The Evil Inclination by Daniel Victor

Author:Daniel Victor [Victor, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 8c5ee8f4-beb3-11eb-8529-0242ac130003
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

30.

As soon as Lev entered the apartment in Red Hook, Angela rushed over and slipped her hand under his belt and into his pants. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, “at least give me a chance to catch my breath!”

“I’m looking for your fringes,” she explained. “I just read Rabbi Dr. Erwon Arkadi’s explanation for the fringes and I want to see yours. I’ve seen them hanging outside other Jewish guys’ pants, for example like with some of the guys you hang out with in the cafeteria, but I want to see them up close.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t wear them.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” she said. “You may not wear them hanging out of your pants, but you wear them.”

“Nope. Don’t wear them. You’ve never seen them on me, have you?”

She took a step back and scrutinized his face. Lev stared back at her, his face open, not hiding anything.

“Lev, I know when you’re fibbing and when you’re not. You definitely wear them. You must take them off before you come here.” She held out her palm. “C’mon, I want to see them.”

He turned away from her and cursed himself for being unable to fool her. It seemed that he could lie to everyone and pull it off, but not to Angela, who was so intimate with deceit that she could not be fooled. The truth was that Lev did wear tzitzis, although he had always worn them with the fringes tucked into his pants where they could not be seen. In fact, all his brothers did the same. The little room off their parents’ bedroom where his mother hung the boys’ Shabbos shirts was where their tzitzis were hung to dry after his mother washed them by hand. The flock of white garments dangled from hangers in a row, drooping from a rod suspended near the ceiling—very much like the rod Angela hung their clothes on in the Love Hotel in Red Hook. The white, four-cornered garments were suspended in order of size, from the tiny ones for Moti to the largest ones for his father, like a brood of albino bats slumbering upside down from the roof of a cave. Whenever Lev needed a clean pair, he grabbed the tzitzis that looked most likely to fit and deposited the dirty pair in a plastic bucket sitting in a corner of the room for that purpose.

Lev wore them every day, but whenever he headed to Red Hook to see Angela, he slipped them off and stuffed them into a side pocket of his backpack.

There was no point in trying to fool her. “Yeah, sometimes I might wear them, but not here.”

“So let me see them.”

“Why?”

“Rabbi Dr. Erwon Arkadi says that the fringes are a special symbol. The fringes are a symbol of all those gazillion commandments you guys have to do. He says they are tied in knots in a special way to remind you of all those gazillion commandments. That’s why I want to see them.”

Lev froze, his stomach roiling.

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