Immortal at the Edge of the World (15 page)

Mirella tried to soften up my rudeness. “What he means to say is we are under a terrible time constraint. We would
love
to come back and put ourselves at your disposal on another occasion, but tonight we have a thing.”

“Yes, a thing,” I agreed.

“Of course!” he said loudly, and I wondered if he was going to bow again. “I am so sorry. But really, the Kadesh Peace Treaty . . .”

“We will have to come back for it,” I said.

“Because of your thing.”

“It’s an important thing.”

“Of course! Please follow me.”

He led us through two more halls it probably just killed him not to tell us all about the contents of, and to a
Staff Only
side door, which he unlocked. This led to a stone stairwell and down to the basement.

Mr. Acar threw a switch, which turned on some unpleasant fluorescent ceiling lights. The place looked a lot like an office building sublevel, except that here and there were pieces of very old things sitting on tables or in boxes or crates, and then it felt more like history’s attic.

He led us quickly down the hall past all of the random bits of archeology. Mirella, holding onto my arm and—I think—watching our backs, whispered, “Why exactly are we here?”

“I’ll explain when we get there,” I said. “Are we alone?”

“Yes. I don’t believe whoever is sharing the museum with us left the main hall entrance.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes, except that means there is only one other exit should we need to leave without crossing their path. Now would be a good time to tell me if you believe this is going to be a violent encounter.”

“They haven’t been violent so far,” I said.

“This is not an answer.”

“I realize that.”

At the end of the hallway we turned a corner and came upon a white door with a square window in the center of it. I was reminded of those doors they always use when they’re showing insane asylum holding cells on television shows.

“You understand this is a highly irregular request,” Mr. Acar said in a library-quiet voice. He looked very uncomfortable, and when he spoke it was actually to his necktie rather than us.

“I do,” I said. I would have apologized, but I didn’t want him to take that as a hint that we weren’t going through with this.

He hesitated, and I got the impression that the fulfillment of this request was something he was very specifically against. “Very well,” he said finally, turning on the light in the room on the other side of the door. “To the left of the door you will find gloves, which I implore you to use before touching anything else in the room. You are aware that the oils from your hand will be very damaging to the contents.”

“It hasn’t been opened?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh, no, it has. And the documents catalogued and under glass.”

“Then why do we need the gloves?”

“Please humor me, Mr. Justinian. This find is public, but we haven’t catalogued and shared the details of its contents with anyone as yet. It’s extremely important we not make any mistakes tonight. I hope you understand, and do not take my precautions as an affront. It’s only . . . again, this is a very unusual request.”

He opened the door for both of us and stepped aside. “I will be just down the hall.”

Mirella looked surprised that he wasn’t joining us but didn’t offer a comment of any sort until the door was closed.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked.

“Don’t forget to put on your gloves.”

There was, as described, a large box of polyurethane gloves on a table next to the door. I took two out and put them on, and then turned on the rest of the lights in the room.
 

It was not a particularly large space, and it was very, very clean. It almost had the feel of a scientific laboratory, except that the labs I’ve seen had a lot more chemicals lying around. At the far corner of the room was a large crate resting on a wooden pallet, and in the center of the room was a long glass table.

Mirella glared at me as I handed her a set of gloves. “You said you would explain once we got here. We’re here.”

“All right. An archeologist working on funding from this museum recently uncovered something I’m interested in looking more closely at.”

“I will bury a knife in your thigh if you don’t start answering straightforward questions.”

“I’m a complicated fellow.”

“Nobody is ever as complicated as they think they are. Where did this archeologist find this thing?”

“In the ruins of an old synagogue in southern Iraq.”

“And what did he find?”

“I’ll show you.”

I led her to the crate in the far corner, which as I suspected held a big square of dirt, at the center of which was something that looked like a brick chimney.

“An old oven?”

“It’s not an oven. It’s a geniza. And I only actually care about what’s inside of it.”

“Dirt? More bricks?”

I went over to the glass table and felt around the underside until I found the switch. The table was backlit, and when the faintly bluish light was turned on we could see what was under the glass countertop.

Mirella circled around the table, looking at the scraps. “These look like letters.”

“They are.” But there weren’t very many. I was expecting more.

Against one wall was a case with what looked like very thin drawers. That was, I imagined, where the rest of them were stored.

“What language is this?” she asked.

“That one’s in Hebrew.”

“And do you read Hebrew?”

“I do. I also read Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Judeo-Persian . . .”

“Fine, I understand. Now why are we opening old mail?”

I smiled. “I’m looking for a particular piece of correspondence from a particular Jewish merchant.”

“And you believe that correspondence is in this room.”

“I sincerely hope so. This is the third geniza I’ve checked and the closest one to the right region.”

I bent down at the table and started skimming the headers of each letter. Formal correspondences back then were very conveniently rote, the best part about them being that they always included something along the lines of
may God bless you
, and it was because of that salutation that these letters even existed.

According to Jewish law at the time, it was a sin to destroy anything that had the name of God on it. This created a few problems, because every correspondence began or ended with an invocation of His blessing to the recipient. To not do so was to invite His displeasure, or something. I’m not really clear on why they kept writing that when it created such a hassle, but everyone did so I’m sure they had a reason.

