The List of the Dead

by Lior Klirs

August 2, 2010

Marc L. Levinsky sat aiming a missile through the stained-glass window when he heard his name: “Marc L. Levinsky,” intoned with solemn enunciation amid the list of the dead.  After services, Marc hurried to the coat closet.  He always preferred to be the first one out.  This time, he needed to exit with special urgency.  But throngs of old men in slow-footed seminars slowed him down (his students had considered him an old man too, but there were essential differences, Marc believed, between him and these codgers who shook with palsy and smelled of pickled herring).  The Rabbi caught his sleeve.

“Marc Levinsky?  Are you Marc Levinsky?”

Marc looked at the Rabbi’s hairy face.

“I’m sorry, someone told me just now.  So sorry.  I don’t know what happened.  Must’ve been a glitch, this new program we’ve got that makes the lists—”

Marc nodded, gave a smile—his best approximation of what he thought other people considered a sincere smile—grabbed his coat and left.

On the way home he turned on the radio, which was no longer his habit on the Sabbath.  A soporific voice spoke of figures and markets.

Marc had taught elementary school for 22 years.  People often asked why, and he used to wonder too.  He liked kids.  He thought he liked kids.  They did smell, sometimes like grass or sweaty laundry.  He couldn’t stand them, that is, most of the time, but he liked how easy their troubles were, how he went home every day empty and sore but with no worries at all, none.  Not like lawyers who lost sleep over pending litigation or social workers who stayed awake all night sweating of heatless apartments and empty vodka bottles.  When Marc was forced into unceremonious retirement last June, his wife, Greta, opened a box and assembled for him a dry white cake and said, wiping crumbs from her lips, “you’ll never have to speak to another child again.”  Greta worked from home for a company whose name Marc always forgot.  She made more in three months than Marc did in a year.  She liked to complain to her friends about supporting her deadbeat husband until he got a real job.  Now he had no job and she no longer complained.

Marc pulled into the garage and removed his yarmulke.  He went into the dining room.  Greta had prepared lunch, as usual: stale bagels, reduced-fat cream cheese, limp slices of pulpy tomato, and a heap of lox, each category of food on its own floral-patterned plate.  Marc hated lox.  It reminded him of shavings of organic tissue, perhaps lung, although he had never seen such a thing.  There was something unregenerative about it all.  He hadn’t the heart to tell Greta though, and always took the two thinnest pieces of salmon, folding them over on one half of an onion bagel and saving the second half, the half unburdened with dead fish, for the cream cheese.  He would’ve preferred full-fatted cream cheese but wasn’t sure such existed anymore in these fitness-crazed times, not that Greta would tell him if it did, since she did the once-a-month food shopping.  It was Marc’s job to order out most nights.

“How was synagogue?” Greta asked.  “Did he make a good sermon?”

“Who?”

“Katz.  The Rabbi.”

“Oh.  I think so.  I mean.  I’m not sure.  It was a bit difficult.”

Ten years into his career, Marc suddenly realized his life of teaching would not lead him to the satisfactory moral reckonings he had imagined.  He liked to hear himself, in his mind, in the tense and crucial moments after a crisis, say, with impressive calm, things like: “Listen, here’s the thing.”  Or, after a protracted sigh, “It’s not that simple.”  Over and over again.  He also, at such moments of sweet potential, relished certain violent images: Marc holding a pistol—what, a .38?  45?  Is that, what they say, a caliber?—never mind, a gun, both hands outstretched, firing off shot after shot (rounds, they call them rounds) while running forward in some kind of underground structure, a parking garage?  Odd because Marc hated gun owners, never touched a firearm in his life. “Listen, son, here’s the thing.”  Or the guns.  But really, he never used the word “son.”  And the calamity—it, the thing—never occurred.

“He called my name.”

“Honey?”

“Before the Kaddish.”

“I don’t follow.”

He suspected his body to be in a state of rebellion.  Retirement suited him fine.  He was not bored.  But now, when he finally had time to do what he had always wanted to do with his life—granted, this was never clearly defined, but it should involve serious endeavors, like writing a novel or learning how to play tennis—his body began to deteriorate.  When he flossed, his gums bled liberally, red bloom in the sink.  Static-gobs of scurf and dead-root hair greased the bathroom tile.  According to most measurements, he had a good three, three-and-a-half decades left, likely a bit more, considering he didn’t smoke, rarely drank or ate meat, and engaged in no risky behaviors.  Surely one couldn’t remain bored for that long.

