The Sephardim

The dark, cloud blanketed Parisian night sky threatened more rain, mirroring Philip’s own hovering unsettledness. He walked distracted from the hotel in the Saint Germaine towards the Marais; bare headed, in jeans, a sweater, and a black raincoat. The still wet streets glistened tar black. People concentrated under canvased awnings, the customer crowded restaurants glowed bright as light oases. Several times he stopped, hesitating, all but determined to return to the hotel. But there was something echoing from Rubi’s voice he couldn’t shake, as if she walked doggedly beside him, urging him on. And then there was the sensation rippling through his core. A warning? An invitation? He wasn’t sure, but it was enough to keep him moving forward.

I’m not convinced this is about me, he told himself, silently countering Rubi’s ragged claim. He was headed back to the restaurant. He carried in the complimentary hotel tote a toothbrush and a miniscule tube of toothpaste. He had decided not to bring a razor.

Rafael, young, bearded, wise beyond his years in a grey suit, open-collar shirt and fedora, greeted him at the door.

“Welcome, Monsieur Rose. We were not sure you would come.”

“I wasn’t sure either.”

Better here than not. Philip’s thought struck slack as a stranger.

Rafael said nothing, turned and, like Moses across the parted waters, led Philip back through the heart of the catacomb of a building into a small, windowless room with a stained skylight, a single bed, a desk and a sad chair. A lamp mounted on the wall, weary, cast a velum yellow light. A package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string perched on the bed.

“There are clothes in this package,” Rafael, pointing with his head, explained rotely. “Robes. Please put them on. There is a plastic bag for your things. Your fast has begun. We will bring you herbal tea from time to time. You must drink all the tea. The bathroom is down the hall to the left. The ceremony will begin tomorrow evening. I will escort you. Do you have any questions?”

Questions, Philip thought, his mind at sea? Yes, I have questions. What am I doing here?

Rafael smiled, nodded but said nothing, then turned and walked out, closing the solid door behind him. Philip collapsed onto the chair. He was exhausted. He sat while time squeezed out, his head filled with fragments. When he could no longer bear the stygian stillness, he stood and paced the small room. He opened the bed bound package and examined the robe and the hoary linen garments. He felt like he was at a doctor’s office about to undergo a procedure. The package uttered the silent command to change.

Not now, he thought. He wasn’t ready. So he paced. He looked at his watch. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since coffee and croissants at the hotel that morning. He returned to the bed and sat, his legs dangling thoughtlessly over the edge. He waited. At midnight, Rafael knocked and entered the room with an alabaster cup and a brown-glazed teapot.

“You must drink all of this tea.”

The tea was screaming hot. From its minerally, earthy flavor Philip knew it was herbal, not real tea. He drank the whole pot as instructed. It eased his hunger. He visited the toilet. He returned to the desk. He tried to think through what he was doing, but thought abandoned him. There was only the rising current of chaos and confusion. So he stopped trying to think.

At around four in the morning, mostly with a suplicant’s sense of surrender, he got up to put on the wretched clothes.

“Alright, let’s do this,” he told himself, unwrapping the labyrinthine package. He undressed, folded his clothes, and placed them in a scarred plastic bag. He leafed through the contents of the package. Besides the pair of dun grey felt slippers, there were four clothing items, all made of a startlingly pallid white material. He put on the loose pants and then a long-sleeved upper garment. The wide sash he fastened in front. The last piece, a robe generous in the arms and double-hemmed extending to mid-calf, was of a heavy wool material. It closed with a tie. He had worn robes before, in the monastery, the complicated and multi-layered robes of a Zen priest. This was not so strange. He stepped into the slippers and scuffed around the room. He kicked them off and sat on the bed, his legs loosely crossed. Without thought or reflection, his body slowly found the Zazen posture. The exhaustion of the long week weighed in. His eyelids became heavy. Always there was the temptation to drift off, to sleep. He resisted mostly out of the monastery habit drilled into him. The pressure bore down on his eyelids, on his shoulders, on his whole body, driving him through the pillow into the mattress. Again, out of a habit that was now a reflex, he began to work his breath, deepening the inhale and slowing the exhale, focusing two inches below his navel. He sat. His eyelids grew still heavier. He wanted most to let them fall, to drift off, to enter the warmth of the hovering cloud. He resisted until first light began to filter in through ceiling skylight. Perched at the edge of some inner precipice, he heard a voice.

