As one, the bewildered Hasidim called out in terror and in warning.
But it was too late.
The long fingers of Death caught on the hem of the Rebbe’s prayer shawl, and he fell.
Until this moment, the wind, as a mark of respect, had observed the custom of parting on either side of the holy Rebbe, but now, as if crying out in grief, the full force of its strength went tearing indiscriminately through Zubinsk, and as the five young Hasidim dashed forward, forward to catch their Rebbe, the gale tore screaming past them on every side.
When the swift storm passed, there was stillness in the road. The clouds above had been washed away, taking the falling snow with them. Only the stars were left to twinkle coldly, high above.
The Hasidim were consumed in their distress, cradling the holy Rebbe where he had fallen in the street, checking for breath, for warmth, for a beating heart, calling out to anyone, anyone for help.
And several feet away, all but forgotten, was the Dark One, lurking, grief-stricken, beneath the shadowy eaves of a house.
What had he done? He had not meant to harm the Rebbe—nothing could’ve been further from his heart.
“He’s breathing,” said one of the Hasidim. “He’s still breathing. Someone, anyone, help!”
The Dark One had been foolish. He should never have come to Zubinsk, never have taken up with these rejoicing Hasidim. His head was swimming—with drink, with shame, with sorrow, with rage.
Before him in the street, he could see the holy Rebbe, still and stony, cradled in the arms of one of his Hasidim.
Why had he turned away?
Why?
And then the Dark One lifted up his eyes, and at the far end of the snowy street, clear in the knife-sharp starlight, the Dark One saw the reason:
Yehuda Leib.
* * *
—
“You,” said the Dark One. It was only a whisper, but Yehuda Leib heard it loud and clear from across the crowding road—a charge, a prosecution:
You.
His heart lurched, and without looking back, Yehuda Leib turned and tried to make himself scarce.
But he had been seen, and he knew it.
“I see you there,” said the voice behind him. “You cannot run from me. I see you, Yehuda Leib!”
Yehuda Leib swung around a narrow corner, and his feet skidded and came to a stop. In front of him, a short alleyway ran no more than six feet deep before ending in a solid brick wall plastered over with faded handbills and torn advertisements. All around him, the buildings rose, two, three stories into the sky.
Yehuda Leib wheeled about.
The Dark Messenger was closing in. There was no escape.
“You,” said the Dark One.
“Stay back,” said Yehuda Leib.
“Why did you call out to the Rebbe?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“It was not his time,” said the Dark One. “What have you done?”
Yehuda Leib was flabbergasted. “What have I done? What have you done?”
The Dark One scoffed. “You know nothing, boy.”
“Oh no?” said Yehuda Leib. “I know this: if I’d called out to the Rebbe and you hadn’t been there, I’d be talking to him right now instead of you.”
“But if you hadn’t—”
“Then what?” said Yehuda Leib, taking a lunging step forward. “What wouldn’t have happened? Finish the sentence.”
“You are nothing, boy,” said the Dark Messenger. “You are a buzzing gnat. I shall be talking with kings when the dust that was your bones has all blown away.”
“That changes nothing,” said Yehuda Leib. “When my bones have blown away, you will still bear the guilt for what you’ve done.”
With a growl, the Dark One lifted his hand to wipe the little gnat away, and Yehuda Leib, shying back, found himself clutching instinctively at the light in his pocket.
The Dark One stopped, his hand high in the air. “What have you got in your pocket?”
Yehuda Leib swallowed. “Nothing.”
The Dark One’s cold eyes twinkled like stars in the frigid sky. “Don’t lie to me.”
Yehuda Leib shook his head quickly. “It’s nothing.”
“Do you wish to know what happened to the Rebbe, Yehuda Leib?” said the Dark One, the sound of a sick grin creeping into his voice. “My bare finger—this one here—caught on the hem of his prayer shawl. That alone was sufficient to fell a man as holy and as potent as he.”
Yehuda Leib was still clutching at his glowing pocket. “You can’t have it.”
“You are meddling with powers you cannot possibly comprehend,” said the Dark One, shaking his head. “Give him to me, boy. Now.”
Yehuda Leib could feel the cold brick wall against his back. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run.
“You’ll have to kill me first,” said Yehuda Leib.
“Ha!” said the Dark One. “Do not tempt me.”
“I mean it,” said Yehuda Leib.
The Dark One shook his head. “Perhaps you do,” he said. “But you have no idea what it is that you mean.”
All of a sudden, Yehuda Leib found that he could not speak without screaming. “I know perfectly well!” he said, tears stinging his eyes. “I watched him die!”
Now the Dark One lost all patience. “And still you continue to meddle! Do you realize that if you hadn’t run from Tupik, your father would still be alive? Do you not realize that he died because of you?”
“Liar!” Yehuda Leib lunged forward, fists swinging blindly in the swimming of his tears.
If, in taking hold of Yehuda Leib, the Dark One’s bare hands had come into contact with even so much as a thread of his clothing, our story would’ve ended here; it was only by Yehuda Leib’s very good fortune that the Dark One managed to cover his hands with his sleeves in time.
