Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [70]
A snort! A burst of air distracted me from my wandering thoughts. I looked over at my uncle, his eyes closed, apparently asleep and ready to tilt over in my direction at any moment.
He opened his eyes even as I regarded him, touching a finger to his nose, and closing his eyes again. My uncle at prayer. Massive but quiet, contemplative, near-sleep. Halevi had insisted to me during my instruction with him in our religion that we Jews prayed by saying our prayers, that is, saying the words which in themselves were near-magical. Yet prayers had never caught on for me, for one reason or another, undoubtedly my own lack. My uncle appeared to suffer from the same lack of ties to the traditions of our so-called tribe. He scarcely repeated a word from the service, listing one way or the other as sleep kept him in that perpetual tilt.
What sort of a Jew was he? For that matter, what sort of a Jew was I? Neither of us seemed to have more affiliation with our religion than we did with family, blood relations. Strange it seemed to me that Christians, as much as I knew them, had actual principles and beliefs—the pact each made with their Jesus to accept him as their savior. What did I have? A vague feeling of association with others like me, most of whom seemed familiar in their lack of fervor and their sense of tribal life without necessarily believing in any supernatural being such as God. These Reformed Jews certainly seemed to me to be further along in the dissolution of our religion than most of us who did nothing but pay lip-service at ceremonies such as this only a few times a year.
More noise burst from my uncle’s nose and lips, not a song but the last gasps of a snore.
I took the time to study his face, the way, as Halevi had once explained to me in one of our lessons about art, a sculptor might study a stone. Chip away at the extraneous and you would find my father’s features in my uncle, and then add some slabs of flesh and let thicken, and you would have my uncle. Staring at this relative whom I had only recently discovered, I felt a certain longing for my home and, yes, my father, and my mind ranged toward him, the man who had engendered me.
Behold what my father had accomplished—built a trading house, and constructed the very stone edifice in which I was born, a marble structure on the west side of Fifth Avenue, looking carved and polished where it stood between two larger Protestant brick palaces. A pair of stone lions guarded the entrance. A ten-foot-high wooden door nearly a foot thick provided entry, if you were permitted it. Once admitted, you found yourself in a foyer that led on one side to a large sitting room and on the other to a dining room with a grand twelve-foot ceiling and room enough to feed the crew of a sea-going trading vessel. This would one day become mine.
“Cousin Nate?”
But there I was, dreaming of home when the service ended, and Rebecca, with an inclination of her head, bid me to slip out of the bench and allow her to step into the aisle. I stuffed the pamphlet into my coat pocket and did as I needed to do.
“Come now,” she said, taking me by the arm, and before I could protest she led me up the aisle to the very girl I had been staring at.
Anna?
“Cousin Anna,” she said, “how lovely to see you.”
The girl, standing with two elderly folk I took to be her grandparents, smiled sweetly at Rebecca, and I followed her eyes as she took note of Rebecca’s prominent belly and then raised her gaze to meet my own.
“Good morning,” she said, as though we had met a dozen years before and every now and then made our re-acquaintance.
“Good morning,” I said, wondering if her nerves felt as hot as my own. I was sure I showed red in my face and pretended to be searching for something up in the stained glass of the windows.
“You are both my cousins,” Rebecca said. And then with a laugh, “Though advantageously neither