“Hello.”

Startled, his eyes blasted open; he looked around the dimly lit room. There was no one else.

The voice repeated. “Hello.”

“What the hell?” Philip growled. The voice was coming from inside his head.

“Relax,” the voice cautioned.

“Relax? I’m hearing voices.”

“So?”

“So. I am going crazy.”

“You are not going crazy. And besides, you’re only hearing one voice.”

Startled, he had known this fright before. For a moment, an old memory emerged. He was back at the monastery, late at night. A bird flying high above the fecund canopy cried out. In a moment of almost blinding insight, Philip started to understand what the bird was saying. He started to understand birdspeak. His reaction then as now was fear. Making this connection somehow calmed him. His thoughts steadied.

“What are you talking about? How do you know I’m not crazy?” He already knew how to speak to whatever this was.

The voice uttered one word. “Ibbur1.”

The word meant nothing to Philip. He shook his head..

“What kind of a Jew are you?” The voice was incredulous. “You don’t know ibbur. What about dybbuk?”

“Dybbuk? That’s some kind of evil spirit.”

“I’m not evil.”

“It must be my lucky day.”

“Maybe luckier than you deserve.”

“What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“It means we’re not getting anywhere.”

“If you haven’t noticed, there’s nowhere to go.”

Philip paused, shrugged and then nodded.

“Do you have a name?”

“You may think of me as Azriel Girbal.”

“So, Azriel Girbal, what are you doing in my head?”

“Ha,” the voice laughed. “You the living always think that once you pass you know everything. The truth is, you don’t. The truth is, I don’t know exactly what I am doing in your head.”

“Exactly?”

“I have theories. Everyone has theories. It’s human.”

“So you’re human?”

“Of course I’m human. What did you think I was, a bird or something?”

For a brief moment, Philip wondered if the voice knew about the birdspeak. The thought made him feel naked, exposed.

“So, what are your theories?” he shot back.

The voice fell silent. For a moment, Philip wondered if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

After a long pause, the voice resumed: “There are two possibilities that seem credible to me. First, I am the soul of Azriel Girbal, a man who served in the entourage of Moshe ben Nachman2. After the great Ramban had been banished, the Dominicans went after those of us on his staff. When confronted with the choice of following Ramban into exile or converting, I converted. I had a young family. I had no money or connections. I protected my family.”

The anguish in the voice was excruciating. Philip listened, wondering how ones identity could be uncertain.

“I spent my life keeping all 613 of the precepts. I was a tsadik, a good man, except for the one moment of pseudo-conversion. I’m guessing the reason I am here is that I have to atone for the conversion.”

“You mentioned two possibilities.”

“What can I say? You won’t understand. It’s theoretically possible that I am a part of your soul, the higher part of you that was not affected by your birth. The higher part, the attendant to Nachmonides, may be you. You may be talking to yourself.”

Philip shot a glance around the shadowy room.

“Yes. That has occurred to me.”

He rubbed his chin.

“Okay, Azriel Girbal. What do you have to do?”

“I don’t know. As I said, once you die you don’t know everything. You don’t. I’m minding my own business and the next thing I know I’m in your head. I’m not sure what I have to do. I’m working on it.”

“Working on what you have to do? What about me?”

“ Like I said, I’m not really sure. In general I’ve found the best advice is to just relax.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Okay, this is not easy. But that’s no reason you have to get all hot and bothered.”

