The Holy Read online

  BOOKS BY DANIEL QUINN

  Ishmael

  The Story of B

  Providence:

  The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

  My Ishmael: A Sequel

  Beyond Civilization:

  Humanity’s Next Great Adventure

  After Dachau

  Tales of Adam

  Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Quinn

  All rights reserved

  Published in hardcover by Context Books in 2002

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,

  Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Context Books edition as follows:

  Quinn, Daniel.

  The holy / Daniel Quinn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58195-239-1

  1. Fate and fatalism—Fiction. 2. Middle aged men—Fiction. 3. Midlife crisis—Fiction. 4. Temptation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3567.U338 H65 2002

  813′.54—dc21

  2002010109

  v3.1

  For Bill Hearst,

  whose faith in this book kept me at it for a decade.

  Having conquered these nations, you must utterly destroy all the sanctuaries where they honored their gods—on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree. Topple their altars, smash their pillars, burn their sacred groves, and hew down their idols, and thus blot out all memory of them from these places.

  Deuteronomy 12.2-3

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: One Day the Hand of a God …

  Part I - Look into the Smoke … Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part II - Everybody Seems to be Lost.… Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part III - There is a Road … Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part IV - Three Different Readings Offer Themselves … Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part V - Her House is the Entrance to Sheol … Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue: One Voice Spoke the Truth …

  Tim sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, staring fascinated at the life that teemed within a column of early morning sunlight. It was a special world, that sunbeam—a world you could enter and disrupt but never belong to. The boy passed his hand through it and watched a swarm of golden sparks hurry out of its way, and he imagined them thinking, “What was that, what was that?” But after a moment the excitement subsided, and they resumed their dreamy wandering. Had this astounding event already been forgotten in their world, or would tales of it be told for generations? One day, the hand of a god crashed through the world, sweeping us all into turmoil and panic.…

  In two months—an infinitude of time to him—the boy would enter kindergarten. He understood the significance of this event with great clarity. No one had explained it; he’d worked it out for himself, over the winter. He’d had to, in order to understand the great crime he’d committed just before Christmas. He had told JoJo, the three-year-old next door, that there is no Santa Claus. She had been shattered, heart-broken, and her parents had reacted as if he’d plunged a knife into her body. He was in disgrace for weeks—plenty of time to work it all out.

  It’s important (or perhaps even necessary) to keep small children in the dark about things—big things, little things: all things. It’s important to deceive, to confuse, to pretend ignorance, to avoid a plain answer to a direct question. It’s even important to promote lies where no questions are asked, as in the case of Santa Claus. By divulging the truth to JoJo, the boy had disrupted the plan, had committed a crime of cosmic proportions.

  Everyone collaborated in the deception—even older children. And the boy would soon understand why. As a kindergartener, he would become one of the older children, and the age of secrecy and lies would be behind him forever. This, he was sure, was the threshold he’d be crossing in two months. He would be entering a world where one is shaped by the unfolding of mysteries hidden from the eyes of the very young. Older kids naturally pretended it was nothing—a bore and a drag. This was only to be expected; it was part of the plan. He wondered if he would agree to collaborate with them in the pretense. It would depend on the explanation he was given for it.

  The boy’s hand swam again through the living beam of light, and he thought contemptuously: Dust. His father had told him the sparks that live in the light are particles of dust. An obvious lie. Another obvious lie among multitudes he’d been told.

  For him, the two months ahead seemed like two years.

  He closed his hand gently around a cluster of glowing motes, knowing they couldn’t be captured and taken out of their beam of light. He wondered if they passed through the flesh of his hand to escape or simply flowed around his fingers.

  He opened his hand, his fingers together, and instantly a whole colony of sparkles was snuffed out in a column of shadow within the sunbeam. He turned his hand sideways, and a new generation was born to cavort in the light. But this generation only lived a moment, as some larger shadow outside swept them into nothingness.

  The boy looked up from the floor and was startled to see a man standing at the window. Not exactly a man, maybe, since his massive, heavy-browed head sported snake-like horns, and his skin was strangely mottled. The boy stood up to have a closer look, and the creature outside watched him solemnly, with the eyes of a large, intelligent animal. They stared at each other in stillness and silence, and the boy felt he’d never been looked at with such intensity and penetration.

  The bones of the man’s face molded it into an expression of complete ambiguity—half a thunderous scowl and half an animal’s grin, so that the boy didn’t know whether to be frightened or delighted. The man seemed enormously proud of his colorful, strangely twisted horns, but the oddest thing about the creature—or man, if he was a man—was his clothing. A man with horns somehow shouldn’t be dressed in an ordinary tan shirt and jeans.

