Read Online The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya - Free Book Online

was not a connoisseur of art. He stared at the painting, and at first he saw only the bright-red fruits; it was an old debate precisely which fruit had tempted Khava, the apple, the pomegranate or the peach. The room portrayed in the painting was also familiar to him: the so-called Chamber of the Last Supper was situated directly on top of the tomb of David in the Old City.
    “All the same, the picture speaks of a purely Jewish chastity,” he decided, looking at it. “He has replaced the people with pomegranates, that’s his trick, poor man.”
    Reb Menashe had been born two days after the declaration of the state of Israel. His grandfather was a Zionist who had organized one of the first agricultural colonies. His fatherhad lived for the underground army, the Hagana. The rabbi himself had both fought and dug the land. He was born under the walls of the Old City, by the Windmill of Montefiore, and the first view he remembered seeing from the window was of the Gates of Zion.
    He was twenty when he followed the tanks and entered these gates for the first time. The Old City still smelt of fire and metal. He had scrambled through it, exploring its maze of Arab streets, the roofs of the Christian and Armenian quarters. The Christian holy places of Jerusalem seemed dubious to him, as did many of the Judaic ones. The Chamber of the Last Supper aroused his particular mistrust: it seemed highly unlikely that this secret paschal meeting would have been organized over the bones of the Great King. But David’s tomb itself raised serious doubts. This astonishing world which he so loved, of weak white stone, fluctuating light and hot air, was filled with historical and archaeological implausibilities, unlike the world of bookish wisdom, which was organized with crystal clarity, without approximations or anomalies, rising intelligibly upward with paradoxically logical convolutions of great beauty.
    He had understood for the first time what this land meant for him when he left it. He was young then; he had graduated from university and had been sent to Germany to study philosophy. A year of concentrated study exhausted his interest in European philosophy, torn off from its living roots, which he recognized exclusively in the Torah. This ended the brief period of his academic education, and in the second half of his third decade, he embarked on the traditional path of Judaic science which is more accurately called theology.
    He had married a silent girl who shaved off her vibrant auburn tresses the day before the wedding, and since then hehad enjoyed the harmony which comes from a life whose every detail is regulated with clockwork precision, and from the intellectual rigours of being at the same time both teacher and pupil.
    His world had completely changed: the information which most people receive from radio, television and the secular press passed him by, and he was nourished by the ancient code of Shulkhan Arukh, the table laid for those who wish to partake of the Jewish spiritual heritage, and by the high-voiced clamour of his many children.
    Five years later his first book was published, an exploration of the stylistic differences between Saadia’s commentaries on Daniel and the Chronicles. Two years after this he moved to Tzfat.
    His world was biblically simple and talmudically complicated, yet all its facets connected, and his daily work with his medieval texts cast a shadow of the eternal over the present. Below him at the bottom of the mountain shone the blue Sea of Galilee, and he experienced a deep feeling of gratitude to the Almighty—Christians might call it Phariseeism—for the happy fate that had been granted to him of serving and knowing, and for the holiness of this land which appears to many as a dirty, provincial eastern state, but which for him was the undisputed centre of the world, in relation to which all other states with their histories and cultures could be read only as commentaries.
    The priest had already