The Kabbalah Master Read online

  Still sketching, the man sitting next to her on the bench shifted closer. Sharon mutely implored his help. With none forthcoming, she began to panic. What if he didn’t understand English? Worse yet, what if he was one of those perverts who got his kicks from watching a woman being gang-raped? A Niagara of terror coursed through Sharon’s bloodstream as, unable to move, she sat pondering the grisly options. It did not, oddly enough, occur to her to mentally recite the Kabbalistic chant Rabbi Joachim had taught her for protection in times of danger.

  “Hey, Baybeee, I wanna ast yuh this question,” the barrel-chested gang leader taunted again.

  A burst of hoots and whistles erupted behind him. Seeing that Sharon wasn’t going to put up a fight, his companions were growing restless.

  “Come on!” A taller young man with the dark hint of a mustache placed his hand on the leader’s shoulder.

  “Git yuh hands offa me, Paulie,” Barrel Chest tossed his friend aside with one violent sweep of his palm and Paulie, now embarrassed, hung back. He had the same name as her son. This was no coincidence. Hadn’t Rabbi Joachim told her there was no such thing as coincidence, that everything was part of God’s heavenly plan—even evil? What was happening to her now was no better than she deserved. She was being punished for neglecting her own Paulie who, at eleven, was already cursing his way into the downward path of his namesake, the “Paulie” who stood threatening her at that very moment.

  “Look, why don’t you just go away? I don’t want to hear your question. Go home.” Sharon startled herself with the calm strength of her own voice.

  “Huh?” Barrel Chest rolled his eyes, pretending to be shocked.

  If the Hebrew letters were truly living entities quivering with divine power, then uttering God’s secret Name would instantly vaporize Barrel Chest and his gang. “The Tetragrammaton is the most powerful creative force in all of Nature. Yet at the same time, it can be more destructive than the atom bomb!” Rabbi Joachim had thundered, swinging his fist over her head like a censer. Was it because she was still only a novice or because she was a woman that he had never revealed the secret Name and delivered its power to her?

  “Listen, Baybeee,” Barrel Chest said, edging closer, “I got this very important question I gotta ast yuh.”

  Sharon raged inwardly at her powerlessness.

  Well, ask it then, you punk! Why the long prologue? Go on and ask me if I dropped my handkerchief. And when I say no, tell me you don’t care if I bleed to death. Or are you going to make some disgusting sucking noise and ask me to give you a blowjob under the boardwalk? Will you and your gang of Paulies run off laughing and cursing in Spanish after fondling my breasts while Pretty Boy sits here drawing sea gulls?

  As if in direct response to her unspoken challenge, the man sitting next to her called out, “Hey, guys, why don’t you leave the lady alone?”

  Eyes flaming, Barrel Chest turned to face him. Sharon thought of making a run for the stand where the man in the chef’s toque was now cleaning up and preparing to leave. But the other gang members, piqued by the prospect of a fight, had massed even closer to the bench, pinning her in.

  “Hey, man, you must be Arnold Schwarzenegger? Did you hear that, boys, we got us Mr. Olympia himself on this here bench?” mocked the smallest gang member.

  Paulie spat and offered him a high five.

  “Shut up!” ordered their leader.

  Suddenly everything came to a standstill. The Parachute, too, Sharon noticed, was oddly suspended in midair. Had it been stopped by her merely thinking of the Holy Name? Or had time itself stopped, the way it did when the rabbi flew through the streets in his red Volvo without the cops noticing? The panicked girls clinging to their sailor boyfriends in the stalled gondola think they’re the ones in danger, Sharon mused. To them, I’m lucky to be safely on the ground. Funny, how it’s all a matter of perspective.

  “Do you know this lady, man?” Barrel Chest said in a low, menacing tone to the man sitting next to her. Still, there was a trace of humor in his eyes. Or was she misjudging, finding humor when it was mania that had turned the gang leader’s darting gaze into a pair of flaming pinwheels?

  “Yes,” the stranger answered pleasantly.

  “Is she yuh wife, man? Otherwise, I mean, if she ain’t yuh wife, yuh know, yuh gotta mind yuh own business. Yuh know what I mean, man?” Barrel Chest finished almost in a whisper.

