Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

When Cass pulled up, he was surprised to see Azarya sitting on the steps with a suitcase next to him. It had to be Azarya, even though Cass would not have recognized him, because what other Hasid would be sitting on his front steps? Azarya stood as Cass got out of the car, and smiled, coming down the stairs to meet him at the front gate.

Azarya probably wouldn’t grow to be a tall man, though who knew? At sixteen, he could still shoot up. Cass had been one of the smaller kids in his class until around Azarya’s age, though he’d had unusually big hands and feet, and his mother had predicted he would grow into them. Azarya was reaching out to shake his hand, and Cass’s big mitt enfolded it completely.

“Azarya! At long last! But what are you doing out here? It’s cold!”

It was mid-March and still wintry, especially at this hour, the sun having disappeared over the horizon.

“I was waiting for you.”

“But why out here?”

Azarya smiled with a shrug.

Cass suddenly recalled the complicated Jewish laws about a man being alone with a woman who was not his wife. How stupid of him to have forgotten! Of course, he wasn’t sure what he could have done about it anyway. He couldn’t very well have ordered Pascale not to be in her own house when Azarya arrived, while leaving the key with a neighbor.

“Come on in. Let’s warm you up.”

But when Cass got inside the house, it was dark and empty.

“Where’s Pascale?” he asked Azarya.

Again Azarya smiled and shrugged.

“You were sitting out there because there was nobody home?”

“I didn’t sit here the whole time. I walked around. I saw Harvard. I walked to MIT. It was good.”

“What did you do with your suitcase?”

“I carried it.”

Cass smiled, a bit confused. Should he start worrying about Pascale? They had only the one car, so she couldn’t have gotten into an accident, but she could have been hit crossing a street, or been a hostage in a bank robbery, tied up in the vault, her small hands helplessly trussed. Before he could get going, he heard the key in the door, and Pascale was running up the front stairs as swift and light as a child, wiggling out of her black sheepskin coat, and hanging it in the hall closet.

She came into the living room and stopped short, looking from her husband to the strange young man standing next to him. She had seen pictures of people who looked like this, but she was shocked to see one in her own house.

“Pascale,” Cass said. “This is Azarya. Azarya, Pascale.”

Fortunately, Pascale was not in the habit of extending her hand at introductions. Cass didn’t know how Azarya would have handled that. He was, of course, not allowed to touch a woman.

Pascale stared. She was dressed in her usual narrow black slacks that hugged her round little derrière, and had on a fuzzy sweater, vividly rose. Her white skin had a faint wash of color from the cold outside, and there was the slash of red over her mouth.

“Here, Azarya. Let me take your coat,” Cass said to break the silence.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll keep it on.”

“But you’re staying here. Make yourself at home!”

Azarya smiled.

“It’s so kind of you both. I hope I’m not putting you out.”

“Are you kidding? This is great! Pascale, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just show Azarya his room and let him get settled. Then I’ll start dinner. Azarya, don’t worry about food. I went to Brookline yesterday and bought everything from a takeout place that’s strictly kosher. I have paper plates, plastic utensils, everything. I got the strictest instructions from my mother, and I followed them to the letter. She even called Cousin Shaindy to make sure that the takeout place met the Valdener standards, but I bought a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables in case you don’t feel completely comfortable, not knowing the place for yourself.”

“Ah, so that is what that food is!” Pascale murmured.

Azarya smiled at her voice. She did have a charming voice, thickly accented, smoky soft.

“Yes. And I threw out all the food that wasn’t kosher, so you don’t have to worry about contamination.”

Azarya laughed, turning red as he did so.

“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. It’s enough that you let me sleep here.”

“Would our food really contaminate his?” Pascale asked. “This I do not understand. How would the contaminants be transmitted? Like spores in the air?”

“No, I was exaggerating. I just didn’t want anything to get mixed up.”

“It is strange,” Pascale softly observed.

Azarya laughed again, and again you could see the flush creeping along his translucent cheeks. He didn’t look as if he had started shaving. No, of course he hadn’t, or he would have a beard.

His hair had darkened since he was a little boy, at least judging by his payess . They were no longer the color of flax, but of baked whole wheat.

“You sure you don’t want to give me your coat?”

“It’s okay.”

It occurred to Cass that Azarya just wanted to warm up first. He’d probably been freezing, sitting on the porch waiting for them.

“Come, you’ll be staying here on this floor.”

Cass led him into the bedroom that was off the living room.

“It’s private here. There’s your bathroom. Pascale and I are upstairs.”

“It’s good. Much more space than I have in my own home, with all the sisters.”

“How many is it now? Oh, I’m sorry! I’d forgotten.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I have eleven sisters. But the five oldest are already married and have children of their own-so far all of them girls, eight of them!”

“So you’re still the only boy. What are the odds of that?”

“One in 524,288.”

Cass smiled.

“And you still have a prime number of sisters. And your nieces are a perfect cube.”

“You remember that. Amazing.”

“It’s more amazing that you remember. You were only a small boy.”

“But for me, it was a big event. To meet you and Professor Klapper and Miss Margolis. To learn that there were names for things like prime numbers. To learn that I lived in a place called the United States of America.”

“I remember. She drew you a map. Did you really teach yourself to read from that map?”

“It wasn’t so hard. She’d said all the names as she wrote them down, and I remembered them. And I already knew how to read Hebrew and Yiddish and Aramaic, so I had the idea that letters could represent sounds.”

Cass smiled at him. Now that he was looking more closely at Azarya’s face, he could see that the child he remembered was preserved there. The expression was eerily similar, and the wide-spaced eyes, a deep blue almost verging on violet. His features were still delicate, though his face had become thinner, the petal-shape curve of his cheek elongated and flattened. He still looked young enough so that the term that came to mind was “beautiful” rather than “handsome.”

“Come, let’s give you something to eat.”

Azarya took off his coat and hung it in the closet.

“Warmed up now?” Cass asked, and of course Azarya only laughed in response, since to do anything else would be to admit he’d been cold in the first place, which would be to imply that his host and hostess had been remiss in leaving him to fend for himself for four and a half hours. Cass was beginning to catch on.

Azarya took off his felt hat. Under it he had a black velvet skullcap, which he kept on.

They went to the kitchen, and Cass took out the food he’d gotten from Tirza’s Batampte Kitchen-Tirza’s Tasty Kitchen-and started warming the carrot tzimmes and the mushrooms with barley in the microwave, leaving the food in the sealed containers so that, as Pascale had put it, none of the spores could infect it. There was also a large pickled fish that Cass set out on the table in the aluminum pan it had come in.