The Angel of Losses (12 page)

I changed the story. “The White Rebbe drew the Sabbath Light on a piece of parchment and dropped it into the bath. The water began to bubble and steam and rise. The servants rushed to the king, but he sent them away, and they watched his face, twisted with fear, until it disappeared in the fog, and they all disappeared from one another, each man alone inside the cloud. When it finally cleared, the purple-robed man in the pool was young and healthy, and the White Rebbe was gone.

“The king and all his servants searched the pool for the charm the rebbe had dropped in the water, but all they found was a single slip of paper, soggy and completely blank.

“The king had ruled over the land for fifty years as an evil monarch, and he ruled over the land for fifty years more as a good one. And that’s how the White Rebbe finally defeated the evil king.”

Eli was asleep in my arms, his fists against his cheeks. Someday he might tell this story to his own children and grandchildren, and they would describe it as Eli’s story. The stories Eli once told. Sharing a name was powerful. In a real way, Grandpa would be alive a century after his death.

I laid Eli in his crib, sound asleep. The mobile above him cast sparks of light as it rotated, like it was skidding against flint. A silver chain wound tightly around two spokes, a tiny blue coin wedged in the joint between them. It was the old man’s charm necklace, the amulet of protection, finally returned to its rightful owner.

For some reason, I imagined it was a tiny replica of the Sabbath Light, the same way a stick figure might replicate a human. I didn’t know what the Sabbath Light represented—some agreement between the rebbe and the angel, some metaphor of what we lose and what we keep, or what we think we’ve lost and what cannot be shaken. I had printed my own version on my skin, just like Grandpa had the White Rebbe do. My gesture was grand but also quaint, childhood memories and bedtime stories. It didn’t feel that way now.

Holly was in her studio next door, humming to herself, head tilted, calligraphy pen in the air, surveying her drafting desk. She looked up at me and smiled. For an instant, it was like a lens had swung over the world, and everything was reconfigured; how beautiful it must be for her to paint, here in her own room, while her baby slept next door.

“What are you working on?” I asked quietly, mindful of my volume. She cocked her head, inviting me to come around. A tiny strip of parchment, the width of a receipt, was secured on the wide expanse, and taped beside it, crisp black Hebrew text on a white sheet. She held up a magnifying glass, nearly the size of a dinner plate, so I could see her work, the sloping liquid letters.

“Do you like it?” I asked. “Copying?”

“It’s meditative. I want to do other things, bigger projects, but I need to prove myself. Besides, right now, creatively, I’m cooked.” She leaned in to see her text, moved a finger over it, and then sat back again. “Not like this is easy. Everything has to be perfect. The rabbis say that if you copy the Torah and mess up a single letter, you can destroy the world.”

“No pressure there.” I paused. “So listen. I’m sorry about fighting with Nathan before the circumcision.” It was true; I was sorry I had upset her. And then there was that nagging, irrational fear that Nathan was right. I had interrupted the protection ritual. I was the reason Eli was vulnerable. I was at fault for Eli’s seizure.

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m sorry too. That I got mad. I have a short fuse right now. I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired and also be alive.”

It seemed like the right moment to end the conversation—everyone’s sorry, everyone forgives, get out while you still can. But she continued: “I’m worried.”

“Eli seems fine,” I said.

“We have a follow-up appointment tomorrow. I’m nervous,” she said. “And Nathan. I’m worried—” She stopped, shook her head.

“Did something happen?”

She picked up her pen and magnifying glass, leaning close to the desk. “He’s fasting.” Her fist pulsed around the pen, though the point remained safely suspended above the surface. “And sometimes he observes . . . it’s like a day of silence.”

“Now I know when to schedule my next visit.” I paused. “I’m kidding.”

Holly was silent.

“Why is he doing it?” I asked.

“It helps him feel closer to God. I’m awake all night up here with Eli, and he’s up all night with his teacher, praying downstairs.” She shook her head. “A teacher who shows up in the middle of the night. Now that I think about it, I guess Nathan never said he was from the yeshiva. I just assumed.”

