Enemy of the Tzar: A Murderess in One Country, A Tycoon in Another. Lester S. Taube

a female counterpart.”

      She suddenly began laughing, and he leaned back in bed and stared at her with pretended severity. “I’m beginning to suspect that you have a degenerate mind,” he observed.

      She laughed harder. “I can’t help it,” she said. “All I can see is this female pumping away at God’s leg.” The glee abruptly fled, and she turned a worried face towards his. “I’ve said something awful, haven’t I?”, she said tightly.

      Hershel exploded in mirth. “Lord, how did you ever conjure up such a picture.” He drew her closer and kissed the top of her head. “Certainly not. What you said was precisely what we were talking about. Male, female, man God, woman God, ergo love and gratification. It can all be reasoned. Science explains that everything in existence, perhaps even rocks, is male-female. Why is God different? Maybe God is a woman and Her counterpart is male.”

      She snuggled closer, her body tingling with pleasure at being part of a union so full of values that it burnished the mere physical act of sex. Under different circumstances, she would have felt lust surging through her loins. But Hershel took you whirling past that to other fulfillments, like the subject at hand.

      “You will probably be able to prove it,” she said.

      “At the risk of being excommunicated by the Jewish authorities, I refer you to the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, which contains a reference to a female with whom God found pleasure before making the universe.”

      She sat up abruptly and looked at him with astonishment. “Is that really true?”

      “The existence of the Septuagint and the reference is true. Whether God had a female companion is another matter.”

      “That’s not reasoning,” she said carefully. “That is evidence.”

      With another man, she would have expected a compliment for having responded in such fashion, but Hershel never looked up at, or, for that matter, never looked down on a person. He would respect an unschooled farmer discussing his crops with the same esteem as he would a professional expounding his vocation.

      “You’re right, it is proof, of a sort. But philosophy relies upon more than one piece of information to reach truth. Many of us had reasoned long before this information came to light that evidence is illusional. What we see or hear or feel is not always what we think we see or hear or feel. Some of the charlatans who read a page or two of philosophy come to the conclusion that since one thing may be illusional, everything is unreal. Reasoning is the power to look beyond those nincompoops and dissect truth to a palatable point.”

      “I thought truth could never be dissected.”

      Hershel smiled that crooked grin, which caught at her heart and snuffed out a cigarette he had forgotten was burning in his hand. “You are absolutely right, my darling.” Then his eyes grew wistful. “The question is, do we really want the truth?”

      Oh, Hershel, Hershel, she thought, reaching inside her purse and slipping out a cigarette. As the pungent Turkish tobacco was drawn into her lungs, she turned her mind to more mundane things. She would shop furiously. She did not want a single stitch of underclothing, outerwear, shoes, hats, and so forth that she now owned to be taken to Austria for her meeting with Hershel. All must be new, not belonging to another time or place. As she herself would be coming to him.