The Angel of Losses (4 page)

Return the baby to his grandparents, Yode’a said, and then we will return to your father’s school.

I’m not going, Solomon said. I’m staying. I’m home.

He heard a voice calling his name. There was Zipporah, rushing forth with her mother behind her. The angel was gone.

The baby, the family agreed, was a miracle, and they set to rejoicing. Rumors began to filter through the alleys that the ghost had been exorcised, that order had returned.

Weeks went by, happy weeks for the others, now that the hand of the church had receded. It was decided that Zipporah and Solomon would marry, but their wedding plans were soon set aside, for her sister’s child had fallen ill. The family’s grief at the loss of their daughter combined with their horror over the infant’s suffering, and a dark cloud settled over them all.

And in every stolen moment, every private whisper, Zipporah demanded, you must save him; she pleaded, can’t you save him?

But Solomon couldn’t. He raised his hands over the child. He prayed the night into morning. Still, the fever wouldn’t break. Solomon realized that the power the angel had given him was only temporary, and he became determined to win it back—not just for the baby but for Zipporah, who was in anguish.

Finally, Solomon rose at midnight to walk along the canal, and again he drew the angel’s symbol in water on his chest. In an instant, the moon pulled the tide free, sending the lagoon lapping at its walls, and the clouds expanded to fill the sky, a white haze obscuring the ghetto, save for a black figure perched on an arching bridge. The silhouette disappeared in a flash of light; the angel had turned to look at him through burning eyes.

Solomon and Yode’a stood together over the water.

Power over the dead is cheap, the angel said. Power over death is costly.

Then the angel told him a story—a terrible story, of nearly inconceivable suffering—just as Solomon’s father had warned him he would, but the story wasn’t about the old rebbe. It was about Manasseh.

Solomon finally understood his father—why he had insisted Manasseh be spared leadership, why he spoke of the angel who gave him knowledge and power as an enemy, even why he hardened his own son’s heart against him. In the end, though, it was for nothing.

Then we are in agreement, the angel said. Someday I will call on you to satisfy your debt.

Some day far from today, Solomon answered.

Very far away, the angel assured him. Yes, very.

Solomon leaned against the stone rail and saw his reflection in the starlit lagoon. The angel was gone, and in his place a many-armed fish broke the surface. It was the magic symbol, full and complete. Its many angles cast a light unlike any the rebbe’s son had seen before.

His father’s emblem. The Sabbath Light. Its power and responsibility now his alone to carry. It wasn’t until later, when the angel became his enemy, that he would wonder if he had made a terrible mistake.

He turned back into the clotted alleys of the ghetto. He thought Manasseh would be pleased with him, with the end of his rebellion and his new life of devotion, but in fact, he was never to see Manasseh again.

Finally Solomon came to the tiny plaza where the dead congregated and found Zipporah waiting for him, a pillar of flame among the shadows, smiling among the invisible wraiths that passed around her like pestilence, and he was afraid to see her walk through this place alone, the land of the dead.

She visited me, like you promised, she said. My sister, in a dream. She said that her son will live.

Yes, Solomon said. Take me to him.

The light in her eyes contracted, piercing as stars. She saw that he was changed.

My father is dead, he told her. My brother too.

The Wonder Rebbe?

No, he said. There is no more wonder in that place.

But you can return it, she said.

She believed in the future he could not yet envision: that he, of all the rebbes in his line, would be the greatest; that legends of his good deeds would spread far and wide; that people who never saw him themselves would be able to describe him, his hair and beard gone white with holiness, his eyes a dizzying blue.

Holding her hand in his, staring into her eyes aglow with dark fire, he became aware of another alphabet, not the silky black glyphs of the Torah or the fiery symbols of God’s secret language but a set of letters known only to one’s beloved. For the rest of their years, and there were many of them, the hearts of the White Rebbe and his wife were as one.

Solomon healed the baby, and he and Zipporah were married in that city of islands. After saying their good-byes, they set out at night while everyone slept, and came to the gates of the ghetto. A shadow grew on the street, lengthening until a figure appeared, his hair wild and gray as smoke, his cloak purple as the deep. It was time for the angel to take them on their journey, and Zipporah grew frightened.

