by Dara Horn
“Inside!”
Now Schechter looked up again, to where the ladder touched the wall. As the sun moved into a window across the gallery, he could see that the dark rectangle at the top, which he had thought was just a patch of soot-covered plaster, was actually a small wooden door.
“What you are looking for is there,” the rabbi said, pointing to the top. “Climb!”
The custodian offered him a lantern, which he lit with a match from his pocket. Still skeptical, Schechter took the lamp and began to climb, with the rabbi and the custodian holding the ladder. At last he reached the door.
The door was about half the size of a normal door, like a cupboard. It had a wide, filthy threshold, which Schechter used to rest the lantern on as he manipulated the door’s small iron latch. Then, with one firm push, he pressed the door inward and lifted his body off the ladder until he was sitting on the threshold, with his legs swinging into the room. To his surprise, there was no floor. His legs were dangling in dark space. Then his foot brushed against something, something that made a loud crunching sound. An enormous cloud of dust blew into his face. Schechter coughed, a long and painful series of coughs that echoed through the room in front of him. He stopped coughing as the dust still hung in the air, and held up the lamp in front of him.
When the clouds cleared, he saw below him a sea of paper.
He had pictured a room full of shelves or cabinets or drawers, a kind of morgue for dead books. But this was an ocean—or, considering the narrow dimensions of the room, more like a well. Papers filled the entire narrow room up to the height of the building’s gallery, rising up in a heap like the swell of a wave near the threshold of the door, where the most recent corpses had presumably been dumped. In places he could make out whole books bound in leather, and at several points the wooden handles of Torah scrolls poked through the ocean’s surface. But most of it, the bulk of that thick and heavy sea, was loose paper.
Some of it was printed, typed, woodcut, but as Schechter looked more closely, he saw that much of it was not. Hebrew letters stared up at him, drowning him in a vast sea of thought. He leaned in, lowering himself down until he was actually standing in the papers, supported by parchments several feet below him and still well above the level of the floor outside. He was immersed in paper up to his waist. And, perching the lantern on the threshold of the door, hardly thinking about fire or dust or rot or anything else, he began to read.
The first paper he saw, near his right sleeve, was a marriage contract. He picked it up and read the first lines, the lines that were the same but for the particulars as the marriage contract he had with his own wife. This contract’s first lines announced that the wedding ceremony between David the son of Abraham and Miriam the daughter of Joseph had taken place in Fustat on a Tuesday, on the fifteenth of the month of Av, nine hundred fifty-seven years before. He lifted it out of the pile and imagined this young couple, suddenly feeling their presence in the room. On the back of the parchment he found another paper, stuck to the first. It was a bill of divorce for David the son of Abraham and Miriam the daughter of Joseph—whose marriage had apparently been dissolved in Fustat on a Wednesday, the eighth of the month of Elul, ten years later.
Schechter shuddered, breathing in more dust. Near his other arm he saw a dark paper with large Hebrew letters. As he lifted it, he saw that the letters were written in repeated rows, in an awkward hand, the letters kaf and lamed scrawled again and again, looping absurdly in and out of the dark ridges that someone had scored into the parchment. Some little child hundreds of years ago had been learning how to write. Stuck to the child’s page was a page written in much smaller adult letters, a passage so disintegrated that Schechter could only make out a few of the Hebrew words: and if anyone believes in the existence of demons, that person has sinned against the Holy One and shall be forgotten for all eternity, for those idolatrous thoughts are the source and here the page was torn. Schechter reached to adjust the lamp, broadening the light. As he moved, he noticed a parchment near the doorway with letters arranged in careful squares, as though for a puzzle, or an amulet. He picked it up and read the neat, emphatic words beneath the boxed letters: May this spell destroy the demons who have possessed Miss Yair, so that she may love me for all eternity.
