"It"s not exactly something he can complain about-after all, they were the ones who took us there...."
I draft an e-mail to the village headman: "Good evening, I am the uncle of Nathaniel Silver, who has told me of his relationship to your village. This July we are celebrating Nathaniel"s 13th birthday, a special occasion in the Jewish faith, marking the transformation from boy to man, and Nathaniel would very much like to have his bar mitzvah in your village. Could you let me know if this might be possible? And also the best route to your village from the East Coast of the United States. Yours sincerely, Harold Silver."
I hear back within minutes. "Fly to Durban and we will arrange car, 12 hour drive, leave time for flat tire. What day you come?"
"My thanks in advance," I write back. "I don"t know what day yet. Meanwhile we have some supplies for the party that we"d like to send to the village. What is the best way to ship them?"
"Send to Durban and my Bro will pick them up."
"Do you have Internet?"
"Of course, that is how we are talking. Do you Skype? We boast to be the only village to have our own satellite-it fell from the sky one night and landed in the hills nearby. We thought it was an earthquake or s.p.a.ce aliens. It gets good reception. Our phones have four bars all the time-very good signal." He pauses; a minute or two pa.s.ses.
"How many people are in the village?" I write.
"We have a school with sixty children and we have another thirty or forty some of whom are old. Come to us. Our children love to party. Can you send money for supplies?"
Is there a polite way to ask, what will we get for the money? "I"ll need you to get receipts-my accountant is very strict about receipts."
"What is an accountant?"
"The man who keeps track of the money," I type. "How much money should I send?" I ask. "Five hundred dollars?" I don"t want to be cheap, but I don"t know what things cost.
"For a full village party?" he writes back. "We may be a poor little village but we are living in twenty-first-century reality." A minute pa.s.ses and then the man writes: "Can I ask a favor? Can you bring ibuprofen? We have some terrible aches."
"Sure," I say.
"Thank you."
"Okay, so let me know your ideas re: the party and how much you think it will cost and we"ll go from there."
"Okay," he types. "I will talk to my Bro and get back to you."
I sign off, surprised that I was only a moment ago conversing with a stranger on the other side of the world-we were going back and forth like you would with someone you"ve known for years. I check to see what the time difference is: seven hours. Wow-it was two in the morning for him.
On Friday night, Ricardo"s aunt"s best friend comes to babysit, and I go out to dinner with Cheryl and her husband, Ed.
Ed is a totally affable, slap-on-the-back kind of a guy. We talk about everything except the fact that I"m sleeping with his wife.
"What line of work are you in?"
"Formerly an academic," I say, "now doing some writing and editing."
"Oh, yeah?" he says. "How does that work? How do you decide what to write about, or what to put in and what to take out?"
I shrug. "You have to get a feel for it. And what about you?"
"Family business-we vulcanize."
"Remind me how that works?"
He digresses into a long speech, combined science lesson/sales pitch.
"Fascinating," I say.
"Don"t humor him, really..." Cheryl says.
"It"s really interesting."
"It"s just what we do," he says. "So are you married? Got kids?"
"Recently divorced," I say. "No kids."
"So how did you two meet?" Ed asks.
I signal for the waitress: "Check, please."
I am working methodically through Sofia"s checklist for the bar mitzvah-and having a hard time locating Ryan Weissman, the young rabbi in training. The phone number on the business card he gave me when he appeared at office hours to discuss "The Jew as Outlaw" is no longer working. Ryan S. Weissman, Herschlag Fellow in Post-Judaic Studies. What are post-Judaic studies? I Google the Herschlag Fellowship. Double click.
Binnie and Stanley Herschlag celebrated their lifelong love of learning with the creation of the Herschlag Fellowship on the occasion of their 50th Wedding Anniversary. They are so proud of their sons, Arthur and Abraham, "twin boys who became rabbis," says Binnie Herschlag. "Who could ask for more?" says Stanley Herschlag. "I could," Binnie says. "And I did." The text is interrupted by a photo of Binnie holding her first grandchild. "Allen Steven Koenig Herschlag. I couldn"t be more proud. Well, I could but..."
I locate Ryan by methodically searching the Web and little postings, like rabbit droppings along the way. His thumbs-up "like" of a site called "Embracing the Gap (Can Jews and Gentiles Really Be Friends?)" is what leads me to him.
"Did you finish your paper on Jews gone criminal?" I ask when I finally make contact by phone.
"I quit," he says.
"What do you mean, you quit?"
"I"m done," he says. "Dropped out of school."
"But you"re from a family of rabbis, you"re not allowed to quit."
"Can you imagine how hard it was?"
"What happened?"
"I got so depressed at how disingenuous people are, how fake leaders are, how full of s.h.i.t everything is. I had a big spiritual and familial crisis and had to ask myself-do I want to be a rabbi?"
In the background there"s a weird snuffling kind of honking sound. "What is that noise?"
"Pigs," he says. "I"m working upstate on an organic farm, and one of my jobs is to tend to the pigs. Isn"t that ironic?"
"I guess."
"They"re very intelligent animals," he says.
I ask for advice on bar-mitzvah essentials, what makes a bar mitzvah legal-are there rules, specific prayers you have to do or say to be sure you"re officially a bar mitzvah?
