The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six

by Jonathon Keats

  Not until the following evening was Meir admitted to the palace, and even then he was received only because he’d been mistaken, from his harsh accent and demanding manner, for an itinerant doctor. He was ushered into Her Majesty’s chambers, where the prince knelt unattended, lips pressed to Yod’s feverish forehead.

  Hearing footsteps, the prince bristled, and clambered to his feet. A councillor introduced Meir. His majesty commanded the medic to tell him what he could about the princess.

  — She’s a golem.

  — Her illness is not a joking matter.

  — I’m the one who made her, Your Majesty. I made her as my mistress. Then she got away. For three years, I’ve been searching the world . . .

  — She’s my princess, of royal blood.

  — She’s a lump of mud.

  — This is slander.

  — Will you return her if I can prove that she’s a golem, sire?

  — If you can’t prove it, I’ll have you hanged for slighting my beloved wife.

  By then both were standing over her as she moaned in her sleep, beaded in sweat. Meir whispered that if the prince brushed back her hair, he’d find a mark on her forehead. At a table in the corner, the scholar drew the vital sign in red ink. He came back to Yod. The prince clutched her hair, and, with a yank, bared Her Majesty’s scalp.

  • • •

  When Yod awoke late that night, shivering beneath sweat-drenched sheets, Raisa was there to comfort her. She fetched woolen blankets, heaped them on the bed. And, to amuse the princess, she described the peculiar man her husband had received while she was asleep, evidently a quack, who’d penned a strange figure on a slip of paper and then stood over her while the prince tore at her hair.

  Yod blanched. She asked Raisa to bring her the drawing. For several minutes, they stared at it together. Then Yod swept back her tresses.

  — Does it match?

  — Does what match, Your Majesty?

  — Does the symbol resemble the blemish on my forehead?

  — Pardon me for saying so, but your forehead is spotless.

  — Then he can’t take me back.

  — I don’t understand.

  — I don’t either, Raisa. Tell me, did the stranger say anything to my husband, after they’d examined me?

  — He was speechless. The prince called for his sentries. The execution is in the morning. Can nobody cure you, Princess?

  Yod didn’t respond. For a while, Raisa arranged blankets on the bed. Then she left Her Majesty to rest.

  In Yod’s dreams, Meir was put to death. As he fell from the gallows, noosed at the neck, she felt a sudden weightlessness, complete release from her past. In a snap, the sensation passed, overwhelmed by a burden that her frail human body couldn’t carry, yet she could not drop.

  Her eyes opened. Looking at the paper inscription in the dawn light, she understood that the mark on her forehead had faded away as it had lost meaning. She was no longer a golem. She could barely move a limb, so completely had strength succumbed to feeling.

  Outside, Yod heard nails being driven into a wooden galyod lows. She bit her lip. She bit down so hard that it bled. She called for Raisa. Raina, who’d taken her place, hurried to her bed. The princess held the slip of paper in front of the girl, and ordered her to draw, as perfectly as she could, the insignia that she saw.

  — Draw it where?

  — On my forehead.

  — With what?

  — With my blood.

  — Have you lost your mind?

  — We’ll soon know.

  Shuddering, the girl touched a plump finger to Her Majesty’s lip. She took a breath, and, in a single stroke, inscribed the inscrutable cipher on the princess’s forehead.

  Yod grasped her hand, and kissed it. Then she sent Raina away to watch the execution.

  Raisa was feeding her young son when her twin sister reached her. Raina tried to describe the princess’s strange behavior. She held out her finger, but neither could find any blood there.

  — She didn’t explain the drawing?

  — She said to attend the hanging.

  Together with Raisa’s boy, the twins hustled to the gallows. Most of the palace was already assembled, as were many peasants. The foreigner stood on a platform. Stripped to a loincloth, hands tied behind his back, skinny legs quivering, he no longer looked so learned. He stared at the ground. Everywhere folks jeered, though none of them knew what crime had been committed.

  His Majesty commanded quiet. He read the accusation: slander of the ailing princess. Would anyone speak in the guilty man’s defense?