The consequence was that no letters could be destroyed. But they couldn’t be kept around, either, because the Jewish merchant class had a lot to lose. These letters held shipping manifests, and business plans, and the names of suppliers, and all other manner of confidential business information. It wasn’t safe to have those documents lying around, but there was that pesky problem of God’s name on all of them.

The solution was to build a geniza. This was a brick compartment that was completely sealed except for one missing brick, built against an outside wall of a synagogue. Whenever anyone was done with a letter—or a book, or anything else with the Lord’s name on it—they’d drop the item through the opening. Once the geniza was full, the last brick would be put in place and they’d build a new one.

It was the kind of genius solution only religion could come up with. And it resulted in hundreds of dead letter drops buried throughout the Asia and Europe.

“What’s so important about this one correspondence?” Mirella asked. “And how do you know that it exists, if the people who found this haven’t even finished reading everything yet?”

“These are in a dozen different hands and employ at least four language variants I can see. It would take years to translate all of them properly. All they are going to do is post a summarization of sample contents and invite scholars to interpret the more interesting ones. I could wait for that, but they might not even find the letter I’m looking for as interesting as I do.”

“And you can read these all right now.”

“I can, yes.”

She sighed. I was sort of falling in love with her sighs. There was an outside chance I was exasperating her on purpose just to hear it.

“Would you please just explain this in a way that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers?”

“I probably can’t.”

She stepped between the table and me and lifted my chin until I was looking her in the eyes. “Try.”

“All right. The letters I’m looking for were written by a Jew named Abraham bin Yasser. They were written to his uncle Menachem and concerned the spice business Menachem owned and Abraham managed. The letters were written over a thousand years ago and sent from different parts of India, Africa, and Eastern Europe, depending on where Abraham’s travels took him. And I know these letters exist because I studied Abraham’s business practices very carefully and eventually did business with him directly, and I learned that he documented absolutely everything.”

She stared at me for a solid ten seconds before saying anything.

“Yes, all right, that makes sense,” she said finally, stepping aside.

“You don’t have any more questions?”

“Not right now.”

“Then I’m going to keep looking.”

“Yes, do that. I’m going to stand by the door and see if your pixie shows up.”

“All right.”

I gave up on the table and opened one of the drawers. More letters under glass, as I’d hoped. The drawers were removable, so I pulled the first of them out and placed it on the table.

“Oh yes, I do have one more question,” Mirella said after a time. “What are you looking for in the letters?”

“That’s an even longer story,” I said.

“Ah. Save it for when we get out of here.”

*
 
*
 
*

I looked for an hour before finding a promising sign that I was in the right place, in the form of an actual letter from Abraham. It was only a list of spices and some nominal accounting information but the year was about right, and it gave me a sample of his handwriting.

“Did you find what you wanted?” Mirella asked. She had been standing at the door for most of the hour, trying to get a good read on what was going on in the hallway from the vantage point of the tiny window. When she didn’t do that she paced, which made me as anxious as she clearly was.

“No, but it’s a good sign,” I said, moving on to the next tray of letters.

“He was a spice merchant. Are you looking for spices? I think we passed a supermarket on our way here.”

“Not spices. A treasure of a different sort.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, shaking her head. She had a few unkind things to add under her breath and then went back to staring out the window.

It was not spices. It was the thing Hsu never quite got his hands on, and since Hsu was not with me and I had never seen the object in question, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. All I did know was that Abraham parted with it, and when he did so he wrote about it in a letter.

It was very likely that the thing no longer existed. History is unkind to man-made stuff, and the proof of that was in every corner of the museum over our heads. Even if it did still exist, after a thousand years I had no reason to think there was any sort of trail I could possibly follow that would lead me to it. But again, I could be wrong, and until I found Abraham’s letter I wouldn’t know for sure.

My money was what made it possible for me to fly around the world looking for this letter, and until I had succeeded I wasn’t ready to disappear. Another chance might never come along. I was aware that this was a stupid reason to put myself at great personal risk—according to Tchekhy—and maybe that was why I didn’t want to tell Mirella what was going on. Or maybe I just didn’t want anybody to talk me out of it.

I was running through all of that in my head when I realized I no longer had to worry about anybody talking me out of anything, because I was looking right at the letter.

“Here it is,” I said.

“At last. Can we leave now?”

“No, I kind of need to read it first.”

“Fine, what does it say?”

“
Dearest sir, I am forwarding a most unusual item. It is to understand the sky. Please if you find no need for it yourself to give it to Isaac to inspire his studies.”

Mirella looked unimpressed. “He’s describing your treasure?”

“I think so.”

“You were looking for something to
understand the sky
?”

“Apparently? I know Isaac was his son, and that’s good news because Isaac lived not far from where this was found. But Abraham thought it was a child’s toy, and I really don’t know what the understanding the sky part means. So I still don’t know what I’m actually looking for.”

“You can think about it later. Now I think we very much have to go. I don’t like being trapped in this room.”