Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander

Author:Nathan Englander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

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Shuli finds the kids on the living-room floor and talks them into forking over a stretch of candy buttons stuck to their paper strip. He sits cross-legged beside them, gnawing away, and thinking about what Miri said. Yes, if God wants you to have it, that’s easy. But what if God doesn’t? What if one is being tested and needs to show God the lengths to which he’ll go?

Shuli ponders it all day, right up until they gather for Havdalah. It’s Nava’s turn to hold the braided candle, and Hayim is in charge of the besamim, passing the cloves under everyone’s noses.

With the blessing done and the wine sipped, Shuli—on purpose this time—spills it into a saucer on the table. Shuli dips the wicks, putting the candle out, and as he does the smell of glim smoke mixes with the cloves and muddles with the taste of sweet wine.

He presses his fingers into the saucer and touches those wine-wet fingertips to his closed eyes, making his weekly wish. He opens them, blinking, the air still cool upon his eyelids, and already he’s looking this way and that, shifty and nervous that Miri has read his mind.

They all wish one another a good week, and then Shuli slips out and goes straight into school. He returns on Sunday morning and Sunday night, facing an empty in-box each time. On Monday, he patrols the sidewalk in front of the yeshiva, waiting for Gavriel. He carries that nice big bag of kosher Paskesz candies, telling himself it’s more than a bribe. It’s a thank-you, and an incentive, and maybe a way to keep Gavriel from eating the treif ones on his own time.

As soon as he sees Gavriel, Shuli races over with the bag, pressing him to create another profile, another e-mail address, to help him lure someone at kaddish.com into writing back again.

“You want me to lie?” Gavriel asks, as he shoves a Sour Stick into his mouth.

“We already lied,” Shuli says. “What’s the difference now? Just eat your candy and make up someone dead.”

And Gavriel does, creating losses, inventing tragedies, great and small, throughout the week. Shuli pops his head into Gavriel’s other classes, pulling him from his studies without hesitation and plopping him down at a terminal in the computer room, sometimes kicking another student out of a chair mid-lesson.

The computer teacher, a woman who looks no older than Gavriel, appears to be having a panic herself. Reb Shuli has seniority, and Religious Studies has primacy, and Shuli knows there’s something about the unbalanced confidence to how he barges in, unapologetic, that make the interruptions seem purposeful and beyond challenge.

As for Gavriel and Reb Shuli’s endless stream of new profiles—which they kept track of in the spiral notebook that holds Eitan’s original instructions—none of the related applications receives a single response.

“They know it’s you,” Gavriel says, matter-of-fact.

How they might know on the other end, Reb Shuli can’t fathom. He asks Gavriel how they can possibly tell the real from the fake.

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