The Visitation

     It was a visitation pure and simple.

     I apologize for using such a schmancy word but there simply is no other way to put it.

     Perhaps I was half-dreaming.  It was, after all, late in the afternoon and the apartment was hot.  So in the way that a warm, lazy, idle mind can drift into whimsy when there is nothing to punct it, I drifted.  And that is when he appeared.  The fact that he seemed as real to me as anyone at that moment is probably just an artifact of the unconscious.  Like sleepwalking or even walksleeping.

     And yet…

     There he was – Hym Yuda of all people, my great-grandfather – sitting there on the other sofa with that familiar face from the photo album and that determined look in his eyes.  For some reason I was not creeped out by his sudden appearance.  At that moment, it seemed quite natural in fact.  As though time had spindled itself and the past and the present come into contact mobiusly, right there in my living room.

     And why not?  If time is going to contradict itself, it has to do it somewhere.  And some time for that matter.

     At least, that was the way I rationalized the appearance of a man who had been dead for a century sitting across from me in my apartment in New York one Sunday in August.

     “How can you be here?” I asked him more out of idle curiosity than awe.

     But he simply shrugged off the question with a flick of his head.  It was a move my mother used make to dismiss an idea.  I think I do it too.

     “Okay then,” I said.  “So why are you here?”

     “I vud like to know vat you tink you’re doing,” he said. 

     The fact that he spoke English – or really a kind of shtetl English – as opposed to Polish or Yiddish or Russian or whatever they spoke back in Vilna seemed trivial at that moment.  I mean, after all, this ghost had just materialized, stepped right out of an old photo, so what was I going to do, give him an ESL test?

     “Doing about what?” I asked.

     “Vy you keep looking at that photograph of me.  I never liked it.”

     The notion that he – by which I mean the image, not the real he – could somehow see me back through the photograph was nuts of course.  But I decided to play along with him in precisely the way I would imagine that psychos humor their own hallucinations.

     “Looking for answers, I guess.”

     “To vut questions,” he asked.

     “I don’t know,” I said and he shook his head in disbelief.

      He seemed to know just who I was too…his son Nachum’s daughter Irene’s kid.  That’s the way he said it, although I was in my fifties at the time and laughed.  But he did not; after all, he was looking at things from a very different angle, coming back from the you-know-what and all through the veil of that photo.

     “I think I’m trying to figure out who I am.  Where I came from,” I added.

     “Why?  Farvos arn?”

     Good question, I thought, and I did not have a ready answer.  In fact, years in therapy had not made it any clearer.  I was down about my life, I suppose, and hoping to find something uplifting in my heritage.  That secret treasure I had heard was given to my family, maybe.  

     The irony is that I had been called a gifted child, which in the lingo of psychotherapy does not mean wonderful.  It means someone who crawls along the razor edge between delusion and disappointment.  Low hopes, high expectations.  It would be bipolar but it is all in the head, not the mood.  No ups and downs, just a steady drift towards aggravation.  The gift is in thinking that I deserved so much while also knowing that I deserved less than nothing.  Charming little paradox there.

     Hours seemed to pass as I reviewed all this in my mind, this life of striving and stumbling, all the high and then dashed hopes, the ego at war with itself.  The sun dipped and the light through the blinds shifted as though in a noir movie.  And all the while, I suppose, Hym Yuda sat there watching, looking.

     I did not tell him all of that, just thought it.  But it did not seem to matter.  He looked at me with those stern eyes and simply said:

     “You’re a real schnook, aren’t you.”

     And he lifted his index finger to make the point.  That was surprising and he actually came more alive in that move.  Not just a ghostly photo anymore but a real live person with a gesture and an attitude.

     “This is what you came to tell me?” I asked, rather irritated.  But his answer was to ask me if I even knew what a schnook was.

     “A schmuck,” I said but from his scowl I saw that this was way off the mark.

     “No.  A schmuck is a guy who steps out of the shower to take a pish,” he said.  “A shnook is someone who flushes the toilet, then steps right back into the shower.  You see what I mean?”

     A comedian, this guy.

     “No,” I said.

     “Figures,” he said.