  Sharon’s bench mate smiled at her—a perfect, straight white-toothed smile in what she now saw was a startlingly handsome face.

  The thugs released a communal chuckle.

  “Shut up!” screamed Barrel Chest, this time without turning to face them. Sharon watched the sweat pour in dual tracks along his temples. A vein formed a purple arrow in his forehead. His body was trembling with the effort to withhold the rage that she imagined mobilized him, woke him each morning, and thrust him into the streets, compelling his fists to slam against flesh. Turning squarely toward the man on the bench he demanded, “Ansuh me loud now, man, ’cuz I ain’t gonna ast you again—you this lady’s husband?”

  “Yes, I’m her husband,” was the instant reply.

  “That’s funny, that’s really funny, man,” the leader addressed his companions over his shoulder. “Did you hear that, you muthas, this dude’s her husband?” Then, turning to Sharon, he asked, “Lady is this really yuh husband?”

  Sharon tried to accompany her short nod with a timid smile, which only served to infuriate her interrogator further. The humorous gleam in his eye had disappeared entirely.

  “Then why yuh sittin’ so far apart? If yuz is married, why yuh sittin’ at opposite ends of the bench?” Without waiting for an answer, the gang leader smacked his right fist into his open left palm and again, barely above a whisper, addressed the man on the bench: “Yuh sure yuh not lyin’ to me, man?”

  “No, I’m not lying,” replied the stranger, this time only almost cheerfully. “I draw and she likes to sit and look at the water and think, so we sit far apart—”

  “That the truth, lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s see whut yuh drawin’ now, man.”

  The Parachute slumped, creaked, seemed almost to stumble from its moorings, and at last groaned its way earthward. Meanwhile, Barrel Chest, the master of chaos, approached the stranger while his entourage of lesser fiends, once again visibly impatient, rustled behind him. “Paulie,” the favored one—could he be the leader’s conscience-plagued brother, Sharon wondered—pressed forward pleading softly: “Come on, man. We not gonna beat on this mutha five against one. He’s one of them artist faggots, man. Like, we ain’t gonna bother to beat on ’im, are we?”

  This time the gang leader did not even bother to push Paulie away. Every particle of Barrel Chest’s attention was now focused on the sketchpad.

  “Let’s see what yuh draw, man.”

  Sharon felt her leg muscles turn to batter. Amiably, the artist handed over his sketchpad.

  The gang grouped in closer around their leader for a look.

  “This ain’t no picture, this is gahbage, man, gahbage!” the tormentor screamed, pulling the sketch pad out of the artist’s hands and holding it high over his head.

  “Hey, man, give the faggot back his pad and let’s split, man. We all ain’t gonna beat on ’im, right, man?” Paulie persisted, now bolstered by short bursts of assent from the others.

  Suddenly, Barrel Chest appeared to be seized by a cramp and on the verge of collapsing. He hunched his body in two and flung down the pad at the artist’s feet. Saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, he backed away, shrieking, “I fought over in Vietnam, killed me plenty of mutha fuckas like you! Don’t wanna hear none uh yuh faggot artist mutha fuckas tellin’ me what to do, hear me, man? Sure she’s yuh wife, man—don’t yuh tell me, yuh lyin’ mutha fucka!” Signaling his gang to follow him, the leader sprang in front of Sharon, snatched her purse, and fled with it down to the beach.

  The next thing Sharon knew she was running on t
he sand behind her bench mate, who had barely introduced himself to her as “Junior Cantana” before leaping up and chasing after the thief. Finding it impossible to run in her shoes, she took them off and carried them as she headed toward the water’s edge, where the tide had flattened the sand. The gang had dispersed, leaving only their leader running ahead with her purse, twirling it around by the strap. Every so often he would tease her, pretending to return the purse to her before pulling it back and bellowing, “Come and get it, lady!”

  The sun emerged briefly, but retreated just as quickly. Sharon’s legs were cramping. At one point she feared they were buckling under her. At last, unable to go forward, ready to concede victory to her tormentor, she dropped to the sand. Shading her eyes, she saw Junior Cantana closing in on the thief. Now he was almost close enough to reach out and touch the corner of her purse. But the thief drew it back again. Together they circled, rose to a clinch that never materialized, and panting, feinted like boxers. An acrid breeze smelling of diesel fuel billowed out her rescuer’s pink shirt in back. Sharon remained seated at the water’s edge, numbly watching the two men.

