Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Are you the one they throw stones at?” she asked innocently as she watched him work.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Menahem. My father’s building the synagogue.”

“The big man?” she asked, hunching herself over to imitate Yohanan’s bearlike walk.

“He would be angry if he saw you making fun of him,” Menahem said with the sensitivity that had been kicked into him by the people of Makor.

She stayed with him, chatting inquisitively, and during the time required for the four extra sacks she watched his motions. “Father turns the stone the other way,” she advised him. “Father holds the sack with his knees.” Finally, when the four bags stood ready for the Greek merchant, she perched on top of them, directing Menahem how to clean up.

His work on this emergency job was so much appreciated by the rabbi’s wife that she kept him on, and in time he replaced one of the men who had proved to be both lazy and intractable. With Menahem’s sober, self-directed energy the mill turned out almost as much cereal as it had under the guidance of Rabbi Asher, and once or twice the perceptive youth caught a glimpse of the future: he would become the foreman at the groats mill and then the contempt that the boys in the streets held for him would vanish. Accompanying this hopeful vision was Jael’s presence, day after day; when he went for walks among the olive trees she tagged along, a lovely blue-eyed little girl making impulsive observations.

“Sister said I shouldn’t play with you, since you’re a bastard.”

Menahem did not flush, for the boys of Makor had long since clubbed into him an acceptance of this word. “Tell your mother you’re not playing with me. You’re helping me make groats.”

“At the mill it’s work,” Jael said. “But in the olive trees it’s playing.”

Often she took his hand as they walked under the benevolent trees, some so old and tattered that they must topple in the next wind, others as young and supple as Jael herself. “I like to play with you,” she said one day, “but what is a bastard?”

At twelve Menahem himself was not sure of what the word signified, except that it covered an ugly situation in which he was involved; but at thirteen—that critical age for Jewish boys—he was to discover in full measure the nature of his taint. This was the year of initiation, when he should have entered the synagogue dressed in a new set of clothes, climbed to the rostrum where the Torah was read on Shabbat morning, stood before the sacred scroll and chanted for the first time in public a portion of God’s word. At that moment, in the presence of the men of Makor, he would cease being a child and would state with assurance, “Today I am a man. The things I do from this day on are my responsibility and not my father’s.”

But when the time came for Menahem to take this dramatic leap from boyhood to manhood, thus entering the adult congregation of Israel, Rabbi Asher, God’s Man home from Tverya, had to advise the boy, “You may not enter the congregation of the Lord, neither now nor to the tenth generation.”

Yohanan began to bellow. He would take his son to Rome. He would halt his work on the mosaic pavement. He contrived other threats that merely made him sound noisy, while his doomed son stood aside—a tall, slender young fellow of thirteen in that agonizing age when the passage of a bird’s feather across the hand can cut like a sharpened knife. For three days he listened to his father and Rabbi Asher brawling, and he heard for the first time in brutal clarity the details of his birth. At last he knew what bastardy was and the terrible exclusion it entailed, not for the author of the sin but for the recipient.

Other boys his age, against whom he had protected himself in the streets, put on their new clothes and made their appearances before the congregation, standing uneasily at attention as Rabbi Asher instructed them in the ways of God. Abraham, the son of Hababli the dyer, a clod of a boy who would never acquire any appreciation of Judaism, to whom the presence of God would never be a reality, stumbled his way through a section of the Torah and proclaimed that he was now a man, and this oaf was accepted into the congregation, but Menahem was not, nor would he ever be.

In despair he fled Makor and for two days no one could find him. Rabbi Asher, sensing the heavy blow that had fallen upon him, was afraid that he might have destroyed himself, as bastards in Palestine sometimes did, but Jael, knowing Menahem’s habits, went into the olive grove and found him sleeping in the hollow core of a patriarchal tree beneath which they had once played. Taking his hand she led him back to her father, who said to the outcast, “You are more of a man than the others, Menahem. On you falls the weight of the law, and the manner in which you accept that burden will determine your dignity on earth and your joy hereafter. My wife says that your work at the groats mill is exceptional. You shall have that job as long as you live, and may God grant repose to your stormy heart.”

“The synagogue?” the boy asked.

“That is forbidden,” the rabbi said, and the sternness of this verdict was so dire, delivered thus to a child of thirteen, that the bearded man wept and took Menahem in his arms, consoling him: “You shall live as the child of God … as the man of God. The sages have said, ‘The way of a bastard is cruel.’” He wanted to say more, but his voice broke with passion, and the two parted.

So his thirteenth year brought to Menahem confusion but also an understanding that many adult men never acquire. At the groats mill he worked intelligently, calculating what must be done to protect the trade, and establishing himself as the practical foreman of the place. It was not unusual that he, an outcast, should be working for the rabbi who had proscribed him; at the dyeing vats Abraham’s father used slaves who were not Jewish, and other Jews hired pagans who still worshiped Baal and Jupiter on the high places back of town. Menahem was happy to have work, and Rabbi Asher was pleased to have at last someone in charge whom he could trust to maintain his high standard.

At the same time the boy’s father had reached the stage in building the synagogue when he must begin laying the mosaic floor, and bitter though he was at the treatment accorded his son, he felt inspired to proceed with this work, so whenever Menahem was not busy at the rabbi’s mill he helped at the rabbi’s synagogue. In these contradictions a youth entirely outside the congregation found both his work and recreation inside Judaism, and in this ambivalent condition his thirteenth year was passed.

Construction of the mosaic had proceeded only a little way when Yohanan found it necessary to consult with Rabbi Asher, but the bearded expositor had returned to the grape arbor of Tverya, so the stonecutter and his son set out through the forest for Menahem’s first trip to the Sea of Galilee; and as they reached Sephet they climbed a steep hill and the boy saw for the first time that radiant body of water and the marble city of Tverya, and they stopped as if the great hand of beauty had halted them: mountains held the lake in a purple embrace; brown fields were as soft as the feathers of birds; gray haze rose from the Jordan; and flowers shone like flickering stars within the meadows. As the stonecutter, in appearance so unlike an artist, looked down at the shimmering lake, he finally visualized the design for his mosaic: mountains, lake, olive trees and birds fell into place and he experienced that consuming urge to create which takes precedence over all other compulsions. So far as Yohanan was concerned, the pavement was complete; now all he must do was spend five years in executing it.

When he entered the gracious, decaying city and led Menahem along the waterfront, he was half pleased, half irritated to notice that many girls lounging near the fishing boats turned to stare at the handsome youth, and he regretted that he had not followed his earlier instinct and taken the boy to a new life in a new land, but building the synagogue had held him captive and his conflicting obligations were tangled in his mind. Finally he found the mud-walled house where the expositors were meeting, and there he sent a messenger to advise Rabbi Asher that visitors had arrived. After an hour the little rabbi appeared, his eyes sad because of some wish of God that he had been unable to explain to his colleagues, but when he saw Menahem standing gravely in the sunlight he was reminded of the boy’s honorable acceptance of his burden, and admiration for the youth cleansed his mind of the sorrow it had been harboring.