He paused. Aharon, feeling that finger on his lips, said nothing. Kobinski was confessing. Aharon did not know why, but he knew enough not to interrupt.
“I could not openly defy their Scripture. If I had spoken against their religious views I would have been gone, like that.” He wiggled his fingers in lieu of the harder task of snapping them. “I did try to improve some things—agriculture, technology. My education was not so useful. What good is calculus in a world struggling with addition and subtraction? Or chemistry in a place where there are no labs, no manufacturing, no microscopes? But I did try.
“It’s this planet, Aharon. Every machine breaks—it’s as simple as that. Only the most basic and hardiest devices survive. The soil is rocky and barren, unresponsive to either irrigation or fertilization. The seas are largely uninhabited. Medicine is barbaric and deadlocked in religious superstition.” He paused again. “It beats you down. It just beats you down.”
He raised a hand, rubbed at his trembling lips.
When it didn’t seem like he would continue on his own, Aharon said gently, “Also, maybe, you’d given up before you ever came here, nu? You already were not the man you were when you wrote The Book of Torment.”
Kobinski didn’t reply.
“Maybe that’s why you came here. You had given up hope.”
Kobinski gave a bitter laugh. “I hated; that’s why I came here. I wanted to take us both to Hell, so that night, wrestling with Wallick, I let it fill me. Hate is a form of restriction, too.”
Aharon studied Kobinski’s face, eyes narrowed in thought. This afternoon, he had hated. He’d hated Kobinski for his participation in these atrocities, hated it that a Jew—one of the chosen and particularly one as “chosen” as Yosef Kobinski—could do such things. And how could he when he had written… when he was the author of this incredible work Aharon was reading? It seemed a double blasphemy.
But now Aharon felt… compassion. He had no idea where it had come from. It was such a large compassion, he couldn’t even take credit for it. It was as if someone were opening his heart and filling it up.
“What happened to the Nazi? This Wallick?”
Kobinski drew in a breath. His chest rose and fell; again his lips formed words that wanted to come out but were held back at the last moment. Finally he released them. “I told the Fiore he was from Charvah, the devil. He… he’s dead.”
“I understand,” Aharon said. And he did. He remembered Yad Vashem, remembered the feeling of utter desolation and emptiness he had felt here, in this room, when all of his old ideas had been burnt to the ground.
Kobinski rubbed at his lip, his face trembling with emotion. “He raped my son, Aharon. For thirty nights, he made me watch. Then he killed him in front of me.”
A deep groundswell of sympathy and pain rose up between them. Aharon muttered meaningless words, watched the old man fight for control of his emotions, watched as his face went stony again. Seeing the emotion was hard, but seeing that harshness, that disassociation, was worse. Aharon reached out his fingers and touched Kobinski’s arm as if by touch he could keep the kabbalist with him.
Kobinski shook like a leaf under the touch. His face did relax a little.
Who am I? Aharon wondered. Because I, Aharon Handalman, have never been this generous in my life.
Kobinski wiped his nose. “I don’t know why it should, but it’s bothered me what he said—the heretic. I couldn’t sleep. Because he’s right, you know. I don’t love the Fiore. I never did.”
“The Fiore are hard to love,” Aharon agreed.
“Most of them repulse me. But what repulses me more is that this place even exists. God repulses me.”
Aharon bridled at such a statement, tried to find a way to turn toward something positive. “I’ve been reading The Book of Torment. There’s so much wisdom there, Yosef. Perhaps you, too, should look at it again.”
“It’s pointless, don’t you see?”
“Why? You don’t think there are places better than this? You don’t think good exists?”
“Oh, it exists. But what does that mean to the Fiore? What did it mean for my son? No amount of good can possibly justify the evil.”
Aharon sighed. His heart was heavy with the responsibility, the desire, to say the right thing. He thought of the old stories, of how the Israelites, when they conquered an enemy, would kill every living thing, women and children included, burn houses and fields and livestock, leave nothing standing. That was what God had done to Aharon—laid him waste. And Aharon understood it had been the only way that anything truly new could ever take root in his heart. He mourned for Kobinski, who had suffered a similar decimation but who had never found that new seed. His heart had remained barren all these years.
“What the heretic said today, about helping one another—is this sentiment common among the Fiore?” Aharon asked.
“Oh, no.”
“And his souclass="underline" If I understand your book, when he dies he’ll go back toward the middle of the ladder. Is that correct?”
Kobinski latched on to this. “Yes. So you see, death is hardly a punishment for him.”
“But what if he needs more time to develop his thoughts? Or to teach others? What if he could help other Fiore, Yosef?”
Kobinski flushed, but he spoke bitterly. “That might happen. And it also might happen that if he had more time here he would grow disillusioned in this hellish place. Or he would gain power and become corrupt. This place has a way of twisting everything to a bad end. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by sentiment. This heretic is no messiah, no martyr. He’s only a Fiore with a modicum of common sense and perhaps some leadership skills, nothing more.”
“Nu? Maybe that’s all that’s required.”
“Required for what?”
Aharon sighed. For a long moment he meditated on the question. His arm was strong enough now to reach up and stroke his beard—how his hand had missed that beard! “You know what I felt when he spoke? Hope. Just that someone—anyone—could speak of love and charity here.”
Kobinski didn’t answer, but Aharon could feel his will hardening. He had said the wrong thing, maybe; he was losing him. He knew the issues were not simple. It was not, god forbid he admit this, black-and-white. He changed the subject. “And what will happen to you, Yosef? When you die?”
That, too, was the wrong thing to say. Kobinski struggled to sit upright. Aharon put a hand on his arm, but this time the older man shook it off. He shoved his legs off the bed and sat on the edge, breathing hard from the effort.
“I’m sorry,” Aharon said. “I cannot imagine what you went through with your son. And who am I to make excuses for God? But that’s the point. It doesn’t matter whether I—or you—excuse Him or not. It seems to me that in this battle—in this battle you cannot win. You can kick and scream and flail all you want to, but you might as well rage at a storm, nu? You cannot win.”
Kobinski got off the bed, placing his weight on his feet with great pain. “The Midrash says God weeps when He loses the heart of one of His beloved. That would have been enough for me, Aharon, to have made Him weep. But the awful thing is, I’m not even sure of that anymore.”
17
…that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained.