by Dara Horn
“No,” she repeated. “Your son is dead. And my daughter—my daughter is still alive. You can kill me, but you can’t kill her.”
She watched his fists tightening. She was sure now that he would pummel her into the ground. Her body cringed, independent of her mind. Then she saw him tremble, a strange vibration that moved from his hands through his arms to his stubble-covered jaw. He shuddered, shaking until he began to make strange noises, strangled noises, coming from his throat. He turned, and leaned against the door. Then he pounded it with his fists, over and over again. The throttled noises kept coming as he lowered his head, pressing his forehead against the doorframe. She watched with a sick, sad satisfaction. She had beaten him more brutally than he could ever beat her.
He opened the door, and lingered in the doorway. She had never seen the door open so wide before. It was usually opened and closed quickly, and usually while she was sleeping; she had never before had a chance to stretch herself into a position to catch a glimpse of the slightest shadow of what went on behind it. Now she was so swollen and bruised that she could barely sit up, let alone stretch the chain. But she raised herself, with incredible agony, to see what lay beyond him outside the door. To her astonishment she saw daylight. Not direct sunlight, but daylight nonetheless, a long parallelogram of golden light lying across a stone floor. Was she above ground all this time, up beyond the underworld, among the living?
One of the guards then appeared in the doorway, with the laptop and the extension cord. He didn’t look at her, and she wondered if he was ashamed, if he was capable of shame. He hurriedly set it on the floor and booted it up, casting the extension cord into her cell. She had once thought of it as a rope, leading to her escape. But now she knew that it was nothing more than a fishing line, and that she had been the fool who had taken the bait. Outside the open doorway, she was shocked to hear a child laughing. Were they in someone’s house? But now the door was closing, the gate sliding shut.
“Finish the programs,” she heard Musa’s father call as he left. “And then you will die.”
When the door was closed, she turned the computer off.
THEY BEGAN WITHHOLDING FOOD. At first Josie wondered if this was a logistical problem, some glitch among the guards that had nothing to do with her. She was no longer used to mattering, baffled by the possibility that her behavior could have consequences. When she understood what she had done, power stirred within her.
Without food she became lighter, freer. The pain was still too great for her to stand up, but she made an effort to sit, to move, to use her perfect arms to drag herself as far as her chain would stretch. The sensation of fasting felt familiar to her. It was as though she were praying, rising above her own body. She found herself preparing for death, reciting the Hebrew confessional, the memorably alphabetical list of personal sins. She was amazed anew by how subtle they were, by how they mainly weren’t about things like physical theft or violence, but instead captured the tiny decisions that led to the diminishment of lives. For the sin that we have sinned before you unwillingly or willingly; and for the sin we have sinned before you by hardening our hearts … For the sin that we have sinned before you by being arrogant … For the sin we have sinned before you with haughty eyes, and for the sin we have sinned before you by impudence … The words ran through her mind like music; sometimes she sang them aloud. It was while she was singing that the door creaked open—slowly, without the angry clang that she still heard constantly in her mind. She was surprised to find that she didn’t tremble, that she was no longer even slightly afraid. When she raised her head she saw the woman, sheathed in black from head to toe, standing in the room with her.
The woman’s black ballet slippers startled her, jolting her into another world, one she couldn’t identify at first. She felt it first as a chill—a memory of a sensation she hadn’t felt in months, cold artificial air against the back of her neck. The chill was imaginary, but arresting, blowing her back to something she had long forgotten. Then she remembered it: standing in the refrigerated Library of Alexandria, freezing, and talking—with arrogance, with impudence, with haughty eyes, with a hardened heart—to a woman named Nasreen.
“He is not here now,” the woman said. “I will bring you food.”
Josie looked at her, not bothering to shrug. Food seemed irrelevant. Surely this was some new game, some attempt to manipulate her. Perhaps the man was even outside now, waiting with his pictures, his truncheon, his teenage goons. She no longer cared.
The woman approached her cautiously. Under the veil, Josie saw her flinch. It occurred to Josie that the look and smell of her own body must be appalling, that she hadn’t seen herself in months, that she was still swollen, still bruised, still covered with dirt. The woman hesitated for a moment, then sat down beside her. She carefully took Josie’s hand in hers. Josie twitched, unthinkingly, and felt a flush of pride as she pushed the woman’s hand away. But the touch had been exquisite. She breathed, and inhaled the sweet thick fragrance of the woman’s shampoo. The smell lingered in her mouth like food.
“I think many people in Egypt will like your—your computer program,” the woman said. “Please help me to remember: what is it called?”
For a long time Josie hesitated, unwilling to speak. But the woman was leaning toward her. Her breath smelled like toothpaste. Josie could taste it in her own mouth. “Genizah,” Josie answered.
The woman leaned back, satisfied. “Yes. This Genizah,” she said. Her veil fluttered before her breathing mouth. “You do not even know how good it would be, to have this program here for everyone. In this country everyone has lost someone. In every house someone is dead.”
