The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [21]
Burke started shouting, the higher registers of his voice distorting the speaker.
“We can take this blame as a curse, and rage against it, crying out about unfairness. How can my child be blamed for anyone’s sorrow? My child is innocent! Innocent! Or we can receive this blame as a gift to us, which is what it is. So much of what we must do today is sculpt our understanding to accommodate what we cannot bear. Now we must help people who do not understand, even if we are lost ourselves. This is our role. And we do this by stepping forward, saying, I, it was I who did this. I did this to you. Not my child. I did it.”
Claire sounded like she’d been struck in the chest.
“Understanding itself is beside the point,” Burke said, more calmly. “Do not make of it a fetish, for it pays back nothing. That habit must be broken. Understanding puts us to sleep. The dark and undesired sleep. Questions like these are not meant to be resolved. We must never believe we know our roles. We must always wonder what the moment calls for.”
Rabbi Burke did not officially exist in public. There was no such person. Our system of worship was likewise kept secret, which means that our practice at the hut suffered its share of misinformation and rumor. The more we concealed it, the more it troubled people, so they invented actions for us, ascribed false powers to the radio. It was guessed to be a hole in some secret location that speaks only to Jews. From the hole came bits of data: sound, word, and pulse, that Jews alone could decode, using their oily gear, their hacked electronics.
We endured lurid speculation on what we might be doing in the woods. We were called forest Jews and in newspapers cartoons depicted what awful work we’d undertaken. The Jew, in these images, sits on a jet of steam that charges him with special knowledge. God’s air, heated to a vapor, is blown over the mystic. The Jew fits his sticky red mouth over the nozzle and sucks. Into a vein in the Jew’s leg comes the cold, clear liquid.
And then the speculation on the dark electronics of such messaging, how a system like this could even work. A radio console with a flesh underside is postulated. Modules sheathed in gauze, lubricants siphoned from children, injected to flow through custom gears.
In our defense spoke only those who said we did not exist. We’d been invented by our enemies to give them something to tear apart with their teeth. How convenient, a Jew with important secrets. How self-serving to you, they said. These were our defenders, but to them we were a fiction. It was not clear that we owed them gratitude.
The Jewish person who has not received an assignment at a hole, and the Gentile who has only heard rumors about the gear that governs the hole’s ritual, have missed the elemental purpose of these transmission sites: the Jewish transaction is a necessarily private one. I am thinking of people like Murphy who would plunge his fists into it, believing he could extract some perfect remedy for the speech fever.
The topic was a common one in the broadcasts. Burke returned to it often. What others, with no information, might make of us.
Let such errors stand, he always said. Their mistakes put good miles between us. There is no better blessing for us than to be unknown.
If a knowledge is to be made public, went the saying, it should erect a shell around our secret. Such is true of the Torah, the Talmud, the Halakha we appear to follow. When we communicate, we do so to throw them off our scent.
Claire and I had done our part. Said nothing. Never indicated for a moment that we were members of this faith.
“To be a Jew is to let them be wrong about you,” said Burke today. “If we cannot allow this, then nothing is possible.”
He always lowered his voice when he was nearly finished, an emphatic whisper he used to hammer home his final point.
“There is nothing like being profoundly misunderstood. Let others expose their secrets, advertise their identities, neutralize their mysteries with imprecise language. A Jew must project behavior distant from his aim, must cast