Free The Believers by Zoë Heller Page B

succumbed, however temporarily, to the idiocy of faith was terrible enough, he told her. That she should have chosen Judaism in which to dabble could only be construed as an act of parricidal malice. "This is bullshit!" he yelled at one point. "I know you! You're constitutionally incapable of buying into this kind of fairy tale. You never even believed in the tooth fairy, for Christ's sake!"
    Rosa had to smile at that. She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering into synagogue one day and finding her inner Jew. But there it was. Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience , was precisely what made it so compelling.
    In the synagogue now, the service had come to an end. From her seat in the balcony, Rosa watched an old man hobbling out of the sanctuary. He was so bent over with age that he looked as if he were searching for lost coins on the floor. She thought of her father in his hospital bed, still as an effigy on a tomb. After a moment, she lowered her head and began to pray.

CHAPTER
4
    For an hour or so, Lenny and Karla had been urging Audrey to let them take her home so that she could get some rest. Audrey refused to countenance the idea of leaving Joel alone at the hospital overnight, so at last it was agreed that Karla would accompany her mother back to Manhattan to collect some clothes and that Lenny would hold the fort until Audrey returned.
    When Karla and Audrey drew up at Perry Street, Julie was out on the doorstep, beating a rug. "Look at her," Audrey muttered. "I wish someone would put her in a coma."
    "Hello, Aud," Julie called as they got out of the car. "What's the news?"
    Audrey ignored the question. "Got everything disinfected, have you?" she snarled as she swept past.
    "Oh, don't mind me," Julie said, "I like to do it!"
    Inside the house, Audrey and Karla met Colin emerging from the downstairs bathroom, where he had been affixing a floral-scented flush device to the toilet bowl. He was wearing rubber gloves and one of Audrey's old aprons emblazoned with an image of a black fist and the word AMANDLA!
    "Aud," he said, lurching toward Audrey with his arms outstretched. "How is he?"
    "Hello, Col." Audrey swerved deftly past him, leaving Karla to pretend that his proffered embrace had been for her.
    "Oh, she looks terrible," Colin whispered in Karla's ear as Audrey proceeded downstairs to the basement.
    "What's going on then?" Julie hissed, coming up behind them.
    Karla gave her aunt and uncle a brief account of Joel's condition. They dropped their jaws and pressed their hands to their mouths in kabuki mimes of horror and dismay.
    "I just can't believe it," Julie said. "He was as right as rain this morning, wasn't he, Col?"
    Colin nodded.
    "We had a lovely long chat with him, didn't we?"
    Colin nodded again, with less conviction this time.
    "He's been doing too much," Julie went on. "I said to Colin just yesterday, it's not right, the way he rushes around. My friend's husband got cancer last year." She lowered her voice to a whisper. " Cancer of the bottom . And the doctors told my friend it was one hundred percent stress-related. One hundred percent --"
    "I think," Karla interrupted in a quiet voice, "I should go down and see if Mom's all right."
    The basement at Perry Street was given over to Joel's chaotic office. Dirty coffee mugs and tottering ziggurats of books and papers covered most of the desk and a good part of the floor around it. A large framed photograph of Joel shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. hung above the desk, but otherwise the grubby walls were bare. Audrey was sitting cross-legged on the floor, rolling a joint, when Karla came down. Her overcoat, which she had not yet taken off, was puddled around her, like a melted candle.
    Karla