Josie looked up, reminded, suddenly, of a verse from the book of Exodus—that after the Egyptians suffered the tenth plague, the death of Egypt’s firstborn, “there was not a single house without one dead.” She traced her own teeth with her tongue, did not speak.
“We would like you to make this Genizah for us,” she said. Josie remembered the woman’s voice now, from that day or night, somewhere on the other end of a valley of days and nights, when the woman had brought her water, medicine, clothes that weren’t drenched in filth. She remembered how startled she had been that the woman’s English was better than the man’s. “For everyone,” the woman was saying. “An open program, one that the whole country can use. But many Egyptians do not have computers. They use computers only in internet cafés, or on a phone. It will need to be open for everyone.”
Josie shifted her body, inching away from the woman. Her legs ached. This was merely more madness, she recognized now, nothing but another corner of the same dark pit. “The consumer editions of Genizah are all accessible online,” Josie said wearily, as if playing a recording of her own voice. “There are mobile applications that anyone can download. Everything is password-protected. People just have to buy a subscription, or pay for the download.”
The woman shook her head. “This is impossible for Egyptians,” she said. Josie understood what the woman meant, what she wanted. “It would be a gift to the people of Egypt.”
For a moment, Josie entertained the idea, thinking like a programmer again—considering how to hack the paywall, remembering, vaguely, that it was one of the last things she had coded herself. It would be easy for her, she realized. But then she stopped thinking, and remembered all that had happened. She was finished, she reminded herself.
Josie looked at the woman, or at the black cloth that covered her, for a long time. It was like a shroud. Did the woman wear it all the time, or was it merely a disguise, like the man’s sunglasses? Somewhere beneath it, Josie forced herself to think, was a person with a mind, with interests, commitments. A life. But what kind of life?
“I heard a child outside,” Josie said. “A girl. Is she—is she yours?”
The woman was silent. But the smell of shampoo and toothpaste invigorated Josie. “I saw a photo of her, with her brother,” Josie said. “She reminds me of my daughter.” Josie wa
ited, unsure of whether to dare. “Does your daughter know that I’m here? Does she know why I’m here?”
The woman remained silent. Josie listened to her breathe. When she spoke, she did not answer Josie’s question. Instead she answered the question behind it.
“Your program will not bring back my son. That is true,” she said. She spoke with her head erect, her voice low. “I know. I am not asking you to bring him back.” Josie listened for a crack in her voice. But the woman refused to indulge her. “I am only telling you that this country is built out of tombs. We are very good at building tombs.” She paused, leaned forward. “On the computer you could build a new city of the dead, for people now. And then everyone would see how big that city is.”
Josie tried to snort, to dismiss the woman’s words. But her breath caught in her throat.
“You do not know it, but I have protected you,” the woman said.
Another impossibility, Josie thought. Then she remembered what the man had told her: She is the only reason you are not dead.
“The hitting, I could not help,” the woman continued. “But I would not let them touch you. I told them that if they did I would smell it, I would see it in their faces, and I would tell someone, I would tell everyone. I know they never touched you.”
Josie shifted against the wall, ignoring the pain.
The woman breathed out, a long, hard breath. The veil fluttered like a moving shadow across her face.
“If you could do this for us, all of Egypt would thank you. And if you did, then I—I—” the woman stammered.
Josie sighed, glancing with contempt at the laptop in the corner, where she had pushed it out of her own reach. Everything seemed useless, laughable. The power in the machine, the one in which she had invested more than half her life, was no power at all.
Then the woman finished: “I would bring you out of this room.”
8
OFTEN, WHEN SHE was with Tali, Judith returned, in her mind, to the pit.
The pit was much too deep, she remembered. She hadn’t known how deep it really was until she saw her little sister at the bottom of it—smaller than she had ever seen her, so far away that Judith could barely see the breathing, beating beauty that had always terrified her. All she could see, then, was a tiny dark-haired creature crying out her name. The power she had felt at that moment had been overwhelming, intoxicating. She had never before known what it was like to matter. She thought of it often now, whenever Tali asked her for the inhaler. She held the plastic cylinder against the girl’s pleading face, watching her cough, counting her breaths, and understood what once might have been.
“I’m so lucky you’re here, Judith,” Tali said one afternoon after her breathing had calmed. “I couldn’t do anything without you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Judith said. “You could do all this yourself if you had to.” After she said it, she remembered saying the same words to another girl, in a darkening poplar forest, before she discovered just how true it was. But this time Judith smiled, because this time she knew it was a lie. The new little girl smiled back, and Judith kissed her.
Judith was home now, finally—living in what she now thought of, without hesitation, as her own house. She hadn’t yet given up her apartment, but it had been weeks since she had returned to it. Everything she needed was here. She spent each night in her dead sister’s bed, sleeping by Itamar’s side. For the first month it was like performing in a play, trying to guess what her sister might have said, what her sister might have done, what would make him happy. But as days and nights passed undocumented, dropping one by one into oblivion, she slowly stopped pretending and started living. She was aware of the gossip at the company and among everyone they knew, but to her own surprise she didn’t care. It was as though she were floating above the world, flying in a dream. Eventually she and Itamar even spoke of new problems, new developments, things that were apparently unrelated to the horror that had made this new life possible. But everything was related to it. Like the fact that the company, for the first time ever, was beginning to falter, the number of subscriptions holding steady instead of growing for the first time in years. It distressed Itamar to the core—not because of the money, but because of Josie.
