The Book of Paradise: The Behemoth's Terrible Misadventure

I slept in all the following day. Everyone went about on tiptoe so as not to wake me, God forbid. Pop didn’t even dare lift his head; speaking out loud was strictly forbidden. He cast about aimlessly like a shadow. My mama took great pains to make sure that absolutely no one should disturb my slumber. I woke up around dusk. It was already nearly dark in the room. My pop stood in the corner silently reciting God’s benedictions in the midst of his evening prayer.

I rubbed my eyes, let out a great yawn and called my mama over to my cradle. “Mama, could you nurse me, please, I haven’t had a thing all day. You know, I can’t eat while I sleep, after all.” I didn’t need to ask my mama twice and immediately she began to nurse me. All the while she caressed and kissed me like the paragon of mothers.

“Oh, my little kaddish, they’re making your life just miserable. Whoever heard of such a thing: grown people not letting a newborn baby sleep? They make him stay up all night long to tell his stories of Paradise. And you, you wretch”—she turned to my pop, who had just finished with the eighteen benedictions—“you are to blame for it all. What kind of papa are you? You’re a no-good, stone-hearted fraud of a father.”

My pop turned pale. He wasn’t expecting such a condemnation at that moment. He didn’t react at all, acting as if she weren’t referring to him.

I interceded on my pop’s behalf. “Leave Pop alone, Mama,” I implored her. “He’s not guilty of anything. It was me who asked for these folks to be called here so that I could tell them how things are in Paradise. Tomorrow night, God willing, they’ll come again and I’ll tell them more.”

Then I fell back asleep, without even saying “Goodnight” to my mama, that’s how tired I was. I don’t remember exactly what I dreamt that night and I won’t tell you anything I don’t precisely recall.

When I woke up in the morning, the room was full of sunlight. My mama wasn’t at home. She was off milking the goat. Our cat was warming herself on the windowsill. “Here, puss, puss,” I called to the cat. She leapt from the window into my cradle. The cat licked my eyelids and I felt newly born.

The day passed without anything particularly interesting happening. We had a little something to eat, in the afternoon Pop rested a bit, and Mama chatted with some ladies outside. I played with a red button on my coverlet.

In the evening, as usual, my father headed off to shul. This time he didn’t stay long and returned a short while later.

For dinner we had rice porridge. It wasn’t long before the rabbi, his assistant and the town magnate came in with a “Good evening”.

They sat themselves down at the table. The rabbi had grown even whiter since the last night, his juridical assistant even thinner. Only the magnate, Michael Hurwitz, was none the worse for wear. He was sparkling in his gold splendour, nodding affirmatively at everything, and kept repeating his German “sonderbar”.

I seated myself across from the rabbi. The lamp was burning on the table. Mama drew the curtains. Everyone was ready to listen.

My mama, as usual, stood in the doorway. She put her hands to her heart and said: “Now don’t strain yourself, my darling, if you get tired you should take a rest. There’s no emergency, God forbid, so you don’t need to be in such a hurry. And as soon as you feel even a little hungry, let me know so I can nurse you.”

My mama, bless her, was so devoted to me. She looked after me as the apple of her eye.

I rested my head on both my hands and began my story. Everyone around the table sat stock-still, you could hear their hearts beating. I began:

*

As you recall, I had said goodbye to my friend Little Pisser. He flew home and I flew home. I was so tired that I could barely stand. I hardly managed to drag myself to my door.

I collapsed on to my cot and fell asleep. In my dream, King David, Bathsheba, Abishag, the naiads, King Saul and the old healer Genendel were all jumbled together. All that I had seen on King David’s estate appeared there, but helter-skelter. The forms and figures were so mixed up that my dream was more of a nightmare than it had been in real life.

I woke up around four o’clock in the afternoon. I washed up, had a bit to eat, and flew right off to my pal Little Pisser. My friend Little Pisser was still asleep. I sat down in the workshop and waited for him to wake up.

Little Pisser’s pop, Solomon-Zalman the patchmaker, was standing at his big table with a tape measure hanging from his neck and a piece of chalk in his hand. He was marking up a pair of wings that had been brought in for repair.

At their benches sat the two tailor angels, Barney and Seymour, both engrossed in their work. The needles were genuinely flying in their hands. I tried to count the number of stitches each made per minute but it was impossible. I kept losing count.

Little Pisser’s mama, the angel Hannah Deborah, came in from the bedroom alcove. She sat down next to me and tried to extract from me where we, that is, Little Pisser and I, had disappeared to. She had thought goodness knows what had happened to us. She very nearly went to the Paradise Police and raised a stink to file a missing angel report.