“He said it was a mistake.  Computer malfunction.  A random error.”

“He really is a nice man.”

Greta had been the one to suggest Congregation Beth Tikva.  She pronounced it like a shiksa’s name: Beth.  It was two months into his retirement and she thought (so he guessed) he needed to affiliate with some form of community, get out and make friends.  So he shocked them both by suggesting he join a synagogue.  “Well,” she said to her mother later that night.  “I should be thankful.  He could’ve started gambling, like dad.”

Rabbi Katz had officiated at her father’s funeral.  She liked his black beard, the way it curled in on itself like bashful ivy: a sign of modesty and ancient wisdom.  Yet so young and handsome!  Perhaps he attracted her, though she’d never admit that.  It was like pretending to like lox—there were certain things you never told your spouse.  No, she simply told Marc how learned Rabbi Katz was, and how well he had handled her mother.  “You know what Mommy’s like.  He had her cooing.  Like she was drugged.”  Marc imagined a drugged pigeon in a pink rose pant suit.  “Sure, he’ll do,” he said.

He called up the synagogue office and added his name to the membership registry.  They sent him mail: bulletins, fundraising appeals, tri-folded blue fliers announcing kosher barbeques and pool parties, more appeals, requests to join the Men’s Club (and contribute to their Torah fund), invitation to the Capital fund gala annual fundraiser, Kol Nidre pledge forms.  Marc calculated that, if he simply met each request half way—not name-above-the-sanctuary level, but not back row folding chair on Yom Kippur either—the synagogue would have $6,280 of his (Greta’s) dollars by the end of the fiscal year.  He placed the mail in a plastic bag and recycled it on his way to Beth Tikva each Sabbath.

After a dozen or so Saturday morning services—Marc usually sitting not quite in the back but not so forward as to call attention to himself, always in the middle of the row so as to avoid the pushy gabbai offering him an honor in the Torah service, and always in a different row each week so as not to seem a “regular”—a few of the old men knew his name.  The synagogue was dying, it was apparent to him, but he liked it anyway, liked the silence, the simplicity of its architecture—purple carpeting, restrained angles—and the way the old ladies arrived in pairs and whispered like solemn little girls leaning over school desks, pigtails touching.  He rarely paid attention to the service itself.  Sometimes he would plant bombs under the pulpit and map out trajectories of bodily evasion, or send bullets to shatter the yellow stained glass and drive the congregants scattering under the pews.  Never any blood, just excitement, real living.  At these times, he sat in great peace, and the service flowed around him like a lazy river.

* * *

The table sat before him, empty.  A labyrinth of scratches marred the cherry finish under each place setting’s customary perch above the tablecloth, now removed and folded and put away, he never knew where.  Thousands of breakfasts for one, lunches for one (except on weekends), dinners for two had left their indelible marks, like desperate predators insisting on this tree, this patch of grass, mine, always.  Where had Greta gone?

How did this feel?  How should it feel?  Marc was used to the weekly Yahrzeit list.  The march of the dead.  The anniversary of those congregants or relatives of congregants who had died on this date in any of the past 150 or so years of the synagogue’s remembered existence—or, the three or four who just this past week had read their last bulletin, sent in their final donation.  The list always alphabetical.  Marc usually started inventing catastrophes after the G’s, of which there were too many.  Gideon, Goldberger, Golden, Goldstein.  But to hear his own name on the list?

It probably meant nothing.  Some kind of cosmic joke.  Although God, about whom Marc remained confused and therefore undecided, did not seem the type.  Just this morning, according to Rabbi Katz’s recounting of the weekly Torah readings, God had caused the earth to open and swallow up a whole gang of anti-Moses troublemakers.  Just like that—you’re in your tent and then, God!  A gaping chasm like the mouth of a whale yawns, gulps you alive.  Marc found nothing funny in this.

What if he had died this past week, his name the final, most obvious sign in a series of macabre omens sent from out there to announce to his wandering ghost the bad news?  He liked the idea of dying in a movie-script way, a slow, painful yet meaningful revelation of the necessity of letting go, letting it all go.  But the difficulty was in imagining the method.  Car accident?  Terrorist attack?  Burst artery?  His life hardly admitted of sudden, exotic ruptures.  He hardly moved, in any net sense, on a week-to-week basis.

“Marc, should I be?  I’m a bit—worried?

Marc sat in his favorite easy chair, rocking gently.  Gentle afternoon light burnished the layer of chalk-yellow dust coating the living room’s every surface.

