36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [72]

The seven had done the moving and rearranging for the professor. They had just been able to squeeze Klapper’s huge desk into his new office, but there wasn’t space for much more, only his own green-cushioned chair and a flimsy metal folding chair that he kept folded up near his desk but could, if he wished, set up for a visitor, which he had done when Cass came by this afternoon to discuss the next phase of his independent study on faith. They were supposed to meet every Tuesday afternoon, but the last two Tuesdays, Cass had found the door closed and his knock had drawn no response. The first week, he went to the next office over to ask Marge whether she knew when Professor Klapper would be back.

Marge had been in the navy after high school and seemed to Cass still to have a military no-nonsense-ship about her. She could hold her own with the professors, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who didn’t scare her, even when he got grouchy. “I think it’s just his blood sugar that gets low, and I keep a bunch of those butterscotch candies that he loves on my desk and just hold them out to him when he gets cranky and he calms down,” she’d tell the other secretaries. But she had a soft spot for some of the students, and Cass was her favorite, as good a kid as she had ever met outside the military.

“Isn’t he there?”

He shook his head. She picked up the phone and dialed the professor, letting it ring for a while.

“He might have stepped out to the gents’,” she’d said. “Why don’t you wait here a bit.”

But it was quite a bit more than a bit, since Cass had asked her if that adorable little blonde girl with the wide grin that showed the missing tooth was her daughter, and learned that it was Krista, her daughter Kim-berly’s daughter, and then he was shown more photos-it was like looking at a depressing time-lapse sequence go from bright-eyed, pigtailed Krista, to slack-jawed, slatternly Kimberly, to slit-eyed, triple-chinned Marjorie-and heard how Marge had had to take them in, Krista and Kimberly and Kimberly’s good-for-nothing layabout husband (Cass didn’t learn his name, though he did learn his brand of beer), and build on to the back of her house so that they wouldn’t be out on the street, and now she didn’t know when she would be able to retire, though it was all worth it for Krista, who was the sunshine of her life. After about forty-five minutes, Cass asked whether he should try Professor Klapper’s door again, since he was expected there, and Marge let him go, but not before forcing him to take a handful of butterscotch candies.

Cass hadn’t checked with Marge the next week, when Professor Klapper hadn’t answered Cass’s knock again, but the week after that, Cass had found the office door open, the professor sitting at his desk and reading. Professor Klapper had looked up startled at Cass’s knock, peering at him intently over his bifocals before telling him where he might find the chair, which Cass, after a moment of hesitation, interpreted as an invitation to sit.

“That Moses Maimonides would be highly esteemed within normative Judaism was by no means a foregone conclusion,” Professor Klapper had launched in, even before Cass had finished unfolding the metal chair. “Maimonides, after all, was the rabbi who performed the mixed marriage between the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover and Yahweh. Be that as it may, Maimonides has been pronounced kosher, gathered, as it were, into the folds of the four-fringed garment. Maimonides lived in trying times- indeed, when have great men not? He was a physician who ministered to no less a personage than the Sultan Saladin, and his prescription for the Jewish soul was a large pill of Thirteen Principles that he said all Jews must swallow if they are to merit entrance in the world to come. I myself have always queried whether belief could be prescribed-take thirteen and call me in the morning-but, then, I am by nature querulous.

“The twelfth principle concerns the Messiah, in whose coming we are adjured to believe: ‘He who doubts or diminishes the greatness of the Messiah is a denier in all the Torah.’ And yet he forbids one to think on the time when he shall come: ‘You should not calculate times for him to come, or look in the verses of the scriptures to see when he should come.’ And where does that leave us?”

Cass was well aware by now that these questions were not intended to be answered, but the slim possibility that this one could be the exception, and the professor was awaiting a response, was always enough to set up a raucous commotion in his chest.

“We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah. Is it not extraordinary?”

Cass nodded.

“At the heart of the cold Aristotelian rabbi’s exegesis, the bloodred blossom of antinomian chiasmus. And can you not help but compare it with the observation of the poet who might have been giving voice to his Jewish ancestry when he proclaimed that the only paradise is paradise lost?”

Cass was pretty sure that Professor Klapper was talking about Proust here; but was Marcel Proust Jewish?