“Is he very old?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said.

“With really blue eyes?” The same shade as Eli’s.

She wrapped her arms around herself. “His eyes? Why do you ask?”

“It doesn’t matter. Hey,” I said, leaning forward. “If you need me to come down and stay with you, just say the word.” I suddenly felt like she and Eli were in danger. “Or you could go stay with Mom and Dad.” A thousand miles away from the old man. “They would be thrilled. And they have a swimming pool. You can be as immodest as you want out there.”

She laughed, and I felt a thawing between us, but then she said, “You’re so predictable. I can’t tell you anything without you insulting me.”

We sat in a thick silence.

Over the past couple of years, I had deliberated making peace with her, arrogantly, as if it was my decision alone. I was at her mercy as much as she was at mine. But she needed me, even if she didn’t know it.

DOWNSTAIRS, I FOUND SIMON AND NATHAN AT THE DINING
room table, staring intently at a laptop and speaking easily, as if in the middle of a long-standing conversation. And I couldn’t even talk to my own sister. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Come look,” Simon said. “We’re trying something new.”

“Tudela said it’s eighteen miles north of Chaibar,” Nathan said, his gaze still fixed on the screen.

“Who’s Tudela?” I asked. “What’s eighteen miles north of wherever?”

“Twelfth-century traveler,” Simon said. “The home of the Lost Tribes.” He hit a key triumphantly and sat back from the computer. “There.”

A single blue flag appeared in the middle of the map.

“Good,” Nathan said. “The more stories, the closer we’ll get to the answer.”

“Like an average?” Simon asked.

“No, of course not,” he answered, irritated. “It’s more like triangulation. Add the next flag.”

“I don’t understand yet,” Simon said. “But let’s keep going.” Nathan’s rudeness rolled right off him. “We’re adding Joseph Della Reina,” Simon explained to me. “He’s in
An Account of Juan Espera en Dios in the Americas.
He traveled to the edge of the world to try to bring the apocalypse.” He loved these stories. They were entertainment.

“I know who he is,” I said. The man in the celestial academy, looking down as the Berukhim Rebbe fooled the Angel of Death.

“Not the apocalypse,” Nathan said. “The Messiah.” He exhaled noisily, impatient. “Well, yes, the end of the world, but the Messiah will bring paradise. Now, how do you enter different endings?”

“What do you mean?” Simon asked.

“Different versions,” Nathan said. “In one, Della Reina’s condemned to be born again for a thousand lifetimes. In another, he wanders in madness. Once he’s turned into a black dog, and then goes mad when he realizes what’s happened to him.” My spine chilled, like the first touch of fever. The White Rebbe and Berukhim Rebbe had black dogs too.

“His punishment is immortality,” I said.

“No.” Nathan gave one sharp shake of his head. “Della Reina’s never immortal.” He paused. “No one is immortal.”

Simon sat back from the computer. “Each version has to be a new entry.”

“But that’s not right,” Nathan said. He was growing increasingly animated—angry, almost. Holly had insisted many times that Nathan just liked to argue. He wasn’t mad. It wasn’t personal.

I stood up. If I didn’t stop them, they would play with the map forever. “We should go. In case there’s traffic.”

Nathan shrugged but then followed us out the door and to the car. “They’re not different legends—they’re the same legend. One man, different faces. They only make sense if you look at them together.”

“I’d have to think about the programming,” Simon offered peaceably.

“Yes, you have to think about it,” Nathan continued, as I climbed into the car and shut the door. “Especially for the Sabbath River.” I reached across the gearshift and popped Simon’s door; he swung it out but hesitated politely while Nathan went on. “The legends all changed over time, but if you put them together, you can guess the original story behind them.”

Finally they shook hands and Simon climbed inside, digging in his pocket for his keys as Nathan rounded the car and leaned down beside my window, motioning for me to roll down the glass. His skin was gray in the afternoon light, but his eyes were bright. “How do you know about the Sabbath Light?” he asked quietly. “What do you know about the Sabbath River?”

