Thirty Fruits Against Adam's Bite and One Bad Swallow

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The Table Set Against the First Bite

The lamp leaned. Wind had found the crack under the door. On the table, thirty fruits sat in three ranks of ten, and the youngest man counted them because his stomach would not be quiet.

Nearest the window, grape and fig and pomegranate, the kind a mouth takes whole. Behind them olive, date, cherry, each hiding a stone. Farthest, in a bowl, walnut and almond and pistachio, shut in shells nobody eats.

The teacher pressed both palms on the wood. "One bite emptied the orchard," he said. "Adam swallowed and said nothing. Tonight thirty mouths will try the other direction."

The youngest had walked four hours through winter mud to sit here. He stopped at a fruit he could not name. Brown. Wrinkled. Soft at the crown.

"Uzerad," the teacher said without looking up. "Medlar. It has to rot a little before it turns sweet. Do not skip it."

Adam Left a Spark in Every Fruit

They poured the first cup. The teacher lifted a fig until the lamp showed through the skin.

"The sweetness went into him," he said. "The spark stayed behind in the fruit. Every orchard on this earth is still carrying what he dropped."

An angel had been set over every growing thing. Behind each angel a rung of the upper world leaned down, so no fig ripened without a witness. A blessing said with the mind on the right Name went into the fruit like a blade into a crack. The spark came loose. It climbed.

"And a blessing mumbled at the ceiling?" the man beside him asked.

"Then you have eaten fruit," the teacher said. "The angel over it stands there with empty hands and waits out another winter."

He Swallowed the Medlar Without a Word

They began at the near rank. Grape, and the room answered amen into the steam off the cups. Fig. Pomegranate, broken so the seeds spilled red across the board.

The bowl reached the medlar while somebody else was still talking. The youngest took it, bit down, and swallowed. The sweetness of a fruit that ripens by rotting filled his mouth. Two brown stones sat in his palm. His jaw was still working when he understood what he had done.

The teacher stopped. Nobody reached for the wine.

"Say it over the next medlar," the teacher said.

"There is one medlar."

The teacher looked at the gap in the rank. "There is one," he agreed, and said nothing more about it.

The young man put the stones in his coat and kept his fist closed around them the rest of the night. Above the roof a thin watcher stood with nothing to carry up.

The Walnut Split Into Four

The teacher recited the medlar's order anyway, the way a man reads a will after the money is spent. Before that fruit a mouth holds a teaching from the sixth chapter of Berakhot and the first of Demai, and fastens on the letters HYVH.

Then he took a quince, too hard to eat raw, cooked in honey that afternoon. He set it in the young man's other hand and would not let go until the blessing was finished. Hackberries came next, small and gritty. The teacher held one between two fingers.

"Seventy-two," he said. "The Name that came out of the sea when the pillar moved behind Israel and the water stood up on both sides. Hold that over this berry."

The young man held it. The berry was almost nothing.

Jujubes after that, dry as old dates. Twelve fruits. Nineteen. Twenty-four. The wine had gone from white to rose. Outside, a dog gave up barking.

Last came the shells. The teacher set a walnut on its seam and struck it once with the flat of a knife handle. It fell open in four parts.

"I went down to my walnut garden," he said. "That garden went out from Eden, and it is the Shekhinah (שכינה), the Presence at the bottom of the rungs, in Malkhut. The nut inside it is the chariot Ezekiel saw, standing under her, wheeled and eyed and burning. Four rivers went out of Eden. Count the quarters."

They counted. The room smelled of honey and cracked shell and wet wool.

"The shell is bitter and nobody eats it," the teacher said. "It is still holding the fruit."

The thirtieth fruit went to the young man. The teacher pressed a walnut into his hand, closed the fingers over it, and waited. The blessing had to be said whole and slow, with the mind on the Name. His voice came out wrong at the start. He said it again. The second time it held.

Nobody clapped. The teacher reached for the almonds.

He Buried the Stones Before Dawn

Before dawn he walked out to the orchard. The almonds were pushing white against black branches. It was the fifteenth of Shevat, the day the sap turns and the year of the trees starts over.

He dug with the knife handle because the ground was too hard for fingers. He put both stones in, pushed the dirt back, and held the letters HYVH in his mind the whole time, which is not a blessing over eating, and he knew it. The spark he had swallowed without a word was still down there, waiting on a tree that would take years and a mouth that would not be his.

He wiped his thumb on his coat. The stain stayed brown. Behind him the lamps burned over thirty empty places. Above the orchard the watcher that had waited since Adam settled in to wait longer.