I didn’t know if I could tell her the truth. I had completely forgotten to get my story straight with my friend Little Pisser about the whole affair.

I sat there awhile tentatively, shilly-shallying. Finally I came to the conclusion that I was under no obligation to tell her the truth. If Little Pisser wanted to, he could tell it. So I played dumb, telling her that I hadn’t seen Little Pisser for around three days. And, as a matter of fact, I had come over to find out if he had, God forbid, taken ill.

“Taken ill!” The angel Hannah Deborah clasped her hands together. “May only my enemies take ill! The last thing I need is for Little Pisser to be sick. A mother’s troubles…”

She kept trying to give me the third degree, but when she saw that I was sticking to my story, that I was no clairvoyant and had no crystal ball, she shook her head and returned to the alcove. Little Pisser’s pop was done marking up the pair of wings. The angel Seymour had just finished with another pair and was preparing them for fitting.

Little Pisser’s pop flew off to his customer, the angel Henzel the miller, to try on the wings. He was barely out of the door when Seymour burst into song:

The game of love’s not worth your time, 
Now angels, I swear it’s true, 
If you please, take my advice 
And let no trouble come to you. 

For love is grief, oh, it’s a plague, 
That robs you all delight, 
It never lets you work by day, 
Or go to sleep at night.

Then the angel Barney, the other journeyman tailor, who was always at daggers drawn with Seymour, was, for the moment, in full agreement with his rival. He joined in, quavering:

Its joy may glimmer for a while 
With stars and birds and daisies, 
Then it runs off a thousand miles 
And leaves you to go crazy.

But going crazy’s not worth your time, 
Now angels, I swear it’s true, 
Better to say: to hell with love, 
Than let it get hold of you.

This song made me terribly sad. I thought back to the moonlit night when I saw these two infatuated tailor angels bump into one another on the sidewalk. They didn’t even know that I had seen them and heard their conversation, I thought. But still, that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

From the alcove, Little Pisser’s sister, Ethel, the lovely angel with the rosy wings, began to sing. She apparently was none too pleased with the lessons drawn by these two unlucky-in-love tailor angels. Her song was sanguine and spirited and her voice was as sweet as honey:

You came to me in my dreams, 
My golden one, my treasure, 
And gave to me a golden ring 
To remember you forever.

The ring is of the finest gold, 
On my finger I wear it proud, 
I showed it to my dearest friend 
And said to her aloud:

This is the ring my true love bought, 
An angel with sparkling eyes— 
And if my parents would consent, 
Into his arms I’d fly.

And in his hold I would remain 
As ages come and go, 
Until my braids, now raven black, 
Turn white as winter snow.

Who is to say which of these was right, I thought. These guys claim one thing and then Little Pisser’s sister comes along to assert just the opposite. When I grew up, I concluded, I’d know the answer for sure.

Seymour the angel sighed deeply. He was thinking about the Paradise shopkeeper’s daughter and it tugged at his heart strings. I saw for myself how a tear dropped from his eye on to a broken wing on the workbench.

Barney the angel was filled with envy for his rival over the shedding of this tear. He thought long and hard about the Paradise shopkeeper’s daughter and squeezed his eyes until he, too, successfully extracted a tear.

He shot a victorious glance at Seymour the angel. His glance said: “You think you’re the only one sacrificing tears for the Paradise shopkeeper’s daughter? Not by a long shot!”

This apparently got under Seymour’s skin. He hung his head, picked up the pace of his needlework, and sang:

Although I know you mocked me, love, 
And with my heart you toyed, 
Still I ramble through the streets at night, 
And know no peace or joy.

From the moon and throngs of stars above, 
Your voice rings in my ear. 
I know I’ll never feel your touch, 
Though I’d die for you, my dear.

Barney the angel stepped back from his worktable. Seymour’s song had unnerved him. He felt that if Seymour were to sing even one more verse, he, Barney the angel, would not be able to contain himself. He would grab the pressing iron and flatten Seymour’s skull.

Luckily, Seymour’s thread ran out. The song had only two verses and Barney the angel settled down. That is, you might say, he seemed to settle down. God only knows what was going on in his heart; from the outside it was impossible to tell.

Little Pisser finally woke up. He came into the workshop and was very glad to see me. He ran over and hugged me as if it had been ages since we had last seen each other. “Have you been here long, Samuel Abba?” “I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour, Little Pisser. You got, no evil eye, quite a snooze in…”

The two of us headed over to the open window and looked out. On the pasture fields outside, the Behemoth was grazing. The three barefoot herdsmen who watched over him were playing a round of gin rummy.