I was taken aback. Had he been eavesdropping on me while I sat with Eli? Did he know something about Grandpa’s notebooks? He regarded me steadily, and my jaw clenched, trying to still the twitch I felt starting in the corner of my eye. I wanted to hear what he knew—but I couldn’t admit I needed him to interpret what my own grandfather had said.

“The Lost Tribes live on the other side of it,” I said, feigning authority. “It’s the Angel of Losses’s domain.”

Nathan turned his gaze to the driveway and drummed his fingers on the car door. He was calculating something. After a moment he looked up again and spoke. “You should stick to your area of expertise. He’s not as simple as a fairy tale. You could wind up getting hurt.”

My ambivalence ignited into anger. “Are you threatening me?” I asked.

He looked startled. “No,” he said. “Why would I do that? I’m trying to help you.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You? Help me?” I asked. He might have taken Holly, but he certainly wasn’t going to take Grandpa and his secrets. “I don’t need your help,” I told him. “I don’t need anything from you.”

I regretted my words almost immediately. Simon and I were both silent until we reached the turnpike. Finally Simon spoke. “We heard you talking to Eli,” he said. “Through the baby monitor.”

My face flushed. “You were listening the whole time?”

“No, we heard you start speaking, and then Nathan took the monitor away.”

So he
had
been listening. I remembered, after Eli was born, when he asked me if I had found Grandpa’s notebooks, the lawyerly look in his eyes. I had revealed something to him, but I didn’t know the extent or sensitivity of what that something was. He knew far more than I did about the Sabbath Light. And he didn’t want to share that knowledge with me.

“You two had a lot to talk about,” I said lightly. “He seemed very interested in your map.”

“Yeah,” Simon said without affect.

“Maybe he could help you,” I suggested. “Give you more material for the project.”

He cleared his throat. “Listen. You’ve got a lot of heavy stuff going on. Your family.” I looked out the window, the dingy trucks, the industrial towers blinking benignly in the afternoon, the smoke and light fading into the distance.

“We don’t know each other that well yet,” he continued. “So let me put this out there. I’m not afraid of heavy. But I’m not into melodrama.”

He knew I was holding things back—from the stories I asked him to research and the reason I left his apartment in the middle of the night. I needed to say the right thing now, and I had no idea what it was. Grandpa had once said I was like him—passionate—but I was beginning to see that I was just reckless, and had spent so many years with my vision clouded by pride that I had never learned how to see or atone for my blunders.

“It’s complicated,” I said finally.

“Then explain it.”

“I would,” I promised. “I really would. But I can’t. It’s . . .” Confusing. Ridiculous. Irrational. Frightening. “Private.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Okay,” Simon said. “Fair enough.” But he sounded insincere. Soon we were back in the city and said good-bye. I watched him walk up the hill, diminishing as the apartment buildings rose around him, the city rose around him, just another traveler on his way to invisibility.

Eight

T
he next morning Simon texted me.

Nathan’s meeting me at my office. Train gets in at 10:47.

I didn’t know if he had invited Nathan for me or in spite of me, and figured I shouldn’t ask, not yet. I calculated Nathan’s trip uptown from Penn Station and added another hour for conversation. But when I arrived for Simon’s report, they were still at work, Simon at his desk and Nathan sitting across from him, three books on his lap and a battered leather briefcase at his feet. The monitor displayed continents sparking with a field of blue stars.

“Wow,” I said.

Simon smiled. “Yeah, I figured out how to link the different endings of the Joseph Della Reina legends. The feature’s still in beta, but I think it’s really going to help.”

“You didn’t tell him I lived with the Mizo,” Nathan said accusingly. Apparently no explanation for my sudden presence would be needed.

