I begin my day by blotting out the names of my enemies.

It’s barely 5 a.m. in the East Village. Already the nutty odors of red and orange curries are rising from the line of Indian restaurants below my apartment. They are as fanatical in their preparations as I am in mine, though I hope for the sake of their many children that they enjoy more lasting results.

I work according to custom. At the request of the vengeful God of Israel, I begin with Amalek, desert murderer of the slow and the elderly. With a needle-sharp turkey feather and a curling, arthritic hand, I write his name in precise Hebrew letters. Dipping the feather once again in black ink, I blot the name away. The Jews are safe for another twenty-four hours.

I am a sofer, a writer of the sacred letters of the Torah. This is my job.

Today I add to my enemies list the name of Rabbi Yakov Mott, a famous Hasidic rebbe from Brooklyn to whom I owe a great deal of money. Two days ago he appeared here, in person, at the door of my East Village apartment after I failed to return daily phone calls from his disciples. I should have recognized him through the door. It’s not easy to be stealthy when you weigh 270 pounds and travel with seven black-hatted bodyguards.

“Pardon the interruption,” he said, when I opened the door.

“It’s no interruption,” I said. Then I slammed the door closed and backed away.

“Reb Ezra,” he said respectfully, “We must have a conversation.” At the same time one of his assistants was leaning against the door so hard that the hinges trembled. I leaned back. “Now is not a good time,” I said.

“Perhaps your phone is broken?” he said from behind the door.

“Yes, I’ll have to check it,” I answered, double-bolting the door. You can’t be too careful with rabbis.

“Reb Ezra, this is silly. We only want to speak with you,” he offered. Meanwhile I was measuring the distance to the fire escape, and the possibility that more black hats would be waiting for me at the bottom. Have you ever seen a seventy-year-old man flee for his life? It is not a dignified sight.

“This is not over,” he said. “You owe us, and we will collect what is owed. Gut shabbes,” he added. Then he and his companions were gone. I looked out the peephole at the empty hallway for a long time.

Perhaps I should explain. My name is Ezra Glick, and I am the finest Torah scribe in all the vast Jewish state of New York and Northern Jersey. From the cranky hasids in Borough Park to uppity Modern Orthodox of the Upper West Side to the investment-banking, nose-jobbed Central Park Reformim, if you want the most beautiful and sacred Hebrew letters, you come to me. You make the journey to a tiny apartment in the East Village, where Ezra Glick, sofer s’tam, shares the second-floor of an apartment building with a health food co-op and a neo-punk band named Chemical Marriage.

But lately I have been experiencing, let’s say, a problem.

Three years ago I contracted with Rabbi Yakov Mott, son of Rabbi Yosef Mott, son of Rabbi Avraham Mott, to provide a new Torah scroll for him and his particularly zealous band of followers. They have been paying in monthly installments and I have been writing dutifully, until recently.

The siyyum—the grand celebration of the delivery of the Torah scroll—is set for this Thursday, the fiftieth anniversary of their arrival in America. Rabbi Mott and his Brooklyn gang will shut down whole city blocks, singing and dancing while each strapping, bearded man adds a dot of ink to the final letters of this sacred text.

The problem, you see, is that my letters have begun to vanish. Disappear from the page.

I am not speaking metaphorically. I mean quite literally vanishing, as if I were writing in invisible ink, or in the language of ghosts.

How quickly depends on the letter itself. A resh disappears as soon as I finish the stroke, as if it were never there. An ayin, for reasons I don’t understand, lingers, tantalizes. Then it’s gone.

The parchments, mostly completed, are stacked on the kitchen table amidst a landscape of half-finished coffee cups, empty whiskey glasses, and bottles of pills. But no matter, I can’t finish. I can’t finish. I am being punished.

The first step was to check my ink. What is man but the sum of his materials? My ink, so very kosher, follows the same arcane recipe perfected in the Talmud for soferim past and future. Gallnut powder. Copper sulfate. Gum arabic. Carbon and water. These last two the same molecules that bind together to form all organic things. Is that any surprise? Why would the letters be composed of anything less than our own elements?

