The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (17 page)

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Old Ephraim died that summer. While he had no family, everybody in town attended his funeral. Sender the rabbi declared him holy. Then food was set atop his coffin, a candle was lit, and the people left in blessed silence.

An apprentice no longer, Chet consumed the sins of his master. When he finished his meal, the candle didn’t flare up—so he snuffed it with his finger. Then he fell asleep, under the weight of indigestion, beside the coffin.

Early in the morning, he was awoken by Ofer the grave digger, who wanted to know when he’d be disposing of Ephraim’s corpse.

— Isn’t that your job, Ofer?

— I only handle folks buried in the cemetery. Old Ephraim never bought a plot.

— The rabbi called him holy.

— It doesn’t mean he had money. I don’t make the rules, Chet. That’s how it is for everybody. It’s the way of the world.

So Chet dragged his master’s putrid body—even the coffin didn’t belong to him—all the way to the rabbi’s study, where Sender was teaching his disciples scripture. When the students saw what was coming, they tried to deflect Chet at the door, to shove him back out into the street, without letting the putrid corpse soil their silk and sable, but Sender waved them away. Wrapping himself in a mink stole, he led Chet into the courtyard, his personal improvement on the Garden of Eden, all marble statuary and malachite cisterns. Against one of the urns, Chet rested his master’s body. Then he told the rabbi how Ofer had cast beloved Ephraim out of the cemetery.

— Ephraim should have known: Credit in the world-to-come is nonnegotiable in the here-and-now.

— He had money, rabbi. He gave it away.

— He was holy. That can be impractical.

— Then what should I do with his body?

— Throw it in the forest. Leave the rest to fate.

Chet did as he was told. When he returned the next day, only bones and vultures remained.

So the sin-eater was fated to be carrion. Had Chet a mind for metaphor, he might have interpreted that in any number of ways, extracted meaning as the birds drew marrow from the bones. But Chet had no capacity for poetry. He was a practical young man, with a promising future in a respectable profession. Following the lead of the rabbi, he resolved not to be holy, but to be wealthy. He didn’t want, quite, to bury himself in money as bankers did. Rather he wished to own, outright, all that the here-and-now had to offer.

That took gold, which might have been hard to obtain were Chet in any ordinary trade: Coal and grain were purchased on credit slips, but death was a one-way cash transaction. Of course, if Chet spent his sin-eating fees—if he built a mansion and bought a carriage with those coins instead of giving them away as alms—he’d have to compensate with other good deeds. He’d have to carry rivers of water to work off the sins he ingested each evening at the cemetery. For weeks he vacillated, and gave his earnings away. Then one night, while picking over the sins of a burgher’s beloved wife—served up as a platter of decomposing fish—crafty Chet saw through his professional dilemma to a scheme that, he mused to himself, would have impressed even upright Ephraim.

Chet had not been back to the orphanage in the couple of years since he began his apprenticeship, but little had changed there. The widow Yidel still woke the children several hours before dawn by pounding her clogs against a tin pan. Boys were sent to chop wood in the dark forest, miles beyond the burghers’ most outlandish property claims, while girls were sent to scavenge what scraps they could from the town waste bins, to scrape together a morning gruel. After that, the children were left to beg in the streets, not because anyone gave them money, but because Yidel knew no better way to be rid of them until they went to bed.

Ever since Chet’s departure, the eldest ward was a girl called Naomie, whose parents, some said, were tree and wind: As an infant, she’d been found alone in the woods after a storm, and, over the decade since then, had grown up as tall and lanky as a white birch beneath a squall of black hair. Naomie was the only orphan Yidel could count on for the occasional copper. Envious, the other girls attributed this to witchcraft, and cursed her unnatural sylvan birth. Lecherous, the boys attributed it to prostitution, and cursed their own financial impotence. In truth, though, Naomie knew neither magic nor men. She was just like any orphan, a cast-off shadow of death.

