worn face. “Your father was a great man and warrior, a friend of Israel and of Jews everywhere. The Chofetz Chaim says, ‘The sign of a great man is the closer you get, the greater he seems.’”
These past months, Stone had been as close to his father as he had ever been, physically—tending to him like the good son he would never be, taking him to his appointments, making sure his medication was right—but still he barely knew him. His father had treated him with scorn, as if he were some sort of servant not worthy of conversation. He knew people believed his father to be great, but to him, the Judge was just distant, cruel, and unforgiving.
The old man fished into his jacket pocket and produced a small, battered prayer book. He handed it to Stone. “It is tehillim,” the man said, “as a keepsake.”
“The book of Psalms,” Ehrenkranz said. “It is the duty of the shomer, or watcher, who stays with the body so it is not alone, to recite psalms to comfort the departed. It is a wonderful tradition to know a body is never left alone like a piece of lost luggage at a bus station.”
Stone thanked the old man for the book and approached the grave.
He looked down into the empty hole in the ground. The soil was damp and black like coffee grounds, minuscule roots protruding from the earth here and there, life springing up in the midst of death. So, this is where it all ends; in the dark, in a box, underground. The thought terrified Stone, and he gasped for breath to compensate for the certainty that he, too, would one day arrive at this point. Would his father approve of his neighbors? Would it matter that Mr. So-and-So’s son had married a shiksa, or that Mr. Such-and-Such with the extravagant tombstone had been a social climber in life with no substance to speak of? It didn’t matter now, but at the same time, it did. It was a pleasant spot, however, open to plenty of sunlight, with tall shade trees standing nearby.
Someone behind him clapped a hand down onto his head. For a moment, Stone was afraid he was going to fall into the grave, but he held his balance and turned to see a bearded man in a black hat and long gabardine coat, his deep-set eyes sepulchral, empty.
“You must cover your head.”
Stone realized now the man had placed a kippa onto his head, one of those satiny vinyl jobs old men tended to wear, propped high on the crowns of their heads like tents.
He didn’t want to, but this was no place to make a scene. The man, perhaps sensing Stone’s reticence, grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “You will wear the yarmulke and honor your father.”
He would honor his father whichever way he chose, and thought for a moment of tearing the thing off his head, but when he saw Pinky pulling faces behind the man, with his own kippa clipped to his gelled hair, he realized this was not a fight he needed to have. He placed the kippa back onto his head, looked the man in his empty eyes, and said, “Satisfied?”
“You are in mourning?”
“My father is dead,” Stone said.
“Then you will rend your garment as an expression of your grief for the loss of a loved one.” Before Stone had the chance to consider the man’s words and what they meant, the man had torn the pocket off Stone’s jacket with a swift yank, so the fabric flapped down below his heart. “Now, you are among the mourners of Zion,” the man said, stalking off into the crowd.
Stone was among no one. This was his only suit, and the man had ripped it with such arrogance and entitlement because of some meaningless tradition that did nothing to comfort Stone. Who were these people? And how could his father have tolerated them? Stone was not part of this world, and for that he was glad.
Stone scanned the crowd to distract himself from the unpleasantness at hand. He began to count in his head, by fives, how many people were in attendance. He doubted he knew half a dozen people who would care enough to pay their respects to him if it were all over now. The thought depressed him, and an immense empty space opened up around him. Somehow, in the blazing spotlight of the sun, he shivered in his suit. He had reached a hundred and fifty when he saw, standing on a small grassy hill beyond the last ragged group of mourners, a slim dark-haired man, face pressed to a camera, its enormous telephoto lens a giant eye out for a day at the circus. Why couldn’t the media just leave this one alone? His father was dead, nothing mattered anymore. The story was over, the funeral a final parenthesis on a complicated life that had ended too soon. He imagined the photograph the next day in one of the local tabloids, the ghoulish headline punning on their family name for the final time. But something caught Stone’s attention: the way the man tilted his head from side to side, as if trying to work out a crick from having slept badly. Among all the black-clad mourners chatting in a noisy mélange of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, this man was different.
Stone failed to notice the casket arrive at the graveside. A rabbi was reciting prayers. The prayers meant nothing, repeated by rote in an ancient language that had no relevance at all to Stone. As the casket descended into the ground, he imagined his father wrapped in the white shroud and prayer shawl the Judge had told him he had received at his bar mitzvah over fifty years ago.
Stone had been so ill at ease at the funeral home that when Ehrenkranz asked him whether he had his father’s prayer shawl with him, he had taken the opportunity to leave at once to go find it. He had left his father’s apartment only a few hours earlier, but when he arrived he saw the lock had been jimmied and the door left ajar. Stone felt as if he had been dipped into a pool of freezing water as he called out, “Hello!” He heard no answer and entered the apartment, half expecting to see his father still in bed, reading. He called out again, heard nothing, and now, filled more with anger than with fear—who the hell would rob a dead man?—he slammed the door behind him and pulled the deadbolt.
The apartment was trashed. His father’s precious books, yanked from the shelves, lay scattered around the floor; his drawers were overturned; keepsakes and tchotchkes lay smashed on the ground. A panicked fist of anxiety gripped his throat and he fought to gain his breath. Something told him not to call the police, not to report the break-in. He was alone, had never been so alone before. But, gathering one of his father’s books from the floor, a yellowed paperback copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Stone realized no, he wasn’t entirely alone. He discovered, as he flipped through the pages, that his father had underlined pertinent passages and made marginal notes throughout the book. He paused for a moment at a passage his father must have marked years ago with a graphite pencil: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl had survived the Nazi death camps but had lost his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife and had the strength to write those words. Stone was barely a quarter-century old and had suffered no such tragedies. And yet he was overcome by such loss and emptiness. In a blind fever he began to gather the books and stack them up in towering piles, nearly as tall as himself. The Judge collected rare books, from “In the beginning . . .” and his eighteenth-century reprint of the Gutenberg Bible through to the Spanish Inquisition and the Jewish mystics, from biographies of the American presidents to the voluminous writings of Churchill and Freud, to Carl von Clausewitz and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Each one was underlined, marked, or annotated to some degree, and, in this way, his father was still alive. The impenetrable mystery of his father lay in those books. The Judge was speaking to Stone, guiding him, as he discovered in book after book, in sentences as bright as gems meant to show him how to navigate his path forward. Stone continued stacking thirteen volumes of Rashi’s Torah commentary, smelled the pages and ran his fingers over the Hebrew words his father had read. More religious books: the Tanach, bound in green leather; the Gemarah; and the Shulchan Aruch, Joseph Caro’s code of Jewish law. The religious books were unmarked, but the soft pages had been read again