But it did not feel like good fortune at all.
With icy fury, the Dark One lifted Yehuda Leib from the ground and slammed him hard against the brick wall. His mouth was beside the boy’s ear, his body close and cold, and Yehuda Leib could smell him: rot and vodka, and a million years of open road.
“I never lie, Yehuda Leib,” he whispered. “Never. And I shall prove it to you. These shall be your final moments: You will be alone. And you will be frightened. Nothing and no one will come forth to save you. And when your time comes, you shall look me in the face, and you shall tell me that I was right.”
One of the Dark Messenger’s strong hands was sufficient to pin the boy there against the wall, feet dangling in the winter night, and he reached the long, twiggy fingers of the other into Yehuda Leib’s glowing pocket and took back the light, which sputtered, flickering in his grasp.
With disgust, the Dark One dropped Yehuda Leib to the ground and tucked the little bottle deep into the blackness of his coat.
“Take my advice, boy,” he said. “Go home. Do what you’re told.”
And, leaving Yehuda Leib in a sobbing heap on the cobbles, the Angel of Death turned and began to stumble away.
“Nothing at all is permanent,” said Death into the night. “Not even you.”
That night, Yehuda Leib slept where he’d fallen, crumpled at the foot of a dead end. Bluma slept beside the Rebbe’s granddaughter on the rostrum of the Great Synagogue of Zubinsk, and even the Messenger of Death, accustomed as it was to remaining awake for millennia, stumbled into the cemetery and passed out in an empty grave, scattering imps and goblins in its wake.
But on the other side of the forest in silent Tupik, warm beneath the blankets of his own bed, Issur Frumkin could not sleep a wink.
A small patch of moonlight.
Yehuda Leib, looking very small.
A pool of blood.
A dead man.
He trie
d to forget, tried to push the memory out of his mind, but no matter how he tossed and turned and squeezed his eyes shut, still, there he was: Avimelekh, bleeding, flat on his back, boots squirming in the churned and slushy snow.
The look in his eyes: knowledge—understanding.
Issur could still feel the reverberation all the way up to his elbow, the way the pot had buzzed and hummed at the impact, and as he lay in bed trying to force his memory to look away, he kneaded the flesh of his arm as if trying to blot the sensation out.
He had never meant to hurt the man.
He’d just wanted to help.
He had to stop thinking about it, had to replace the memory with something else, something pleasant, something that would allow him to drift peacefully off and get some rest.
The smell of Sabbath preparations: warm bread and roasting meat.
The glow of candles.
Light.
With effort, Issur slowed his breathing. Bit by bit, his muscles slackened.
After a short time, he began to doze.
But outside the hallway window stood a bare tree, and when the wind stirred, the knobbled knuckles of its twiggy fingers brushed against the window glass. And from the inside of his bedroom, this sounded very much like rattling spurs.
Issur tore back his bedroom door and peered out into the empty corridor.
No. There was no one here: only the shadow of the tree on the wall, shifting and shuckling in the moonlight.
There was no one.
But at the far end of the corridor, where the stairs descended into his father’s shop below, darkness gathered thick like dust in the corner.
He couldn’t see.
Back into his room he went, fingers shaking at the matchbox, eager to make a little light, to throw back the curtain of darkness and see what hid beneath.
There was nothing, of course, nothing and no one to see: not in the hallway, not on the stairs, not even in his father’s butcher shop below.
But somehow he didn’t believe his eyes.
In the stillness, the candlelight flickered and danced on the cool, clean blades of his father’s knives.
He began to feel it before he even turned back to the staircase: the lurking certainty that he would find no rest until he did something.
But what? What could he do?
Tears began to sting his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as much to himself as to anyone else. “I’m sorry.”
But this was not to be enough.
The flame of Issur’s candle flickered, guttered with sudden movement as he turned to climb back up the stairs. In the narrow passage of the staircase, jumping shadows leapt up on all sides, and he was there, Avimelekh, as clear as could be, looming up on his rearing black stallion, his black coat filling the stairway, his dark eyes shining behind his bushy beard, and Issur cried out and stumbled back, and he fell and dropped his candle to the floor, and it died out in a narrow plume of smoke.
Shadows.
Only shadows.
This couldn’t continue. He had to do something.
And so Issur climbed to his feet, went outside, and began to harness the poor, weary Frumkin donkey once more.
It took him nearly two hours to make his way back to the place where it had happened, and by the time Issur arrived, the chill of the night had soaked into his bones.
This was it: the place was unmistakable.
But the body was gone.
It wasn’t clear what had happened. Everything was covered over in the creeping obscurity of fresh-fallen snow. The wide pool of blood was rosy and faint, the ruts and footprints thickened, filling in. Issur could see where Avimelekh had lain, that his body had been moved, turned, lifted.
But what had been done with him, he could not say.
Once more, Issur’s eyes began to brim with tears. He didn’t know precisely how he’d thought to accomplish it, but on his long journey into the forest, he’d come to hope that he might give the man a proper burial.