For weeks, the gruel had been so meager that children were seasoning it with their own fingernails and earwax, when Naomie found, miraculously, in a basket on the orphanage doorstep, food enough to stretch a porridge for several days. The hidden patron must have been rich to have had such copious leftovers, and to let them go when they’d still do as feed or fertilizer. Probably a foreigner; the last generous local had been the sin-eater Ephraim.

By the time the others returned from their morning rounds, Naomie had prepared a feast that made even the widow Yidel wonder what incubus the girl had seduced. But who could utter a word when all mouths were full of food?

That night, Naomie dreamed that she’d killed a man she’d never seen before, bludgeoned him with a rock, and hauled him down to the river with a rope. The water was cold. She started to shiver. Waking in a fit of chill, she got up to see if the door was open. Through a break in the wood, she spied a man. Not the stranger she’d bludgeoned in her sleep. Someone as familiar as a brother. She watched as Chet dropped off another basket and left.

In the morning, she retrieved it, fuller even than the day before. With some rotten eggs and a slab of moldy cheese, she fried an omelet. She boiled a soup from a batch of chicken feet and six dried-up turnips. She was chopping up some mealy apples to bake a pie, when the other orphans started to arrive, sacks and cups as empty as their hollow bellies. They glared at her, as if she were to blame, but ate what she served them, and fought over the apples before she could put pie into oven.

Naomie’s dream that night set her inside a mansion more extravagant than any she’d ever imagined. She was there alone with the miller, who had his arms around her, despite the fact that—she felt quite certain—she wasn’t his wife. He kissed her. She recoiled onto the orphanage floor.

Before climbing back onto her straw mattress, Naomie looked out the door. She saw the basket, and then Chet walking away, his back to her.

He slept more soundly now that he had money. Within a few weeks of fortuitous deaths (an unscrupulous gambler, a farmer with a violent temperament), he’d collected enough to buy a small plot of land and to have a wooden cabin built on it. Most of the cabin was occupied by a great brick fireplace, where he warmed himself after his nightly rounds, and which he intended to set the scale for his future estate.

And already, by his estimation, he commanded more respect than old Ephraim: Moneylenders greeted him in the street, matchmakers offered him sturdy peasant girls with guaranteed dowries, and he even hired a chimney sweep, though his flue was still sootless. He also quietly engaged the services of an out-of-town tailor to fashion him a suit with hidden pockets, fit for a magician.

Into these he fed the victuals set out for him in the cemetery, vanishing comestibles with the alacrity he’d once dispatched mounds of granite, and extinguishing the death-watch candles with a rhetorical flourish. It was an elaborate performance, but the dead were said to be an unforgiving audience: He’d heard enough ghost stories not to want to imagine what would happen if the deceased believed he was bungling their atonement.

And he wasn’t, not really. Chet was, by his own judgment, a moral alchemist, nourishing innocent orphans on sins committed before they were born, offering them not only daily sustenance but also the weight of history. If children inherit the flaws of their parents, the dead could become an orphan’s surrogate family. Chet had it all figured out. His future was practically assured, the good life guaranteed, when, one night, he spied in the graveyard a set of open eyes.

Now it’s a well-known fact that if a corpse meets your gaze you must not blink first, lest you be obliged to take the cadaver’s place. (This is why the law requires sealed coffins and deep graves.) Cursing Ofer’s negligence, Chet stepped forward to drop the dead lids. He reached out his hand into the receding night, but the vision passed like a specter: Nobody was there.

He might have dismissed the episode had the apparition been an aberration, but its sequel the next evening, and again the night after, led him to take precautionary measures. He set a trap. He dug a trench and covered it with twigs so fine that not even a hallucination could escape.

That evening, Naomie crept out of the orphanage just before midnight. She tiptoed down a side road, scurried into the woods. She scampered through trees under a moonless sky, as light and sure as a familiar. This was the place that had borne her, she’d been told for as long as she could remember, and she knew her way as certainly as other children recognized their mothers.