  “Yuh—wan—this—bag—man?” screamed the panting tormentor, “Come—and—get—it!” Then, without warning, he dropped the purse onto the sand in front of him.

  Junior Cantana moved in closer.

  An old woman in a faded blue bathing suit and sneakers came out of the water and walked between them. “Bums, that’s all you get on the beach here lately is bums,” she muttered.

  Sharon was close enough to see the muscles tense in the old woman’s face. She wanted to get up and run for help but could not lift herself from the sand. “Please, oh, please, call the police,” she screamed, but the old woman waddled past, ignoring her.

  At that moment, Junior Cantana sprang forward, thrust out his left leg and drove one swift karate kick to the tormentor’s stomach. Stunned, the thief burst into tears and fell down on the sand.

  “I—was—in—the—military—in—Vietnam, too,” Junior Cantana panted, gathering up Sharon’s purse and his sketch pad in one motion. “Are you feeling healthy enough to get up and walk over to the police station, or do I have to carry you there?”

  The tormentor hid his face in his hands and sobbed. By that time Sharon had regained her ability to move and was sobbing too.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the gang leader, whose name was Jorge Diaz, had never been to Vietnam. He’d never finished basic training in South Carolina, where he’d first been introduced to pep pills and then graduated to heroin and a dishonorable discharge. According to Edward Pols, the arresting officer at the Coney Island precinct, Jorge was no teenager, either—“just a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old punk.”

  On the other hand, the man who identified himself as Specialist Fourth Class Carlo Gianni Cantana had served for eighteen months in Vietnam before being wounded in the stomach and sent back home. A recuperating soldier on leave—Sharon marveled at the irony of it. Imagine, she thought, as she signed her name under Carlo Gianni Cantana’s in the charge book, me being saved from a junkie by a karate freak fighting a war I don’t believe in.

  It took over half an hour to book Diaz, who sat nodding on a bench throughout the proceedings. Handcuffed and surrounded by policemen, he was no longer menacing but looked pathetic. The sympathetic desk sergeant warned Sharon that a trial would be time consuming but it was the only way to get Jorge Diaz into rehab. Otherwise, he’d no doubt be on the street again the next day snatching some other woman’s purse—or maybe even dead of an overdose on a tenement rooftop in Spanish Harlem. Prodded by generations of Jewish identification with the underdog, Sharon agreed to take the case to court. She would be informed of the date by mail, the desk sergeant said. Edward Pols would accompany her as the arresting officer. Without being asked, Carlo Gianni Cantana volunteered to testify on her behalf.

  TWO

  SHARON SECRETLY HOPED that what she had come to think of as “the boardwalk incident” would magically change her life for the better. But it did not. At home, her run-ins with her mother continued; in fact, they seemed to increase. The tension between them rose to such a pitch one night that Pinnie threatened to take the children away with her to the country for the rest of the summer if Sharon didn’t “stop mooning over that rabbi and start acting like a mother again.” In an attempt to divert her anger from her mother, Sharon went downstairs and got into a foolish argument with the landlady over a leak in the bathtub instead.

  “People who don’t pay their rent on time shouldn’t complain so much about the plumbing!” the landlady shouted from the porch within earshot of the surrounding neighbors.

  Pinnie was furious. “Now everyone on Westminster Road knows that Sharon Berg doesn’t pay the rent on time. That witch! I tell you, Sharon, if you don’t call that pig of an ex-husband of yours and tell him to send the money tonight, I will.”

  Resenting Pinnie’s habit of using Barney and the children as an excuse for probing into her private life, Sharon had long stopped confiding in her. Besides, these days she was working from morning to midnight and she had no time to talk to her mother even if she’d wanted to. The raise Rabbi Joachim had promised her had never come through, but, not wanting him to think she was more interested in money than in being his disciple, she had been too ashamed to remind him of it.