“It’s just, we haven’t talked much today.  I thought, maybe, you were sad about something.  Does it have to do with that computer malfunction?  It seems, to me, like just a silly mistake.”  Marc focused his eyes on the darkened hollow under her chin.  Sunlight, he knew, at the right angle, bared a fine-furred arbor.  Greta’s body never ceased in its wonders; he wondered what she made of his diminishing remains.  “Marc?  Why do you have to brood so much?  Speak!”

People were always criticizing him for not talking.  He could never figure this out.  Silence was a part of him, like a digit.  One couldn’t take it away any more than one could drive out Greta’s aggrieved cheeriness or his mother-in-law’s myopic heart.  Most either ignored him or looked through him; but when they did notice, they took his social reticence for constitutional glumness.  He remembered the senior Rabbi at his parents’ synagogue.  Old Cohen, with his fringe of white hair and finely-brushed mustache.  As a child, Marc always found a way to escape services, changing up his excuses each week: “I have to go to the bathroom.”  “My stomach hurts—I’m sorry, I’ll be right back.”  “I think I left the car door open.  I’ll just check to see.”  He sat on a couch in the lobby and played solitary paper football.  Rabbi Cohen must have found an excuse too, because there he was, standing over Marc and smiling like a loon.  Marc looked at the man’s mustache.

“Marc,” Cohen said.  “Boo.”  He stuck fingers in his ears, made his head into one of those deep-water fish with the labial fins.  “Marc, can you smile for me?  Just once.”

Marc stared at the Rabbi’s head.

“It won’t hurt, I promise!”

To drive the fool away, Marc gave a smirk that he thought might pass for a smile.

The Rabbi frowned, shaking his head.

Cohen officiated at his Bar Mitzvah, although at that point he was Rabbi Emeritus and did everything—walk, eyeball, sing—crookedly.  His parents insisted that he officiate instead of the replacement—Cohen had done so much for the family, insisted Marc’s mother.  After Marc gave his perfunctory speech, Cohen, as was his habit, joined Marc at the pulpit to give his personal blessing to the new man.  This involved a placing of hands on the shoulders (a somewhat awkward endeavor, as in his Emeritus years Cohen barely grazed five feet and Marc was already gangly at thirteen), a mumbled blessing in Hebrew, and a dry, scratchy kiss on the hairline (for this Marc leaned down and offered his head).  But before the benediction, each Bar or Bat Mitzvah would receive a private nugget of mystical insight from Cohen, acting as proxy for God in this age of non-intervention.  Among the seventh graders, rumors flew about what he actually said.  Some claimed that Cohen whispered the secret name of God which, if repeated by the mere youth would cause him/her to spontaneously dissolve into a pillar of salt.  Others argued that he imparted naughty adult wisdom about where to find the key to the liquor stash that invariably disgorged its contents, as if by magic, on certain slow holiday mornings, into thimble-sized plastic cups which made their greasy way among the old men with winks and concealed palms.  Or about the sacred virtue of sex.  The soon-to-be Bat Mitzvahed girls were particularly insistent on this latter interpretation.  They shivered beautifully in disgust.  Yet Marc was never privy to the truth from recently minted men and women who had passed through the ritual to the other side of adult privilege and tedium.  These older teens never talked to him—not that he ever attempted to initiate a conversation, not that they recognized his presence as a human being occupying the same weary earth.  What remained certain and knowable was the ritual: Cohen shuffling toward the pulpit, hands at his sides, his face a solemn mask signifying recondite knowledge; Cohen now at the young person’s side, raising his prayer shawl and lowering it like an executioner’s hood over Rabbi and victim alike, circumscribing them both within a yellow canopy, hidden from the congregation’s view.  And then the revelation.

As the shawl’s fringes lowered around his shoulders—Marc aiding by grabbing the edge tossed limply by Cohen onto his forehead—Marc squeezed his eyes, trying on a mien of holy anticipation so he wouldn’t have to look.

“Marc,” whispered Cohen.  “Oh Marc.”

Marc looked.  Cohen’s upturned nostrils filled his visual field with surprisingly dark, vigorous hairs.

“Marc, if you don’t turn to that adoring crowd and smile when I drop this tallis I’m going to pull my pants down right in front of everyone.”

Marc reminded himself to blink often, every three seconds or so.

I’ll moon you right here,” Cohen whined.  “Come on, you can do it.  Smile.  Smile.”  This last word oozed out, reptilian, the Rabbi’s lips grinning into a rictus with mustache sitting atop like a white caterpillar, dead.

