Servant of the Bones (2 page)

In African countries, people starved as the result of civil strife and famine. It was a nightly sight as common as a beer commercial to see on television fresh footage of starving African babies, bellies swollen, faces covered with flies.

Jews and Arabs fought in the streets of Jerusalem. Bombs went off; protesters were shot at by armies; and terrorists destroyed innocent people to strengthen their demands.

In the Ukraine, remnants of a fallen Soviet Union made war on mountain folk who had never given in to any foreign power. People died in the snow and cold for reasons that were nearly impossible to explain.

In sum there were dozens of places raging with suffering in which to fight, to die, to film, as the parliaments of the world tried in vain to find answers without bullets. The decade was a feast of wars.

Then there was the death of Esther Belkin, followed by the scandal of the Temple of the Mind. Caches of assault weapons had been found in the Temple’s outposts from New Jersey to Libya. Explosives and poisonous gases had been stockpiled in its hospitals. The great mentor of this popular international church—Gregory Belkin—was insane.

Before Gregory Belkin, there had been other madmen with great dreams perhaps but smaller resources. Jim Jones and his People’s Temple committing mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana; David Koresh, who believed himself the Christ, perishing by gun and fire in a Waco, Texas, compound.

A Japanese religious leader had just recently been accused of killing innocent people on the country’s public subways.

A church with the lovely name of the Temple Solaire had not so long ago staged a mass suicide coordinated at three different locations in Switzerland and Canada.

A popular talk show host gave directions to his listeners as to how they might assassinate the President of the United States.

A fatal virus had only recently broken out with stunning fury in an African country, then died away, leaving all thinking individuals with a renewed interest in the age-old obsession: that the end of the world might be at hand. Apparently there were more than three kinds of this virus, and numerous others equally as deadly lurking in the rain forests of the world.

A hundred other surreal stories made up each day’s news, and each day’s inevitable civilized conversation.

So I ran from this, as much as anything else. I ran for the solitude, the whiteness of snow, the brutal indifference of towering trees and tiny winter stars.

It was my own Jeep which had brought me up through “the leather stocking woods,” as it is sometimes still called, in honor of James Fenimore Cooper, to barricade myself for the winter. There was a phone in the jeep by which one could, with perseverance if possible, reach the outside world. I was for tearing it out, but the truth is I’m not very handy and I couldn’t get the thing loose without damaging my car.

So you see, I am not a fool, just a scholar. I had a plan. I was prepared for the heavy snow to come, and the winds to whistle in the single metal chimney above the round central hearth. The smell of my books, the oak fire, the snow itself whirling down at times in tiny specks into the flames, these things I
love and need now and then. And many a winter before this house had given me exactly what I asked of it.

The night began like any other. The fever took me completely by surprise, and I remember building up the fire in the round pit of a fireplace very high because I did not want to have to tend it. When I drank all the water nearest the bed, I don’t know. I couldn’t have been fully conscious then. I know that I went to the door, that I myself unbolted it, and then could not get it closed; this much I do recall. I must have been trying to reach the Jeep.

Bolting the door was simply impossible. I lay for a long time in the snow itself before I crawled back inside, and away from the mouth of the winter, or so it seemed.

I remember these things because I remember knowing then that I was very much in danger. The long journey back to the bed, the long journey back to the warmth of the fire, utterly exhausted me. Beneath the heap of wool blankets and quilts, I hid from the whirlwind that entered my house. And I knew that if I didn’t clear my head, if I didn’t recover somehow, the winter would just come inside soon and put to sleep forever the fire, and take me too.

Lying on my back, the quilts up to my chin, I sweated and shivered. I watched the flakes of snow fly beneath the sloping beams of the roof. I watched the raging pyramid of logs as it blazed. I smelled the burnt pot when the soup boiled dry. I saw the snow covering my desk.

