by Dara Horn
Under the veil, in the room just beyond her private dungeon, she had seen her sister as she never had seen her before: abject, humbled, forced to her hands and knees. She wondered how her sister had seen herself, but she would never know. It had been too horrifying, the sudden clank of the lock and the woman pointing the gun at her, followed by the woman taping her mouth, muttering something hard to understand and even harder to believe.
“Someone is here,” she murmured in Josie’s ear. “She says she is your sister. I am sure she was sent by the police, to trap us.”
Josie had choked, gagging against the duct tape as the woman continued. “I said I will let you go,” the woman whispered. “But I cannot let you go now, not until I trust her. I cannot go to jail. My daughter needs me. You understand.”
It was unfathomable, impossible. But Josie had no choices, no way to control her future. She didn’t struggle as the woman covered her in a heavy fabric veil and pushed the gun into her back. And then she passed through the door for the first time and saw that it was true.
To see Judith in that room, but to be unable to speak to her, unable to do anything that might result in the gun being fired, was a greater agony than she could ever have imagined. To leave Judith behind was more terrible still. As they left the house, Nasreen had to clamp her hand against Josie’s mouth to keep her from screaming. “He has friends everywhere,” Nasreen had rasped in her ear. “No one can know. Not yet.”
Josie hadn’t walked in months; the journey to the edge of the ancient cemetery resulted in her collapsing from the exertion. She lay on the ground in a tiny alley, gulping at the air with her body pressed against a pile of trash, when Nasreen spoke again. “I couldn’t believe it was you,” she said.
“I—I—tried to tell you, and my sister,” Josie gasped. “I wrote so many things on that paper, but I couldn’t get her to read anything but the—”
But Nasreen was already looking away, pulling out her cell phone and lowering her voice. “I’m calling the police,” she said.
Josie nodded, dazed, and then remembered what the woman in the dungeon had told her. “No, don’t,” she tried to shout. Her voice came out as a sob. “She—she said she can’t be arrested, she—my sister—she—”
Nasreen paused, but only briefly. “Zulaika is completely paranoid; he’s made her insane. Getting arrested would be the best thing that could happen to her. At least she would be away from him.”
She placed the call as Josie passed out.
Many hours later, when Josie awoke in a makeshift hospital bed inside the American embassy, she saw Nasreen sitting before her. Through a veil of morphine, Josie heard Nasreen describe the arrival of the police at her sister’s house—which had only happened after her brother-in-law returned.
“He was holding your sister in front of him, and he started shooting at the police,” Nasreen said. Her eyes gleamed, but her voice was steady, as professional as Josie remembered it. “They had no choice but to shoot back. He survived, though. Zulaika did too.” Nasreen sat back, silent.
“Is—is my sister—” Josie tried to ask.
Nasreen lowered her eyes, and Josie knew.
“He saw the police and became hysterical,” Nasreen said through Josie’s silence. “They told me he was screaming his son’s name, over and over again.”
“Musa,” Josie whispered.
Nasreen stared at her. “How do you know his name?”
For the first time since she had arrived in the dungeon, Josie wept. Uncontrollable weeping, extravagant weeping, a bottomless wrenching weeping like nothing she had ever lived through before, not even when she was first locked into that tiny room. Two hours later, when she spoke to Itamar for the first time—when she saw his face and Tali’s on the screen the embassy provided for her—she was still weeping. They thought she was weeping for them.
She was still weeping the following day, weeping in her sleep, when she awoke to see Itamar in the doorway.
“Yosefi,” he whispered. “You came back.”
He was taller than she had imagined him during those dark months—taller, and older. She hadn’t remembered the bits of gray hair around his temples. Was it a dream? Josie wondered. Or am I dreaming now? He crumpled onto the bed beside her, on top of her, falling on her neck, covering her in his embrace.
“I did,” she said, her voice small and still. She clutched his hard shoulders like planks in a shipwreck. She was afraid to look at his face. He was the first to pull away, to look at her, to smile.
