The Instructions by Adam Levin
“Sexual awake!” said Yuval’s second-youngest daughter.
“That’s right, Naomi!” Yuval said, making a Harpo Marx face, “at six you will awake!”
“Six I will awake!” she agreed.
“Can you believe how smart they are?” Yuval said to us. “The rate they’re picking up English—aye! Anyway, back to why your boy’s not Dovid. Or Michael.”
“Well you can imagine,” my mom said. “I need to use the bathroom, I am banging on the door, Judah comes rushing out, this ball of newspaper in his hands, I hear him fall in the living room, he shouts to me he is okay. Okay. By the time I finish up my business, though, Judah is making all kinds of noise in the kitchen, and I go to see, and he is screaming at me, ‘Get back in the bathroom! Take a bath in the bathroom! Stay out of the living room! I spilled! Where is the broom and the dustpan?’
“I do not know where the broom and the dustpan are—when do I clean the house? Do I not go to work like him? Am I not thirty-seven weeks pregnant? Do we not have a nice woman who comes on odd Wednesdays and hides the cleaning supplies? If the broom is not in the pantry or the closet, how am I to know where? I tell him that he is crazy and I go to the living room, and he chases after me. And this is silly, is what I am thinking. My husband, I am thinking, this lovely man, this powerful, beautiful man, is losing his mind over fingernail clippings. And so me, a wiseguy sometimes, I do a little show. A little dance atop the fingernails, a bump and grinding. What can he do? Tackle me? I am pregnant. And what does he say, Yuval? He says nothing, becomes white. Totally white. And yes, I feel awful. Now I feel awful.
“And then we go to sleep. And while I am sleeping, I have a dream. In this dream, I am in the backyard of the house I grew up. My father is there—he has been dead already eleven months, my father, and I am not much of a dreamer, Yuval, I am not someone who remembers what she dreams, but this was vivid. He had tzitzit on under his fatigues, not a custom he adhered to, the tzitzit, and he was wearing tefilin, facing the Old City, his back to me. I said ‘Aba,’ and then, in a very formal tone, not a tone I can ever say I had heard him take, he answered me, saying, ‘Your indiscretion looms large over the child you carry. Only because he is especially beloved by God will this boy in your womb survive your womb and enter the world. If you wish him to live beyond his bris, you will name him Gurion, for a lion cub will he be, and as a lion will he conquer, red-eyed from wine and white-toothed from milk. And you will raise him as would befit a lion cub born of Tamar and Judah lest he depart from this world a boy, trampled beneath the feet of his brothers. And you will take that ridiculous belt off your face. Stop trifling! Now, Tamar!’
“The belt is a story for itself, I will leave it alone. As for this ‘Stop trifling’ that he said, it was a thing he shouted to me only one other time, years before, when I was twenty, in Beirut. My father was not at all a shouter—he was a loud, loud man, but he did not often shout, and it happened that in Beirut, we were waiting inside a building for something to happen, it is not important what, but we were waiting in this building, on an upper floor, the fifth if memory is serving me, and there was a young woman on the ground, crossing the street, holding the hand of her daughter, who was so fumbly and small she must have just learned to walk, and because of this thing we were waiting for, and how beautiful they were, amidst all the hideousness, the wreckage that Beirut had become, like a bruise on a scar was Beirut, and how gorgeous the mother and daughter, and this thing we were waiting for to happen… I fired a few rounds out the window, in the air, so that they would take cover. And my father, he shouted at me, ‘Stop trifling!’ and by the time the last of the three syllables was out, I’d been struck in the shoulder by sniper fire. What we’d been waiting for to happen, it happened then, and there was no more sniper fire, there were no more enemies left breathing in the vicinity, and I was evacuated, and I went back home, where I had to spend two months recovering before returning to Beirut. It is the only time I was ever shot, right after my father yelled at me ‘Stop trifling!’ And in the dream, as he says it for the second time, I tense suddenly, and awaken, and the sheets are soaked. My water has broken.