I have been cooking ink for thirty years, and it’s a precise process, trying to achieve a consistency that is thinner than stew, yet more viscous than water. I use my own kitchen—the ink is more necessary to my life than food. I make a black so dark no light escapes. And bonded together so strongly it would no sooner leave the parchment than God Himself would withdraw from the world. Or so I thought.

I sat in my tiny kitchen and tested each ingredient, especially the gum arabic, the sticky substance that binds the ink parts to each other and thus to the page. I looked at the cooked ink in its final form. There was nothing wrong—everything was as it had been for the past thirty years. I took a coffee mug full of ink and splashed it on some parchment; it stuck. I had performed the same test yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. The splashed ink, like a Rorschach test, spread out and blackened the parchment as all my ink had done for the three decades since I first took on this difficult, God-loved profession.

This was not the time to be shy. I plunged wrist-deep into the pot of ink, still hot. I rubbed my black fingers on my forearms and painted stripes, or tefillin. The ink stuck to my skin, to my hair follicles. It stuck to my face and darkened my beard.

I stood in the kitchen rubbing myself with ink for so long that my beautiful Russian Jewish prostitute Miri yelled, “Come to bed!” and with a shake of her delicate wrist dangled her panties in the doorway. I said, “Start the meter, I’ll be there in a minute.” But a half-hour later I was still in the kitchen. That cost me a good chunk of the rabbi’s money, let me tell you. Over the last six months, Miri and I have become quite close (in the context of a capitalistic sexual relationship) but she’s a businesswoman and she doesn’t give freebies.

When I finally did come to the bedroom Miri put down her Pirke Avot, the one I translated into English and hand-wrote for her in a little notebook to fit in the pocket of her most revealing summer outfits. She rolled over, naked and skinny, filling the same space where my beloved Anna used to sleep. When Miri saw me she said, with her harsh Moscow accent, “You weel not touch me with those hands.” I looked at my skin, purple as a blueberry picker and greasy as a mechanic. It took another half-hour to scrub myself clean, and she charged me for that, too.

I always have been, and continue to be, a man of needs. My wife of thirty-nine years, Anna of blessed memory, put up with all the tsuris and difficult moments one sofer can generate, and stayed with me, though she wasn’t above throwing dishes to make her point, either. I am seventy-one now, I have seniority and can offer counsel, according to the Talmud (though who would take it?). Anna and I loved each other like husband and wife each day of our life together, even when I climbed into her hospital bed on the day of her death, eleven months ago.

After, I could not do without a woman’s companionship. So having recited Kaddish and shoveled dirt into Anna’s grave, I went to Brighton Beach and found myself a Russian-for-hire.

Let me explain something: when a man gets to be my age he starts to feel some nostalgia for the Old World, even if he’s never been there himself. So I took the subway to Brooklyn to find the kind of woman my grandfather would have fucked. I met her on a dingy corner outside a bodega: Miri, eighteen years old, tall as an exclamation point and wearing a pair of silver hot pants so small you could send them back to Russia with a single postage stamp.

I needed answers. I poured my newly cooked ink into several bottles and took the subway sixty long blocks to Yossel Mintz’s house. When I banged on the door of the Mintzes’ apartment, Yossel’s sweet pious wife answered. The odor of challah and greasy cholent wafted into the hallway. Two of their many children (Five? Six? Who can keep track?) hung onto her legs and buried their faces in the folds of her long skirt.

“Is he here?” I demanded.

“Yes,” she answered, and I tapped their mezuzah and hurried past her into their apartment, which has all the features of a railway car, the same narrowness and poor light. In the apartment’s last room sat Yossel, who bought my ink because he had no room in his modest dwelling to mix his own, as well as no talent for it. I found him at his work desk, squinting under a lamp and surrounded by holy books on all sides. After twenty years of effort and earnest davening he still could not grow a beard that covered even half his pale jaw.