“I didn’t know that you did,” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”

“In India,” Nathan said, shuffling the books in his lap. “The descendants of the tribe of Manasseh. You’re familiar with Manasseh, of course?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.” Poor Manasseh. I felt Solomon’s affection for his brother, so innocent and undeserving of his fate. Something terrible had happened to him, but what?

“Manasseh is going to be the first Lost Tribe to return,” Simon said, saving me. “When the world ends.”

“Is that what you were thinking of, Marjorie?” Nathan asked, leveling an unblinking gaze at me. He was taunting me, or maybe just trying to get me to speak plainly. Maybe this was how his teachers spoke to him, but it was not how anyone spoke to me.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, pointing to the book in his hands:
Hasidic Tales of Wonder,
the same book the old man had given to me. “Who gave it to you?”

“I pulled it,” Simon said.

“The last Berukhim Rebbe left behind a great library,” Nathan said. “His followers protected it for generations, but it was lost during the war—none of his direct writings survived. The stories we have of him are just a small fraction of what once existed, and you can’t know how true they are, retold so many times. But I think . . . I think fragments of the true stories remain. The true stories are disguised in folklore and fairy tales. This one”—he tapped the page—“perfect example.”

“It wasn’t really the Angel of Death,” I said. “It was the Angel of Losses.”

“For one,” Nathan said, and smiled, slightly but genuinely. It took years off his face, reminding me he was only slightly older than me. The sudden flash of cheer revealed how unhealthy, haggard even, he had become.

“Look,” Simon said. “We added the Berukhim Rebbe to the map. I had no idea he was one of mine.”

Nathan edged forward, his attention back on the screen. “Some rabbis say he travels the world helping people in need. But there’s also a theory that he’s traveling in search of the Sabbath River and the Lost Tribes.”

“Whose theory is that?” I asked, but Nathan remained focused on the map. It was his theory, then—or maybe the old man’s.

Simon typed, clicked, typed again, and a white line connected a scattering of bullet points. “This is new. For individuals, historic or otherwise.”

It was the Berukhim Rebbe’s path. I reached across Simon and hovered the cursor over the points, raising location names and a shifting grid of borders. Israel, Greece, Turkey, Russia. I scanned the text boxes as they bubbled up with names of ancient places and men, until something popped up that I recognized.

“What’s this?” I said.

“You’re off-roading,” Simon said.

“It’s the land beyond the Sabbath River—” Nathan explained.

“No,” I interrupted. “The Sabbath Light.”

“We just added it,” Nathan said. “In the land of the Lost Tribes there are twenty-four great kings. On the Sabbath, when lighting a fire is forbidden, King Daniel the Pious raises it over his palace and it lights the realm.”

“But it’s not just that,” I said.

“No,” he continued. “It’s the light of the Messiah. It’s the light of the seven spheres of the universe.” Nathan paused. “You were confused the other day. It’s not a talisman. Not for magic tricks.”

He was talking about the fairy tale I had told the baby—he had listened to the whole thing—and he was right that I had made that part up, the White Rebbe using the Sabbath Light to grant youth to the king. “But I wasn’t entirely wrong,” I said.

Nathan hesitated. “Not entirely,” he agreed.

“Did someone . . . did someone tell you all this?” I asked.

Nathan exhaled sharply. “Okay,” he muttered. “Okay.” He leaned over and began digging into his briefcase. His suit jacket bunched around his shoulders, loose on his frame, revealing an uneven row of red and orange and blue fringe at his waist. “I thought I put it . . . wait . . .” I glanced at Simon, questioning, but he just shrugged. “Yes. Here.” Nathan straightened up and handed me a marbled composition book.

“Oh my God,” I blurted. I opened to the first page.

The White Rebbe the Wanderer

The third story in the list. Grandpa’s dense black script covered several pages before running out. Most of the book was blank. “Where did you find it?” I asked, holding it against my chest. The edges of the pages were soft with age. “Where are the other ones?”

“There are other ones? How many?” Nathan asked, and we regarded each other with a mix of mutual understanding and suspicion.