“That Behemoth,” I said to my friend, “gets fatter and fatter every day. By the time the Messiah comes, he’ll be so fat that they won’t be able to move him out of there.”

Little Pisser kept quiet. We watched as the angel Hasia strolled past the Paradise pastures. She was in her ninth month and every evening she took a walk through the Paradise pastures to get some fresh air.

“What is she doing in that red pinafore, Little Pisser?” I asked my friend. “If the Behemoth sees red, something terrible, God forbid, could happen.”

“Oh, that’s true, that’s true,” Little Pisser agreed, and we both motioned with our hands to signal the pregnant angel that she ought to turn back while there was still time.

The angel Hasia, however, seemed not to take the hint. She continued her meandering, all the while getting closer to the spot where the Behemoth was grazing.

The Behemoth spotted the red pinafore and his eyes lit up. Here it comes, we thought, he’s going to pounce on the angel. We thought wrong, however. Indeed, the Behemoth was no admirer of the red pinafore. But, to our great astonishment, he kept his wits about him. Apparently he was of the opinion that he was not just any bull: he was the Behemoth. And it would not do at all for him to get worked up over a little bit of red like your run-of-the mill dumb ox.

I was rather impressed by his composure. The Behemoth kept tugging at the grass and paid no mind to the foolish angel in the red pinafore.

Yet, a catastrophe was still in store. The angel Hasia wasn’t the sharpest angel in Paradise. One might say that she was more of a lummox than the Behemoth. When she got even closer, barely a few steps away from the grazing Behemoth, she stopped to observe him as he chewed away on his cud with relish. She stood there wide-eyed for a while, admiring his appetite.

The three barefoot herdsmen were busy bickering over their cards. One argued one way, the second said another, and the third insisted quite the contrary. They were so absorbed in their arguing that they didn’t notice that the pregnant angel had walked right up to the Behemoth and was now stroking his neck.

“Let her,” the Behemoth thought, “let her pet away to her heart’s content. It would be better, though, if she took off that red pinafore.”

But as Little Pisser’s mama, the angel Hannah Deborah, says: “Fools rush in…” The pregnant angel didn’t realize just how magnanimous the Behemoth was being. She continued to pet and stroke him and then, suddenly, bent down and whispered in his ear: “The Messiah’s on his way!”

The Behemoth’s entire hefty body began to tremble. “The Messiah’s on his way!” That would mean that they were going to come after him, to slaughter him and slice him into pieces and roast his flesh. The tzaddikim would dip their hunks of challah into gravy made of his drippings, gorging on his flesh and savouring his deliciousness: “My, it’s heavenly, the taste of Paradise!”

Then the Behemoth went berserk. “The Messiah’s on his way!” Danger was imminent, he had to escape, save his hide, elude the slaughtering knife.

The Behemoth, who was just an ox after all, was unaware that the pregnant angel Hasia only meant it as a joke. Until the Messiah was actually on his way, he still had plenty of time to graze on the pastures of Paradise… All at once he dropped his head, snatched up the pregnant angel with his horns, and set off running full steam ahead.

Little Pisser and I raised an alarm. We shouted at the top of our voices: “The Behemoth is on the loose! The Behemoth is on the loose!”

The three herdsmen leapt to their feet and started whistling and chasing after the raging, runaway ox. The angel Hasia, flailing, held on to the horns with such a shrieking that everybody and his cousin came out running. They asked one another: “What’s going on? What happened?”

“The Behemoth took a pregnant angel on his horns and ran off.”

“We’ve got to chase after him!” “We have to catch him and bring him back!” “Forget the pregnant angel, the Behemoth is what matters. What would the tzaddikim do without the Behemoth when the Messiah comes?”

An out-and-out chase was under way. Anyone with a pair of wings, no matter how old, took off flying.

The unbridled Behemoth, however, kept running like a thousand bats out of hell. No doubt, in his eyes he could see before him the flash of the butcher’s knife that they would use to slit his throat. He was escaping the “Great Repast” for which the Messiah was supposed to prepare the Behemoth’s own flesh to serve the tzaddikim.

The pregnant angel struggled to hold on to his horns. She flailed her arms, she hollered, she swooned, she came to and swooned again.

We chased after the Behemoth. The three barefoot herdsmen led the way and behind them were angels with beards and without. The only little kid angels who chased alongside them were me and my friend Little Pisser.

Some angels ran out of steam. They took time out in the middle of the chase, tried to catch their breath and wiped the sweat from under their wings before flying back home.