Three decades passed before Marc stepped foot in a synagogue again.

What he wished Cohen could see now—if Cohen had somehow lived to match the age of Moses—what Marc wished his wife could witness too was his other self, the self who performed in front of a classroom of 32 sixth graders.  Used to perform, before his “retirement.”

In front of those kids, a dry-erase board behind him, silent Marc became a different man:  voluble, witty, funny—an entertainer.  A born performer.  He cracked jokes at the expense of stupid answers, making the offender laugh with him.  He came up with silly names for the more colorful characters in the classroom: Captain Hyperbole, Super-eraser.  He spieled endless stories about his childhood—all fabricated, every detail—and talked rhapsodically of the finer things in life: Swiss chocolate; Mark Twain; the Grapefruit League.  The banter between him and his students—always so quick with a retort, a professional eye-roll—left him empty of words so that, when returning to Greta after a day of teaching, sitting at the long, mostly empty dining room table with two pagoda-boxes of Chinese takeout between them, he felt left with nothing to say.

“Marc L. Levinsky.”

When Katz reached the end of the list—Zilberberg?  Zwick?—the mourners and those observing Yahrzeit rose to say the Kaddish (the prayer in praise of God, so Marc intuited from the translation of the Aramaic, for outliving the dead).  Say wasn’t the right word, nor sing.  More of a chant, or rhythmic incantation.

The Mourner’s Kaddish was the only part of the service that commanded Marc’s complete attention.  It wasn’t the words, or the meaning of the words.  As far as Marc understood, in his rediscovery of the prayer book after his exile from the tradition of his ancestors, Jewish prayers espoused the same basic two or three concepts in endless iterations.  Praise, exaltation, abjection were nothing new at this late point in the service.  Rather, the collective voice of these relatives of the dead, the very sound of their coordinated bass, entranced him—a voice with such profound absence of affect, as if droned by a horde of B-movie zombies.    At this moment Marc felt less a part of a harmless if wacky tribe than an eavesdropper at a dark Masonic ritual or satanic coven.

What would it be like for him?  Greta in synagogue, doily primly bobby-pinned to her saloned crop, tripping over the entangling words: such an incongruous image Marc enjoyed several different permutations.  Greta in tears, mouthing the lines silently; Greta soldierly and brave, barking it out; Greta in Katz’s arms, whispering into the Rabbi’s shaggy ear.

But the sound of his name struck Marc like the drop of a hammer—like the explosion of his phantom missile.  And when the last name leaped off the end of the list into oblivion and the mourners stood to perform their obligation, their living dead number, Marc rose to join them.  He did not remember sending the message to his legs: stand.  He simply rose and spoke the words: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash . . .”  Marc recited the prayer for the dead for himself.

“Talk to me, Marc.  This isn’t healthy.”

“Listen, I forgot something at the synagogue—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll be right back.  And Greta?  I hate lox.”

And with that he was out the garage door before she could criticize him for speaking.

* * *

Marc wasn’t sure if he remembered the directions.  He passed through rows of lazy oaks.  Perfectly parallel sidewalks stretched before him like railroad tracks leading nowhere.  A bug squirmed on the glass, spilling its wasted juices.  Marc hit the windshield wiper.  And then he was there, as if in following some downward grade gravity had done the work for him.

When Greta’s father Samuel died, Marc was in bureaucratic purgatory, in the middle of the union’s prolonged deliberations with the school board over Marc’s aptitude and therefore his future as a teacher.  The trouble had started simply enough.  Sean Taylor, whose Wonder Bread face matched the Anglo-Saxon blandness of his name (such student names—Sean Taylor, Eric White, Brad Matthews, Ryan Thompson—Marc considered sneering affronts to his achingly obvious non-WASP status, notwithstanding his own mono-syllabic goyisch nickname hiding the more cosmopolitan Marcus), had raised his hand apropos of nothing at all to say: “Mr. L, can I ask you something?  Are you gay?”  The answer came immediately: “Why, you interested?”  Only after did he understand what he should have done: spike the question and sit Sean down after class, beginning with “I understand you’re naturally curious, but it’s not quite that simple, son.”  And then a lecture on the appropriateness of sexual orientation as a topic for casual conversation with one’s teacher.  Not even a gun required.

