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He stands a long while, listening to the silence within his body that is the absence of Genghis Mao’s outputs, and decides that it is not yet time to return to Ulan Bator. He will go onward. He will complete his tour.
He says, under his breath, too self-conscious to let Meshach Yakov hear it. “Thank you, Lord, for having made this world and for having let me live in it as long as I have.” Better to give thanks than to ask favors. Even so, asking favors is not forbidden. To himself Shadrach adds, “And let me stay in it awhile longer, Lord. And show me how I can help make it more like the place you meant it to be.” The prayer sounds foolish to him, mawkish, ingenuous. And yet not contemptible. And yet not contemptible. If it were given to him to live this one moment over, he would not revise that prayer, although he would not like to admit to anyone, either, that he had uttered it. When they are done at the Wall, Meshach Yakov invites Shadrach to di
Yakov’s apartment itself is small, well kept, furnished sparsely in a tasteful, old-fashioned way. “My sister Rebekah,” he says. “My grandchildren, Joseph, Leah.” He tells them Shadrach’s name, and they all have a hearty laugh over the coincidence, the close biblical association. The sister is in her seventies, Joseph about eighteen, Leah twelve or thirteen. There are black-framed photographs on the wall — Yakov’s wife, Shadrach assumes, and three grown children, probably all victims of the organ-rot. Yakov does not say, Shadrach does not ask.
“Are you Jewish?” Leah demands.
Shadrach smiles, shakes his head.
“There are black Jews,” she says. “I know. There are even Chinese Jews.”
“Genghis Mao is a Jew,” Joseph says, and bursts into wild laughter. But he laughs alone. Meshach Yakov glares at him; Yakov’s sister looks shocked, Leah embarrassed. Shadrach finds himself shaken by the sudden intrusion of that alien name into this serene self-contained household.
Stiffly Yakov says to the boy, “Don’t talk nonsense.”
“I didn’t mean anything,” Joseph protests.
“Then save your breath,” Yakov snaps. To Shadrach he says, “We are not great admirers of the Chairman here. But I would not like to discuss such things. I apologize for the boy’s silliness. ”
“It’s all right,” Shadrach says.
Leah says, “Why do you have a Jewish name?”
“My people often took first names from the Bible,” Shadrach tells her. “My father’s father was a minister, a religious scholar. He suggested it. I have an uncle named Absalom. Had. And cousins named Solomon and Saul.”
“But the last name,” the girl persists. “That’s what I mean. It’s Jewish too. There once was a great rabbi named Mordecai, in Germany, long ago. We heard about him in school. Do black people pick their own last names too?”
“They were given to us, by our owners. My family must once have been owned by someone named Mordecai.”
“Owned?”
“When they were slaves,” Joseph whispers harshly.
“You were slaves too?” the girl says. “I didn’t know. We were slaves in Egypt, you know. Thousands of years ago.”
Shadrach smiles. “We were slaves in America. More recently.”
“And your owner was a Jew? I don’t believe a Jew would own slaves, not ever.”
Shadrach wants to explain that the slavemaster Mordecai, if ever he existed and gave his name to his blacks, was not necessarily Jewish, but might have been, for even Jews were not beyond owning slaves in the days of the plantation; but the discussion is making Meshach Yakov uncomfortable, apparently, and with such abruptness that the children are left gaping he changes the subject, asking his sister whether di
“Fifteen minutes,” she says, heading for the kitchen. As though heeding an unspoken warning to leave the guest in peace, Joseph and Leah withdraw to a couch and begin a stilted, awkward conversation about events in school — a worldwide holiday has been proclaimed, it seems, for the day of Mangu’s funeral, and Joseph, who is at the university, will be deprived of a field trip to the Dead Sea, which a
The advent of di
“Wait,” Shadrach says. “All this in one day?”
“We’ll take two, then,” Meshach says.
“Even so. Can we really cover so much ground so fast?”
“Why not? You look healthy enough. I think you can keep up with me.” And the old man laughs.