Schechter looked around at the fathomless pit of paper. The air in the room was alive, trembling with the thoughts of the thousands of people whose names were inscribed in the parchments below. He sifted the papers before him, lifting them like sand and letting them slide between his fingers. He turned, heard a crunching noise, mourned whatever document must have been ground to dust beneath his feet, and spotted a piece of parchment with carefully written verses inscribed on it, dark ink on dark vellum, like the scraps the twins had shown him a lifetime ago in Cambridge. He seized it, unable to believe what he had in his hands. The words, he saw immediately, were from Ben Sirah:
There are some that have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no name,
who have perished as though they had not lived.
In some dark closet of his mind Schechter heard a voice, a voice so distant and irrelevant that it took him several seconds to realize it was the rabbi’s. The shout echoed toward him from beyond the well:
“Is this the garbage you want?”
Schechter placed the poem aside—but there was no “aside,” it was all a well, a deep and bottomless well of lives, the lives of everyone who had left a name, and everyone who had perished as though they had not lived.
Schechter tried to speak, coughed, choked, tried again. “Yes, yes!” he shouted.
“Then perhaps we can come to an agreement,” the rabbi called back.
The words jarred Schechter back to the world outside the room. This time he understood immediately. He stared at the papers below him, thought of what Professor Taylor had given him, calculated what he had left, calculated what he might still need. Suddenly money seemed irrelevant. He was dipping his feet into eternity. But the rabbi below wanted an answer. And he was the one holding the ladder.
“I can offer you three hundred pounds sterling for it,” Schechter blurted.
Three hundred pounds sterling! It was more than four years’ worth of rent on his house in Cambridge. But what else was Taylor’s money for, if not for this?
Somewhere outside the hole in the wall, Schechter heard a sudden gasp, and then loud laughter. When the laughter finally faded, he heard the rabbi call out, in a bright tone, “Take whatever you like!”
As a matter of fact, Schechter liked it all. The next day he returned with canvas bags.
WITHIN DAYS THE PREVIOUSLY empty synagogue was full of people. Each day Schechter would take a carriage from the Metropole to the synagogue in Fustat, and each day he was met by a phalanx of men and women whom the rabbi had sent to assist him. Schechter quickly discovered that they preferred to be compensated for their efforts not through the lowly method of per diem payment, but rather through baksheesh, which had the added benefit of being payable for services not rendered. Such services ran the gamut from carrying large bags full of documents down the ladder to considering doing so, and included such niceties as offering condolences when he was overtaken by coughing fits and wishing him the best when he sneezed.
Bechor Maimoun, the twins’ supplier, was the worst of them. When the number of sacks of manuscripts rose to eighteen, Schechter returned to the genizah one morning to find two sacks missing. The beadle insisted that Schechter had counted wrong, and Schechter had no choice but to believe him. Two weeks later, Maimoun indicated that he had a number of manuscripts for sale that had been discovered in a different genizah, in the graveyard outside of town. When he showed them to Schechter, they included pages of books that Schechter had already bagged.
“If these holy writings have found favor in your sight,” Maimoun said in his stilted Hebrew, “I would be pleased to offer them to you, at the price of only fifty shillings.�
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Schechter was overwhelmed by a coughing fit. “Damn,” he gagged in English. “Damn, damn, damn. I’m a fool.”
Maimoun smiled, and inquired in Hebrew, “What is ‘damn’?”
“We have in our language a little word of one syllable which is full of theological meaning, and is used as a sort of charm against people who annoy us,” Schechter told him, and pulled out his wallet.
But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, the living didn’t matter, because Schechter was too deeply immersed with the dead. For that is how he saw the books and papers he collected now: as dead people, buried in the genizah the way that bodies are buried in a cemetery, until, miraculously, the act of reading brought them back to life. He mourned each time he found a paper he could not read, and had to fight the urge to read every paper he touched. It was like watching dry bones come back to life, the reanimation of a world. He felt, as he worked, an all-powerful arrogance, a sudden and stupendous triumph over time and death. But after two weeks it became clear that reading was hopeless, like stepping into quicksand, being sucked down into the depths of days until he could no longer breathe. Already he was choking. Matilda would do something for him, bring him something to ease his sickened lungs, he thought. The fact that Matilda was several thousand miles away seemed irrelevant to Schechter as he gagged. But he had to keep working. His only goal, now, was to bag as much material as he could before he ran out of money for baksheesh. He carefully peeled a piece of vellum off the filthy gray brick wall.
