      When he told his teachers he was leaving and would not become a rabbi, they wept as though for the dead. They pleaded with him to explain why such an upright student would forsake his own purpose. But he gave no answer, and told no one of the dream, for fear that they would try to reason with him, explain it all away, tell him tales of demons who tormented the righteous with false visions. He knew the truth of what he’d dreamed; what he didn’t understand was why.

      And so Yehudah Schaalman left his studies behind. He spent sleepless nights combing through his memories, trying to determine which of his sins had damned him. He hadn’t led a spotless life—he knew he could be proud and overeager, and when young he had fought bitterly with his sister and often pulled her hair—but he had followed the Commandments to the best of his ability. And were not his lapses more than compensated by his good deeds? He was a devoted son, a dutiful scholar! The wisest rabbis of the age thought him a miracle of God! If Yehudah Schaalman was not worthy of God’s love, then who on earth was?

      Tormented by these thoughts, Yehudah packed a few books and provisions, said farewell to his weeping parents, and struck out on his own. He was nineteen years old.

      It was a poor time to be traveling. Dimly Yehudah knew that his little shtetl lay inside the Grand Duchy of Posen, and that the duchy was a part of the Kingdom of Prussia; but to his teachers these were mundane matters, of little consequence to a spiritual prodigy such as Yehudah, and had not been dwelled upon. Now he learned a new truth: that he was a naive, penniless Jew who spoke little Polish and no German, and that all his studies were useless. Traveling the open roads, he was beset by thieves, who spied his thin back and delicate looks and took him for a merchant’s son. When they discovered that he had nothing to steal, they beat him and cursed him for their troubles. One night he made the mistake of asking for supper at a well-to-do German settlement; the burghers cuffed him and threw him to the road. He took to loitering on the outskirts of the peasant villages, where at least he had a chance of understanding what was said. He longed to speak Yiddish again, but he avoided the shtetls entirely, afraid of being drawn back into the world he had fled.

      He became a laborer, tilling fields and tending sheep, but the work didn’t suit him. He made no friends among his fellows, being a thin and ragged Jew who spoke Polish as though it dirtied his mouth. Often he could be seen leaning on his spade or letting the bull walk away with the plow as he ruminated once more on his past sins. The more he reflected, the more it seemed to him that his entire life was a catalog of misdeeds. Sins of pride and laziness, of anger, arrogance, lust—he’d been guilty of them all, and no counterweight could balance the scale. His soul was like a stone shot through with brittle minerals, sound in appearance but worthless at heart. The rabbis had all been deceived; only the Almighty had known the truth of it.

      One hot afternoon, while he reflected in this way, another fieldworker scolded him for laziness; and Yehudah, in the depths of his gloom and forgetting his Polish, responded with a more insulting answer than he’d intended. The man was upon Yehudah in an instant. The others gathered around, glad to finally see the arrogant boy receive his comeuppance. Flat on his back, nose gushing with blood, Yehudah saw his adversary crouched above him, one fist pulled back to strike again. Behind him rose a circle of jeering heads, like a council of demons sitting in raucous judgment. In that moment, all the heartache, resentment, and self-loathing of his exile contracted to a hard point of rage. He sprang up and barreled into his attacker, knocking him to the ground. As the others watched in horror, Yehudah proceeded to pummel him remorselessly about the head and was on the verge of gouging out one of his eyes when finally someone grabbed him in a bear hug and pulled him away. In a frenzy, Yehudah twisted and bit until the man let him go. And then Yehudah ran. The local constables stopped chasing him at the edge of town, but Yehudah kept on running. He had nothing now but the clothes on his back. It was even less than he’d started with.

      He ceased pondering his roster of sins. It was clear now that the corruption of his soul was an elemental fact. That he had avoided capture and jail did not console him: for now he began to dwell on the greater judgment, the one that lay beyond.

      He left off fieldwork and instead wandered

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