Sean went home and told his mother that Marc had: called him a filthy name; charged, not insinuated, that Sean was a flaming homosexual; and propositioned him right there in class.  The school board launched a full investigation, but the only witnesses being Marc and a bunch of sixth graders, they recorded so many versions of the truth that the union’s offer of voluntary retirement, with full pension arriving at the age of 55, seemed to satisfy all parties, in that the board wanted Marc out but feared a lengthy and expensive lawsuit (after all, a teacher couldn’t be fired on mere hearsay), the union needed to make a statement to show the board who ran things in this town, and Marc was happy for the brilliant out he never could have contrived on his own, and could take the hit considering his wife’s salary was more than enough to support them both.

With her father dead Greta had changed, too—less pushy, even less domestic (if that were possible), limiting her housework to that one simple lunch each Saturday afternoon when Marc returned from mock-praying at synagogue to find the dining room table bedecked with mock-Jewish fare.               The last thing Samuel said when they visited him at the hospice center and Greta was in the lobby buying a soda was “tell me, son, why’d you never have kids?”  And before Marc could answer he was dead and Greta came in and studied the body while sipping her Diet Seven-Up.  When she finished she crumpled the can and called the nurse.

The funeral home had not changed: same bottled 1970s air, same plastic ferns.  Marc was not surprised to find the door unlocked—who would break in here?  What to steal?  The old man who ran the place, who’d walked Marc and Greta through the showroom to pick his father-in-law’s coffin, lived in a shack in back of the building and was probably enjoying a nap on a quiet business-free afternoon.

The coffins sat on sawhorses with their lids propped open.  Each was composed of only wood and glue as per Jewish custom, differing only in quality of material and certain modest flourishes of color, stain, and trim.  Marc stood alongside the first model, an unfinished pine box dotted with knotholes.

The room buzzed silently.  He listened for bird calls, for cicadas, but heard nothing.  The coffins sat their sawhorses, expectant, content.

“Marc L. Levinsky.”  The sonic shape of his identity so strange, the uncanny alliteration and shtetl-bound family name.  These were mere word-sounds, empty of meaning, like the words of the Kaddish, abstracted in Aramaic tangles.  Glorified and sanctified.  The great name of God.Katz did read them well, grant him that.  Twenty, thirty Jewish names—not just Jewish names but dead ones, not a truncated syllable.  Marc wondered if he practiced.  To read each name with equal resonance, to attach no preference to any individual.  A necro-democracy.  Marc’s name as all the others: moldering, thoughtless, concrete.

Marc eased away the strut supporting the lid of the coffin and climbed in, drawing the lid closed after him.  His feet hit against the backboard (Marc had always been tall for a Jew).  He felt surprisingly comfortable, if a bit stiff.  Closing his eyes, he tried to empty his mind.  The dirt would fall on him, clump by clump.  The mourners would form a line for turns at the shovel.  Katz says his name, slowly, now imbuing each syllable with dread significance—a luxury that will pleasantly disappear a year later, when his name will appear on the list again, and again the year after, and the year after that, on into eternity or until the synagogue dies and the rolls are expunged.  Only Greta will not be there to hear it, nor will anyone who really knew him, and this was just as well, Marc preferred it so.  His name was nothing special.  It belonged with the rest, a blip in a list to be cached and repeated—digital noise stuck between parallel mirrors—a list to be heard and forgotten; not heard, really, but endured in anticipation of the post-service spread, the herring and whitefish.  Marc’s mind swirled with dead fish.

A door opened and the proprietor entered with a young couple.  The old man carried a clipboard.  “This one is our cheapest model,” he said, knocking its side.  “Solid pine.  Good construction.  Simple and humble, for a simple, humble person.”

“Mom would hate that,” said the young woman.

“Not her decision,” the man replied.  “She isn’t paying.”

“Would you like to see the inside?”

The young man took his wife’s face in his hands, forming a vise.  He lowered his head to glare down at her, communicated certain inevitabilities.  Tending a death was like moving house: so many annoying to-dos.  You’ll have to feed a bloat of relatives for a week.  Read all those agonized sympathy cards.  Find a synagogue, a daily minyan, learn how to pray again, say Kaddish once a day for an entire year.  Fill a life’s hole with those nail-in-the-throat words.  So let the dead deal with accommodations.

He released his wife and tapped the clipboard.  “We’ll take it,” the man said.

“A good choice,” said the old man, placing his hand on the woman’s arm.  “Practical, what I say.  Not the time to be showy.  God doesn’t care for ornamentation.”

Marc smiled, happy, for now, as always, to say nothing.

Lior Klirs is a writer and English teacher whose work has also appeared in the journal Kerem.