I had interrupted him halfway through the long Aramaic of a ketubah. Yossel made his letters correct in all their halachic requirements, no one could argue it, but they were dull and without life. His final chet reached a yud’s length below the other letters, as required, but did not yearn to reach that point. A marriage scribed in his hand would lack all passion.

“Ezra,” he said, “I didn’t order any . . .”

I dropped my carton of ink on his desk. I grabbed a bottle of ink and pulled the cork. It made a popping sound like cheap champagne. “Write!” I said.

Yossel just sat there, looking at me. “Do I have to dip the ink for you?” I said. “Write!”

Yossel obligingly dipped his feather into my ink. On a scrap of paper he made a yud, the smallest letter.

“More.”

He made another yud, extended it, slanted it into the first arm of a shin. The ink stayed on the page, but it was just shapes. No resonance, no gematria. This wouldn’t tell me anything.

I grabbed his arm. The feather jerked and made a pinprick in the sheet.

“Write Torah!” I said.
“But . . .”
“Write Torah!”

From the bookshelf he pulled down a roll of parchments tied together with baker’s twine. One of Yossel’s sons ran in, tzitzis flopping. When I glared at him he squeaked and ran out.

Yossel spread a square of parchment on his desk, opened his tikkun. He moved as if every movement were a weight. Then he mumbled through his brachas, head down. I grabbed him by his collar. “Write!” I said.

He selected two lines from Parshat Noah, the story of warning and flood. Yossel began a flurry of writing, touching his ear and cheek, and glancing out the window, which had a view of an alley and a brick wall. Even with this limited view, he could see that the day was ending and shabbes would soon arrive. He hurried to finish the line.

I grabbed the parchment from under his quill and held it under his desk lamp. Yossel ran out of the room and off to shul. I looked at his clumsy letters. They stuck to the page. I shook the page. They stuck to the page. I lifted the parchment to my lips and tasted the letters, tried to lick them away. But when I put the parchment down the letters were there, fastened to the page, as if engraved with blood.

I sat down at Yossel’s tiny desk—a humiliating feeling. I took his quill, dipped it in the ink. I wrote the name of Noah, who survived a disaster only God could dream up. But for me he was a ghost. As soon as I finished the letters they disappeared, as if the parchment itself had been purified by flood.

I left all six ink bottles for Yossel, paying generously for his time. As I headed through the narrow apartment to the door Yossel’s wife asked, Would I please stay for shabbes dinner? They would sing zmiros, she said, in that nasal Ashkenazic accent that makes every word sound like a shmear of chicken fat. “I’m not fit for company,” I said, and I left their apartment to its smells of thick bread and young Mintzes.

The Hebrew letters, the rabbis teach us, have no inherent loyalty to paper. Nor even to ink. They exist independently of these things, independent of all physical objects, independent of even the concept of writing them down. We hear, for example, about the story of Rabbi Hananya, who had the misfortune to live during one of the more brutal Roman periods. For the crime of teaching Torah, he was bound in a Torah scroll (a wet scroll, to increase the length of his suffering) and set on fire. As he burned, his students (who could not take their eyes off their teacher, even in his torture) asked, “Rabbi, what do you see?” “The parchment is burning,” he replied, “but the letters escape. They fly toward the heavens.”

It was not always like this. As a young man I had apprenticed myself to an old rabbi who had taken to making a living, if you could call it that, as a scribe. As a leader of men, Reb Menachem Schmidt was a failure. Where he wanted to go, people would not follow. Maybe the Jewish world was not ready for Reb Schmidt. Maybe he would have found his place in the pop-mysticism revival of the last few years, written books, gone on a publicity tour. But the truth is that Reb Schmidt was probably not made for an earthly moment.