He certainly couldn’t do that now.
With a sigh, Issur hopped down from the cart and set about turning the donkey back toward Tupik.
What else was there to do?
He was just about to climb up and make his unhappy way home when, glancing over his shoulder for one last look at the fateful spot, his eye caught on an unevenness, a strange, protruding wrinkle in the rosy snow.
Drawing close, he reached out and pulled it up, rough and stiff with blood:
Yehuda Leib’s red woolen scarf.
And this is how it came to pass that Issur Frumkin stood, chilled to the bone, over a shallow hole he had dug in the Tupik cemetery as the first glimmer of dawn stole into the village.
Carefully, with ceremony, he folded the scarf and laid it in the ground.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Issur Frumkin, choking back a sob, and because he didn’t know what else to do with them, he put his hands into his pockets.
What was this? Something cold against his fingers: a little disc of metal.
Yes, yes, of course. The coin Yehuda Leib had given him. It was strange, like no other coin he had ever seen: an open eye on one face and a closed eye on the other.
It didn’t seem right to keep it.
And so, with care, Issur Frumkin bent low and placed the battered gray coin on top of the scarf, closed eye up. That felt right.
But it was very hard to look at—the blood and the scarf, the unchangeably closed eye—and quickly, impulsively, he pushed dirt in on top of them, filling the little grave.
There. That was it.
Nothing more to be done.
Without looking back, Issur Frumkin made his way down the hill toward his bed.
The sun was beginning to rise.
* * *
—
The creak of a heavy door. The murmuring of voices.
Morning sun.
Inside Bluma’s eyelids, everything was warm, a cocoon of amber blush, and when she finally forced herself to open her eyes, she immediately regretted it.
The Great Synagogue of Zubinsk was nothing like the homey little prayer house at the center of Tupik. There, the synagogue walls were of painted wood—they seemed to drink in the warmth of the breath spilled in prayer, as if holding it safe for later—but here, everything was cold polished stone and figured metal.
Bluma shivered and rolled over.
She was alone. The pew upon which Rokhl had slept was empty.
She was alone.
But not quite.
The sharp spoon dug painfully into her hip.
With a wince, Bluma pulled the spoon up from her apron. Resting the handle in her palm, she ran the pad of her thumb through its cool basin and up across its edge.
It was almost—almost—beautiful.
A deep yawn bubbled up inside Bluma. She was terribly, terribly tired, more tired than any single night’s sleep could ever wash away. Of all things in the world, she wanted most just to go home—home, where the air was fragrant with the warmth of baking, where she could rest in a bed that knew her shape.
But it was not safe in her bed. It wasn’t even safe beneath it.
That was where Death had found her.
And as hard as she ran, she was beginning to understand, Death would always follow.
She always came back.
Bluma’s fingers began to tremble, her breathing growing shallow.
She didn’t want to see the Dark Lady ever again.
Ever.
She had taken a good first step in doing away with her face, but it was not enough. Still the Dark Lady came, calling out her name:
Bluuuuuuumaaaaaaa…
But Lilith had mentioned someone in the Far Country who might be able to help.
Who had it been?
With a start, Bluma realized: the sun had risen above the rooftops, but the synagogue was completely empty. And, today of all days, it should’ve been packed with worshippers at their morning prayers.
Where was everyone?
Softly, as if loath to disturb the thick silence of the sanctuary, Bluma crept out the front door.
There were people everywhere, and it was early still—on a regular day, only a small number would have been abroad at this hour, aside from those at prayer.
At first Bluma thought it must’ve been the wedding that was causing the excitement, but before long, it became clear that this was not the case.
Something had happened in the night.
Something bad.
From all corners of the city, feet seemed to rush toward one central spot like bathwater to the drain, and soon Bluma was caught up and carried in the flow. By the time they spilled out into the wide, crowded road to which they were headed, she’d heard words like Rebbe and fell and very serious spoken in enough voices to have a guess at what had happened.
But nothing could’ve prepared her for the scene that met her eyes.
The street was packed, shoulder to shoulder, the press of people filling the road, passing through the Rebbe’s front door, cramming the sanctuary in the front room, climbing the stairs, extending all the way up to the very threshold of the bedroom where he lay. Everywhere, there were Hasidim, swaying back and forth, cycling manically through the Book of Psalms, praying for a full and speedy recovery; everywhere, long beards were wet with tears.
Bluma began to shove and shimmy her way through the crowd, and once she managed to make her way past the Rebbe’s door, she had become so used to everyone facing in one direction—toward the Rebbe’s house—that she spotted him immediately.
He was facing the other way, several doors down, his arms folded, his eyes fixed firmly on the shadowy windows above a well-appointed general store on the other side of the street:
Yehuda Leib, wan and sharp-edged—just as he’d been the night before.
By the time Bluma reached him, Yehuda Leib had taken notice of her staring. For a long moment, they stood regarding one another, their ears flooded with a cacophony of psalms.
The Way Back Page 16