  A single voice cleaved the silence. The crowd split, to let Yod pass.

  The princess wore none of her regalia, merely a white bed-sheet, clutched around her trembling body with one hand while she groped her way forward with the other. At last she stood in front of her husband. Loud enough for all to hear, she declared that the accused had not slandered her.

  — He called you a golem.

  — I am one.

  — You’re delirious.

  — I’m a golem, sire, and I was made by that man.

  — You’re sick.

  — He made me his mistress. You could learn a few tricks from him.

  — You’re mad.

  — You won’t believe me. See my forehead.

  Yod threw back her umber hair. The prince stared at the blood mark. His face flushed red. With a fist, he wiped out the blotch.

  Her trembling stopped. Her body dropped to his feet. He knelt to lift her. Meir broke free of his ropes.

  The prince tore away her sheet. The scholar sought her heart. Meir shook his head. There was no beat. In the shadow of the gallows, both men held her together, and began to weep.

  As their tears touched her, Yod flowed away, a river of mud between their fingers.

  YOD-ALEF THE MURDERER

  Wise men say that you can never truly be lost: Death will find you in the end. Forgive their misinformation, for they’ve never been to the distant city, rarely remembered by intrepid traders, once forgotten by the grim reaper.

  Of course, folks who lived there didn’t notice at first. It was a big enough place that nobody cared about the fate of others, and those of an age to consider mortality, to expect the end, simply assumed that death was on another street, or just around the corner. Only the grave diggers complained, and there wasn’t much sympathy for men whose money was made on misfortune.

  In fact, a whole winter passed before respectable people began to comment on the phenomenon. They asked one another why there were no longer any casket processions, whether funerals had gone out of fashion. They tried to recollect the last time that an acquaintance had died. Perhaps the grave diggers weren’t such grifters after all; maybe they’d pawned their picks and had to cadge their meals for a reason. Everybody knew how difficult the city was to reach on horseback. Was it possible that death, additionally burdened by cloak and scythe, had given up the shlep?

  Beyond death’s ken: Never in their lives had folks felt so lucky. A feverish giddiness spread through the city as swiftly as an epidemic. The heat of invincibility drove people, delirious, into the streets, where they danced with neighbors who had been strangers the previous day. And that night more children were conceived than there were branches on the tree of life.

  In the following month, old feuds were resolved, families reunited, friendships renewed. People became familiar with everyone in their neighborhood. Given immortality, folks could afford to be generous on a daily basis. Or, rather, in eternal terms, a slight costs more than kindness, a grudge more than forgiveness. With forever on the horizon, life’s entire perspective shifted.

  Yet people also noticed less felicitous changes. Tradesmen seldom did their work, reckoning, not unreasonably, that they could always get to it later. As a result, shopkeepers carried less, and kept holiday hours. Which left laborers with so little to purchase with their wages that they couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger.

 
; Economies collapsed. When they realized that their masters would never retire, apprentices burned their indentures. And the absence of inheritance effectively ended the trade in burghers’ sons and daughters, the merger of bloodlines, the birth of dynasties. Divested of death, the city edged into rigor mortis.

  The only ones who weren’t idle then were the academicians. These twelve learned men, whose role ordinarily was to ensure the city’s place in history, had been asked by the governor to apply their scholarship to the future. The most senior of the savants, the renowned alchemist-astrologer Akiva Alter, accepted the brief on behalf of the cabal, assuming absolute authority over life-and-death matters.

  For one month, they researched the future in sealed chambers. Each man wore a beard the length of his tenure, and a gown and cap colored according to his discipline: black for classics, white for logic, red for anatomy, purple for divinity. Akiva Alter presided, richly robed in silver and gold, his beard rolled out like an ancient manuscript from the head of the table to the foot. He wanted to know whether, in all human history, the angel of death had ever failed to appear at the end of a life span. Benesh the necromancer reported that, excepting for beings not falling under death’s jurisdiction, such as dybbuks and golems, nobody survived indefinitely. Which naturally provoked the question: Had the city fallen out of time? Iyov the geographer could find no evidence for so titanic a tectonic shift, and Pinchas the anatomist could vouch that people continued to age, to which the mathematician Menache added that there were new children, droves of them, born every day.