"What they don"t tell you is that nothing is required," Ryan says. "When you turn thirteen, you are a man-the ceremony is a public gesture. At thirteen you are obligated to observe the Torah"s commandments, to be counted as part of a minyan, and you are liable for your misdoings, you can be punished. Usually the bar-mitzvah boy reads from that week"s portion of the Torah, or he could deliver a paper on a particular topic."
I ask Ryan if he"d consider joining the trip as our official spiritual leader. He loves the idea of bringing Jewish traditions to a remote village, loves what Nate has done, but..."I can"t," he says. "I can"t. I want to but I can"t. The pigs need me, or maybe I need the pigs."
I"m at the office in Manhattan, making small talk with Wanda while waiting for the vault man to pull out the boxes.
"Just a heads-up that I"m going to be taking some time off this summer," I say. "I am taking my family to South Africa."
"Have a good time," she says.
"I"ll be reachable on my cell in an emergency."
Wanda nods. "What kind of an emergency? Like a misplaced comma?"
"I"m just saying. It"ll give Ching time to catch up on the transcriptions and copyediting."
"Okay," Wanda says.
"Any travel tips? Pointers about great places to go, fabulous restaurants?"
"Not a clue," she says.
"But aren"t you the granddaughter of-?"
"The Nixons" old cleaning lady in Washington?" she says, cutting me off. "Marcel tells everyone that my mother worked for Mrs. Nixon."
"That"s weird," I say and go no further. "What"s Marcel"s story?"
"Well, he"s either the illegitimate son of Nelson Mandela who was sent to Harvard to get a divinity degree and flunked out, or he"s a kid from New York City who does stand-up comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade."
"I wonder where the truth lies," I say, knowing I"ve been had.
"It"s an open question," she says.
As the days go by, everything becomes more urgent. I"m juggling pa.s.sports, plane tickets, health forms for camp, iron-on name tags.
Cheryl and I are in the drugstore at the mall, shopping for supplies. "I thought it went well with Ed," she says.
"As well as could be expected," I say.
"What does that mean?"
"I can"t picture the two of you together. What do you talk about?"
"We don"t talk. That"s why I"m here buying hand sanitizer with you," Cheryl says, annoyed.
"Are you mad about something in particular?"
"Sofia has a crush on you," she says.
"All she talks about is you and the bar mitzvah and how wouldn"t it be so fun if she got to go with you and that she can"t believe she"s going to miss it."
"I"m not interested in her," I say. "Maybe she just wants whatever you"re having. Women are like that: when they go to lunch they like to both order the same thing."
"She"s after you," Cheryl says. "Her husband is dumping her for a new kind of trophy wife, a particle physicist who"s a big skier."
"Not going to happen," I swear to Cheryl.
"Because you"re already in a "relationship" with Amanda?"
"Because I"m not interested in Sofia."
"Are you inviting Amanda on the trip?" Cheryl asks.
"I haven"t yet," I say. "Are you asking because you want to go?"
"I"m not going," she says. "It would look weird. What would my kids say if I said I had to go to South Africa for your nephew"s bar mitzvah? They"ve never even met you."
"That"s what I was thinking, but didn"t want to say it. Just so you know, it"s an open invitation for you and your family, husband, kids, whoever...."
"Sounds fun, like an adulterers" Brady bunch," she says.
"And," I say, like a TV game-show host heaping on the prizes, "I really would like to meet your kids sometime-it would make things more real."
"Meet them in what way? Like you come for dinner and I say, "This is the guy Mommy plays with while Daddy"s busy vulcanizing"?"
"Meet them like I"m a friend of yours," I suggest.
"I"ll think on it," she says. "Married women don"t have male friends."
"Times are changing," I say.
I"m loading my basket with travel sizes of toothpaste and shampoo while Cheryl is trying to get me to "do" her in the new grocery section-"grab and go," it"s called. Her idea is that we should have a s.e.xual adventure in every store in the mall. We"ve made our way approximately one-quarter of the way around the horseshoe-shaped structure, but I"m convinced store personnel, security guards, and others recognize us. I"m not sure if it"s because we"re regulars-like the old ladies who come to walk, doing exercise laps-or because they"re trading some kind of hidden-camera videos.
I"m putting disposable toothbrushes in the basket when my cell phone starts to ring. I ignore it. After four rings it stops, and then it rings again. "It"s her," Cheryl says. "Who else calls you twice in a row? You may as well answer it."
"h.e.l.lo," I say.
"I can"t find my father," Amanda says, panicked. "He"s wandered off."
"Where are you?"
"Outside, in some f.u.c.king shopping center," she says, "near the parking area."
"What does your mother say?"
"I sent them into the Dairy Queen while I was taking the sofa cover into the dry cleaner"s-I didn"t want to embarra.s.s them by explaining that there were feces on the sofa...." Despite the fact that I"m not on speakerphone, every word is coming through loud and clear for Cheryl and anyone within ten feet to hear. "My mother told my father that he couldn"t have chopped nuts on his sundae because it"s bad for his diverticulosis, and he stormed out. I"m trying to look for him, but she can"t walk fast enough to keep up."
"Maybe put her in the car while you look, or see if there"s someone who can keep her for a few minutes."