Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“Sorry for the inelegance.” He laughed.

“It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble. I’ll set the table,” Azarya said.

“It’s only these paper plates and plastic knives and forks.”

“Really, I didn’t expect this, or I wouldn’t have bothered you at all.”

“Nonsense. This is such a pleasure for me! Looking at you, I realize how quickly the years have gone. Here, just put them at these three places.” Cass indicated where they’d be sitting at the huge table, with its six oversize chairs. “When do you see Gabriel Sinai?”

“Tomorrow morning at nine.”

“I can drive you over.”

“Oh no, no need. I know the way. I went by Professor Sinai’s office this afternoon, just so I’d know how to get there. It will take me a half hour at the most, now that I know where it is.”

Cass smiled. He was elated. Azarya had had this effect on him when he was a child, and now Cass hadn’t spent more than ten minutes with him and he was already giddy. Why not? The boy was there intact, you could see the child still lurking in his expression. Only by now, at sixteen, his mind must have traveled infinities. Barry Fine certainly thought so, and, according to Barry, Gabriel Sinai, himself one of the best mathematical minds alive, was willing to go all-out to get the boy to MIT. And if that happened, then of course Azarya should live with Cass and Pascale. He was too young to be in a dormitory, and that world would be too disruptive anyway. How could Azarya go from New Walden to coed dorms and friends with benefits? No, it made sense for Azarya to live here with Cass and Pascale, who were his own family and would ease his transition. Cass was already heady on the fantasy.

Cass ran upstairs to Pascale’s study to bring her down for dinner. She was standing at the window that looked out on the park across the street, and turned around at his footstep.

“Is the Jewish food ready?” she asked.

He laughed. “It’s just regular food, really. You won’t be able to taste the difference.”

“It is very strange to me.”

“It’s pretty strange to me, too.”

“Not in the same way. That much is obvious.”

“How do you mean?”

“The obvious meaning. You are Jewish.”

“But not a practicing Jew. Not a believing Jew.”

“Still, it is very different for me. It makes me see you differently, too.”

“Me?”

“I had never thought about it, that you are Jewish. It made no difference. It was not part of my conception.” She pronounced this as a French word.

“Does it make a difference now?”

“It is just that I am seeing it now. I had not even seen it before, and now I wonder how it is I could not. It is like when I noticed that the Klimt rug in the living room has circles that are ovaries. I had never seen them until I saw them. Now to look at the rug is to see the ovaries.”

Cass felt the elation draining out of him, though it was understandable that Pascale would, at first, think of Azarya as alien, an intergalactic voyager. The whole point of the distinctive hair and clothes was, of course, to keep the Hasidim separate from the outside world. These things were as effective as Cass’s tossing all the unkosher items out of the refrigerator, meant to ensure that no mix-ups occurred. It would be hard for Azarya at MIT if even Pascale was having difficulties seeing past the payess .

They sat down at the table.

“But why do you have the paper and the plastic? Can our plates also infect his food? You did not throw out all our dinnerware, I hope!”

Cass shook his head, the blush on Azarya’s face painful to see. Then, to divert the conversation as quickly as possible, he said to Azarya, “Pas-cale’s father is a mathematician. He’s at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.”

“Oh, in Bures-sur-Yvette!”

“Ah, you know!” Pascale’s tone was instantaneously warmer.

Azarya smiled.

“Is it okay if I ask who your father is?”

“He is Claude Puissant.”

“The Puissant Manifold?”

“Ah! You know this, too!” This time she raised her glass of Carmel kosher wine at him in a toast. Her eyebrows had interlaced over her nose as she’d studied the label, finally shrugging and taking a cautious sip, grimacing slightly before taking another one.

“I assumed the manifold was named ‘Puissant’ because it’s such a powerful tool.” He smiled self-effacingly. “I have a lot to learn.”

“I am also interested in mathematics. Most especially probability theory, which I reject without qualification.”

Azarya’s smile wavered a little uncertainly.

“I will explain. An event that happens happens. Its non-occurrence, therefore, cannot happen. When something happens, its not happening cannot happen. If it is happening, then it is happening one hundred percent, and it is zero percent that it is not happening. Therefore”-she puffed into the second syllable in her distinctive way-“there is only the absolutely impossible, with the probability of zero, and there is the thing that happens with absolute necessity, so that its probability is complete and infinite. C’est tout.”

The blood rushed to Azarya’s cheeks, and he got a look of panic in his eyes.

“Would you like some wine?” Cass asked him, and Azarya, who had declined any wine before, dumbly nodded yes, and then, not bothering to examine the label as Pascale had done-he must simply have trusted Cass to have obtained kosher wine-took a long sip.

Pascale excused herself early from dinner, carrying another glass of the Carmel with her upstairs. Cass poured the rest of the bottle into Azarya’s glass.

“Pascale is a poet,” Cass said.

“A poet,” Azarya said. “I never met a poet before.” He smiled. “She’s how I would have pictured a poet She’s very… poetic.”

“Maybe sometimes a little… imprecise.”

“Poetic license.” Azarya laughed.

Cass wondered whether Azarya realized that Pascale wasn’t Jewish. It was hard to gauge how worldly Azarya was, but for him even to know a phrase like ‘poetic license’ showed that he was reading. He was obviously less of a stickler for the Law than the other Valdeners-at the very least, he didn’t count counting people as a transgression. The question that was quivering on Cass’s lips was what the Valdener Rebbe thought of his son’s venture into the outside world. Was this sojourn to Cambridge an act of rebellion? As if reading the unspoken question, Azarya brought up his father.

“My father sends you his greetings. He says that it’s more than long enough between your last visit and your next.”

“How is he?”

“How is he? I am wondering that myself. The whole time on the bus, walking around Cambridge, even sitting here at dinner with you and Pas-cale, I am asking myself how he is.”

There was quiet in the room. Cass sighed, and Azarya answered him with another sigh, staring down at the tzimmes on his plate.

“I’m thinking about my mother,” Cass said. “I’d never really asked her too much about her leaving New Walden. She just told me recently that it had been hard for her.”

“Your mother is my angel. Remember when Miss Margolis-”

“I think you should call her Roz. If I know her, and I do, she’d be offended to hear you calling her ‘Miss Margolis.’”

Azarya smiled.

“Yes, I like that. Roz had said I was her angel. I thought that was the best joke I had heard in my life. But now that’s how I think of your mother. She’s my angel.”

Cass smiled.

“She’s a wonderful mother to me and Jesse.”

“And a second wonderful mother to me. In many ways, I’m closer to her than to my own mother. Your mother sends me books, journals, tapes of Bach, Mozart.”