“He’s got grit, that Behemoth.” “Have you ever seen anything run like him? He’s faster than the fastest hare in Paradise.”

“That dumb broad scared the daylights out of him. They ought to take her outside the shul and give her a spanking so that she’ll learn never to monkey around like that again.”

That was the way the angels talked amongst themselves as they headed home. But the Behemoth was still on the run and we kept after him.

The Behemoth left quite a bit of damage in his wake. He ran over gardens and newly sown fields, trampling everything. He knocked down a couple of little angel kids who were playing “Red Rover”.

An old angel who was standing on the outskirts of a village playing a hurdy-gurdy got such a blow that he made several somersaults in the air before landing on the ground unconscious. It took great effort to bring him back to his senses.

“Look, Little Pisser, he’s heading west, towards the border of Gentile Paradise.”

“I see that, Samuel Abba, I see that. If only there were better news to report.”

The evening began to darken. The Behemoth chase became even more frantic. He had to be caught before nightfall. Or so we thought. The Behemoth, however, thought otherwise. He concluded that once it was dark, the angels could turn the world upside down but they’d never catch him.

The night cast its shadow over the fields and the roads. And, as if just for spite, the moon didn’t appear in the sky. There was no sign of a single star. It was total darkness, you couldn’t see the nose of the person next to you. All you could hear was the swift beating of wings and the fearsome bellowing of the Behemoth.

“Where does he get his energy?” an angel gasped, short of breath. If I’m not mistaken, it was Hillel the nightwatchman. “Where, you ask?” someone responded with a laugh. “He hasn’t stopped grazing since the days of Creation, you think he hasn’t been saving his energy?”

The Behemoth raged on like a whirlwind over the fields of Paradise. He carried the angel on his horns, her red pinafore fluttering like a flag.

“You see those green lights up ahead, Samuel Abba? That’s the border of Gentile Paradise. He better not have got it into his head to cross the border. That would be a catastrophe.”

“He’ll probably get scared and give up.” I tried to say something hopeful to my friend, even if I didn’t believe it myself. Can you be sure that an enraged Behemoth will play by the rules?

I wondered. What does a beast know of borders? What’s the difference for him between a Jewish and a Gentile Paradise?

The lights at the border were getting closer now. We could hear the bells of the Orthodox church ringing near the frontier. The Behemoth carried on with wild momentum, heading closer and closer to the border crossing.

The pregnant angel, still clutching the Behemoth’s horns, had no strength left to scream. Her raspy voice jangled like a bell. Now you could just barely hear the creak of a groan coming from her.

The three herdsmen who had been charged with watching the Behemoth were as pale as a piece of chalk. What would they do if the Behemoth, God forbid, were to cross the border into Gentile Paradise? All indications were that this was where things were heading. The bells of the Orthodox church rang out: bing-bong, bing-bong.

The Behemoth sprinted and bounded so hard that he was nearly frothing. The border was right there; you could clearly see the Gentile Paradise Border Patrol angels with their blue eyes and blond hair. They wore large jaunty boots and stood leaning against their lances.

“Little Pisser, what’s going to happen?” “A catastrophe!” my friend Little Pisser moaned. “It’s a catastrophe, Samuel Abba.”

The Behemoth with the pregnant angel atop his horns crossed over the border. Several gentile angels tried to block the way, but he leapt over them and kept running.

Our angels, that is to say, the Jewish angels, came to a halt at the border, unable to pursue the Behemoth any further. That is, they would have wanted to, but the gentile angels would by no means allow it.

We touched down below, sad and chagrined. We didn’t know what to do. We stood looking across the fields where the Behemoth had run off and disappeared.

“Maybe they’ll catch him?” said an angel. “And if they do,” another answered him, “what good is that to us?”

“They might even improperly slaughter him and render him unkosher,” a third said.

“He’s a pretty fat beast, our Behemoth, no evil eye. They’d make quite a saint’s feast out of him.”

“Our holy tzaddikim will be left with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. They’ve been sharpening their teeth their whole lives for this and now—no more Behemoth.”

“Bite your tongue!” the angel Henzel replied angrily. “What do you mean ‘no more Behemoth’? He still exists after all! He’s just gone into Gentile Paradise and now we’ve got to get him back from there.” Henzel the angel stroked his sparse beard, determined to come up with a scheme to extricate the Behemoth. “What can be done, Mr Henzel?” asked a short little angel with a thick beard. “Suggest something, Mr Henzel.”