“Four,” I said. “I think.”

“You have one,” he said. “I need to read it.”

From the moment I met Nathan, I had cast our relationship as a power struggle, one that he was always winning. Now I had something he wanted, and giving it to him would only allow him the upper hand again. He would understand the story better than I did, but I didn’t trust him to share what he learned.

“Okay, but you have to tell me what it means,” I said. He shrugged and shook his head at the same time. “What’s that? Is that a yes?”

“Yes, whatever you want to hear.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain it, whatever you want.”

I pointed the book at him, then clasped it to my chest again, protective. “That’s not what you said.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Guys,” Simon interrupted, and gestured to the door. We were nearly yelling.

Nathan and I looked at each other.

“Okay, you can read it,” I said. “But you can’t keep it.”

He checked his watch. “I’m catching the next train. We have an appointment.”

Eli’s follow-up—I had forgotten.

“Here.” I took
The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light
out of my backpack and handed it to him. I carried it with me always now, reading it over and over again, just as I once did with tales of the Wandering Jew. Nathan immediately began reading, one finger zipping across the lines.

“Be careful,” I said. “Don’t smear the words.”

He shrugged one shoulder in flippant acknowledgment but then lifted his finger off the page too, doing as I asked.

“How’s Holly?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said, still reading.

“How’s Eli?” I asked. That question, a third time. It was beginning to feel like an incantation.

Nathan met my eyes. “I’m afraid he’s sick,” he said. His tone sounded the same as when he had coaxed the Angel of Losses concession out of me—signaling me to attend to a subtext I couldn’t quite bring into focus. He slipped the book into his briefcase.

“The last blood test was only a little out of range,” I said, challenging him to be optimistic—as if saying it could make it true.

“No, the doctor’s not worried,” Nathan conceded. “But I had a dream.” He heaved the case’s long strap over his shoulder. The strap tugged on his jacket and shirt, revealing an inch of sharp collarbone.

“Let me know,” I said.

“Yes,” Nathan said. “I will.”

He nodded and I nodded back, some kind of agreement I didn’t entirely fathom.

The White Rebbe the Wanderer

Fall was turning into winter once again. The trees flamed orange and their leaves crumbled to bronze; their slender fingers fell bare and sparkled with frost. By day the wind sliced like a blade, and by night the winter air simmered in the rebbe’s throat, and his little black dog, a collection of slim bones, shivered against his side, and as the sun turned the sky a delicate and deathly blue, the little dog awoke and looked at him with torturously opaque eyes. Soon the rebbe’s eyes would fill too, with a bleak, unnatural glow, the same light he had seen in his father’s eyes on his final night on earth, and the Sabbath Light would swell within, through, over him, and his fate would be sealed.

On his sleepless nights the rebbe toured his village, the tiny kingdom that he presided over: the school, now three buildings; the path that bordered the village of his youth, now just another road in the spreading town; home after home that hosted visiting supplicants, all of whom he saw, none of whom he ever failed to help. Yes, it was as the angel had promised; he was the greatest wonder rebbe the Berukhim dynasty had ever produced. The most powerful. And he would be the last.

His wanderings inevitably brought him to the graveyard, past the newer monuments with their sharp engravings and meticulous edges, through a field of stones growing ever more slanted, the names and words inscribed on them ever more flat and illegible, to where the men stood, swaying through their prayers, their shawls reflecting the color of the moon, and when he touched his staff to the ground, each Berukhim Rebbe in turn spun in place and revealed his ruined face, their blind eyes glittering like stars or their eyelids warped over vacant sockets. All of the departed Berukhim Rebbes—all but two.

He bade them farewell, for he would not be joining their battered souls here, no, not ever.

Soon the angel would arrive.

The White Rebbe fled into the night.

He traveled like the prophet Elijah, presenting himself as a holy beggar. He visited a majestic library in Baghdad, its books donated by generations of childless Jews, with a Torah written in Ezekiel’s hand. He visited a library in Constantinople that held psalms copied by King David himself. Many of the books he read contained tales that mirrored his own. None contained an acceptable ending. They began and began and began again.

