Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

K had seen too much of this sort of thing to be disenchanted.

He sang lustily:

(K had Purcell very much on his mind, though his thoughts had been running chiefly in the direction of The Fairy Queen ; he was to be married in the fall. He had a pronounced aversion to the Wedding March from Lohengrin as nuptial accompaniment.)

The regular association of ideas naturally led K at this point to walk down to Blockbuster to borrow the DVD of Kiss Me Deadly . Only to find — O tempora, o mores! — that his trusty Blockbuster was no more. (It had been one of the good ones.) Enquiries at his hotel elicited the suggestion that he watch the thing on his laptop by streaming it off Amazon. Pfui!

Gerald discovered, somewhat late in the day, that this would have been the most terrific coup . He had once read a novel by Iris Murdoch and had not enjoyed it; for the most part the word ‘contemporary’ sufficed to put him off a work of fiction. He had never heard of K. He happened to mention the incident in a moment of fretfulness to one of the younger Canons and was told that K was in the running for a Nobel Prize. Oh my ears and whiskers! The man’s name, mercifully, had never happened to come up in water-testings with the Bishop.

K had gone back to England for a few months to do research and organise documentation for his wedding.

K, as he had often expatiated, had nothing against marriage provided it was sufficiently ritualised. It seemed a modest requirement, but when he did in fact engage to marry people kept trying to clutter up the ritual with effusions of sincerity. K simply wanted the Hebrew text in the programme and if people wanted to feel something that was entirely their own affair. (K’s views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier, in which the Aramaic text is conspicuous by its absence, may readily be imagined.) He had thought that in New York, of all places, this would be simple enough to arrange, but as it turned out none of the printers they approached had anything remotely suitable. He was left to try to drum up something passable in Golders Green. A strategic sortie to Glyndebourne, where they were putting on a delectable Rosenkavalier , palliated the anguish. (Printers! Gaaaa!)

K returned to New York at the end of the summer and was chagrined to discover that Der Freischütz was on at the Met on Erev Yom Kippur. Damn and Blast! He worked out that he could snatch a last meal, just, before the curtain went up and begin his fast during the first act.

An excellent plan in its way, it meant that he was hors de combat when social arrangements were made during a longueur in Kol Nidrei. K’s fiancée, Rachael, invited a friend to join them in breaking their fast.

(Thanks to the mixed seating so popular in America, K could easily have put the kaboosh on the plan had he not succumbed to the superior charms of Der Freischütz. )

The meal could be said to have had its uses. There’s something to be said for allowing a fiancée to learn, early in the relationship, the sort of occasion one goes out of one’s way to avoid.

The friend, Eloise, had started life as a Presbyterian. She had converted in England; she had undergone ritual immersion at Henley, where it had been necessary to dodge rowers warming up for the regatta. She had in fact broken up with the boyfriend for whose sake, or rather, for whose mother’s sake, the conversion had been embarked upon, but Simon had said it would be rude to the rabbi to drop out. Permission to work in the UK, which would have accompanied marriage to Simon, was now out of reach, so she had returned without enthusiasm to New York. She had attended services on Yom Kippur because it seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi not to bother. It had seemed obscurely rude to the rabbi to skimp. Hence Kol Nidrei. (All this, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)

The girl’s Hebrew was not at all good. (Her personal best for the Amidah was a shamemaking 25 minutes.) With the result, unsurprisingly, that she had whiled away the forcefasted hours reading the English pages facing the impenetrable Hebrew of her shabby Machzor.

720 pages into Birnbaum the child had come upon Isaiah 57:14–58:14. (Quotation from which cannot help but seem long to the sort of person for whom an hour is a reasonable length for a service. What is to be done? Pah!)

There is no peace for the wicked, says my God.

Cry out, spare not, raise your voice like a trumpet;

Tell my people their guilt, tell Jacob’s house their sins,

Daily indeed they seek me, desiring to know my ways;

As an upright nation that has not forsaken the laws of its God,

They keep asking me about righteous ordinances;

[footnote from Birnbaum: ולס ולס, the prophetic portion recited as the haftarah , refers to the fasts. The people have complained that their fasts have produced no change in their material welfare. The prophet replies that their fasting was a hollow pretence. [!!!] Instead of giving their workmen a holiday, they worked them all the harder. If they would but feed the hungry and nurture the destitute, God would lift them out of their miserable conditions. [!!!!!!!!]]

They seemingly delight to draw near to God.

‘Why seest thou not,’ they ask, ‘when we fast?’

‘Why heedest thou not when we afflict ourselves?’

Behold, on your fast day you find business,

And you drive on all who toil for you.

Your fasting is amidst contention and strife,

While you are striking with a godless fist;

You do not fast today to make your voice heard on high.

Can such be my chosen fast, the day of man’s self-denial? [!!!!!]

To bow down his head like a bulrush, to sit in sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call fasting, a day acceptable to the Lord?

Behold, this is the fast that I esteem precious:

Loosen the chains of wickedness, undo the bonds of oppression,

Let the crushed go free, break all yokes of tyranny!

Share your food with the hungry, take the poor to your home, [!!!!!!!]

Clothe the naked when you see them, never turn from your fellow,

Then shall your light dawn, your healing shall come soon;

Your triumph shall go before you, the Lord’s glory backing you.

[footnote from Birnbaum: …פתח חרצבו that is, God favors the fast that includes ת the self-denial shown in the exercise of justice and kindness; for example, setting the people free and distributing food and clothing. [!!!!!]]

The synagogue was very full, for it was a day of competitive fasting. The girl thought: But perhaps at this very moment there are Jews manning soup kitchens, having taken this passage of Isaiah to heart… So they would naturally not be in synagogue. Perhaps the sort of person who goes to synagogue fasting is not the sort of person who would take Isaiah to heart. So perhaps it was not odd that EVERYONE did not stand up and walk out and give a homeless person a place to stay. But was it not odd that not one person did so? (This too, naturally, part of what passed for conversation at dinner.)

Ah, said K, but you’re taking it out of context. The interpretation of the text is determined by the oral tradition. You can’t cherrypick. If you’re going to reject the oral tradition, it’s not clear what you’re doing there in the first place. Why are you willing to accord special status to this text on the basis of its presence on an occasion whose importance is determined by tradition?