Will I feel it?

It’s like the story of the Messiah, Solomon told her. The redeemer goes into the desert, and the sand rises in a great storm, spinning around him, blinding him, and it becomes his whole world, and he is lost.

But I will protect you, he promised his beloved. When you open your eyes, you will see a world of mud and small houses and people who think only one way, but our love will make it a kingdom.

Two

W
hen I returned to school after Grandpa’s funeral, I realized the Wandering Jew, the subject of that semester’s research, was just another White Magician. So that was why the tale, tucked inside a two-hundred-year-old novel, had gripped me. No one had spoken of the White Magician since that night long ago when Holly had seen the ghost; perhaps that’s why it took so long for me to notice the similarities between the two figures.

In this particular tale, the one I would claim for my dissertation, the Wandering Jew was a traveling sorcerer with a walking stick and a velvet strap tied across his forehead, summoned to exorcise a restless ghost. When the spirit appeared, shrouded and chanting, the wanderer unbound the velvet strap, baring the fiery symbol etched in his skin, an image the living could not bear to look upon and the dead must obey.

Soon I found the Wandering Jew everywhere, the same man wearing different clothes: a Faust or the Ancient Mariner, demon or tragic hero, ancestor or harbinger, but always immortal, a presence simultaneously fleeting and eternal, the embodiment of an unspeakable power. I felt like I was in the company of Grandpa’s hero again. I wrote about that first story and its related literature with a single-minded intensity through my senior year of college and three years of graduate school. My family was proud of my accomplishments, but they didn’t understand my work, not really, and my grief took on a new shade: Grandpa would have understood. I was like him. We both had dark tastes.

I EMERGED FROM THE SUBWAY EXHAUSTED BY MY VISIT WITH
Holly and the strange world of
The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light,
which I had read on the train. Still, I went straight to the university library. I had received an email that my book order had arrived, an order I couldn’t remember placing.

I had spent June and July in the library stacks—treading the narrow aisles, triggering the weak track lighting, skimming the canvas spines. The rows of books, the palette of a November tree, were endless. I drilled through database taxonomies; I went to the shelves in search of one title and left with eight or nine. My back ached and my ribs were tender from hugging the books so close. I wasn’t burdened, though. I was driven. Obsessed. If I found one useful sentence, one fact, in four hundred pages, I felt triumphant, like I had pulled a rare fossil from a great desert. Every notecard, every typed bullet point helped me forget the nagging anger and shame my relationship with Holly had become.

Loss is the origin of all drives and desires.

Every drive aims to reclaim something lost.

Traumatic dreams repeat endlessly in a futile attempt to articulate a horror.

Words assume the power to call their object into being.

The Wandering Jew asks the ghost: “What disturbs thy sleep?”

I worked and worked, slept the whole night through, and greeted my work again rested. It was a strange sort of peace, and I cultivated it, knowing that it was finite. We were all meeting at my parents’ place in Florida for Christmas. Holly insisted, even with the new baby. She said she missed the coast, but I was sure she missed the holiday. She had been the guardian of all our family traditions. She loved ritual. She was good at it. In that respect she was suited to her new life. I never cared much what we ate or when we gathered, but now I longed for Holly’s orchestrated Christmas instead of the dysfunctional reunion that waited at the end of the semester.

The library building resembled a domed cathedral, its stone façade inscribed with the names of philosophers and slit with dark, glittering windows. Inside, marble lobbies, two-story reading rooms, innocuous doors that led to millions of books stacked from sea level to sky. Beneath all of that, a labyrinth of dusty, fluorescent-lit administrative suites. In the basement interlibrary loan office, a dazed student clerk handed me a brown canvas-covered book, barely half an inch thick, the spine stiff and the pages coffee-tinted with age.
An Account of Juan Espera en Dios in the Americas,
translated into English by Abraham Ghazzati and published in 1907.

“I didn’t order this,” I told the girl.

“It’s your name on the slip.”

“Yes, but I didn’t order it. It’s a mistake.”

She shrugged. “Okay. Leave it on the counter.”