At first glance he assumed it was yet another leaf from a Bible, or some sort of compilation; every other phrase was a quote from Isaiah, Genesis, Samuel, Kings. By this time he barely looked at the parchments, but whenever he came across a biblical compilation, he was careful to give it two seconds’ more time before tossing it into the sack. He held the vellum up to the light from the hole in the wall. But its words (twelfth- or thirteenth-century, it appeared, based on the handwriting) soon resolved into a personal letter, written in a kind of biblical composite, as nearly every personal letter in the room had been—like listening to the Grand Rabbi, words laden with too many ribbons and pearls.
He was about to drop it into the canvas sack when he began to cough, the same cough that had plagued him every day since he had begun his work in the darkened room. He stared at the letter as his lungs calmed, checking whether the lack of oxygen had affected his senses. Worn down, drowning in a sea of words, he cleared a space amid the piles of papers and dirt and crouched on printed litter, holding the letter in the air above him as his vision resolved. Yes, he could still read; the words on the scrap in front of him were eminently clear. He tested himself on a few lines in the center of the page.
Suddenly he became someone else, a man opening his mail eight hundred years before. The letter spoke in an almost human voice:
The worst disaster that struck me recently, worse than anything I had ever experienced from the time I was born until this day, was the demise of my brother, that upright man (may the memory of the righteous be a blessing), who drowned in the Indian Ocean while in possession of much wealth belonging to me, to him and to others, leaving a young daughter and his widow in my care.
From then until this day, that is, about eight years, I have been in a state of disconsolate mourning. How can I be consoled? For he was like my son; he grew up upon my knees; he was my brother, my pupil. It was he who did business in the marketplace, earning a livelihood, while I dwelled in security.
My only joy was to see him. The sun has set on all joy. For he has gone on to eternal life, leaving me dismayed in a foreign land. Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his books, my heart is churned inside me and my sorrow is rekindled. In short, I will go down in mourning to my son in Sheol. And were it not for the Torah, which is my delight, and for scientific matters, which let me forget my sorrow, I would have perished in my affliction …
The page trembled like a living thing in Schechter’s hand. He sensed the man who had written it fuming over his shoulder, angered and ashamed, as though Schechter had come across him in the very moment when he was weakened and stripped, grieving in a windowless room over a catastrophe that no one could possibly understand. He wanted to turn to that nameless man—the grammar indicated that it was a man—and reassure him that everything would be all right. He wanted to be the one to tell that lie. But the man didn’t seem like the sort who would believe him. “I will go down in mourning to my son in Sheol,” the man had written—the words of Jacob in the Bible, when his sons deceived him into thinking that his favorite son Joseph had died.
That verse had made Schechter shudder since he was a child. He remembered his father as he had last seen him, through the window of the train that he took to Vienna when he was seventeen years old, after he had told his parents that he could no longer remain in their house, in their town, in their world. His father had blessed him before he boarded the train, covering his son’s head with the thick hands he used to slaughter bulls in his butcher’s abattoir. Schechter felt like a mute calf as he saw his father’s face. As the train pulled away, he shouted out the window about visiting for the new year, but he knew they would never see each other again. His grief had filled the railway car until he was unable to breathe.
The weeping man who had written the letter was surely in Sheol now, Schechter thought. He recalled a description he had once read of Sheol, the only hint in the entire Hebrew Bible of any afterlife at all: a netherworld deep beneath the earth, enclosed with locked gates, a dark buried room that was the fate of every person who ever lived, no matter their good or evil deeds—a place, he recalled, of unrelenting silence. No one after biblical times ever spoke of Sheol. It had been replaced by cheerier visions: divine judgment, the resurrection of the dead, underground caverns through which the revived would crawl to Jerusalem at the end of days, the righteous feasting on the flesh of the leviathan, the justice and mercy of the world to come. But Sheol, the dark room of oblivion, was what haunted him. It was what haunted everyone.
