The Spell of Time: A Tale of Love in Jerusalem

By Meyer Levin

Science and mysticism collide in this romantic fable from the acclaimed author of Compulsion and The Old Bunch.

When Félicité, a young French researcher, travels to Jerusalem to study the secrets of life alongside renowned professor Uriel Buchhalter, she is surprised to find the older man’s heart as engaging as his mind. But their relationship is complicated when American scientist, Joe Schwartz—bitterly jealous of his rival’s personal and professional accomplishments—also vies for Félicité’s love. To plumb Félicité’s true feelings, Joe and Uriel seek the aid of a cabbalist whose mystical solution sets all three on a journey that will change all their lives forever . . .

Featuring more than a dozen original black-and-white illustrations by Eli Levin, The Spell of Time is a captivating exploration of the vast spaces between science and faith, and of the tenuous bonds between body and soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625670663

Book preview

The Spell of Time

Copyright © 1974 by Praeger Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Cover design by Jessica Reed.

ISBN 978-1-625670-66-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

The Spell of Time

Also by Meyer Levin

In memory of Mable

ALWAYS in Jerusalem there is this sense of expectancy, this feeling that some new spark of meaning will appear and glow for an instant, and that it must be caught before it fades. And yet if the spark proves elusive one need not despair; surely the meaning will appear again, for in this place everything recurs. Even peace, too, hovers and fades and returns, uncertainly, shining for an interval, perhaps even a long interval, over this old-new city, Jerusalem. It appears as a ray piercing down to the very heart of the city, the ancient area, set within its own walls like a jewel in a lacework of Yemenite silver.

Just as surely as war is of a sporadic and passing nature, so surely here in Jerusalem is there a human activity of opposite tendency, not sporadic surges but forever present impulsion, continuous and enduring: this is the quest for knowledge, for revelation.

Here, then, is a tale of Jerusalem, the city of such a quest. I have heard this tale from an inhabitant, of the fifth generation.

On two hills holding the city between them stand the structures of a university; young in time, yet this center of learning is the oldest in the world, for it continues from the academies of ancient days, searching to define the understanding of man.

In the present university there was from the outset an exceptional concentration in those studies that seek the root of life and sentience itself. In the sciences of chemistry and biology there were world-renowned professors, some of them having escaped, before the destruction of the Jews, from Germany. And from all over the world students of unusual ability were attracted by these men.

And so it was, in the days just after the Second World War, that a young Frenchwoman was drawn to Jerusalem by the presence there of a professor formerly of Bonn, in the Rhineland.

There are studies which are founded on the differences between nations, where political and economic views may clash, but the sciences are universal and even possess something of an international language through mathematical symbols and chemical formulas that are identical in any tongue.

Félicité had read Professor Uriel Buchhalter’s papers in various scientific journals, and the purity of his formulations had excited her with the sense of inevitability she had more often found in poetry. In Rimbaud, in Rilke. And so when she won a fellowship offered by an American foundation, providing the means for a year of study in any place of her own choosing, she had applied at once to Buchhalter.

Early in spring she reached Jerusalem. Leaving her bags at the station, Félicité took a taxi directly to the university, at that time quartered only on the eastward side, on Mount Scopus. Winding upward, giving her glimpses of the crenelated walls that contained the inner, ancient part of the city, the taxi mounted a segmented valley where goats foraged, and came to an impressive group of buildings on a ridge from which one looked out on the whole of Jerusalem, the newer areas growing around the walls of the old.

Which department did she want? the driver inquired, rattling off a list of the sciences. Mathematica? archeologia? biologia? chemica? Or perhaps philosophia? He was semi-bald and chubby, hairy-legged in khaki shorts. When Félicité mentioned the name of Professor Buchhalter, he beamed possessively. Ah, Professor Buchhalter was in the building of the Radkin Research Foundation! And as he drove there, the driver recited the names of the world potentates of science whom he had had the honor to transport to this door.