“Now, Judah has not yet even fallen asleep. He is up and he has me up, and we get to the hospital, and I go into labor for, what, Judah, for eight hours?”
“Ten hours,” my father said.
“Ten hours of labor, and the whole time I am thinking: ‘This is not because of the fingernails. This is because of some guilt I feel about the fingernails. I feel some guilt about scaring my husband white, and I have a dream about my father, and he tells me something horrifying about my son, it is nothing. Maybe my water broke because of the shock of the dream, maybe I had the dream because my water was about to break… These things can be explained, okay? Right?’ That is what I think.
“And then this guy is born. And it is not just that he is born with a full head of hair—and I do not mean to imply the fine, silky baby kind, but the very same coarse, uncombable mess that you see before you, though much more of it than he has now: this hair he is born with, all wet, it hangs to his shoulders—all I think of the hair is: ‘Strange, nu? What isn’t strange? Life is strange.’ And the obstetrician, he is cradling this newborn son of mine, and telling me to look at the full head of hair, it is amazing, the hair, ‘Amazing, amazing,’ he carries on, and then he strokes the hair, the obstetrician, and the moment he strokes the hair, this newborn son of mine bites him on the neck, right where it meets the shoulder, and the obstetrician lets out a little scream, but I think it is just surprise, and I think, ‘Well, my baby does not like strange men to touch his head—okay, neither do I.’ But then, you see, Yuval, blood starts coming through the white of this obigynie’s doctor-jacket. My son has drawn blood. My son, he has a mouth full of teeth. And these teeth—these are the last nails in the coffin of naming my boy Michael, of naming him anything other than Gurion. I tell this to Judah, and what is he going to say? The whole way to the hospital, he is convinced I am miscarrying. He could care less what we call the boy. So that is why Gurion, and not Michael nor Dovid.”
“This is true?” Yuval said to my father. “About the teeth and the hair?”
“He had four teeth,” my father said, “not a mouthful, but they were the right four teeth—that doctor was bleeding. The hair, as I remember, was even longer than she said, but what do I know?”
“Amazing,” Yuval said, not really believing what he’d been told.
“Tell us more stories about Judah,” my mother said to him. “It is good for Gurion to hear.”
My mother left a part out of the story of my birth. That Seder was a long night of leaving parts out of stories. I knew the part she left out because she’d told me the story hundreds of times. She used to put me to sleep with it when I was younger. The part she cut picks up right after I bit the man for touching me on the head, right after he started bleeding:
“…But then you see, Gurion,” she’d tell me, “blood starts coming through the white of the guy’s doctor-jacket, and this worries me a little, because now I am going to feed you, and what will your teeth do to me? It turns out they do nothing—you know you have teeth, you know I am your ema, you love me, you do not want to hurt me. And you are laying there against my chest, and you stretch your arms up like babies sometimes will, you stretch them so your hands are just under my chin, and my first impulse, I have a strong impulse to put your little fists inside my mouth, to see if I can fit them both, and I see that you have pressed them together, your tiny little fists, as if that is what you want, too, you have pressed them together for me I think, and as I take hold of your wrists to guide your hands inside my mouth, I see you have these birthmarks, these yud-shaped birthmarks, and this stops my heart. These birthmarks are the last nails in the coffin of naming you Michael, of naming you anything other than Gurion. And I tell this to your father, and what can he say? The whole way to the hospital, he is convinced I am miscarrying you. I knew I was not, but he was convinced. So he could n
And this is why my mom left that part out at the Seder: because, of course, I still had the birthmarks. If she told about the birthmarks, then Yuval might have asked to see them. Then I might have had to scrub the makeup from my knuckles and shown him. And then he would maybe suspect that everything my mother had just said was not only a story to tell about your son in front of your son to make him feel like there was no one else like him in the world; Yuval might suspect it was not merely a pretty way to dress up the fact that I was born rough and ugly, like how they call retarded and handicapped people “differently abled” (and it was those things as well, surely, for she’s my mom, and she’s a psychologist)…My mom has always been scared that if Yuval, or anyone else, were to learn about the birthmarks, it would somehow lead, as her dreamed father warned, to my being trampled beneath the feet of my brothers.