The experience was gravely weird, but somehow Philip was getting used to it. He was adjusting. It’s just a voice, he told himself. I’m really tired. The melting fear slipped away. Fatigue accelerated like a descending fog. He could no longer think, about anything, about the ibbur or the strangeness or the test or Uncle David or the de Las Vargases. As sleep overran him, before he slipped into oblivion sitting cross-legged on the thin matress, for the briefest moment the thought reached him, “How did I get here?”

Six weeks earlier, the Northern California sky, relentlessly blue, offered little shelter from the dominant August sun. The air, thick and curdling, weighed hard on limb and mind. The phone rang, momentarily breaking through the warm stupor. Philip Rose, an architect, thin, of average height, with short-cropped light brown hair, barefoot in baggy shorts and a t-shirt, reached for the phone.

“Rose.”

“Hey Philip, it’s your brother.”

“Harold?” Philip answered, and then wondered, why is brother was calling?

“How’s it going, little brother?” Little brother: the older sibling’s eternal advantage pressed. Things are as they are.

“What’s up, Harold? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Philip, as much as I cherish chatting with you, I actually called for a reason.” Harold, a philosophy professor at Princeton, now shading his voice slightly pompous. This was official. Philip said nothing. The pause lengthened.

“I’ll get to the point. I just received a letter from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Association.”

“You mean the Spanish Civil War?”

“Yes. That Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”

“You mean they still exist? The war ended 75 years ago.

“Some things never change and some things never end. Apparently the Spanish Civil War still is among those things. It turns out that a shallow grave with six bodies was discovered in the mountains of Northern Cataluña.” Harold read from the letter: “‘Artifacts and papers found in the grave indicate that one of the bodies was that of David Michael Rose.’ That’s our Uncle David, dad’s older brother! Some group called the ARMH3 has arranged for a memorial service in a small town near where the bodies were found. They contacted the Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans. The veterans contacted me.”

Uncle David, Dad’s older brother? Philip thought. I never knew him. He died before I was born. Dad used to talk about him, even idolized him. Uncle David was a hero. He volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain. A childhood memory bloomed; a dusky photograph of a Spanish bar in brown sepia shades with high ceilings, burning candles and smoke-murky plastered walls. Young men and women crowd around marble topped tables, young Americans from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in kaki and leather jackets and the Spanish women touchingly feminine in coveralls and neck scarves. The eyes through which Philip remembered the photo were the eyes of a 13-year old pubescent, the legend returning stronger, piercing now as then; young, achingly beautiful women giving their bodies to the Americans who were about to die.

“The veterans want me to attend a ceremony.” Harold’s drone interrupted Philip’s brief reverie. Philip clung to the images of the young Spanish women’s bodies, images still tinted with forbidden adolescent colors.

“Philip, I can’t go,” Harold pressed, his voice rising. “I’m absolutely swamped. I have meetings in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Vancouver the week of the ceremony. These things have been planned for months. I can’t get out. I’m hoping you can go. Someone from our side should attend.”

Philip turned “someone from our side” over in his mind; it was a strange way to describe a loosely connected family spread across a sprawling continent.

“What are the dates?”

“They want us there in exactly a month. It’s not much warning but do you think you can make it?”

“Are you really the oldest surviving member of the family?” Another pause.

“Oldest surviving male.”

“Send me the stuff. I’ll see if I can get there.” The two brothers said goodbye. Philip put away his cell phone. For a moment the sepia image lingered, a memory that had somehow detached from the death of an uncle Philip he never knew.