While Félicité got out, the man declaimed the aims of the Foundation, listing the names of the American donors, in addition to the Radkins, and she was certain that in another moment he would have poured out a chain of data from Professor Buchhalter’s pioneering researches in the structure of the brain. But instead, the taxi driver, when she inadvertently overpaid him, applied himself to interpreting the value of the piaster for her in all foreign currencies, happily accepted back as a tip the sum she had overpaid, and drove off with an overload of eight students who had been waiting for a bus, and who now clubbed together to make up his fare.

Eager as she was to touch the very end of her journey, Félicité could not bring herself to enter the building at once. There was a covered walkway winging from it, a chain of arches, each framing a segment of the city of Jerusalem. She slowly walked the length, the panorama moving with her, already exerting upon her the fascination of that undeniable, tangible reality that persists in having the quality of a dream scene. For there it lay, a complete city sharply outlined in the lucid atmosphere, yet unreal. It was cupped in the hand of the ancient wall, but between the fingers it had spilled out, forming the new city of glowing stone. There it lay, a metropolis in a desolation of mountaintops, with no visible reason for existence, no sustaining fields, woods, or rivers, a city in nowhere out of nowhere, and yet the center of the world. Jerusalem was indeed, Félicité reflected, like some abstract creation of the human mind taken form in stone.

This might, in a bald, high-domed head, have been a commonplace notion, but in Félicité there was still the spark of youthful discovery, so that Jerusalem, for her, was at once a warm and magic city.

Lingering for a moment as one may before a momentous new entrance in life, she satisfied herself with the extraordinary view, taking it into herself as a good omen, a fortification. Then Félicité went into the building, a girl in a sleekly fitting travel costume worn with a fuzzy little pink-gray sweater, kitten-soft. A round, rather solemn, compact face, topped by a cluster of short blonde curls.

There is no feeling so comforting as the encounter of familiar objects in places far away from home; a village cobbler from Italy is reassured by the sound of a shoe-maker’s tapping in New York’s Mulberry Street, and so it was for Félicité as she entered the long laboratory and realized she might just have stepped in from the Rue Pierre Curie. For here were the same high worktables, the heads bending over microscopes.

An angular man hurried toward her; his limbs were like slats of wood loosely bolted together, and his copybook French phrases, the same. With gusto he proclaimed that it was his duty and privilege in the absence of Professor Buchhalter to make her welcome; his name was Hillel Bentov, formerly Herman Gutson, but now of course Hebraized; he had been assistant to Professor Buchhalter at Bonn, and now, he announced as though the sheer wonder of it was still hard to grasp, he was the assistant to Professor Buchhalter here in Jerusalem!

Like the taxi driver, he wore khaki shorts, and his thin legs, matted with reddish hair, stuck out incongruously beneath his laboratory apron. The Professor is desolate that he could not be present to welcome you in person, but he is at a conference with Dr. Weitzmann in Rehovoth on the subject of the chemistry of growth, the assistant said. May I show you our facilities and see that you are established in our midst?

Bentov held a bottle-stopper in his hand, but must distractedly have set down the bottle somewhere; from the far end of the laboratory a young man, who had been watching them, made a gesture toward an open ether flask. The assistant put back the stopper, but immediately picked up a test tube which he proceeded to agitate as he walked around the laboratory with her, introducing her to her colleagues.

Though there was wide variety in their work, the problems all seemed to revolve around Professor Buchhalter’s fundamental absorption in time and growth in cyclical structurings. An elderly man was researching the enigma of the seven-year locust swarms, which he explained really came in cycles of thirteen years; another was working on the parallel enigma of the five-year plague of mice.

There was the obligatory laboratory flirt, Félicité noticed, a tiny, very dark girl named Chava, with enormous chocolate eyes; and the best-looking of the men was the one who had reminded her guide of the open ether flask. Stocky, with a powerful neck and with heavy eye-brows that joined to form a single glowering line, he turned out to be an American. I’m here on the GI bill of rights, he seemed to find it necessary to inform her. Félicité knew something of the arrangement, having met some of the GI students at the Sorbonne. It was a way for ex-soldiers to resume