A Seat At the Table by Joshua Halberstam

Author:Joshua Halberstam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2013-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

13

He who doesn’t see God everywhere sees God nowhere.

—the Rebbe of Kotsk

Elisha hadn’t noticed the skeletal woman drinking a coffee a few stools away, her wrist slim enough to fit into a Mafioso’s pinky ring. Were there anorexic angels, too? Emaciated angels created by people who stinted when speaking kindly to others, their comforting words expelled from behind half-closed mouths. What about crippled angels? One-armed by-products of the charitable deeds performed by those who donate with one hand behind their backs, their philanthropy a hedge against possible sanctions in the afterlife.

Elisha wished he could spend the rest of the morning right there at Zeitchik’s counter strolling the corridors of the celestial spheres rather than at the crammed table in the yeshiva. How nice it’d be to sip his coffee and visit with the blind angel who’d be waiting for him on a tree stump off the heavenly road.

“Let me tell you my side of the story,” the angel would say as Elisha approached. “Do you have any idea how relieved I am to be finished with that old man? Shlepping him around, day after day, decade after decade, that fat old Mr. Pomposity, that sanctimonious, supercilious, snobbish…better don’t get me started.”

Elisha asked for a refill and rehearsed the conversation he’d have with Katrina that evening. He’d retell the tale of Blind Angel and Katrina would be tickled by the idea of tentative angels battened to the impulsive decisions of humans down here on earth, sympathetic to the notion even our petty actions have cosmic significance. He’d complain again about her concessions to fairy tales, and, to buttress his credibility, quote the levelheaded Kotsker Rebbe: “Can the tzaddik resurrect the dead? No, that’s God’s business. Our job is to resurrect the living.” But Katrina would just shake her head and quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Why was it, Elisha mused, the people who mattered most to him had such tolerance for mystery and magic? He had no good answer to that question, he admitted, and gathering his coat, he bid a good day to the top of Mr. Zeitchik’s head still hidden behind the register.

***

The hours Elisha spent in Boro Park diminished with each passing day, while the hours with Katrina increased with each passing evening. They’d meet before Katrina’s waitressing shift and after, before classes and after, sometimes conspiring to skip school altogether and roam the city’s obscure neighborhoods in search of imported trinkets before settling into a café for a few hours more to dissect God, government, Gogol, and The Godfather.

Katrina dazzled him with her exuberance; her impulsive abandon blazed such contrast to his own pensive sobriety. One school evening, to his embarrassed admiration, she jitterbugged in the student lounge to a Leonard Cohen dirge then insisted on teaching him the steps. One Sunday morning, she recited a continuous run of nursery rhymes the entire train ride from Manhattan and all the way up the steps of

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