Judaic Studies

I had been sitting in Café Schwarzenberg on the Karntner Ring long enough for my clothes to go out of style, lured there from the pension I occupied in the shadow of the twin towers of the Votivkirche by a woman who claimed to have been one of my students back in the States.   In a Viennese coffee house, you can linger over a coffee as long as you like and as long as you don’t use a finger to stir in your zucre. Thus I lingered. It was May and the sun was out.  It was spring but this news hadn’t reached the weather, so I was fucking cold. Stay in the sun. That was my only hope: I was dressed (I conceived that I needed a touch of formality in formal Vienna) in linen slacks, a sleeveless alligator shirt, and a gossamer sports jacket, also linen. So I kept inching my table along its path as afternoon made its way toward the somber hour. A red and white streetcar chugged by. Someone two tables away complained to a black-jacketed waiter that the sun was too much for him . He wanted the awning lowered. I coughed, and when the waiter looked I frowned and made a gesture that money would be forthcoming. The awning stayed up.

“I don’t remember the course I took with you, Professor,” Ms. Ellenbogen had said on the telephone.

“How’d you find me in Vienna?”

“The project I need help with—“

“Did you say how you tracked me down? “

“It’s not important. Not a mystery—“

“So what IS important?”

“I’m not some flibberty-gibbet. This is serious.I’m a Yale Ph.D.[Pause] And I teach Judaic studies at Muhlenberg.”

“Muhlenberg?”

“In Pennsylvania. Deep in Pennsylvania…”

“Forgive me: are there Jews in Deep Pennsylvania?”

We’d arranged to meet here  at 2:30, and it was a quarter after 3, and while I waited I’d been reading a Tagblatt to try to awaken my dead German.  Masha  (not MaRsha) Ellenbogen had gained a stranglehold on my attention  by demanding—not too strong a word—the collegiality due a colleague and the old-times-sake due a former student.  And I was a leaf in a breeze: what the hell: free time, hiding out in a foreign country, no heavy stones resting on my chest—let’s see what happens.  Besides, tomorrow I’d be at the Wien Westbahnhof climbing aboard the last train to Munich, and from there a sleeper to Paris. From Gare de l’est, I’d walk to Rue du Chateau d’Eau, where I would stay with my French friends, Natalie and Lazare, whose communications to me hinted strongly of an imminent separation.  This had been brewing for a while.  I suspected they were hoping, though they’d be shocked at the idea, that my presence would awaken whatever feelings had once held them together.  Death lurked there. I was some kind of American breeze: a recovering pessimist. Maybe. It was a thought.

And like everybody else with working optic nerves I loved Paris. That’d be tomorrow.  What harm in listening to resourceful Masha today? She had found me here. No mean feat. How’d she do that?

There was a commotion, and I saw her: she’d dropped a shopping bag, kicked it, and in trying to retrieve it had dislodged a fragile sorbet glass from the edge of someone’s table onto a sparkling shattered mess on the ground. The sun sparkled in the shards—a cosmic event. Gathering herself together, one hand clutching the shopper and one an immense leather and string ladies’ catchall, she swung around, hesitated, then spotted me. Breathless, she sat across from me. (I remembered her now: her name was trouble.)She was trouble. I was stung with the idea-from-nowhere: she’s gonna tell me secrets. I don’t wanna know.

“Professor,” she breathed out.

“Call me James—we’re colleagues now.”

A waiter came carrying a passport case that he handed to her.

“My God,” she breathed again, “Thank you.”

“Es ist nichts,” he said, “Fraulein/Miss, you vish to order somesing?”

She ordered Viennese coffee with  extra schlag and brushed her hair aside. Her eyes were dark—almost black—her face diamond-shaped with a tactful dimple, artfully made up, a luxurious head of long hair tending to curl. Her lips were full and—somehow—sweeping: she was very beautiful, in her early thirties. But her forehead wrinkled. She was worried.

I took a long, squinting stare. I shook my head.

“You don’t recognize me—how could you? So many students…”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t have a head for faces, anyway. So. I’m here. You’re here. What’s up or as pharaoh said to Avram, mo-zat?

She took out of her leather thing a manuscript in a binder. “I need help with this—“ I began to shake my head. “—you know the game: I need tenure and a promotion and for that I need a book. I think Cambridge is really interested, and if someone like you could read it and—“

I was the only one like me, I said, and  maybe I wasn’t even that, and belonged to no class of hotshot academic stars, as she seemed to imply. I’d recently published something on Kabbalah and eros. It was scholarly, kind of bland in the end, a lot of reground chopped meat   It got an okay reception. I had found the subject absorbing: A broken world capable of being healed by the coming together of emanations, the last, the female shekhina, uniting with the male Godhead to create a kind of perfection and a fulfillment. Not a permanently fallen world as my Jesuit masters had assured me.

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