Amsterdam

by Elissa Barmack

Rabbi Adam sneezed, and tears came to his eyes. He wiped his nose and eyes, and went to wash his hands, then rolled up the scroll of the Torah. He sighed, and phlegm made rattling noises in his chest, but his attention was elsewhere. He was thinking of his father, who had read from this very Torah. May he rest in peace, he thought, and looked out the window, as if Papa might appear before him again. But at the end of the war he, Mama and Esther returned to Amsterdam to start life over without Papa. Adam became a rabbi, as Papa had been, and studying the Torah became his life, his passion.

After some years, the congregation decided to replace the Torah's old cover with a fine gold-embroidered, blue velvet one. But to everyone's surprise, that cover soon became worn. Adam first smiled, congratulating himself that it was from use, but when he looked closely at the parchment he saw speckling and stains, and worse, the letters were fading. Incredibly, the text was disappearing.

Adam turned to paper and parchment restorers. Intimidated, they first hemmed and hawed, but finally said that the Torah was being eroded by the same pestilential air which they breathed every day. Doubtful, he showed the parchment to a chemist. "Pollution," was the brusque reply, and the scientist returned to his spectroscope. Rabbi Adam was facing an emergency. "Put it in an air-tight container!" suggested a plastics manufacturer. "Buy another!" suggested a wealthy, but ignorant friend. Neither he nor the congregation could even consider such a solution. Their Torah, had survived the Shoah. They would keep it, guard it. It would live on.

He bought a case made of synthetic material, grumbling each time he unfastened the clasps and removed the scroll. It was another ritual in his life. Whatever they did, the Torah that he and Papa had read was being slowly dissolved while he lived and breathed, unable to do anything.

Rabbi Adam took two pills from a small bottle in his pocket, and swallowed them without water, ignoring the burning dryness in his throat. His gaze turned again to the window. Outside, the slimy stumps of barren branches reached to the window ledge.

No end to miseries, he thought. Now everybody had a cold. Well, not a cold: pollution, but it came on just as stealthily and developed so innocently. Getting up in the morning meant coughing, spitting and sneezing before prayers or anything else. The body secreted a sticky ooze to protect itself from the gray and yellow air. Rabbi Adam's thoughts wandered: it's the times we live in. He refused to make any judgment, though the word plague came to mind, a plague of dust and waste and acidity. Who needed frogs and locusts and blood?

Years earlier, only the unfortunates living near industrial plants were affected by the chemical waste. Miners suffered from coal dust. A few others died of asbestos in the lungs or from some other invention said to improve life. Back then, it was only certain cities, like that one in California--or was it Ukraine?--that had to be evacuated and closed down. It was a scandal. In Holland, they had been at the forefront, using bicycles rather than fueled vehicles. Now it seemed as though past efforts had not sufficed. The world was one vast industrial zone, overhung with soot and fog. The elderly had to stay indoors, the newborn were sickly, and people out strolling often wore masks. And don't even think about radioactive pollution, he added glumly to himself--invisible filth. He wiped his glasses again.

The scroll of the law had to be saved. Jews could not remain Jews without law--such Jews as were still left--he thought. He didn't forgive those who no longer held themselves to every injunction as he did. Still. Humanity could not be humanity without law. Adam allowed himself a pious regret: there had been no law about this kind of pollution in the Commandments. Yet if there had been. . . would it have helped? He looked upward. A design? An intention? He sighed. In his throat something quivered and tickled. His cough shook him like a train.

The seizure quieted down. He straightened up, red-faced, and repositioned himself on the chair. His elbows on the table, he brought his fingertips together, touching two or three times. This always helped him renew his concentration. But there was a knock at the door.

"You should do something for your throat, Adam. Let me bring you a nice cup of tea with honey and lemon." Ruth had heard his coughing. Tea with honey and lemon--a grandmother's recipe for a child's ailment! How far this was from his terrible preoccupations! "Or a vapor treatment?" she asked, but he frowned. He detested such remedies. Now Ruth had an endless stock of advice on all subjects. When she went back to school he had first feared her studies would exhaust her, but each new course brought on more and more of her ideas and suggestions.

"Mrs. Fix-it," he mumbled. Sociology, o.k. Nursing, alright. Now she had remedies for everything. What next?