“I should have known that the laws of mortality don’t apply to you,” he said. “Do me a favor and don’t ever die again.”
She was beginning to smile back when she was slammed by the memory, a physical three-dimensional force, of everything she had learned in the past twenty-four hours, of what Judith had said, what Judith had done, what had been done to her.
“Itamar,” she said, “Judith—Judith is—”
She could see in his face that he already knew.
“Yosefi, I need to tell you—” he began.
“Judith told me everything,” she said. “You don’t have to say a word.”
His grip tightened around her hand. “What do you mean?”
“When I saw her, she told me everything. Everything about you and her.”
His face purpled. She squeezed his hand as he slid his fingers from her grip. “Don’t be angry at yourself, Itamar,” she said. “I’m glad she was with you. And with Tali.”
Where was Tali? Josie suddenly thought. She glanced at the closed door of the room and understood that Tali must be right behind it, that Itamar had wanted to see her first, alone—to hold her himself, and to explain about Judith. But Josie already knew.
Itamar winced, and clutched the rail of the bed. Had she forgotten the wrinkles around his eyes, or were they new? “What she did to you—to us—was evil,” he said. She could see that he had tried not to say it, that he couldn’t help himself. His voice was shaking. “She was evil. I was an idiot not to know it.”
Everyone thinks that someday there will be some large and cold and magnificent moment when they will confront the person who wronged them and wreak not revenge, but justice, the justice of seeing that person not punished, but shamed. Josie had long had such thoughts. You think it will happen, live your whole life with the understanding that it will happen, but it doesn’t. Until one hard bright afternoon, it does. And only then do you understand that it wasn’t what you wanted at all.
In a drumming rush of wind that burned through her lungs, Josie understood what Rambam had meant by absolute free will. I am completely free, she thought. Nasreen was right: it was impossible to control the future. But it was possible to control the past.
“No, she wasn’t,” Josie told him. “She saved my life.”
Itamar scowled. She had forgotten, during those dark months, what Itamar’s face looked like when he was angry. There hadn’t been a reason to remember it. She touched his face, tracing his temples with her fingers.
“Yes, technically,” he said, “but she—”
Josie swallowed, and dared. “No, Itamar, I mean it. She volunteered to take my place.”
It wasn’t true, of course. But the truth of the past was gone forever, Josie knew now, gone the instant a moment disappeared. What remained, always, was something new: creation, and redemption.
Itamar took her hand, and stared. “What do you mean?”
“She volunteered,” Josie repeated. She leaned forward in the bed, straining her legs against the starched sheets. “When Judith saw that it was me under that veil, the woman who had me at gunpoint said that she couldn’t let me go, that her husband was going to kill her if he saw that my room was empty. Then Judith asked the woman to cover her with the veil, so that she could stay there instead of me. So that I could escape.”
Itamar lowered her hand to the bed, pressing her fingers between his. His mouth hung open. “The police said—”
“Forget what the police sai
d,” Josie interrupted. “I was there. They weren’t.”
“But that woman from the library—”
“Trust me,” Josie said. It was a demand, not a request. Itamar understood. She waited until he slowly nodded. “Judith knew what was going to happen to her. She did it for me. For us.” She paused, unsure of how far to go. “Her life was a gift to us. And to Tali.”
It was done. In Itamar’s face she saw what she had achieved. He was crying now, loud choking sobs. Josie knew then that he had loved her sister, and that now he was allowed to love her still, to love them both. She had given him that gift. Itamar saw her watching him, and buried his face in his hands. In the privacy before his covered eyes, Josie smiled. For the first time in her life, Josie loved her sister too.
He raised his head, and took her hands in his again. “Tali is waiting outside,” he said.
“I know,” said Josie, glancing past him. Already the door was dissolving, replaced by what she hoped to see.
“She doesn’t know about Judith yet,” he added. His voice was a whisper. “Should we tell her now?”
“Don’t say anything,” Josie told him. “I know exactly what to do.” She swallowed, breathed, and then called, “Tali?”