By night, he wandered the celestial academy, through long marble halls bordered with columns, through rooms where multicolor ribbons of book spines wound from ivory floors to domed ceilings, past dark figures who crowded long tables and climbed iron ladders toward lofty shelves, the sound of turning pages rushing like a tide. Its halls showed him every library that had been and every library that would be. He passed through a room with scuffed, unfinished wooden floors and walls, mud oozing through the cracks, a cluster of chairs facing a podium stacked with leather-covered books, lit by a thick and cloudy windowpane. He visited tight corridors with flickering chemical lights, rising from a foundation between two rivers. He passed through a tiny bedroom whose walls rippled with book spines, brown and navy and maroon, canvas and snake-slick paper, plays and philosophy and history and myth; a scratched caramel-colored table with spindly legs and baroque knees, a chair with flattened pillows tied to the seat and back, a desk lamp with a phosphorescent green glass bell.

By day he searched for his brother, fated to a thousand rebirths, and he found him time and again. There he was at Mount Carmel, a young illiterate man, tending the orchards beside Elijah’s tomb. Here he was a wizened elder, mourning for Zion, begging for change. Here he was, a young girl selling amulets in a market in Corfu. His brother was born and his brother died and died and died again.

By night he passed a room of cobalt and gold, where a podium stood tall as a tree on cracked tile, heaped with ledgers inscribed with lists of lost things: lost shoes, lost keys, lost pets, lost nations, lost hopes. There were whole pages of names: lost souls. Dust grew like mold on the empty shelves, and water seeped toward the splayed books. He knew exactly how long this room had stood empty. It had been centuries since the first Berukhim Rebbe had commanded the angel to relinquish the Sabbath Light to man, and since the angel had been cast out in punishment. Beside him was a pool where fish sliced the surface of the water, each the length of his forearm, their flanks bleeding gold, secret words shining in their bellies. When they breached the surface, his own flesh throbbed with the faint premonition of God’s final alphabet.

By day he watched clouds gather, felt the sky fatten, brushed ash from his cloak, listened to the sizzle as the ends of his hair were singed against his back, his shoulders, his ears. By night he descended narrow, termite-plagued staircases, hurried through dirt-floored corridors lined with books, while behind him a cry of mourning gained: Arise! Arise! Was it the first Berukhim Rebbe, continuing his desert ritual for eternity? His brother, Manasseh, carrying out another piece of his endless punishment? Were their souls the same? Was it just the echo of their desperation, or was the soul itself desperation, a star burning toward explosion?

Or was it the angel, the debt owed him finally in sight?

The White Rebbe fled into the night. The seasons spun first like a cartwheel in loose mud, then like a bicycle wheel over packed earth, like an automobile tire over pavement, faster and faster and faster. He heard the wailing of all the penitents. He heard the wailing of his own broken heart. Memories of his wife, buried under the weight of his mission, the weight of the very world, began to stir and claw toward the surface.

The White Rebbe fled into the night. He could no longer be alone. He could not be alone. He had a family, somewhere. He must have a home. He had cured the sick, he had brought children to the infertile, he had pried the fingers of demons from the shoulders of the tormented, he had found things that should have been lost forever, and yet it remained impossible for him to rest without passing his curse on to another.

The White Rebbe fled into the night. He looked for holy men, gurus, miracle workers, for he knew every powerful man has a source, and every angel has a flaw in its armor. He looked for his children, his children’s children, and their children, and theirs, strangers to him now, separated by thousands of miles and years, unaware of one another’s existence. He brought them gifts and bewitchments, and they greeted him as a lost uncle, a distant cousin. They knew the names of the Berukhim Rebbes, their wives and sons, and then one day they didn’t; they knew the wondrous feats of their ancestors, and then one day they didn’t; they had heard of a White Rebbe, yes, fairy tales, children’s stories.