"No, no, I'm all right," he answered peevishly. She closed the door quietly, and returned to her books and papers spread over the kitchen table. It was a good thing she was doing, he reflected. The community needed more paramedical personnel. Yet he didn't know why her helpfulness irritated him. Later, he'd apologize. He shifted in his chair and the tips of his fingers came together.

He looked intently, not outside the window, but into the distance of his imagination, and saw Papa. Since the war, he imagined him lined up with others, gaunt-faced, before the gas showers of the camp.

Just after Papa was deported, when the last of the Jewish men were being rounded up, they'd taken the scroll from the synagogue and Adam's mother hid it under a pile of dirty linen in an old basket. The bottom layer of laundry was left unwashed until just before they, too, left. When his mother learned that Jewish women and children were being rounded up, she entrusted the scroll to neighbors, the van Rijns, next door. They had always been kind, decent people. Years later, Adam learned that they had been members of the Dutch resistance. The van Rijns had secretly brought the Torah to their grandmother's home in the country. Oma hid it in a trunk among old lace, table rugs and brass bric-a-brac until the occupation was over. Extraordinary problems called for extraordinary solutions, Adam thought, as he thought of the Torah's strange adventure. And so, what now? But now there he was, the great fool, unable to protect the scroll from plain air. Well, not so plain.

What would Papa say about a problem that was hardly conceivable when he was alive? Papa's answer always seemed to elude him. Adam thought back to when he had buried Mama, ten years ago already, may she rest in peace. He already had a glimpse of the future then.

No more new land was available for cemeteries. Real estate was for the living. Fortunately Mama could still be buried in the last plot belonging to her family. But existing cemeteries were nearly full then. Other people were not so lucky. There were terrible decisions to be made.

Land had become scarce, for the dead as much as for the living. You could take over the grave site of a family member, but you had to prove that it was really your relative who was buried there, and that no one else had a better claim because they were more closely related. After that, you could apply to be buried in the plot if you were not ashamed to disinter a father, a grandmother or an aunt. The remains of the family member would have to be cremated, contrary to tradition, or buried again, in reduced space, "compacted like trash," as Adam had said with contempt. If such a thing were too repugnant, a person had no choice, and could expect to be cremated. His grandson, that little smart aleck Jakob, suggested that coffins be sent up to orbit in outer space. A bitter joke. The child must have heard it somewhere. He was always watching t.v. Such a thought! But where was the reality of things? Reb Adam hardly knew any more.

He shivered. There were already the millions of dead, gassed in the war, their ashes hanging in the air like so many ghosts. Enough of burning, he thought. Too many chimneys. Ashes, ashes, so many ashes.

He was adamant: there was no question of his digging up past generations of his family so he could lie there in their place. It pained him to consider this aspect of the future, let alone that of his and Ruth's six children (praise be to the Almighty). And when he thought of the grandchildren, he wanted to weep. He felt lost and somehow guilty. He searched for a solution, for an idea, for an explanation.

Through the darkening window, he looked out at the low, thick water of the canal. Though it was a late summer afternoon, empty black branches stretched up from trees along the disused waterway, and he looked away.

It had begun with the trains that delivered human beings to poison gas showers and incinerating chimneys. Now there were other machines, more refined, more complex, clicking away, accounting inexorably, taking in the world in statistical bits. Yet all the computers, generators, and miraculous machines could not lift away the ashes that embittered the rain, burnt the leaves and poisoned the fish and livestock, the birds and other creatures of the earth. The Golem, that robot monster, was growing each day. He who had been servant to the rabbi of old was stoking the furnace and couldn't be stopped. He'd gone mad, out of control, and the house was burning.

There was burning somewhere. Adam's eyes smarted. His chest filled with water and phlegm, but not enough to put out the fire. He wanted to escape, too many ashes, but he didn't know how to get out.

He started to rise from his chair. Perhaps if he could see his father again, read, with him the Torah which the Almighty himself had consulted before Creation, he might find. . . Rabbi Adam struggled. He saw the gaunt face of him whose soul he imagined between the heavens and earth, suspended in rings of dust that circled the planet. He saw a splatter of fiery light, then heaved a great roaring sigh. Suddenly he was swallowing the sun.