When I found him, he was working in a tiny religious bookshop in Queens. He did not own the bookshop, nor did the bookshop owner pay him to be there. Twice a day he shuffled down the street and came back with two cups of coffee: one for himself and one for the bookstore owner, an old reedy Jew who never moved from behind his counter.

Anna and I had just married and moved into our East Village apartment. I had dreams of being a painter, and Anna supported us with a job as a secretary for a Japanese importing company with an office in Manhattan. Mostly I didn’t paint; I wandered bookstores instead, moving from borough to borough. As a way of passing time it seemed more productive than facing the canvas or drinking or going to the track.

I encountered Reb Schmidt in the corner of the store, in front of a motley history section. He sat on a low stool—he was quite short—and, leaning over a small typewriter table, wrote one tiny Hebrew letter after another. This was his studio. He wrote his tiny letters not out of artistry but of practicality; his entire income, I learned, stemmed from writing klafim for tefillin and mezuzot, a job which demands compressing long verses of text into the smallest spaces. At first, the letters looked like nothing but spots of black over and over again. But after many hours looking over Reb Schmidt’s shoulder—he did not acknowledge, nor discourage, my presence—I learned to read them easily and from a distance, a birdwatcher finding rare creatures in the forest.

After four more days and no progress in completing my duties, I did the unthinkable: I refused to let Miri in the apartment.

She came at the scheduled time, nine p.m., after the first hour of sit-coms and before the evening news. I had not seen her, nor anyone else, in days. A dozen inkpots were spread across the living room floor, full and dark, as if a thick black rain had been dripping through the ceiling. I had brewed batch after batch, but no change. I had even resorted to buying ink—something I have not done in years—from a sad little Judaica store on the Lower East Side like the one in which I had met Reb Schmidt so many years before. But nothing written in my hand would stay. I had parchments, words, and ink, but no longer had the capacity to bind them all together.

When I didn’t respond to the doorbell, she knocked hard on the door. There’s something intimate about knocking. A doorbell just floats through the air, but when someone knocks, knuckles tapping on your door, you can’t help but believe that there is a living, thinking person who wants to see you, even if it turns out they are just delivering a package.

I shuffled to the door, joints stiff from days of useless motion. The walls buzzed with the noise of amplifiers—Chemical Marriage gearing up for a late-night practice session.

I looked through the peephole and saw Miri, wearing a puffy Soviet-era blouse and tiny jean shorts. She had artfully opened the top button of her shorts, and was pointing to the spot. Free advertising. Through the arciform glass of the peephole she looked curved and wondrous, a Russian mermaid.

“Go away,” I mumbled.

She looked into the peephole, eyeball bulging (you can’t see inside a peephole, but people do it anyway) and then stepped back again, one hand on hip.

“Open!” she said, like one of Stalin’s thugs.

You must understand what would lead me to refuse Miri’s company. I am a man of few remaining pleasures. Morning coffee. Sex. Ink. But the last had betrayed me—or I had betrayed it. Now I was less than twelve hours from delivering an unfinished—and thus useless—Torah scroll to the Mott community in Brooklyn.

Rabbi Eliezer wrote that the five sofit letters—the ones whose shapes are altered when they finish a word—carry within them the secret of redemption, the possibility of a perfect world. Any stroke of ink, then, carries an opportunity to end misery, end famine, end alternate side-of-the-street parking, end fruit available only in summer, end death. Who knows with which letter I might roll my lovely Anna back out of her grave, to stand once again in this apartment. At which point she and Miri can stand here together in the doorway and discuss my many, abundant faults.

I opened the door. “Take your money and go home,” I said, pointing to the coffee can stuffed with bills that serves as my bank account. Being a scribe is largely a cash business. I prefer it that way. My former teacher, Reb Schmidt, bent over as he was, used to quote Talmud: Remember before whom you stand. He didn’t mean the IRS.

“What is this?” Miri asked, looking at the destroyed apartment, ink pots, discarded parchment, Indian take-out containers, whiskey glasses, and piled in the corner, like a dying old dog, the nearly done, impossible to fully complete Torah scroll.

