The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (24 page)

— I think they’re supposed to pass away.

— I liked it better when you were a bricklayer.

Still, Sisel adored her husband, and was anxious to aid him in his work. Since death was a job to be done at night, that meant preparing him a good early supper, waiting up while he did his rounds, and warming him with a bowl of soup when he came home. Not that the change in trade was as simple as altered eating habits. In fact, grim-reaping had very little in common with bricklaying, and even if he’d been asked to build schooners with his hod and trowel, poor Yodal would have been less at sea.

The academicians weren’t helpful. While they were meticulous about the grim business of who he had to visit, backing the latest astrological data with breakthroughs in necromancy and divination, they gave no consideration to how the actual reaping ought to be done.

On his first night, Yodal was sent to see an old burgher named Meyer, who lived alone with his servant in a mansion on a hill. The burgher received Yodal at bedside. In a voice that crackled like falling snow, he asked the tradesman to take the chair nearest his head. Yodal sat, and, opening his warrant, tried to figure out where to begin. He gazed at Meyer. The man’s skin was so pale, and stretched so tightly over his skull, that, for a wishful moment, the reaper-by-proxy thought his grisly job done. Then Meyer peeled back his lips. He said that, from the warrant, he understood what Yodal wanted, but that he wasn’t ready yet. Accustomed to delinquent accounts, the bricklayer asked him how long he needed.

— I was expecting to live forever. Come back later.

— Tomorrow night?

— In a while, Yodal. There must be others who can go before.

When Yodal got home, Sisel took care to embrace him as if he were an ordinary tradesman. She gave him some potato soup, salted with tears. After a silence, she asked him about his work.

— I was a failure.

— Does that mean you don’t have to be grim reaper anymore?

— You don’t like my job.

— I want you to be happy, Yodal. But if we have children, think what it will be like for them.

In bed, they tried again to make her pregnant, as they had every night since their wedding. After a while, she forgot what her husband did for a living. And the two were drawn together anew.

A rumor awakened the city the following morning. First the servants heard it. Soon it rose from the houses where they worked, up through the echelons of wealth and power to the great assembly hall, where every bell tolled in the tower.

Then it was true: Someone was dead. Meyer the burgher had died in the night. But—here folks spoke in a whisper—it wasn’t on account of the grim reaper. Meyer had been finished off by Yodal the bricklayer. A murderer? By warrant of the governor!

In another time and place, there might have been protests, riots, gunfire: Shoot the messenger. However, everybody in the city had lived long enough without the angel of death to want someone else extinguished—universal immortality being less agreeable even than equal distribution of wealth—and Yodal was as good as anyone to play grand macabre.

He was the last to know what had happened. He slept through rumors and bells until noon, when Sisel woke him and repeated everything that people were saying in the marketplace.

— You told me that you didn’t do it.

— I didn’t. Meyer asked me to come back.

— No need for that. He’ll be buried by the time you slaughter your next victim.

Yodal didn’t know whether to be proud or distraught. Overnight he lost all his friends: Everyone knew what he did, and avoided him like the plague. Only Sisel stayed with him, enduring the social quarantine, resolutely redoubling her devotion. She stirred up ever more elaborate soups, and threw ever more effort into giving him children. She missed him awfully during the hours he was gone, and throbbed with jealousy when his appointment was with a woman. But naturally Yodal cared only for his Sisel, and did his work for her sake. Grim-reaping brought him a good salary—a government contract on which to raise a family—and wasn’t nearly as labor-intensive as mortaring bricks for a living. In fact, with his warrant and reputation, he needed merely to make an appearance to have his effect.

Certainly, folks tried to negotiate. While all could agree that life in the city was much improved by the return of death, understandably everyone wanted to enjoy the benefits. Yodal was always courteous and empathetic, generous with his condolences. He offered to return the following night when requested, but there was never any need: By morning, the man or woman would be dead.

Occasionally there were accidents—folks frightened to death when they saw him pass under a streetlight—or complications of other kinds. A pawnbroker offered him a wealth of diamonds for a six-month furlough. A young trader proposed a partnership in his business to spare him and take his father instead. A young woman approached him at home, promising her body if only he’d murder her husband.

Scrupulous Yodal refused all of it, patiently explaining that he didn’t decide who died, that it was reckoned by academicians on arcane charts in secret chambers. (The accidents they wrote off as accounting errors.) Yodal was just the deliveryman, and had no more say about a life span than a farmer did over the turn of seasons.

Still, some didn’t believe him. One man attacked him, and had a stroke. One woman ran away, only to be knocked flat in the street by a horse and buggy. The only person who nearly lived to see daylight was the philosopher Meshulam, who held Yodal for hours in contemplation.

The philosopher received Yodal in his study, where he poured some fine brandy, and posed more questions than the bricklayer had asked in a lifetime. Yodal didn’t understand any of them—though they extended from the inner realm of ethics to the outer reaches of cosmology—and he never knew whether to nod yes or no. But Meshulam scarcely noticed him. The old man had as little interest in answers as he had in bricks: Answers confined questions. So the philosopher always asked more. He might have gone on forever, were it not for the liquor. Meshulam grew drowsy. Yodal slipped away.

The soup was cold when the bricklayer got home. His wife was in bed. Her pillow was bruised. Her eyes were shut with hurt.

— You’re out later every night. You love your job more than you love me.

— I tried to get away. The philosopher Meshulam had some questions.

— If it isn’t your job that you love, then you must have a mistress. Come here. I can smell the liquor.

Yodal obeyed her. She pulled him close. As they made love, she begged him never to leave her again.