Two days later, Philip, returning from work, found a red, white and blue FedEx box on the desk in his office. Milagro, the cleaning woman, must have signed for the package. He cut open the box with his bone handle penknife. The box held an inner manila envelope festooned with two lines of brassy colored Spanish stamps marked ESPANA and CORREOS. The brownish-grey color of the manila was different, European. With the penknife he reopened the side of the envelope that had been resealed with Scotch tape and lifted out batches of folded papers. On top was the letter from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It documented what Harold had said, that a shallow grave had been discovered in the low mountains north of the town of Berga. Based on some of the artifacts and documents found in the grave, it was thought one of the bodies was of David Michael Rose, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Someone with the ARMH Committee, set up by the Spanish Government in 2004 to repatriate and restore the status of those who had suffered during the civil war and the Franco dictatorship, had written the original letter in Spanish on committee stationery. Philip, having spent a year in Spain, read and spoke Spanish. The letter focused on the discovery of the bodies. It was the committee’s stated intent to contact all possible relatives and to promote, to the extent possible, closure to the tragic events that led to the deaths, to lay the memory of the tragedy to rest.

The twice mailed and now battered box also contained reproductions of photographs taken at the gravesite and close-ups of found artifacts and documents. One document stood out: a glossy photograph of an American passport opened to the first page. Philip could make out the name and date of birth: David Michael Rose, August 13, 1915. Even though he was looking at a reproduction of a photo of a passport photo, Philip recognized a family resemblance. David Michael Rose looked a lot like old photos of Philip’s father.

The winding sound of Rubi’s car in the driveway broke through Philip’s thoughts.

“Hello, Darling. I’m home.” Like a scent the melody of Rubi’s voice floated sylph like through the house.

“I’m in the study,” Philip called out.

Dr. Rubi de Las Vargas, medium height, rich brown hair, green eyes and a full and shapely figure, dressed in blue-green scrubs and gold jewelry, walked to where Philip sat, leaned over and kissed him lightly. In her mid-fifties, she looked much younger, maybe mid-forties. A floral scent enveloped her. It was the softness of her lips that stirred Philip; beautiful Spanish women prepared to give their bodies to American heroes.

“What are you up to?” Rubi asked, leaning across to see what was on his desk. She picked up the manila envelope and examined the stamps. Then she leafed through the whole package. Rubi had the unusual ability of perfect recall. Mostly she used her gift to memorize the endlessly expanding drug formulary. By now she could precisely recite every drug, every indication, every side effect. Philip watched her scan the documents, knowing she could now repeat the documents verbatim

“What is this?” Rubi asked, giving Philip a strange look.

“Something heroic. Those are the papers from brother Harold.” Philip stood and walked to the kitchen, calling over his shoulder.

“You know, that thing in Spain where they found Uncle David’s body.”

Philip pulled open the fridge, took out two bottles, crossed to the glass cabinet, selected two wineglasses and poured Lillet and Sancerre into each glass. He added a strip of orange zest and a few drops of orange bitters. Rubi was still examining the Spanish documents when he handed her the glass. She looked up, smiled and offered her glass as a toast. Clink. Philip brought her a chair. They sat for a while sipping their wine.

“This ceremony looks pretty serious. Are you really thinking of going?” She waved the document with the Spanish Government ornate letterhead.

“Yes, I am and I was hoping you would go with me.”

Rubi frowned. “I can’t go. I have to work.” The warmth in the room seemed to drain away, replaced with something cold and stiff. A nerve in each had been touched.

To Philip, Rubi was working too hard. She saw patients four twelve-hour days each week. She did four or five 24-hour on-call shifts each month. Her sleep was regularly interrupted to attend births that often took hours to resolve. She pulled an additional weekly12-hour shift in hospital as a hospitalist. Philip calculated, based on an eight-hour day, that Rubi was working 6.45 days per week. “They don’t let truck drivers drive trucks for that many hours,” he would tell her.

Sensing Rubi retreating, Philip knew if he pressed she would strike out. Her voice would harden with anger. The relationship was wrong, she would claim. He was too controlling. He was trying to tell her what to do.

A ripple of anger rose in him, threatening to take control.

“You’re an idiot, Rubi,” it pretended to reason. “You’ve developed adult-onset epilepsy—brain seizures for Christ’s sake. Legally, you can’t drive for three months. You can’t do call. Your neurologist told you to take time off. The practice expects you to take some time off.”