He looked around the dark room, at the heaps of unread words entombed in earth, and knew. This is what becomes of all of us.
The words of the letter grew dimmer in the fading light. As he turned over the piece of vellum in his hand, he noticed the signature at the end of its long lament: Mosheh ben Maimon.
7
The impossible has a stable nature, one whose stability is constant and is not made by a maker; it is impossible to change it in any way. Consequently we do not ascribe to God the power of doing what is impossible. While philosophers say that it is impossible to produce a square with a diagonal equal to one of the sides, it is thought possible by some persons who are ignorant of mathematics. I wonder whether this gate of research is open, so that all may freely enter, and while one person imagines a thing and considers it possible, another is at liberty to assert that such a thing is impossible by its very nature; or whether the gate is closed and guarded by certain rules, so that we are able to decide with certainty whether a thing is physically impossible…. We have now shown that there are things which are impossible, and whose creation is excluded from the power of God. It is now clear that a difference of opinion exists only as to the question to which of the two classes a thing belongs; whether to the class of the impossible, or to the class of the possible.
Musa loved puzzles. He was fanatical about them. The other boys in the neighborhood were fanatical about soccer, but for Musa it was puzzles. When he was a toddler he was captivated by the cardboard kind that his mother bought cheap on the street; he mastered those quickly, putting together forty-eight pieces in minutes. As he grew older, he started creating puzzles of his own. He would break plates in order to reassemble them, fold and cut paper to build geodesic shapes in three dimensions. When the family worshiped in the mosque, he would train his eyes on the patterns of the medieval tiles on the walls. At nine years old, he pointed out to his parents how the tile patterns were regular, all sequences of pentagons and decagons i
nterspersed with rhombuses with endless minor variations, but that they nonetheless never once replicated, despite being spread out over enormous surfaces—potentially infinite surfaces, in fact. The pattern would imitate itself, always following its own rules of symmetry in ten directions. But it would never, ever, ever repeat.
His parents didn’t believe him at first. The mosque had been built eight hundred years before. Its architects could not have been using infinite patterns; they could not have understood that sort of math; even his parents, reasonably educated people, did not understand it. Musa proved it to them, demonstrating at home with paper and scissors. It was true: the secret code of a divinely generated universe, an infinity that never repeated but nonetheless always conformed to simple rules, endless generations of infinitely varied cells, plants, moments, arguments, love stories whose infinite variations were relentlessly confined within rigorous laws as generous as birth and light, and as unforgiving as gravity and death—all of it had been discerned by their ancestors, grouted onto the walls in front of them. Only Musa had noticed it.
Josie had begun recording this one evening when her captor arrived in her cell and sat down beside her, bat in hand, forcing her to type his words into the program as he spoke endlessly about his son. She recorded it all in simple English, explaining how one could use an online translation system (she listed a few free ones) to bring it into clumsy Arabic, filing it away in the software behind the appropriate doors. It sickened her, but she did it, replacing the thoughts and descriptions and memories of Tali that she had accumulated in the program’s labyrinth of rooms—proud Tali, weird Tali, friendless Tali, crocodile-obsessed Tali, the Tali who was barely more than a shadow of whatever adult she might become—with this new dead boy. The malware project had been suspended for now, it seemed. She shouldn’t have cared about this, but she did, feeling the old ache from years of coding, the wrenching frustration of all of her work gone to waste—a strange feeling, considering that her only real goal ought to have been to prolong the project forever, to never finish it at all. But now there was something new to accomplish, another impossible goal. “Keep that agile mentality,” she had once repeated regularly to every person who ever worked for her. “Deliver greatest business value first.” Greatest business value in this dungeon, she reminded herself, was whatever kept her alive. And what was keeping her alive, now, was the digital revival of Musa, the dead Egyptian boy.