  Now it doesn’t take a savant to know that a city can hold only as many people as there are names—just as the sky can hold only as many stars as there are numbers—and to see the horrific effects of perpetual aging, one has only to look at the wrinkled crust of the wretched earth. In a thousand years, the city would be mountainous with living flesh, bodies no longer individually sentient, a roiling sediment of collective agony, dumb to all but the mercilessly enduring present. While there was some dispute among the savants as to whether this human mountain would be domed or peaked, and whether it would be barren or forested with evergreens, the academicians could all agree that such concerns were academic. A practical solution was wanted. Following one week’s fast with neither talk nor sleep, Akiva Alter sat down, rolled out his beard, and proposed one: an idea so ingenious that it was adopted without discussion.

  • • •

  Like everyone else, Yod-Alef the bricklayer and his wife, Sisel, were summoned several days later to the great assembly hall, where they stood in line for hours, waiting to draw lots. Ordinarily the loss of a day would have angered Yodal (as everyone called him), for he took his work very seriously. He could mortar and set from dawn to dusk without rest, laying twice the thousand-brick standard of his trade. It was for this competency, this diligence, that Sisel several years before had married Yodal instead of one of the richer bricklayers who’d courted her, such as tall, handsome Hebel, former apprentice to her dead father. But lately it made no difference how many bricks her husband could handle, since nobody bothered to build. This was the first time Yodal had had a place to be in ages. He saw his fellow tradesmen and friends, and all of them agreed that lining up was a fine idea: A line had a start and a finish, a direction, a purpose—even if nobody could explain it, or reckon what the lottery was about.

  Yodal’s turn came at last, after Sisel had drawn. Watched over by twelve ancient men in colored gowns, he reached his hand into a box the size of a coffin, and closed his fist around a little wooden ball. He looked at it. Sisel’s had been white. His was black.

  The academicians conferred in a strange tongue. They gathered around Yodal. The eldest, robed in silver and gold, laid his hands on the bricklayer’s shoulders, and commanded him to follow them. As he walked, Yodal heard Sisel begin to cry. He glanced back. He saw Hebel reaching his arms around her slender figure, to comfort her.

  There was no supper for Yodal when he came home, past midnight. Sisel sat in front of the dark fireplace, a cauldron in her lap, into which her tears dropped.

  — What happened to Hebel?

  — Who cares, Yodal? All this time, I’ve been waiting here for you.

  She told him that she’d had no idea if he’d ever return, and made him promise not to abandon her again. His vows swelled into kisses, and then a deeper cleaving as they carried each other to bed.

  In the morning, Sisel wanted her husband to tell her where he’d been with those odd men. She gazed at his reflection in her looking glass as she asked, brushing her fine red hair. He was not handsome at all, the man she’d married, built thick like a stump, yet that only fiercened her ardor: With her moist eyes and tight waist, she was attractive to every man—a reflexive passion—whereas she had chosen specifically to desire him. Sisel was a willful girl who knew how to have her way. She sat by her husband and stroked his head.

  — It can’t be that bad. And our vows are mutual, Yodal. No matter what, I’ll be here for you.

  — It isn’t good.

  — Do they want you to love a girl besides me?

  — They’ve . . . they’ve appointed me . . . grim-reaper-by-proxy. Until further notice, I’m supposed to be the angel of death.

  Sisel’s hand pulled away, and only with the greatest effort did she bring it again to where it had been. She swallowed a tremor in her throat.

  — They can do that?

  — They’ve never tried it before. They’re not sure, but they say it’s the only chance we’ve got.

  From the pocket of his coat, he withdrew a warrant, and unfurled it on the bed. A scourge of black lettering raged across a whole sheepskin of vellum, branded with the governor’s red wax bull. Neither Yodal nor his wife could read it, but both agreed that it was a terrible document.

  — What do you do with it?

  — I carry it when I tell folks that their time has come.

  — Then what?

  — 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.