I slumped back into my La-Z-Boy. “It’s no use,” I said. “I’ll never finish. Nothing works.”

Miri looked at me, lower lip in a pout, hands on each delicious hip. Anna would give me that look, too. It said: I have no time for this. It said: you’re a sorry, sorry man. It said: I will help you.

If you think that Reb Schmidt took me under his kind wing, taught me how to write the holy letters with warmth and encouragement, you would be mistaken. At first I watched him from a distance; later, without permission, I pulled my own chair next to him and copied his letters as he made them. When he left to get coffee (twice a day, as I mentioned) he didn’t bring me any. He didn’t even offer. When he spoke, it was only to Mr. Lieberman, the bookstore owner, and even then only about practical matters: “Call so-and-so and tell them their klaf is finished”; or, “There is a new deli where the old deli used to be.” Which was fine. In my days in elementary school and high school and art school I had an indifferent relationship with teachers. I took what I wanted to know; anything else was just ego.

One Tuesday in August, I found Reb Schmidt standing at the bus stop in front of the bookstore. It was early in the morning, rush hour, and he had sandwiched himself in among the dishwashers, typists, insurance brokers, and other workers that left Queens for better places each day and came back at night. Three buses had come and gone since he had begun to sit there. He was waiting for me, but only so that I could pull out enough coins to get him on the bus. I walked up to him and said, “Where are we going?”

“To the beach,” he mumbled back.

Thus began the long bus ride to Jones Beach. It was summer, sweaty and stifling in the metal container of the city bus. There was no opportunity to interrogate Reb Schmidt. He had fallen asleep a few minutes after the bus left Kew Gardens.

The bus spit us out, finally, onto a sandy parking lot and we trundled to the beach with the masses. Men in undershirts walked by us, carrying coolers under their meaty arms, ushering their children toward the sand like belligerent sheepherders. The beachgoers were packed skin-to-skin across the length of the sand. We walked past them, me in heavy shoes and sweaty clothes, Reb Schmidt in his long black caftan. The beach was a bounty of swelled breasts and triangle bikinis, but Reb Schmidt didn’t look at them. After years of squinting at his tiny letters, he could not reliably see anything more distant than his own arm.

He meandered around the blankets and umbrellas. I followed, bumping sunbathers as I slipped in the sand. We told each other to screw off. Then I found Reb Schmidt again, black as a beetle in the sun.

He led me to a secluded boardwalk that, even then, was known as a rendezvous for gay men. He took off his coat. Then he began to work the buttons of his pants.

“That’s it,” I told him, “Find your own way back to Queens.”

He called to me, the first time he had said my name, with his pants around his ankles. Waving his hands, he pulled a stack of klafim from the pocket of his coat. He explained that he could not afford the dues at the mikveh in Kew Gardens, so he saved up his klafim and traveled here when he had to write God’s name. He pointed to the empty spaces on tiny mezuzah parchments. It seemed that it had been some time since he found the opportunity to purify himself.

He finished undressing. Naked, he looked even more out of place than when he had been dressed, his body bluish-white and featuring a worn, shriveled penis with a tiny cap like a button. He staggered naked into the water, while I stood on the beach holding the klafim, the partially written parchments, and guarding clothes no one would ever want to steal.

I watched as first his thin legs and ass descended into the water, then his upper body. A motorboat buzzed by and waved to someone on shore. Then Reb Schmidt’s head vanished. It came up again two beats later and he wandered out of the water, looking a little lost. The process took about twenty seconds.

Reb Schmidt put his clothes back on while he was still wet and we shuffled toward the bus back to Queens. Another hot, nasty ride. When we finally arrived back to the bookshop it was nearly nighttime and neither of us had eaten all day. He sat down in his corner and plucked the first klaf from his pile. Whatever his other faults, Reb Schmidt was right about this. That day he wrote God’s name as it should be written.

