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the lenses of his spectacles, “I healed her shame. And I also watch over his son’s footsteps.”
“At a price of one hundred dollars a day times thirty years, cash in advance, Mr. Sommo?”
And so, at last, I managed to ruffle his calm. The Parisian patina shattered and the African fury erupted like pus.
“Mr. Zakheim, with all due respect, you earn for your merry japes more money in half an hour than I have seen for all my labors. Kindly take note, Mr. Zakheim, that I did not ask to receive a penny from Professor Gideon. He was the one who offered. And it was not I who asked for the present meeting with you, sir. You asked to meet me. And now”—the little teacher suddenly got to his feet, and I had a momentary feeling that he was about to pick up a ruler from my desk and rap me over the knuckles; without offering his hand, barely concealing his loathing, he ejaculated—“and now, with your kind permission, I shall put an end to this conversation because of your malicious and indecent insinuations.”
And so I hastened to appease him. I effected what you might call an “ethnic withdrawal.” I put the blame on my impossible Germanic sense of humor. I begged him to be kind enough to ignore my unsuccessful joke and consider my last words as unsaid. And I immediately expressed an interest in the financial contribution he had sought from you toward some zealot monkey business in Hebron. Here he adopted an impassioned didactic air as, still standing on his short legs and with field-marshal-like gestures toward the map of the country on the wall of my office, he favored me with a free (apart from my time, which in any case you pay for on his behalf) mini-sermon on the subject of our right to the land, etc. I shall not weary you with matters we both know ad nauseam. The whole thing was embellished with Biblical quotations and allusions, and simplified, to boot, as though he thought me somewhat slow on the uptake.
I inquired of this miniature Maimonides whether he was aware of the fact that your political views happened to be more or less at the other end of the spectrum, and that all these lunatic schemes for Hebron were diametrically opposed to your publicly stated position.
He retained control of himself this time too. (I tell you, Alex, we shall hear more of this mad mahdi!) He replied patiently, in honeyed tones, that in his humble opinion “Dr. Gideon is currently undergoing, like so many other Jews, an experience of purification leading to intimations of repentance which will soon bring about a general change of heart.”
At this point—I shall not try to conceal it from you, my dear Alex—it was my turn to lose my European patina and to explode at him: What, in heaven’s name, gave him the idea that he knew what went on in your mind? How could he have the nerve, without even having met you, to decide for you—perhaps even for all of us—what is going on or what is going to go on in our hearts, even before we know it ourselves?
“Surely Professor Gideon is attempting even now to expiate the sins that stand between man and man. That is the reason why you invited me here to this meeting in your office, Mr. Zakheim. So why should we not take advantage of the occasion to open up, by means of this donation, a way to expiate the sins that divide man from the Almighty?”
And he was not content to leave until he had taken the trouble to explain to me the inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew word for
blood,
which can also mean
money. Ecce homo.
My dear Alex, I hope that you have been duly infuriated on reading this account. Or, better still, that you had a good laugh and changed your mind about the whole business. That was the reason I took the trouble to reconstruct the whole scenario for you. How does the little preacher put it? “The gates of repentance are never closed.” So repent you at once of your strange idea and send the pair of them to hell.
Unless there is something in that old intuition of mine, which