Departures

“Thank you,” he said. That wasn’t nearly strong enough. He went over and hugged her. “Have I told you any time lately I think you’re wonderful?”

“Yes, but I never mind hearing it again. Come on; let’s get this over with.”

Traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway never moved fast. Old gasoline-fueled cars, alcohol-burners, and electrics crawled along together. Kaplan had just about decided to make his next car, somewhere in the indefinite future, an electric. With more and more fusion plants coming on line, they were definitely the coming thing. Smog was down, too; not out, but down.

They drove past billboards in Spanish, English, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi. Every decade, it seemed, some new group of immigrants settled in southern California in droves. Kaplan’s neighborhood supermarket stocked nine different chutneys and seventeen curries.

With their superior climate, Westwood and Santa Monica had long dominated the L.A. area, leaving the old downtown to stagnation again after its rebirth in the 1970s. Skyscrapers flung long afternoon shadows across the San Diego Freeway as Kaplan and his wife swung norm.

The parking garage in the building that housed the headquarters of Genetic Enterprises went down eleven levels underground. The elevator’s surge was like a rocket lifting off, but it was not the only reason the rabbi’s stomach had for lurching.

Genetic Enterprises kept its labs elsewhere in the city, where rents were lower. This was where the executives worked. When Kaplan opened the door to the receptionist’s office, a delicious smell rolled over him like a wave. It was not really unfamiliar; one could not live in Los Angeles without coming across it now and then. But it had never had anything to do with him before.

Delahanty came out almost at once to shake his hand. “Good to see you again,” he said, politely adding, ”A pleasure to meet you,” when Kaplan introduced him to Ruth.

“Shall we get on with it?” she said harshly.

“Of course,” Delahanty said. “Thank you for coming, both of you. I understand how difficult this must be for you.”

You don’t begin to, Kaplan thought, but he and his wife followed Delahanty back into his office. On the desk lay a meat-filled platter. “Blade-cut por-uh, chops,” Delahanty said. “Here, let me heat them up for you.” He popped them into a microwave oven, which obviously had been brought in for the occasion.

As the microwave hummed, Kaplan sighed inaudibly to himself. Perhaps even without meaning to, Delahanty had eliminated a possible last-ditch excuse to chicken out-another inappropriate phrase, the rabbi thought ruefully. He might have begged off by saying that the beast now reheating had not been slaughtered by a shokhet-any ritual butcher would have laughed himself silly at the notion of practicing his skill on a pig. But Kaplan did not insist that his beef and mutton come from the shokhet’s knife; he bought them at the supermarket. And so he could not honestly apply a standard to the R strain different from the one by which he judged other acceptable meat.

But he did avoid cuts from the hindquarters of the carcass. The section of meat through which the sciatic nerve passed was not kosher, in memory of the laming blow the angel of the Lord had inflicted on Jacob when they wrestled through the night. Blade-cut chops, though, came from far forward on the beast.

The reverie was done long before the microwave turned itself off. When it chimed, Delahanty took out the platter and produced some plastic cutlery from a desk drawer. “Would you like me to step out for a few minutes?” he asked.

“No, that’s all right,” Kaplan began, but Ruth broke in, “Yes, please.”

“Of course,” Delahanty said quietly, and shut the door behind him as he left.

The fantasy that flitted through Kaplan’s mind this time was frankly paranoid: he wondered if this was all an elaborate practical joke to get him to eat forbidden food.

He and Ruth looked at the gently steaming chops and at each other. Gathering his pride, the rabbi said, “Me first,” and picked up knife and fork. The meat was tougher, grainier than veal, which to his eye it most closely resembled. He speared it with his fork and brought it toward his mouth.

Chapter 92 of the Shidkhan Arukh dealt with laws concerning one dangerously ill and one forced to transgress a precept. Karo wrote, “If one who is dangerously ill requires meat, and only forbidden meat is obtainable, an animal should be slaughtered for his sake in order not to feed him with forbidden meat, as it is apprehended lest he will become aware of having been fed on forbidden meat and he will become nauseated thereby.”

Kaplan had come across that passage before. Now he had no doubt it described something real. When a couple of hours of theoretical knowledge came up against forty years of ingrained practice, distress was inevitable.

He clamped his jaw shut to hold down his gorge, then realized he could not eat that way. He took a deep breath, chewed, swallowed, then set his jaw again.

“Well?” Ruth demanded. “How is it?”

He laughed shakily. “You know, it’s just like the time I ate bacon and eggs when I was a kid. I have no idea what it tasted like.”

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” Ruth cut a large piece and chewed with deliberation. “Not bad,” she said reflectively. “Nothing to write home about, but not bad.”

The second bite, Kaplan found, came much easier than the first. This time he too, was able to consider the flavor of the- of the R strain, he told himself firmly. “Different,” he agreed.

They ate a chop apiece, not with any great speed or relish, but steadily. Looking at the meat still on the platter, Kaplan asked, “Still hungry?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I. Even honestly believing that was acceptable food, it was harder than I ever thought it would be.” Ruth nodded. “You did very well.”

“Thanks. So did you, and thanks for that, too.” He hugged her again. “Shall we give Delahanty his office back and show him the dreadful deed is done?”

“Just a second.” She took a tissue from her pocket and brushed at his beard. “Now.”

“Okay.”

Not surprisingly, the head of Genetic Enterprises had been hovering just outside in the hallway. He hurried in, saw the bones on the platter. “Rabbi, Mrs. Kaplan, thank you very much,” he said, shaking hands with them both.

“It’s all right,” Kaplan said. “You’ve given me one of the more, ah, interesting afternoons of my life, that I can tell you.”

“I really didn’t mean to pressure you,” Delahanty said. But, like any scientist, he was curious by nature and could not help asking. “How did you like it?”

“We got through it,” Kaplan said.

Later, driving home, he wondered if he had been short with the man. Then he thought of twenty-five hundred years of history, of conquest and captivity under Babylon; persecution by the Greeks; savage and futile war against Rome; European ghettos and Christian mobs; Dreyfus; the Holocaust, still too appalling for any sane mind to take in; round after round of war in the Middle East, and no end in sight. No end to Jews in sight either, though.

Without much thought, he had managed to sum up the history of a people in four words. That wasn’t bad.

He changed lanes.