“What happened to us—our separation, our reunion—was mandated,” he told me with that air of moral certitude. “Man finds his own preordained pathway. The infidel finds a path to God,” he went on, laying on me another of his rabbinic pensées, “the misanthropist to his fellow man, the estranged father to his son. Sometimes it is no more than a trail in the wilderness, the half-hidden beast-track through the jungle. According to both the Targum and the Midrashim, there are thirty-two pathways back to Eden. And one of them,” he said, “leads through Assama.”

“Eden? The Eden of Adam and Eve?”

He nodded solemnly. “The Cradle of God,” he said. “Eden on earth. It’s somewhere out there,” he went on, “toward the uncharted northeast. Somewhere beside the ghost of a stream that once fed the Nile or the Tigris or the Euphrates. Waiting to be rediscovered…”

He was watching me closely, looking for some sign of challenge. I nodded, rearranging my face to show how seriously I took his teaching. Apparently it wasn’t seriously enough.

“You think I’m some kind of zealot?” he asked with a twisted smile. “A fanatic? Let me tell you, it’s the fanatic who keeps the faith alive. Everybody else backslides into deracination.” His flinty eyes burned into mine until I was thoroughly cowed.

Satisfied, he went on: “This place, Assama, this land of desolation, is holy land.”

It didn’t seem so to me. There was a too-muchness of everything about it. The sun that baked the brain. The rain that turned it spongy. The exhausted earth, the insipid shrubs standing like a stunted army of blind sentinels, the sapless stalks, and always the smell of rot, clogging the nostrils with its putrescence, clouding the eyes. This was holy land?

“It’s a most unpromising country,” I ventured, “as far as you can see.”

“We Jews,” my father said, “have always been interested in what lies beyond the horizon.”

“How can you ignore what’s all around us?”

“What’s all around us?”

“Dishevelment. Untidiness. Chaos.”

“I don’t ignore it. I like it, I welcome it.”

“What’s to like?”

He thought for a moment. “In Genesis,” he said, “God, the architect of the world, introduced order and harmony. But if God is the Prime Mover of the universe, did He not introduce what came before? Was He not the agent, first, of chaos? And is not then chaos the initial stage of harmony, the weed of God that became the flowering of Eden?”

He paused, giving me a little time to grasp his words. I wanted to take seriously everything he said, even the conceptions I couldn’t accept. I didn’t want another rift between us. We had known enough stress and strife back in the States to last my lifetime. But all I could think of was Valerie’s words. Indeed he was kind of peculiar.