I do not believe that is true. I never have. My brothers will never trample me, and if ever they do, I don’t see how my birthmarks could cause it. But my mom—she is my mom, and the thought of me getting trampled spooks her. When I used to complain about the makeup, she’d get very worried- and scared-looking, and she’s a killer, my mom. She has killed a lot of people, and she won’t say that, but she will tell me that her dad did, and but what was she doing in Beirut? What was she doing getting shot in a building with her dad’s special forces team? She wasn’t cooking chicken for them. She was killing enemies with them, lots of enemies, and at the same time, all of those enemies were trying to kill her, but she didn’t die and the enemies did, because my mom was a much better killer. If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don’t want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she’s willing to do? You can’t. So the least you can do is make it so she worries less and doesn’t get all sad-looking about some birthmarks. That’s what I think. So I put the makeup on every day and I don’t complain or make faces, and if I believed that anyone were, anytime soon, going to read this Story of Stories as the scripture that it is, then I wouldn’t even mention the birthmarks. So it is good that you read it as fiction for now—my mom can relax. By the time you know it’s scripture, I will have proven, even to her, that I am untramplable.
“So where was I before?” Yuval said.
“Litberg’s!” shouted Sara.
“Yes, Litberg’s,” said Yuval. “Delicious bagels. We’d get our delicious bagels gratis and walk around, and talk about all of you, our futures, how we’d one day bring you to Litberg’s, maybe at midnight twelve-thirty even, like how the Spanish do in Barcelona. When we were bar-mitzvahed together at the Western Wall, we fathers of yours, we had a day’s layover in Barcelona on the way back, all because of these two here,” Yuval nodded to his silent, smiling parents, “and your grandparents, too, Gurion, may they rest in peace. The four of them wanted to make us worldly, and we loved them for it and we love them for it. And on the Ramblas at midnight twelve-thirty, what you see is men pushing strollers and holding hands with their dramatic wives. The Catholic Spaniards! We’d do it like them, but without a Rambla or Gaudi facades. It would be Devon Avenue, true, but what we had was Litberg’s bagel factory, and those poor Spanish ham-eaters—they didn’t. Just a lot of pickpockets and a giant Lichtenstein at the end, some fantastic coffee, true, and some tomato-stained bread that seemed like maybe it was the perfect snack, a snack to end all snacks, and yet we never knew for sure since we couldn’t try for its proximity to all that ham.”
“Traif!” shouted a younger daughter.
“Traif like you wouldn’t believe, Kreindeleh. The ham was everywhere in Barcelona! As if striving to forbid us from joy, the ham. But we had a great time, anyway, a great time despite the ham. Am I making this up, buddy? Tell them—am I making it up? About the ham? About how we’d talk about them all the time, about taking them to Litberg’s?”
“Oh the ham,” said my father, mashing flat with his fork’s curved part the cross-hatches he’d earlier sculpted from his potatoes. “He’s telling the truth.”
My mom said, “We went to Litberg’s on our first date, and for all of this time I thought because Judah was broke.”