  Wanting his mother to come see him, Tim ran to the kitchen and said, “There’s a man outside.”

  “A man?” his mother asked, drying her hands on a dish towel.

  “He’s got a face sort of like an animal and he has horns.”

  Ellen Kennesey smiled indulgently. “There’s no man outside.”

  “There is! He’s standing right outside my window!”

 
“You imagined it.”

  For a moment the boy stared at her, thunderstruck. He’d imagined it? She had never accused him of imagining things when he’d seen a praying mantis or a bull snake or a falling star. But now, for some reason, he was imagining things?

  Then he understood, and his indignation was transformed into a bitter resignation. The creature he’d seen at the window belonged to that infinitely large world of things to be lied about to children. She knew perfectly well what the thing was, but she wasn’t allowed to tell him. She wouldn’t come to his room to look at it, because then she’d be forced to invent still more lies to answer his questions. It was easiest to put him off with a single, unanswerable lie: he’d imagined it.

  At the age of four and a half, he’d learned a profound and unforgettable truth:

  There is a lie to be told about everything.

  CHAPTER 1

  Although only visitors and new members notice it any more, there is a brass plaque on the door of the Herman Litvak Chess Club on North Sheridan Road in Chicago. It reads:

  Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer

  It may be that the club’s founder imperfectly understood the quotation when he chose it. Considering the almost unwavering atmosphere of gloom inside, it appears more likely that he fully intended it to confound and dispirit those who enter there. A sorrowful presence seems to haunt the dark, heavily furnished rooms, and the older members know that this is the presence of Herman Litvak himself, who put a bullet through his brain in an upstairs room one evening in 1940.

  In 1954, in the club’s only political crisis ever, the members voted to apply for a private-club liquor license. The losers predicted with absolute confidence that the place would turn into a hangout for bookies and pimps, but of course they were wrong. The worst that happened was that a few chess tables were replaced by massive club chairs and cocktail tables. Even when it seems that only the drinkers are on hand, a few games of chess are played, if only out of an obscure sense of obligation.

  In effect, it’s a social club for Jewish men of a certain temperament, and those who don’t have it soon find somewhere else to spend their evenings.

  Howard Scheim was an exception. He’d joined in 1991 at the age of sixty-one, a year after his wife’s death, with the idea of renewing a boyhood fascination with the game. After a few nights’ play, he saw it would make as much sense to buy a tennis racket and go out after Boris Becker. It was a different game from the one he remembered, and even the most casual players could crush him in a dozen moves, laughing with embarrassment, as if they couldn’t quite figure out how to throttle down their own power. There was no hope at all of learning from his mistakes; he was just too far outmatched.

  This didn’t drive him away—far from it. To be humbled by so frivolous a mystery delighted him. He gave up playing and became a watcher, and never failed to be joyously astounded when the masters’ moves were completely outside his expectations.

  He knew without thinking about it that some members found him an intimidating figure: Howard the Hulk. There was nothing he could do about that. In his mid-teens, already a giant, he’d gone into the ring with the notion of becoming the next Max Schmeling. The draft board had saved him from getting his brains beaten out, but they were too late to save his face. In repose, it was the face of a thug, an assassin. A hump of scars over his left eye forced it into a sullen wink, and the casual locker-room setting and resetting of his once-delicate nose had given it the look of an outcropping of shattered rock and made him a lifelong mouth-breather.

  In his line of work, there had been times enough when his menacing appearance had come in handy, and he knew well how to enhance it. When he dimmed the intelligent glitter in his eyes, rolled his lower lip out to expose his teeth, and spoke in his throat like a dog, there were few men who wouldn’t take a step back from him, even now. Smiling came more naturally, and anyone who knew him at all knew he was as mild as butter, the sort of man who, born a century earlier, would have buried himself in a study house to pore over the endless mysteries of the Torah.

  What made Howard acceptable—even popular—was the fact that he was a listener. Before his arrival, such a thing as conversation at the Herman Litvak Chess Club was practically unknown. This is because it’s part of the temperament of those who belong there that they yearn to be heard but have no patience for listening. And so they talk—and fall silent as others talk—but there’s rarely any authentic interchange of ideas among them.