But Philip held his tongue. If he said anything they would fight. For a moment he wondered if it wouldn’t be better if they just ended it. He felt his head shake “no” as if some deeper part had determined it was not yet time.

He sipped his Lillet. Slowly, silently, inside his head his own narrative began to unfold. ‘Patience,’ it reminded him. ‘Gentleness.’ ‘Now.’ He waited until he could feel the roll of his own breath, sipping his wine and releasing the tension in his neck and shoulders. Then, into that small gap that separates things, he spoke.

“Darling, you could really do with a vacation.” Philip sipped his Lillet. He spoke slowly and softly, his tone gentle, patient. “We’ll fly to Barcelona, go to this ceremony, spend a week, eat well, sleep long.”

Rubi looked across at Philip. She was tired, dark circles underscored her eyes. The new anti-seizure medicine, like a dull cloud, was taking its toll. It was true: With a driver’s license suspended for three months she couldn’t do call. The practice more or less expected her to take some time off. Her neurologist assumed she would. She had run out of excuses and didn’t have the strength to argue. The tension in the room softened. Rubi smiled and nodded. The trip was on.

Philip remembered little about the Spanish Civil War—mostly that evil Franco, with the monsterous aid of Hitler and Mussolini, had defeated the bravely elected Socialist government. He knew as a small child from home spun family lore that his Uncle David had volunteered to fight. He knew that Uncle David along with a few thousand young American men, over the objections of the blinded U.S. Government, had to sneak into Spain to join the fight. Many had belonged to the American Communist Party and Ernest Hemingway was somehow involved. Maybe he drove an ambulance or was that e e cummings?

In the mid-1960s, while the U.S. was bogged down in its own futile war in Vietnam, Philip had spent his junior year studying architecture in Barcelona. Philip’s lingering memories were of a city and a time quietly astride the Franco dictatorship. He had heard that the years just after WWII had been hard. Barcelona, like many other cities in Spain, had been devastated. Fighting Communism had been the excuse the archly Catholic Franco used to rationalize his autocracy. But fighting Communism, partly because of the disastrous Vietnam War, was losing its panache with Philip’s generation. At least for a young American studying architecture in Cataluña in 1967, it made Franco seem senility remote and borderline irrelevant.

At ETASAB4 the whole subject of the civil war was seldom mentioned in class, and when it was, it was always with the dripping self-glorification of a government controlled press. Through student circles Philip had heard whispers, of the Defensa Interior, a secretive militant student anarchist organization that sought to unseat Franco. Untouched, Franco remained completely in control, with his multitude of armed soldiers visible on the street. Philip mostly spent his days focused on learning the language and studying Barcelona and its enchanting architecture. One of Philip’s fellow students, Jean Paul Rodin, a Frenchman, was involved with the Defensa in smuggling anti-Franco poetry out of Spanish prisons. Philip hung out with the group, primarily because there was a woman he was interested in. There was an exciting sense of danger, kind of floating and rebellious and not particularly political. He wasn’t interested in Franco any more then he was, say, in Lyndon Johnson. The whole of his active participation in the Defensa consisted of a few nights spent with Pauline as lookouts while the group made contact within the prison. For Philip it was a break from the grind of architecture school—and then there was Pauline Dumonet. During this radical ‘flirtation,’ she had tried to arouse Philip politically. She did arouse him and they became lovers. After the term ended he traveled with Pauline to her home in Paris where he spent the summer. Pauline’s parents were dedicated leftists. Philip and Pauline shared a bedroom and most of the dinner conversations were about obscure and hard to follow left-wing French politics. Philip lost track of the anti-Franco thread. He had enough to deal with between Charles de Gaulle, George Pompidou and the European New Left. Intricate discussions of the PCF5, the PS6 and the PAS7 went over his head. It wasn’t even close. Sex easily trumped politics. In his memory it was a really great summer.