I looked at the flimsy receipt tucked into the book. My name, Marjorie Burke, and my student ID number. Sent from the University of Texas at El Paso. “Wait,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

I tucked the book under my arm and went to find an available computer outside the stacks. I checked the Library of Congress database; there were only three copies of the book in all of North America, and two—one at Arizona, another at UCLA—were missing. I logged in to my library account. It registered an order for the book on August 14, a little over a week ago and days after I had finished my preliminary research and returned the last of the sixty-seven books I had ordered from collections across the country. Next to the entry was the code ADMIN 8141573.

I scribbled down the serial number and returned to the loan office. The girl behind the counter stared at me. “I found this code in my account,” I said, sliding the paper toward her.

“I’m going to get my supervisor,” she said, relieved, and disappeared into a back office.

A few minutes later a man appeared. He was tall, with narrow black glasses and brown hair falling over his forehead. “Can I help you?” he asked. He had the same bored affect as the girl and was dressed unseasonably in a baggy green sweater, protection from the library’s air-conditioning.

“Yes, I want to know what this code means. This book came in for me, but I never ordered it.”

He tapped the paper. “That’s me. I put in the order for you.”

“What?”

He pushed his overgrown hair behind his ear, blinked a couple of times.

“And why did you do that?” I asked.

“Well, I saw you were ordering every book in the database linked to the Wandering Jew. Juan Espera en Dios is a Spanish incarnation—”

“I know who Juan Espera en Dios is,” I interrupted. “But I don’t do the Americas.”

“What exactly is your research on?” he asked.

It had been a while since someone asked me to describe my dissertation—a while since I’d been to a dinner party or university reception or bar—but I had an old strategy. If I doubted the sincerity of the speaker’s interest, or was just feeling difficult, I gave them theory: uncanny doubles, split subjects, the subversive feminine sublime. The listener’s eyes would squint, indicating concentration; then they would relax back into blankness. He or she would offer a quick nod, feigned comprehension, a signal to move on to a new topic. If I liked the person, or was a little drunk and expansive, I went straight to the story: blood-soaked ghosts, wandering exorcists, flesh burning with illegible magic. I was always a little surprised when that didn’t win them over—usually it didn’t. You would think everyone could appreciate a good ghost story.

The librarian was tall but not too tall, with cheekbones just subtle enough and lips just thin enough to save him from being pretty, and his eyes were just squinty enough from screen time to hide their brightness.

And yet I still gave him the first answer.

“Feminist postmodern psychoanalytic critique of exorcism in the British Gothic tradition.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. You were ordering so many—”

“Why are you following my book orders, anyway?” I had been feeding search criteria and requests into an electronic processing system, never a thought about the person on the other end. It was like he had been reading my thoughts. I didn’t like that, no matter how nice he looked—actually, that made it worse.

“It’s been a slow summer,” he started. “Look, I’m sorry if—I thought it might be helpful. The book is kind of hidden. I was researching for months before I came across it.”

Of course, I knew the Wandering Jew had found other scholars—I had read thousands of their pages—but here, at this university, it had just been me and the immortal. I never considered that while I combed through the pages of Enlightenment Europe in the narrow halls above, someone was in the basement, conducting the same search through rambling American apocrypha.

“Researching what?”

“The Human Geography Project, with the Anthro Department, and Near East Studies. A digital map of folklore migration. The Wandering Jew. Other stuff too. I’m doing another degree in information science. This—” He gestured to the empty loan office, the buzzing air conditioner, the sullen girl reading a book, her feet on the counter. “Day job.”

“Okay, thanks for the book,” I said quickly. “I don’t do the Americas. And I do my own research. So. If you see my name. You know. Ignore it.”

He exhaled. “Sure. Sorry, Marjorie.”

Suddenly I wanted to backtrack. I could tell him about the story. He would find it interesting, my Wandering Jew, with magic written into his skin. I could tell him my family never asked about my research, confess that I was too possessive to discuss my work with the other students in the literature program, and that I had no one to talk to about the tale around which my whole life turned. I had a rough morning, I could say. I’ve been working so hard. I haven’t been sleeping well. The White Magician was a rebbe, and Grandpa had never told me.

“I’ll take the book,” I said, by way of apology. He just shrugged.