The following evening, Yodal told Akiva Alter that he wished to retire. He’d brought death to nearly a hundred people, sometimes half a dozen in a night, he pointed out. He’d worked hard and done his job well, but his real trade was bricklaying, and he’d heard from Hebel that business was improving. He missed his work. He missed the daylight. The wise man was understanding. A replacement might be found, the next night, even. But first the day’s chosen had to be culled. The grim-reaper-by-proxy asked for the death roll. Akiva Alter gave him only one name: Sisel.

— That can’t be. Sisel is my wife.

— Her time has come.

— She’s healthy and young.

— You’ve killed off children.

— That was different. I live for Sisel.

— You know how this works, Yodal. Our charts are infallible.

— Let me see them.

— You’re an ignorant tradesman.

Still, Akiva Alter led the bricklayer up into the locked observatory, the tallest building in the city, where the charts were kept.

For all his experience with plumb bob and line pins, Yodal was astonished by the complex machines stored there. He gaped at an enormous clockwork of brass gears and steel springs, the sole purpose of which, Akiva Alter showed him, was to roll up his beard. Then he showed Yodal mysterious spools of numbers that he said represented the most advanced research on the planet, calibrated to the equinoxes, verified in consultation with sun and moon. Yodal couldn’t remember any of the fancy cosmological questions posed by Meshulam with which to confound Akiva Alter, so he simply asked the academician:

— What if the stars are wrong?

— Look at them. They map all time. In the whole span of history, they’ve never changed their position.

The bricklayer looked up through the observatory’s oculus, in the direction that the seated savant was pointing his jeweled finger, and watched, an instant later, a streak of light arc the distance of darkness.

From that moment, the cosmos was different for Yodal. Nothing was fixed. As he spiraled down the staircase, he scarcely heard Akiva Alter calling after him about necromancy and divination and the infallibility of learned science. Sisel would live. That was the only certainty. Yodal would not bring death to her. He wouldn’t visit her with that. He’d never see her again, but what was his happiness measured against her life? Like the comet, he vanished into the blackness of night.

For many years, Yod-Alef wandered the continent, working for bricklayers and stonemasons as a laborer, never staying anywhere more than a season, nor giving away his real name, lest his Sisel chance to hear it spoken, and pursue him. He claimed to have no wife, which often encouraged young widows to court him. But his solitary love for Sisel was inviolable, absolute, and girls’ well-meaning efforts to cleave it pained him like a brick ax to the heart. In her absence, Sisel occupied him through day and night. Because he could tell the truth about himself to no one, she was, as he remembered her, his sole companion.

Yodal’s fellow laborers didn’t know what to make of him. They wondered how a man his age could have no good stories, how it was possible that nothing the least bit interesting had ever happened to him. But he didn’t drink with them, or share their whores, so, following a few sarcastic comments, they generally forgot about him, and, by the end of the season, he was able to slip away without anyone remembering that he’d been there, let alone caring where he’d gone.

Towns are people divided by walls: Yodal could have run away every month, every week, each hour of every day, and have still found places in want of his anonymous skills. He was suited to the itinerant life. Bricks and mortar were his freedom.

One morning, he got into a conversation with another laborer about towns where they’d worked. The man called himself Motke, and, while he was young enough to be Yodal’s son, they’d many similarities. In the first place, Motke was unusually handy for a common laborer, adept with line pins and plumb bob, so proficient with square and bevel that the master’s apprentice had several times begrudgingly taken instruction from him. In the second place, he was exceedingly discreet, which alternately gave the impression that he had nothing to say and that he was in possession of unspeakable secrets. And in the third place, he was built thick and strong like Yodal, which was why both had been hired for the hard work of lifting bricks three stories to set a spire atop the town hall.

As they spoke, Yodal recognized the dialect peculiar to his native city, the patois of an isolated place with many terms for immediate proximity and few for long distance. Motke was the first person he’d met from his region since leaving, the first man who might know if his Sisel was well. Yet naturally he couldn’t say her name. Instead, he simply asked about the city. Motke looked him over with care. At last he bent near and said:

— You’re from there, too?

— I had a job in the city a long time ago.

— Which master did you work for?

— A fellow called . . . Hebel.

— Hebel was my father.

— He wasn’t married when I was there. Who’s your mother?

— Her name is Sisel. Do you know her?

— I suppose that I don’t.

The master called Yodal to fetch more lime for mortar. Motke watched him sling the wooden hod across his shoulder and head toward the quarry.

Several days later, the hod was seen in pieces at the bottom of a cliff. A search for Yodal’s body followed. Not even his bones could be found.

The widow Sisel was living in a tiny hovel built of rough granite in the hills above the city. Brick and mortar had brought her nothing but despair: the loss of one husband after another, and then her only son. She was still marriageable—her beauty had aged with the firm resolve of fine marble—but what good had men ever been? When the matchmakers came, she slammed the door on them. Nor did she go out much anymore. Her childhood friendships hadn’t survived her marriage to Yodal, and Hebel’s companions had been rough-hewn masons who wanted only to lay her.

And, in any case, so many people had died. Ancient Akiva Alter had been the first after Yodal’s departure, found the following morning in his observatory, expired over the celestial tables, one jeweled finger pointed stiffly toward an empty sky. Within weeks, the other eleven academicians were deceased. Nobody thought to replace them, nor to appoint a new grim-reaper-by-proxy. Folks reckoned that death had finally recalled the way to their distant city, and repaid Yodal’s makeshift undertaking by making him angel’s apprentice. Only Sisel was dissatisfied with that explanation for her husband’s sudden disappearance. She believed that he’d bartered death for life with another girl, younger and prettier than she. She confided this in Hebel, who naturally encouraged such faithless suspicions. He courted her openly. Nobody was surprised to see that, within a year, they were married and a son was born.