The door opened. Behind it, framed in the doorway like an image on a screen, stood Tali. She was far more beautiful than Josie had remembered. The girl’s eyes were full of pure joy.
Tali raced into the room and bounded onto the bed, laughing as she covered her mother with kisses. Her mother held the girl tight, enfolding her in her arms. “Mommy, you aren’t dead! I’m so glad you aren’t dead!” Tali shrieked, and laughed even harder, until Josie and Itamar were laughing with her.
“You aren’t dead,” Tali said again, as their laughter settled into happy breaths. Then Tali said, “Judith was right! Can we tell her?”
And then her mother told her what had happened.
12
IT WAS THE DEPTH of the archive that disturbed him. Not the amount of material, but the depth. Solomon Schechter, who had committed sixty-three volumes of the Talmud to memory by the age of sixteen and who read every new humanities book the university library acquired on top of the 365 novels he read each year, wasn’t afraid of having too much to read. What troubled him was not the vastness of what he had brought home from Egypt—it appeared that his two dozen large shipping crates had contained almost a quarter million medieval documents, all told—but the vertiginous bottomless pit of forgotten lives that each of those scraps of parchment managed to evoke. What frightened him was the thought—the shadow of a thought, really, since he did not quite allow himself to think it—that he would not live long enough to relive all of those buried lives. No one could. In which case the pile of parchments would remain exactly what it was: a heap of garbage, a destroyed city, an archive rendered pointless, if it had ever had a point at all. The tens of thousands of private letters and torn prayerbook pages and marriage contracts and business inventories in the heaps that now surrounded him in Cambridge had only reached this room because they were written in the same letters used to write the name of God.
Schechter enjoyed a fair amount of fame now, thanks to these piles of trash. Today he even had a letter in his pocket inviting him to become the head of a modern rabbinical seminary in New York. But Schechter was still searching, amid the garbage, for the material that actually mattered: the sacred words, the ancient poetry, the prophecies. He had discovered marvels, but for every hand-copied variation on Isaiah, there were a hundred medical prescriptions and a thousand sales receipts. They crowded his table, making it difficult for him to breathe.
And what was the point? What was the point of him reading the dowry list of the types of silk required for a bride named Hana’s wedding dress, or the divorce papers for Abraham and Sarah, or the contract between Musa and David for the sale of some herbal remedy? More often than he would have liked as he searched for biblical works, he found himself distracted into imagining these people, picturing this Hana, that Musa, that David, trying to guess what sort of people they were, what they liked, what they hated, what they loved.
There was no point to it, he knew. Then why couldn’t he stop? Sometimes he looked around the room and saw it filled not with papers but with people, people long dead, people he had captured on a fishing line dipped into the deep pit of Sheol, baited with a receipt for a medieval drug. But the idea that he could ever know who these people had really been was an illusion. There were no other people in Schechter’s library room. Except for the twins.
“Mr. Schechter!”
“Mr. Schechter!”
By now Schechter could even—sometimes—tell them apart. The sisters had joined him in Egypt, bringing a respirator to soothe his suffering lungs and reserving a beautiful hotel suite in which to clean the parchments. After another trip to the Sinai they had followed him home, meeting him daily in the room the librarians had set aside for him and his manuscripts, working through those that dealt with biblical Apocrypha, labeling and cataloguing them as best they could. Gaslights were inadequate for reading the darkened parchments, and a fire hazard at that; all the work had to happen in daylight. Now the day was turning, arcing toward night.
“Mr. Schechter, please, stop reading now. You’ll damage your eyes,” Margaret said. The sisters had risen from their own tables to hover over him like his parents once did when he was a small child, urging him to go to bed.
Schechter leaned back in his seat, reluctantly putting down a twelfth-century doctor’s bill for imported pharmaceuticals. He hadn’t noticed how much his eyes hurt. “Thank you,” he said. It was odd to look up and see these two women in their modern widow’s frocks, in this cold Gothic room. In his mind, he had been in Cairo in 1171.