I opened it in the nearby reading room. Whether the text proved relevant or not—and I was sure it would be the latter—the book itself was a comfort: a return to my work, quiet study rooms and surprises that were only scholarly in nature.

The chief Rabbi of Monterrey suggested the mysterious stranger was Joseph Della Reina, the medieval rabbi who could no longer bear the suffering of his people’s exile, and was thus determined to force the coming of the Messiah.

One of Della Reina’s disciples died, one went mad, and one gave himself to apostasy. The rabbi himself went into a new kind of exile, fated to be born again and again, generations of penitence, until he might redeem himself, just himself, and not all of mankind. Meanwhile, the Messiah remained lost in a great desert beyond a river of stones.

But this stranger, it was agreed by the townspeople, was not the mad rabbi, but a different immortal Jew.

I shut the book. Had I picked it up the day before, I would have read and dismissed the story without a second thought—it was folklore, nothing at all to do with my research—but today was different. This was the same story depicted in Holly’s painting: the condemned men hanging in a swirling sky. It reminded me of Grandpa’s Manasseh too, a holy man overcome with sorrow for his people’s spiritual exile.

The story had come to me now three times in a single day. Holly would call it synchronicity—the old Holly would have, anyway. She had spent her twelfth year presiding over a Ouija board, her fourteenth reading tarot, her sixteenth writing down every dream in an attempt to uncover her past lives. The summer before the start of her sophomore year of college she announced her intention to convert. We were drinking in the backyard, beer for me and juice for her, ants crawling over our bare legs and the low sky a deep polluted orange. She hadn’t told me about Nathan yet—I didn’t realize how serious it all was—and I laughed. “When did you start believing in God?”

She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke her voice quavered. “Marjorie, I’ve always believed in God. Didn’t you know that?” She stared at me through her tears, with an expression of such betrayal it left me dumb, too shocked and sorry and confused to respond.

We didn’t talk about it again. I went back to school, to ruin ghost stories with jargon about social contracts, patrilineage, and national anxiety.

To me, the mad rabbi was just a coincidence. I wasn’t a believer.

And yet.

I RAN ALL OF THE ERRANDS I HAD BEEN IGNORING. I CHECKED
my mailbox, did my laundry, downloaded several fellowship applications, so I wouldn’t have to teach next year either, however impoverished it would leave me. I moved my bed and vacuumed under it. I called my mother to tell her about my morning with Holly and Nathan, but she didn’t pick up and I didn’t leave a message. What would I say? Holly was painting a picture of doomed, white-eyed rabbis. She let me feel the baby move. Grandpa wrote a story about a magic rabbi, and I don’t know what it means, where it came from, why he would change his fairy tales into a religious story—or if he had changed religion into a fairy tale—when he had never spoken about religion at all, certainly not Judaism, except to make bigoted remarks about the families clustered around the Berukhim Yeshiva.

I read the marbled composition book again and felt no closer to understanding its mystery. There were four titles listed at the beginning, three missing stories in I didn’t know how many notebooks. Gone. I remembered Grandpa’s friend Sam, nervously delivering the books, and Dad, driving off and letting me think he had destroyed them. Had they read this story?

I sat on my bed for a long time, the notebook with the strange sketch inside pressed between my folded arms and my heart, studying my grandfather’s watercolor, framed beside the door. It was a seascape, a turquoise ocean with curling traces of white foam. The sky above it was washed out, ivory fading into orange at the horizon, a glowing equator thin as a pen stroke. A flock of black birds, slack check marks, hung in the top left quadrant. They seemed unmoored like the men in Holly’s painting, neither receding into the sky nor swooping down from it. I focused on the swirling currents, white and blue and purple and black twisting around one another until they took shape—a hand, a flowering vine, a dissolving eye. I blinked and the brushstrokes relaxed back into pretty nothingness, but it was too late. Grandpa’s whole exercise in painting now appeared deliberately obscure instead of pleasantly vague.

It was early yet, only ten o’clock, but I had barely slept the night before, and I knew I needed rest so I could concentrate on my work. I turned off the lights, climbed into bed, and stared at the streetlight glow clinging to the ceiling. I stared at the door, outlined in black, the hall beyond quiet, empty. I stared at Grandpa’s notebook, a sliver of darkness on my desk.