  Except that she no longer went to the beach to sit on her bench and dream, nothing had changed. No matter, her work at the Center now kept her from dreaming at all. Immediately after completing his index of variations on the Holy Name, Rabbi Joachim had plunged into research on a new “secret project.” He was, in fact, so preoccupied with it that Sharon—whose job it was to clear up the odds and ends of the old and prepare the way for the new—hardly found herself at home.

  Even after a year of working so closely with Rabbi Joachim, she could still marvel at the inexhaustible draughts of energy he seemed to draw from some hidden mystical source. No sooner would he complete one enormous task than he was already embarked on another, leaving Sharon struggling not to fall behind. What made it harder was that he never really explained anything. Only once had he stopped in the middle of describing the intricate network of Sephiroth on the mystical Tree of Life to recount his own experience in Jerusalem as an adept of his uncle, a Kabbalah master noted for eating no meat, drinking no wine, and living in hermetic celibacy.

  “It was this holy man, my master, whom I watched as he single-handedly foiled the Arabs during the Six-Day War,” the rabbi recalled. Holding his hands out in front of him in a gesture of benediction, his voice rising slightly, he recreated the event for Sharon.

  “Like this, he stood on a Jerusalem hilltop overlooking the city. The sky was suddenly filled with clouds. Even the birds grew still. All we could hear was the distant rattle of gunfire in the valley below us. Turning his gaze toward heaven, my master suddenly cried out in a voice like thunder: ‘Shema Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad!’ A streak of lightning pierced the sky. The gunfire seemed to draw closer. Suddenly I heard shouting, men’s voices swelling louder and louder, coming closer and closer to the city. I looked at my master’s face. His eyes were closed and his cheeks were bathed in tears. Afraid of what might happen if I addressed him, I crept away softly and made my way back to the three-room schoolhouse where I had lived and studied and prayed under his guidance since the beginning of the war. My body was limp. Sweating and chilled at once, drained of the psychic power he had drawn from me in order to reinforce the spell I stumbled blindly into my hammock and fell into a deep, trancelike sleep. That night I awoke to the mingled sounds of mourning and rejoicing. After centuries, Jerusalem was ours again! The war was over.”

  The Rabbi paused; then, almost in a whisper, he resumed. “But my master was dead. He had given his life in exchange for the life of Israel.” Rolling the sensuous last r across his tongue, the Rabbi fell silent.

  Overcome by love and vicarious religious ecstasy, Sharon choked down a sob.

  As always, af
ter delivering one of his “exempla,” Rabbi Joachim recovered himself by brushing his hand over his silky black goatee and blinking the tears from his eyes. Within seconds, and with seemingly no effort, his voice and appearance returned from the exalted realms to the everyday reality of the Center’s cramped little office.

  The spiritual high and its precipitous drop left Sharon confused. Rabbi Joachim’s uncle’s momentous self-sacrifice contradicted everything he had told her about the Jewish prohibition against martyrdom. Hoping that he would eventually reveal the story’s deeper meaning to her as she matured in her practice of Kabbalah, she refrained from pointing this out. Like the color charts depicting the complexities of the cosmic spheres, this mysterious parable would have to be shelved until she was ready to grasp it. Right now, her task as a devoted disciple was to stay open to Rabbi Joachim’s teaching by following his instructions for clearing her mind and concentrating on the Holy Name. As a woman irrationally in love with a married man, who also happened to be her employer, she was less certain of their relationship. Admittedly, she’d had little interest in religion before attending his lecture that first night. Her grandmother had meticulously observed the ceremonies of the faith—lighting candles every Friday evening at sunset, dropping pennies into the blue-and-white charity box on the refrigerator, taking her to the synagogue on the High Holidays. But her grandmother’s orthodoxy had died with her, and the remainder of Sharon’s adolescence had been loosely governed by Pinnie’s earthy agnosticism. Perhaps the fact that there were no men in her family, since both her grandfathers and her father had died young, had something to do with it—Judaism being such a male-centered religion. Maybe if her father hadn’t left a house full of women adrift, she’d have been less prone to spiritual searching. Perhaps then she would have been contented with the life of an ordinary Jewish woman. It would have been enough for her to have membership in a suburban sisterhood, a prosperous religious book salesman for a husband, a son who did not curse and hit his grandmother when she told him to go to bed—or at least Sharon would have then had the money to pay for psychological counseling. But that wasn’t her fate.