The angel Henzel didn’t answer. He walked straight over to the Gentile border guard and started discussing the matter, partly in their language, partly in Yiddish, and the rest he expressed with his hands. “Nashi Behemoth,” Henzel began, gesturing to all of us on our side of the border, “went off and escaped into vashi ray.” He pointed vigorously towards their Paradise.

“Chto?” Vasil Angelenko, staff sergeant of the Gentile Border Patrol, responded uncomprehendingly.

“Nashi Behemoth do vashi ray,” Henzel the angel attempted to clarify, gesticulating with his hands to show exactly where our Behemoth entered their Paradise.

The Gentile Border Patrol all burst out laughing. Staff Sergeant Vasil Angelenko twisted the ends of his moustache and then barked out harshly: “Poshel von, zhid parkhatiy!”

The “dirty Jew” just addressed, Henzel the angel, shuddered at this order to “beat it”. We all stood there crestfallen, our wings dropped at our sides.

From the fields of Gentile Paradise we heard a sudden “Hurrah!” and a peal of laughter. The gentile angels, it seemed, had successfully stopped the Behemoth.

We stood on our side of the border and listened to the gentile cheers. In the chests of each of us, our hearts pounded like clocks gone haywire.

The angel Hillel the nightwatchman sighed deeply. You could have heard his sigh from seven miles off.

The three barefoot herdsmen stood as if slapped in the face. How would they respond when they were brought in for their comeuppance?

“So this is how you bastards take care of the Behemoth?” And the tzaddikim would spit right in each of their faces and with good reason, too. They were just dying for a round of gin rummy, weren’t they… and while they played, the catastrophe occurred.

The laughter emanating from the fields of Gentile Paradise grew louder. Each of us could picture them, parading the Behemoth into a Gentile Paradise paddock. They would put the pure and kosher beast by a single trough alongside their pigs. Woe to those who lived to see the day!

“Goodness knows what will happen,” Henzel the angel said to no one in particular. “They might go and slaughter the Behemoth with their unkosher knives. What will our holy tzaddikim say about that? A fine kettle of fish that would be to have the great feast with no Behemoth. Mercy me, tell me what to do, angels?”

“Tell you what to do! That’s easier said than done.” The night was now completely dark. The angels with their downcast wings stood by the border and, frankly, didn’t know where to turn.

“You know what?” said one of the barefoot herdsmen. “Let’s light a fire so we can warm ourselves up a bit while we consider what to do and how we should disclose the matter to the rest of Paradise.”

Everyone appreciated the plan to light a fire. It was, as I said, the middle of the night now, and we were all shivering. The three herdsmen gathered kindling and lit the fire and we all sat around it. Everyone was scratching his head, thinking and figuring out what should be done. “What do you say, Little Pisser?” “What can I say, Samuel Abba? It’s all pretty, pretty rotten.” “Now they’ve got the Behemoth and we’re left with bubkes, Little Pisser.”

“We’ll have to do without the Behemoth, Samuel Abba. When the Messiah comes, the Leviathan will be served. And at any rate, the meat of the Leviathan is tastier than Behemoth meat.”

The angel Henzel, who had overheard our conversation, was outraged. He became apoplectic and launched into a whole sermon. Punctuated by fits of coughing, he said:

“So, the youngsters are already willing to let them keep the Behemoth there in Gentile Paradise. What’s that, we should let them have our Behemoth? For millennia we have tended him, and for what: to let them make a feast of their own? As if they don’t have enough pigs there, they need our Behemoth to boot? The world may be brought to its knees, it may be hell and high water—you hear what I’m telling you: hell and high water—but the Behemoth will be returned to us!”

My friend Little Pisser and I were frightened. We tried to splutter out a response: “Don’t be angry, Mr Henzel, sir! We didn’t, God forbid, mean anything bad. We wanted… We were just saying… You see, Mr Henzel?”

But once Henzel gets fired up, it’s very hard to calm him back down. He stood inflamed over the fire, gesticulating with his hands, ranting, sermonizing, droning away like a mill wheel. No one understood a word he was saying.

All of a sudden he flapped his wings, blowing out the fire that flickered in the field. He shouted shrilly: “Rise up, angels! Why are you sitting here like a bunch of old ladies around the fire? Let’s wake up all of Paradise. Let’s raise the alarm. Let’s defy danger! Woe to all my years that I have lived to see such a day.” We all stood up, spread our wings and flew off. Henzel the angel flew ahead with all of us behind him. With a fearsome flapping of his wings he yelled: “I’ll be damned if we let them have the Behemoth! The Behemoth is ours, we shall bring him back to our Paradise by any means necessary…”