Miri sat down at my desk. Just last year Miri couldn’t tell Hebrew from English. But I was calling out from the depths.

I put the tikkun on her left, the ink pot on her right, and the parchment right in front of her. I was moving as quickly as an old man can move. I couldn’t find an unbent quill anywhere, until I found that Miri had been using one to tie up her hair.

There was no time for lessons. Rabbi Akiba taught that even the crownlets, the minor strokes that adorn certain of our letters, are an opportunity to understand the nature of God. But this was no moment for theology. I was old, broke, and if I did not produce a Torah scroll, Rabbi Mott’s followers would ruin me. In the next apartment, Chemical Marriage was holding a rehearsal or a party—who could tell the difference?—beating their instruments to the edge of bursting.

Miri had a talent for certain letters: the curve of the samech as it glances across the bottom (like a cute ass, she said), the hammer-straight dalet. But mostly she just drew black lines, copying one letter after another like a child working a spelling primer. She chewed strands of her hair in the corner of her mouth, or hummed a Russian pop song I had heard in Brighton Beach.

By three in the morning, even Chemical Marriage had given up. I thought of Yossel Mintz, at that moment no doubt asleep next to his plump wife, the way that Anna would sleep next to me. Perhaps in the middle of the night a child wedged between them for comfort. In a few hours Yossel would wake up, wondering how the child got there without notice. Modeh ani, he would say, thanking a God that returns his soul to him in compassion, in faithfulness.

At four a.m. I told Miri to take her clothes off. “Too tired,” she mumbled. Her hair fell all around her face in wisps. She didn’t have to worry—my penis was nothing but a hanging thread. Frankly, I haven’t had much luck in that department since my ink problems began, though I don’t like to consider the Freudian implications. Or talk about them with Miri, who likes a good philosophical discussion as much as the next prostitute. “It’s for the letters,” I said, and left to run the bath.

My building is old, pre-war, and I couldn’t get the bath temperature to rise beyond tepid. Miri came in the bathroom and undressed. I put my hand on her strong hips and helped her in. I let her sit in the water for a moment. How many times had I come in to shave, or brush my teeth, and seen Anna in that same bathtub? How many times had I passed her in the apartment without saying a word? Nothing is permanent. All disappears.

Then I put my hand on Miri’s forehead and used all my strength to push her underwater. She thrashed and kicked, she slapped at my hands. I said the bracha. Then I pulled her out again.

She shivered and complained, but I had no time to hear it. I pushed her out of the bathroom and to the writing table, where she wrote God’s name over and over, until she had filled each space.

Three hours later I was sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a street in Brooklyn. The sun was crisp and shining when Rabbi Yakov Mott, son of Rabbi Yosef Mott, son of Rabbi Avraham Mott, came up the street, followed as ever by his assistants and them followed in turn by his congregants, his flock, his hundreds of Jews.

“I’m an old man,” I told him. “Here is your Torah scroll.”
“Ezra Glick,” he said. “It’s good that you came.”

Then he bent down and took the Torah scroll from me, held it in his big arms. He began to dance. Men clapped and shouted and circled around him, tall, reed-thin men in black coats arm in arm with short, fat men in black coats, and tall fat men too, and short thin men, and they looked in all their wonderful circling variety just like Hebrew letters. There was a mechitza set in the street to separate the sexes and against it I could see the shadows of their women dancing and clapping, beautiful dark upright forms shifting in the light.

The letters, Rabbi Hananya said as he burned. They are dancing.

When Anna was dying in the hospital, tubes inserted in her delicate arms, I asked her how she felt about leaving this particular world. I’m fine, she said. It’s you I’m worried about. I’m afraid you might just float away.

Rabbi Mott held the Torah that Miri the prostitute had completed and then he passed it to the man next to him who passed it to the man next to him as if it were perfect, as if it were sacred, and they hugged it and they kissed it and held it tight like a long-lost family member, come home at last.