“He doesn’t like to tell anyone anything is why you thought that, Tamar. It’s how he is, it’s been very well established. And probably he was broke—broke never damaged the charm of a nightwalk to Litberg’s—but what I’m telling you,” said Yuval, “is that your husband beside you, smiling wryly at his old friend, at ease enough here among us to register a little embarrassment at the revelations I’m spouting, him; to violate with nervous hand-movements the physical integrity of these delicious potatoes my mother never fails to cook in just enough juice from the briscuit that they become flavorful but still maintain their firmness, your husband—they slice rather than crush, the potatoes, is what you always said, hey Pop? What I’m saying, Tamar, is when we were young, Judah dreamed of you without ever having met you. When he wasn’t being this weirdo with his nose in arcane scripture even the rabbis couldn’t teach him from, your husband, or writing these articles insisting first that Leviticus was enjambed, and then that it was incorrectly enjambed, he would talk about you; your husband was a romantic above all else, and he would pray to meet you, he lived to meet you, and to raise you, Gurion. Others might have said, ‘Yehuda, he’s a cold S.O.B.,’ but I was his closest friend and I roomed with him, and I knew him the best, I knew it wasn’t for books that he lived, but family, that he studied in order to be better at family; that when he wasn’t arranging various syllables of the ten sephirot for seemingly dubious purposes that turned out would save that girl from—”
My father dropped the fork on his plate and it clanged and he said, “Yuval.”
“What?” Yuval said.
“My son is here,” said my father.
“Yes?” said Yuval.
My father set his hand on Yuval’s and told him something, but quietly, so that I, at the other end of the table, with the other children, couldn’t hear.
Yuval, in full voice, said, “Bobe-mayses what, Yehuda? I saw with my own eyes. Why the whispering?”
“My son is here,” said my father.
“I see him,” Yuval said. “He’s beautiful. Why keep secrets from such a beautiful boy? You keep so many secrets… I still don’t know,” Yuval said to no one and everyone, “what Rebbe Schneerson told him on my wedding day! Imagine! It’s my wedding day, the ceremony is halted by the most important rabbi in the world—the most important man in the world—so that he can whisper something to my closest friend in the world. Do I complain? I don’t complain. Do I expect to hear what it was, this big secret? No. I don’t expect, because this closest friend of mine is a peculiar and highly secretive individual. However… However! Do I hope? Do I dare to hope that this veritable brother of mine will one day tell me, or even hint to me what it was that was so important that my wedding was halted? Yes! I hope. And still: what? Disappointment… And now he says, now he says, ‘Oh…’”
“Gurion is my son,” said my father, “and you’re in your cups, my friend, and in your cups you are expansive.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Yuval, “but this—”
“This is nothing to argue about,” said my father.
Yuval said, “I agree! Why talk me in circles? All I said—”
My father said, “Please.”
My father’s voice is fuller than anyone’s, even Yuval’s, so when it goes quiet suddenly, like it did when he said “Please,” it is normal to notice how shadowed and angly and completely unjolly my father’s face is, how coiled it is, how ready, how unreadable its stories, and it is normal to be shaken. I shook, but I wanted to hear more. When Yuval said the thing about changing around the syllables in the ten sephirot, I knew what he was talking about. The ten s
It is also believed that these aspects correspond to different parts of men’s bodies in such a way as I have diagrammed on the following page.
Yet the ways in which the ten sephirot can be diagrammed are not as important as why so much time is spent on thinking about them by those who would diagram them: They are the ten words that Hashem speaks billions of billions of times per second to hold the world together. Everything that happens gets said by Hashem first, and he says everything into happening with combinations of those ten words. I think that when you combine the sounds of them in a certain order, you get His true name, Hashem’s, the name the Cohain Gadol used to speak in the Temple on Yom Kippur, when there was still a Temple. It is said that if you recite the ten sephirot in certain orders, fast enough, you can affect the world—physically. You can walk on water, maybe, or heal people, or make someone’s head explode. I’d often thought of recombining the syllables myself, but a No! from Adonai would exact swift paralysis on my muscles whenever I’d sit down to try, so I’d never actually tried.
While I shook in the silence after my father’s “Please,” my thoughts about the sephirot led me to thoughts of nice Amit Bar-Sheshet, son of Rolly the trilling cantor, to a story Amit had told me when I was six, and it was that story I meant when I said to Yuval: Were you going to tell about the fire?