I made a plan to rise, then fell asleep. I dreamed those fretful stupid dreams that fever makes, then woke with a start, sat up, fell back, dreamed again. The candles were gone out, but the fire still burned, and snow now filled the room, blanketing my desk, my chair, perhaps the bed itself. I licked snow from my lips once, that I do recall, and it tasted good, and now and then I licked the melted snow I could gather with my hand. My thirst was hellish. Better to dream than to feel it.

It must have been midnight when Azriel came.

Did he choose his hour with a sense of drama? Quite to the contrary. A long way off, walking through snow and wind, he had seen the fire high on the mountain above, sparks flying
from the chimney and a light that blinkered through the open door. He had hurried towards these beacons.

Mine was the only house on the land and he knew it. He had learnt that from the casual tactful remarks of those who had told him officially and gently that I could not be reached in the months to come, that I had gone into hiding.

I saw him the very moment he stood in the door. I saw the sheen of his mass of black curling hair and fire in both his eyes. I saw the strength and swiftness with which he closed and locked the door and came directly towards me.

I believe I said, “I’m going to die.”

“No, you won’t, Jonathan,” he answered. He brought the bottle of water at once and lifted my head. I drank and I drank and my fever drank, and I blessed him.

“It’s only kindness, Jonathan,” he said with simplicity.

I dozed as he built up the fire again, wiped away the snow, and I have a very distinct and wondrous memory of him gathering my papers from everywhere, with great care, and kneeling by the fire to lay them out so that they might dry and some of the writing might be saved after all.

“This is your work, your precious work,” he said to me when he saw that I was watching him.

He had taken off the big double-mantled coat. He was in shirt sleeves which meant we were safe. I smelled the soup cooking again, the bubbling chicken broth. He brought the soup to me in an earthen bowl—the sort of rustic things I chose for this place—and he said drink the soup, and I did.

Indeed, it was by water and broth that he brought me slowly back. Never once did I have the presence of mind to mention the few medications in the white box of first-aid supplies. He bathed my face with cold water.

He bathed all of me slowly and patiently, turning me gently, and rolling under me the new fresh clean sheets. “The broth,” he said, “the broth, no, you must.” And the water. The water he gave me perpetually.

Was there enough for him, he had asked. I had almost laughed.

“Of course, my friend, dear God, take anything you want.”

And he drank the water down in greedy gulps, saying it was all he needed now, that once again the Stairway to Heaven had disappeared and left him stranded.

“My name is Azriel,” he said, sitting by the bed. “They called me the Servant of the Bones,” he said, “but I became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genii.”

He unfurled the magazine for me to see. My head was clear. I sat up, propped by the divine luxury of clean pillows. He looked as unlike a ghost as a man can look, muscular, brimming with life, the dark hair on the backs of his hands and on his arms making him appear all the more strong and vital.

Gregory Belkin’s face stared forward from the famous
Time
magazine frame. Gregory Belkin—Esther’s father—founder of the Temple of the Mind. The man who would have brought harm to millions.

“I killed that man,” he said.

I turned to look at him, and then it was that I first saw the miracle.

He wanted me to see it. He did it for me.

He had grown smaller in size, though only slightly; his mane of tangled black curls was gone; he had the trimmed hair of a modern businessman; even his large loose shirt was changed for the supremely acceptable and impeccably tailored black suit, and he had become…before my very eyes…the figure of Gregory Belkin.

“Yes,” he said. “It was the way I looked on the day I made my choice, to forfeit my powers forever; to take on real flesh and real suffering. I looked just like Gregory when I shot him.”

Before I could answer, he began to change again, the head to grow larger, the features to become broader, forehead stronger and more distinctive, the cherub mouth of his own to replace the thin line of Belkin’s. His fierce eyes grew large beneath the thick eyebrows that tended to dip as he smiled, making the smile and immensity of the eyes seem secretive and seductive.

It was not a happy smile. It had no humor or sweetness in it. “I thought I would look this way forever,” he said, holding
up the magazine for me to see. “I thought I would die in that form.” He sighed. “The Temple of the Mind lies in ruins. The people will not die. The women and children will not fall on the road as they breathe the evil gas. But I didn’t die. I am Azriel again.”