  At first they hardly knew what to make of a man like Howard, who not only had things to say but seemed genuinely interested in hearing what they had to say. It was freakish, almost unnatural, like levitating or walking through walls. But it was also refreshing, and the members soon found themselves slyly competing for his attention. A strange subspecies of social interaction blossomed; men gathered in the lounge and sat around talking insurance, football, and the stock market like commuters on a train while waiting their turn at the club’s one listener. None of them would have admitted he was there to talk to Howard the Hulk, but they became edgy if one member seemed to be monopolizing his time. “Hey,” someone would shout, “give the man a break!” Meaning: Give one of us a break.

  It was a rare thing for Howard to buy a drink for himself (which, on his budget, was just as well), and he thought it was very funny to become a social success at his age.

  Aaron Fischer was the only one who wouldn’t compete for Howard’s attention. He didn’t like starting a conversation with the feeling that others would soon be breathing down his neck. So he outwaited them all—a narrow, dainty man with a humorous face, and always impeccably, expensively dressed—savoring his long, expensive cigars and sipping the very special old brandy that was stocked at the bar just for him.

  Aaron was as proud of his patience as other men were of their sexual prowess or business deals. While others hustled, Aaron took his time, and he credited everything to this sublime practice: his long life (he was seventy-three), his good health, and his fortune. He was one of the club’s top players, but drove everyone mad with his interminable pondering of perfectly obvious moves. Legend had it that he’d once spent two minutes and forty seconds considering his response to an opening move of pawn to king four.

  His approach to Howard had been no less cautious.

  “Howard, tell me: Are you a religious man?”

  “Howard, what do you think? Is a Jew who denies God truly a Jew?”

  “Howard, do you think there is meaning to Jewish history—a sort of meaning that the rest of history lacks?”

  “Howard, here is something I wonder about. As Jews, we’re taught that the whole of man’s interaction with God is somehow encompassed by Judaism. But Judaism is only five thousand years old, while mankind is millions of years old. What do you make of that?”

  All these questions and many more like them, Aaron posed over a period of two years, and Howard began to feel he was being covertly interviewed for a job. He even wondered if Aaron was considering him as a match for some widowed or spinster relative. Although he couldn’t grasp the tendency behind the questions (and had never contemplated such things himself), Howard admired the old man for asking them. It seemed like pretty deep delving for someone who, at the age of fifteen, had been an apprentice glove maker.

  Characteristically, Howard would answer these questions with something like, “To be honest, Aaron, I’ve never thought much about that, but I’d be interested to hear what you think.” The old man was well read, a rigorous thinker, and not at all inclined toward simplistic answers. In fact, though he talked for countless hours, Aaron never really answered the questions he asked. He left them hanging in the air, unresolved, and in the end Howard wasn’t sure what Aaron thought about anything.

  Finally, one winter night near midnight, Aaron portentously advanced a pawn in the game he’d made o
f their relationship. He took a sip of brandy, replaced the glass on the table between them, looked up, and said, “Howard, I’d like you to come to dinner at my house tomorrow night.”

  Howard the Hulk, his mouth drooping a little more than usual, stared at him in astonishment as he tried to analyze his reaction to this strange invitation.

  Members rarely socialized outside the club. That’s what the club was for, after all. But it wasn’t just that. Within the club, social and economic lines were recognized but democratically ignored; if Aaron wielded more influence than Howard in club affairs, it wasn’t because he was a millionaire but because he’d been a member for decades and Howard was a newcomer. Aaron’s vote counted for no more than Howard’s, but at the end of an evening, a chauffeured Cadillac whisked Aaron off to his house (or perhaps it was a mansion) in Evanston, while Howard caught a bus south to Ainslee and walked to his second-floor bedroom and bath.

  It wasn’t that wealth daunted him. Howard had seen too much of the world to be impressed by it or by the people who have it. Nevertheless he wondered if his comfortable relationship with Aaron could survive an encounter with his wealth.

  Meanwhile, misunderstanding his hesitation, Aaron was nervously assuring him that his kitchen was strictly kosher and that his cook was a phenomenon of nature.

  “I wasn’t worried about that,” Howard said, amused. “I’ll be happy to come.”

  “I’m afraid I eat at an unfashionable hour, six o’clock,” Aaron said. “Otherwise sometimes I don’t sleep so good. Is that too early for you?”

  Howard decided that, since it was Aaron’s idea, Aaron should do the accommodating. “It is a bit early, for a weekday, Aaron. I keep my office open till five.” For no very good reason, he added to himself.

  “I don’t want you to suffer a hardship for this, Howard. Just the opposite. Is seven okay?”

  “That’ll be fine,” Howard said, understanding now that it was a business deal.