“We need your eyes,” Agnes added. “This archive is only a heap of dust without your eyes.”
“It’s actually the opposite of an archive, isn’t it?” Margaret said as she sifted through a stack of dark leather scraps.
“Not quite,” huffed Agnes. She pointed to a pile of brown dust on the table where Margaret had been working, the remains of a parchment accidentally crushed. “That is the opposite of an archive. And please be a bit more careful, or this entire room will become the opposite of an archive.”
Schechter coughed, coughed again, sputtered. The heaps of dust had affected his health. He wasn’t yet fifty, but he already resembled an old man. As he glanced at the dust that had caused his trouble—disintegrated animal matter that coated everything he touched and that floated in the air he breathed—it occurred to him that his body would ultimately become something just like it, that the bodies of every person alive would ultimately become something just like it, that every human being, in the end, becomes the opposite of an archive. But this was too disturbing to consider, and his living breathing body was coughing too hard for him to think it through.
On his way home from Egypt, he had spent a month in Palestine with his twin brother, Srulik. To his astonishment, his brother seemed barely to have aged at all in the thirty years since they had last met, despite the fact that Srulik was already a grandfather—to two girls the same ages as Schechter’s daughters. Meeting another set of redheaded girls so similar to his own delighted and disturbed Schechter. Their Hebrew reminded Schechter of the rabbi in Cairo, and it occurred to him that his own daughters would have nothing to say to these girls, even if they had shared a language. There were far fewer misty moisty mornings here; the nursery rhymes weren’t the same. But he and his brother had reverted immediately to their youth. They began arguing almost before Schechter reached the end of the pier. As they traveled from the port in Haifa to his brother’s newly built town of Zikhron Yaakov, Schechter described the treasure he had collected in Egypt. Srulik laughed and called him a fool.
“You don’t understand,” Schechter had grumbled, still marveling at his brother’s unwrinkled skin, and at the view from their rickety donkey-drawn carriage: biblical mountains, stumpy and bald and hideous, with t
heir feet dipped in malarial mud. That night he would sleep in the three-room hovel his brother called home. His brother’s house reminded him of their old house in Romania, except that here they slept under mosquito nets. “There are entire worlds in those sacks of papers. Even versions of the biblical books that no one has ever seen before. Forgotten prophecies! It’s going to take decades just to read them all. Have you any idea what we might find?”
“No, I don’t,” Srulik grunted cheerfully, “and I also don’t care. Forgotten prophecies don’t interest me much. Who needs a prophecy if it’s already come true?”
Schechter looked again at his brother’s youthful face. Was it possible that he had aged while his brother had gotten younger? “Why live in a hole in a library?” his brother elaborated. “No matter how long you spend in that pit, you aren’t going to resurrect the dead.”
“But am I not obliged to try?”
Srulik laughed again. “Try something else,” he said. Srulik had been smiling during their trip, but now his face turned thoughtful, grave. “Do you remember that night before you left for Vienna?” he asked.
The last time they had seen each other, Srulik meant. Schechter looked at his brother and remembered how he had last seen him, his final glimpse in the mirror of someone else’s face. “Of course,” he said softly.
“I’ll always remember it,” Srulik said. “It was a grand send-off, a don’t-forget-where-you-came-from sort of thing. Father was going over the teachings of the rebbe Shneur Zalman, for whom he named you.”
Schechter laughed. “As if I could forget.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll remember what he taught us that night too. That night he read us some horrible passage from one of the rebbe’s disciples, about how the rebbe’s ideas are able to revive the dead.” Srulik paused and deepened his voice, mimicking their father. “A corpse is something cold and unfeeling,” Srulik quoted. Srulik’s impressions of their parents used to send Schechter into hysterical laughter, but now Schechter was struck dumb as he heard his dead father’s voice. “‘And is there ever anything as frozen in self-absorption, as cold and unfeeling, as the mind?’”