Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(117)

Irv looked at his son and whispered, “I don’t have parents anymore.”

The rabbi said that now was the moment, before the casket was taken from the hearse, for Irv to forgive his father, and to ask for forgiveness.

“It’s OK,” Irv said, dismissing the offer.

“I know,” the rabbi said.

“We’ve said everything that needed to be said.”

“Do it anyway,” the rabbi suggested.

“I think it’s foolish to speak to a dead person.”

“Do it anyway. I wouldn’t want you to regret missing this last chance.”

“He’s dead. It doesn’t matter to him.”

“You’re living,” the rabbi said.

Irv shook his head, and continued to shake it, but the object of the dismissiveness shifted: from the ritual to his inability to participate.

He turned to Jacob and said, “I’m sorry.”

“You realize I’m not the dead one.”

“Yeah. But both of us will be at some point. And here we are.”

“Sorry for what?”

“An apology is only an apology if it’s complete. I’m sorry for everything that I need to apologize for. No context.”

“I thought we’d be monsters without context.”

“We’re monsters either way.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a schmuck, too.”

“I didn’t say I was a schmuck.”

“OK, so I’m the schmuck.”

Irv put his hand on Jacob’s cheek and almost smiled.

“Let’s get this party started,” he said to the rabbi, and approached the back of the hearse.

He tentatively put his hands on the casket and lowered his covered head. Jacob heard some of the words—he wanted to hear everything—but he couldn’t make out the meaning.

The whispering went on—past “Forgive me,” past “I forgive you.” What was he saying? Why did the Blochs find it so hard to talk to one another while alive? Why couldn’t Jacob lie in a casket long enough to hear his family’s unspeakable feelings, but then return to the world of the living with what he’d learned? All the words were for those who couldn’t respond to them.

—

It was way too humid, and one extemporaneous speech would have been way too many. The men sweated through their underwear, through their white shirts and black suits, sweated all the way into the folds of the handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They were losing their body weight in sweat, as if trying to become salt, like Lot’s wife, or become nothing, like the man they were there to bury.

While most of the cousins felt obliged to say a few words, none had felt obliged to prepare a few words, so everyone was made to endure, in that humidity, more than an hour of rambling generalities. Isaac was courageous. He was resilient. He loved. And the embarrassing inversion of what the goyim say about their guy: he survived for us.

Max told the story of the time his great-grandfather took him aside and, apropos of no birthday, Hanukkah, glowing report card, recital, or rite of passage, said, “What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want.” Max told him he wanted a drone. The next time Max visited, Isaac again took him aside, and presented him with a board game called Reversi—either a knockoff of Othello, or what Othello knocked off. Max pointed out to the mourners that if one were to try to think of the word that sounded least like drone, it might be Reversi. Then he nodded, or bowed, and returned to his mother’s side. No moral, consolation, or meaning.

Irv, who’d been working on his speech since long before Isaac’s death, chose silence.

Tamir stood at a distance. It was hard to tell if he was trying to repress emotion or generate some. More than once, he used his phone. His casualness knew no limits, there was nothing he couldn’t shrug off: death, natural catastrophe. It was something else about him that angered Jacob and that Jacob almost certainly envied. Why couldn’t Tamir be more like Jacob? That was the question. And why couldn’t Jacob be more like Tamir? That was the other question. If they could meet halfway, they’d form a reasonable Jew.

Finally, the rabbi stepped forward. He cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose, and took a small spiral-bound pad from his pocket. He flipped through a few pages, then put it back, having either committed the contents to memory or realized he’d accidentally brought the wrong pad.

“What can we say about Isaac Bloch?”

He left enough pause to generate some rhetorical uncertainty. Was he actually asking a question? Admitting that he didn’t know Isaac well enough to know what to say?

What can we say about Isaac Bloch?

Quickly, the wet cement of annoyance that Jacob felt at the hearse dried into something to break fists against. He hated this man. Hated his lazy righteousness, his bullshit affectations, his obsessive beard-stroking and Central Casting hand gestures, his too-tight collar and untied shoelaces and off-center yarmulke. This feeling sometimes subsumed Jacob, this unnuanced, swift, and eternal loathing. It happened with waiters, with David Letterman, with the rabbi who accused Sam. More than once he had come home from lunch with an old friend, someone with whom he had been through dozens of seasons of life, and casually said to Julia, “I think we reached the end.” In the beginning, she didn’t know what he meant—the end of what? why the end?—but after years of living beside such a binary, unforgiving person, someone so agnostic about his own worth he was compelled to a religious certainty about others’, she came to know him, if not understand him.