In a few minutes, she was at the cemetery gate, which she vaulted in a leap. Chet crouched. Hidden in the thicket of underbrush and tombstones, she edged forward through the generations. She stepped into her customary spot—and felt the ground take leave of her bare feet.

For a moment, Naomie stood atop a gap. Then she dropped, a six-foot plummet into a makeshift grave.

Chet rushed up to the pit, holding a candle and Ofer’s spade. He peered over the lip as he threw in the first shovelful of dirt.

— What are
you
doing down there?

— What are you doing up
there
?

— I’m the town sin-eater. Everyone knows that, Naomie.

— You haven’t been eating many sins lately.

Another load of dirt landed on her chest. Then one hit her in the face, hard, all rock and clod. The soil stuck where her nose began to bleed. She called his name, sharp like a sob.

— Chet, have you already forgotten that you were once an orphan like us?

— I remember the gruel all too well. You may be too proud to accept my charity, but I’ll be damned if I lose a penny to your meddling.

— I’ve never told a soul your secret. I never will, Chet. I only wanted to understand the sins in my dreams.

— Why should I trust you? Why should I care? I’ll give the food to vermin, and let the orphanage starve.

Naomie had climbed to her feet. She hoisted herself out of the pit, and came near to Chet. She hadn’t seen him, except from afar, since he was a scrawny twelve-year-old boy whose fear of the widow Yidel marked him like the measles. He’d since become bulkier, to be sure, but the greater change had come about in his mouth, which glistened with greed. She shut her eyes and kissed him there, in the way she knew from her dreams. She let him fondle her, until he’d taken his pleasure.

He left her in naked pain. Yet only as her physical discomfort subsided did she begin to wonder whether the lingering mortification was the feeling of sin or of redemption.

Every night for many months she slipped into the cemetery and gave herself to the sin-eater, returning to the orphanage in the morning to make breakfast from the food he provided her. And Chet, he took home the cash. In short order, he was rich. He added so many rooms to his house that the fireplace had to be supplemented with three more. He bought his neighbors’ land and tore down their hovels, to make room for a garden that would make the rabbi’s Eden resemble a peasant’s vegetable patch. He purchased animals fit for Noah’s ark, clothing to match Joseph’s coat, and a carriage to rival the Tabernacle.

A few of the town elders considered his pretensions unseemly, but everyone judged him an improvement over Ephraim: He negotiated his fees without so much fuss over family history, and dressed well at festivals. And what of penance? Given his success in business, who could question his skill at balancing the books in heaven?

He also, natural showman, mastered the extravagant gesture. He waived his sin-eating fees for the rabbi’s relations, hosted banquets for visiting dignitaries, and, when the town hall needed repair, donated a new cupola. Granite to garnet, the orphan became a leading citizen—and the region’s most eligible bachelor.

The matchmakers no longer bothered with sturdy peasant girls. They offered him burghers’ daughters whose trousseaus came with chambermaids, and exotic beauties from islands too distant to have names. But nobody he met was right. The burghers’ daughters came with attractive dowries, to be sure, and the exotic beauties promised to keep any man enchanted for a thousand and one nights or more. What did he want, then, the matchmakers asked. A princess? They located one for him, with blood so pure that, it was said, a single cut would drain the life from her. But he wouldn’t be enticed, nor could he say why.

Chet asked Naomie to marry him. A full moon witnessed his proposal, and illuminated her response. Her eyes closed. She frowned. She said no.

He stood. He asked her if she knew what he owned, how much he had. She did. He said she couldn’t possibly, unless she saw it all. He set her in the back of his carriage, and drove her to his estate. First they circled around his garden—which, unlike Eden, had flagstone roads laid for such excursions—naming for her the sleeping animals and flowers in the languages of their native lands. Then he brought her into his house, the foyer ceiling taller than the forest canopy, the halls more numerous than woodland trails, each leading to a bedroom, all of them empty except one, where he slept alone on silken sheets under blankets woven from gold thread. He led her there.