I took his hand. “You’re a living breathing man,” I said. “I don’t know how you made yourself look like Gregory Belkin.”

“No, not a man—a ghost,” he said, “a ghost so strong that he can wrap himself in the form he had when he was alive; and now he cannot make it go away. Why did God do this to me? I am not an innocent being; I have sinned. But why can’t I die?”

Suddenly a smile came over his face. He was almost a boy, the tangled curls making their dark frame for his low cheeks and the large beautiful cherub mouth.

“Maybe God let me live to save you, Jonathan. Maybe that’s all it was. He gave me my old flesh back so I could climb this mountain and tell you all this, and you would have died had I not come here.”

“Perhaps, Azriel,” I said.

“You rest now,” he said. “Your forehead is cool. I’ll wait, and I’ll watch, and if you see me, now and then, turn into that man again, it is only that I’m trying to measure each time the difficulty of it. It was never so very hard for me to change my shape—for the sorcerer who called me up from the bones. It was never so hard for me to throw an illusion to trick my master’s enemies or those he would rob or cheat.

“But it’s hard now to be anything but the young man I was when it started. When I bought their lies. When I became a ghost and not the martyr they promised. Lie still now, Jonathan, sleep. Your eyes are clear and your cheeks have color.”

“Give me more of the broth,” I said. He did.

“Azriel, I
would be
dead without you.”

“Yes, that much is true, isn’t it? But I had my foot on the Ladder to Heaven, I was on it this time, I tell you, when I
made this choice, and I thought when it was all over, the Temple destroyed, the Stairway might come down for me again. The Hasidim are pure and innocent. They are good. But battles they must leave to monsters like me.”

“Lord, God,” I said. Gregory Belkin. A lunatic plan. I remember fragments…“And there was that beautiful girl,” I said.

He put down the cup of broth, and wiped my face and my hands.

“Her name was Esther.”

“Yes.”

He opened the curled and damp magazine for me. It was now badly creased as it was drying out in the warm room. I saw the famous photograph of Esther Belkin, on Fifth Avenue. I saw her lying on the stretcher just before they had put her into the ambulance, and just before she had died.

Only this time I focused on a figure in this photograph which I had noticed before, yes, in television broadcasts, and in the larger cover photographs of this very scene. But I hadn’t until now paid any real attention to the figure. I saw a young man by Esther’s stretcher, with his hands raised to his head, as though crying out in grief for her, a young man blurry and indistinct as all the other crowd figures in the famous photograph, except for his heavy beautifully shaped eyebrows and his mane of thick black curly hair.

“That’s you,” I said. “Azriel, that’s you there in the photograph.”

He was distracted. He didn’t reply. He put his finger on the figure of Esther. “She died there, Esther, his daughter.”

I explained that I had known her. The Temple was new then, and controversial rather than solid and immense and indefatigable. She had been a good student, serious and modest and alert.

He looked at me for a long time. “She was a sweet, kind girl, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, very much so. Very unlike her stepfather.”

He pointed to his own shape in the picture.

“Yes, the ghost, the Servant of the Bones,” he said. “I was
visible then in my grief. I will never know who called me. Maybe it was only her death, the dark horrible beauty of it. I’ll never know. But you see now, you feel now, I have the solid shape of that form which was nothing before but vapor. God has wrapped me in my old flesh; he makes it harder and harder for me to vanish and return; to take to the air and to nothingness and to reassemble. What is to become of me, Jonathan? As I grow stronger and stronger in this seeming human form, I fear I
can’t
die. I will never.”

“Azriel, you must tell me everything.”

“Everything? Oh, I want to, Jonathan. I want to.”

Within an hour, I was able to walk about the house without dizziness. He’d found my thick robe for me, and my leather slippers. Within a few more hours I was hungry.

It must have been morning when I fell asleep. And then waking in the later afternoon, I was myself, clearheaded, sharp, and the house was not only safely warmed by the fire, but he had put a few candles around, the thick kind, so that the corners had a dusty soft nonintrusive light.

“Is it all right?” he asked me gently.