Barbra ignored me. The book had an etched drawing on the cover of a morose-looking, bearded, bonnet-headed man: Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah.
‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to read this all in a month,’ I said, pretending to weight-lift with the thing.
Barbra stood up. Her knees cracked. She was wearing a tight linen dress. She headed upstairs, careening, and plunged her hand into exposed fibreglass. I followed the back of her, reading the thousand-page thing:
The only messianic movement to engulf the whole of Jewry – from England to Persia, from Germany to Morocco, from Poland to Yemen – was that aroused by a young kabbalist rabbi from Smyrna, the ‘messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, in 1666.
I remembered it was Joel who told me that Jesus was Jewish. I didn’t believe him, at first. Why would Jesus be Jewish? That had seemed totally ludicrous to me. And Nathan of Gaza – uh, I didn’t think someone named Nathan would be wandering around Gaza. I wanted to tell Barbra all of my jokes. 1666: the year Jewry – Jewry? – was undone!
At the front desk, Jim told Barbra that this book was one of a kind. Then he asked her what she knew about the Zohar.
‘Book of the Hidden influenced every single stage of Sabbatai’s journey,’ Jim said, ‘so you might be kind of lost if you just start with this.’
‘I am not starting anything,’ Barbra said.
Jim looked at me over his glasses, surprised.
‘Barbra’s from Israel,’ I said quickly, handing Jim my mother’s credit card. ‘She probably learned about this stuff in, like, high school – am I right?’
Barbra stared out the greasy glass door of the bookstore. ‘Yeah. What we learn in this life, the dna already knows.’
She walked away from us, holding her arms slightly out. I felt embarrassed. I knew Jim wasn’t trying to challenge Barbra. I knew Jim just loved talking books and making links. I took Barbra’s book from him in a paper bag. Why’d she choose this? This was not literature. Was she trying to impress my father?
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked her outside on the street.
‘Read,’ Barbra said, rolling her eyes at me.
I handed her the book. We walked for a few blocks in silence. I didn’t know what to say because I felt like anything I said then would be wrong. But I wanted to ask her what she was talking about in the store. Did she mean that we’re born with what we know and that’s it? Was she implying she had a God-given superiority?
Barbra popped gum that smelled sickeningly cherry. I felt it spray down on my head.
§
Joel told me they’d nicknamed Barbra ‘the giraffe.’ He wanted his asshole friends from the tennis c
lub to meet her. But it was starting to be impossible to get Barbra to go out. She’d told my mother that she didn’t want to pick up Abigail. She told my father she didn’t want to have dinners with us either. I think the first few nights of her missing were okay, it almost felt like things were back to some kind of normal for my family. But after four nights in a row, I think we all started feeling the same. Rejected, desperate. Abigail said she felt depressed. Every dinner she whined, ‘What is Barbra doing down there?’
It was the end of the third week of July. I knew what Barbra was doing. I didn’t tell my parents. Reading and drinking until she passed out. I felt like it was a secret – just like my awareness that Barbra was not her real name. If I kept her secrets, I thought, I’d get her back to my bed.
I’d learned from the internet that Sabbatai Zevi was from Smyrna, born in 1626. Back then, every Jewish boy studied the Torah all day, instead of going to a regular school. I read that he rebelled as a teenager; he started to display so-called strange behaviour, like kissing the Torah and eating forbidden foods. By the time he was eighteen years old, Sabbatai Zevi was excommunicated from Smyrna. He wandered around Turkey and Italy, got married twice, had both marriages annulled, and then, I don’t know when – Wikipedia didn’t tell me – the mofo began to think of himself as the Messiah. He was wandering around Europe preaching about women and their freedom – a far cry from cheder – and somehow he ended up in Egypt, where he met this guy Nathan, a visionary kid from Jerusalem. Anyway, Nathan and Sabbatai really hit it off. They decided to preach more strange behaviour and keep titillating the ladies. By the time Nathan moved to Gaza to continue his studies and help spread Sabbatai’s liberation message, Sabbatai married his third wife, Sarah, a Polish orphan who’d worked as a prostitute.
Another Jewish Jesus, I deduced, mad into bromance and whores!
I couldn’t wait to talk to Barbra about this.
But, truly, she would not come up from the basement.
My mother kept asking me if I knew what the hell was going on. She said, ‘The girl’s eating baked beans straight out of the can down there.’
My father said he cancelled two Rotary fundraising talks because Barbra told him she wasn’t feeling well.
I thought, botulism and self-sequestering: it’s messianic.
I knew it was kind of my secret job to get her out of this funk. I wanted to creep down and ask her these pertinent questions: What do you like about that rabbi motherfucker? What do you want from your last month in our house? Do you really want a visa? You really want to go to school here? I’ll get you a bottle. Five bottles. What’s your real name? Can we fuck? Can we fuck? Tell me your innermost thoughts, then we fuck? I’ll get you your visa. And then we fuck.
My mental incursions were useless. Barbra would not come up.
But on August first, she sent me a text at four a.m.: Do you believe in a punishing God?