“I feel like I’m killing her again,” he confided one night in bed. Judith had suggested selling advertising in the software—the obvious option, one that their closest competition had chosen years ago. But Itamar corrected her. “No, we can never do that,” he told her. His voice at night was different than it was during the daytime, Judith noticed: softer, warmer. He laced his arms around her neck, running his fingers through her hair. “She never wanted Genizah to be one of these things where you can’t touch anything without someone trying to sell you something, where everything you do is pillaged for new ways to get your attention, or your money.”
Judith used to cringe when Itamar talked about Josie in bed, but she didn’t anymore. His hands were wandering between her shoulderblades, caressing the stunted points where she might have grown wings. She listened, entranced. “Every time we open our eyes now, we’re surrounded by people who want to use us, and we’re expected to think there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Genizah was meant to be different, with nothing in it except what mattered to that person. It was supposed to be a—a sacred space.”
“A sacred space,” Judith repeated, as her sister never would have. To her joy, Itamar did not flinch. She had just begun to see into Itamar, to discover the hidden vault within him. At first she had known only what he needed her to be, and she had obliged him. From him she had learned, without words, what he and her sister had done, how they had danced, and she had allowed him to lead her. It was safer to pretend that she already knew him. But in recent weeks there had been a subtle shift between them, as if Judith had at last nudged her sister out of the bed they shared.
“Yes, something that no one else can touch, unless you invite them,” he said that night. “Like your body.”
She assumed he was speaking generally, a reference to the body of any person on earth. He had always closed his eyes when they were in bed together. But now he looked at her face. No one had ever looked at her like that before, except for Josie, reaching up from the pit.
“You are beautiful, Judith,” he whispered, and took her breath away.
After they made love she had lain in bed for hours, amazed, unable to sleep as his chest rose and fell in gentle rhythms beside her. She gazed at the glowing blank canvas of the ceiling and relished a fresh and unexpected feeling that she had never before experienced, one that her dead sister had once lived with nearly every day: not merely love, but certainty. Judith was now the happiest she had ever been in her life. And that was when, in the most silent hour of the night, she heard the buzzing of a message landing in her phone.
She rolled in the darkness and looked at the dim glow of the phone’s screen as it vibrated on the night table, wondering what calamity awaited her. Something about her mother, she guessed. She picked up the phone, glancing again at Itamar’s long thin body, that narrow oasis of joy in the vast wastes of her life. She read the words on the screen, then sat up in shock:
im still here dont tell anyone come get me love josie
It was impossible, she knew as she stared at the screen. Absolutely impossible. At that moment, Judith decided that it would remain impossible.
Her first impulse was to erase it, as she had erased everything else. But as she sat in her sister’s bed, something pulled at her, some double-helixed string stretching across the universe, and she could not quite summon the unbridled brazenness she would have needed to cut herself completely free. She tapped at the phone until the message was saved—something the software would have done automatically, if she hadn’t disabled it. If she had been a different person, she might never have slept again.
Instead she rolled over and draped an arm across the beautiful man who lay beside her, glanced at the clock and thought of the little girl who w
ould wake her at dawn, pulled up her sister’s striped multicolored comforter, and tumbled blissfully down into a deep pit of unremembered dreams. She slept well, reveling in sweet oblivion, until Tali kissed her into the new day.
A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, she and Itamar had attended Tali’s parent–teacher conference together. Josie had often mentioned that Tali wasn’t reading, that Tali wasn’t even interested in reading. Josie had said this with a kind of perverse pride, Judith remembered, as though she were inverting the usual maternal guilt: instead of trying to live her life through her child, Josie was so satisfied with her own success that she pretended not to mind if her daughter was raised by wolves. But now Judith saw how maddening it must have been for her sister, how profoundly disappointing, and all the worse for the shame that the disappointment bore as its shadow. Tali was only in first grade, and one could never be publicly disappointed about one’s child being average. Josie had bragged about how Tali couldn’t read, Judith now understood, because she had tried and failed to teach her.
Judith thought of this as she settled into the child-sized chair next to Itamar’s in a classroom decorated with posters of anthropomorphic animals. She could feel the warmth of his body beside hers as the teacher regarded both of them with a sympathy that bordered on a thrill. The teacher then spent the first seven of the allotted ten minutes bemoaning the family tragedy and excusing everything Tali had done since then—it seemed that Tali had hardly completed any classwork, had failed three different assessment tests, and had shredded “about four or five” paperback picture books with her teeth—by saying how of course after everything that had happened, Tali couldn’t be expected to be at her best. Toward the end, the teacher mentioned, almost in passing, that while Tali had “tremendous potential,” the little girl had adamantly refused even to attempt to learn to read.