“Azarya, do you know what you are? Has anyone ever told you? Do you understand why a man like Gabriel Sinai is so eager to bring you to work with him?”
“You don’t need to tell me that I’m special. All my life, that’s all that I’ve heard. All my life, the community has kvelled at my every word.”
“But not for the right reasons, Azarya. Not because of who you are but because of your bloodline.”
“Not because of who I am.” He smiled ruefully. “I guess that’s the question. Who am I?” He shrugged. “When my designator is rigidly picking me out in other possible worlds, what’s it coming up with? What’s the part that can go and what’s the part that can’t?”
It was extraordinary how young Azarya could still look, when the clarity in his eyes was overtaken by a helpless wonder and his mouth quaked.
“You’re the boy who proved at six years old that there’s no largest prime number. I can’t imagine what you’ve proved since then. I can’t imagine what you could go on and prove. You talk about your responsibilities to the Valdeners. Don’t you have a responsibility to human understanding?”
“Believe me, human understanding will continue without Azarya Sheiner. The Valdeners are a different story.”
“But should they continue? It’s a harsh question, I know, harshly put.”
“Yes. Harsh.”
“But, Azarya, you don’t seem to shy away from questions. So answer this one for me: Why should the Valdeners continue with their superstitions and their insularity and their stubborn refusal to learn anything from outside? Why is that something to perpetuate?”
“I was hoping that maybe you could help me answer that. Because that is your specialty, psychology of religion, no?”
“No. This question is meant for you alone, Azarya.”
“As I’ve always feared,” he said softly.
“Let’s think about it together, then. Let’s say you leave and the community suffers for a while, then disintegrates and disperses to other Hasidic groups; maybe even-because of the trauma of your leaving-the members become assimilated into the modern world. Tell me what’s lost? A few fewer false beliefs knocking about in the world? The Valdeners end up being like my mother and me? Is that so bad?”
Azarya stared down at the table a while before he spoke.
“It’s tragic, a diminishment, when a people goes out of existence, a way of life, a culture, a language.” He spoke slowly, either from emotion or because he was thinking out his line of reasoning as he went. “But that’s not even the heart of it. No. The heart of it is the story of this people, my people, my Valdeners. You are who you are.” Cass saw with horror that Azarya’s eyes were welling. “Had my grandfather Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer not fought with all his life to bring over as many Valdeners as he could in 1939, then there would be none living now, and even so he wept on his deathbed for the lives he hadn’t saved. That bloodline that every Valdener child can recite as easily as Shema Yisroel”-“Hear O Israel,” the iconic Jewish prayer-“would have ended in that burning shul if not for him. So how can I, Azarya ben Rav Bezalel ben Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer, decide to be the executioner now? How can it be by my hand?”
He’s sixteen, Cass was thinking. Look at the quantities of agonized thought he’s poured into his paradox, and look at the living agony twisting itself out on his face right now, welling over in his eyes and making his upper lip tremble.
It was enough for one night, more than enough, and Cass said so. As they were getting up from the table, he couldn’t help putting his hand gently on Azarya’s shoulder, remembering, as he did so, how the Valdeners had kissed their prayer shawls and touched the child with them as if he were a living Torah as he was bounced around on his dancing father’s back.
“Azarya, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.”
“It’s for me wonderful to be able to share this with somebody. It’s a gift that you are taking my decision so seriously. Often I think maybe I’m taking it too seriously myself, that the world will go on whatever Azarya Sheiner decides to do. Still, a person takes his life seriously. A person has to live his life. Who else’s life is he supposed to live? Maybe together we’ll figure out how something that’s necessary but impossible can happen. We’ll collaborate on a solution.”
“It would be an honor to be your collaborator. And we’ll bring Professor Sinai on board, too, as a collaborator. Why don’t you bring him here tomorrow for dinner? I’ve still got piles of food from Tirza’s Batampte Kitchen. I’d like to meet the man whom Azarya Sheiner calls a gaon.”
Pascale was up in her study and Cass was in the kitchen, warming up the barbecued chicken and the potato kugel, when an excited Azarya arrived home with a burly man in heavy black-framed eyeglasses, his wavy black hair awkwardly mounding on random places of his head. He had the shy, uncomfortable grin that had probably not been revised since he was a child. He wore a green flannel shirt and an air of unkemptness, but it was hard for Cass to take him in because of a transformed Azarya beside him, holding three bunches of green-tissue-wrapped tulips in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.
Before Cass had gotten a word out, Pascale came sashaying into the room, balanced on a spiky pair of red shoes that matched her lipstick. Her long black hair, the color of the rest of her outfit, was piled high on her head. She stopped cold at the sight of them.
“But is it you?” she asked Azarya with the directness of a small child, and he laughed.
“But where are your”-she curled her index fingers beside her ears- “your baguettes à cheveux?”
Azarya, who didn’t know French but couldn’t help getting Pascale’s drift, pointed to the Red Sox baseball cap he was wearing. He lifted it off his head with a flourish, and two dark-blond payess came flopping down.
Pascale shrieked with laughter, which cracked them all up, Gabriel Sinai joining in with a high whinnying noise.
“Non, non, you must put them back tout de suite! It is so much better like that. Oui, comme ça! Plus beau! You are a beautiful boy! It is amazing how the beauty comes out. Better, why don’t you just snip, snip?”
She ran with her frantic movements, the high heels clacking on the wooden floor, to the kitchen drawer, and pulled out the poultry shears- Cass was surprised she knew where to find them-and advanced toward Azarya, in a pretend menacing way, moving her black-sheathed legs like a stalking panther. She jiggled the poultry shears beneath Azarya’s right ear. Cass uneasily wondered what Pascale was capable of in such an antic mood.
“I’m not quite ready for that.” Azarya was laughing back at her, not looking worried himself-but, then, he didn’t know Pascale. “One thing at a time.”