by Dara Horn
The carriage was climbing one of the hideous bald hills now, providing an excellent view of several villages made of clusters of shacks and of the swamps leading down to the sea. Schechter had expected to gaze on the landscape here and see verses from the psalms and the sages come to life. But even he had to admit that these vast lakes of mud, occasionally interrupted by a row or two of carefully planted eucalyptus trees, were the very opposite of poetry. Language was pointless here, it seemed, and the mind even more so, the future as inscrutable as the past. There was nothing here but mud.
Srulik’s own voice returned, jarred by the bumps in the dirt road. “Frozen in self-absorption, as cold and unfeeling as the mind,” he repeated. “I couldn’t get those words out of my own cold mind. It occurred to me then that I had been sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of snow all those years, every day, while I sat in that frigid study house next to you.” Srulik was smiling now. “Father looked at me then, and he knew that I understood what he meant. He knew I wanted to leave, and not to live a life of learning like you. I know he aimed those words at me. Those words made it all right for me to close those books, as if Father was promising me that God wouldn’t abandon me if I did. Everything I’ve done from that moment forward was because of what Father said that night. ‘The cold and unfeeling mind.’ I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”
Around a cliff of gray rock, Srulik’s town was emerging. To Schechter’s surprise it was quite beautiful, with smooth streets lined by palm trees and several large stone buildings which Srulik would later identify for him (synagogue, enclosed water reservoir, hospital, and winery—or as Srulik put it, “everything a person could possibly need”). But as they passed the cemetery, full of children’s graves from the town’s first ten years of malarial plague, Schechter remembered something, and spoke.
“That wasn’t what Father meant at all,” he said.
Srulik looked up at him, and in his face Schechter saw their father. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that’s not what that passage is about, and that’s not why Father taught it to us. It does begin the way you quoted it—that the mind is like an unfeeling corpse. But the very next sentence says, ‘And when the cold-blooded mind understands and is excited by a divine idea—is that not the revival of the dead?’” Schechter paused, glancing up at the stone buildings that had begun to emerge at the sides of the road, and at the people who had begun to gather at the roadside as their carriage approached. “Father was teaching me that passage intentionally, to remind me to continue serving God as I continued studying, even as I was studying in worldly universities,” Schechter said. He could see that his chance to explain Srulik’s mistake was disappearing; the door of the moment was closing, the carriage slowing, the pull of new possibilities impossible to resist. Srulik was already looking away, scanning the crowd for people he knew. “He was saying that reading and learning were ways to revive the dead,” Schechter finished. “That’s what I remember. Because that’s what he said.”
“That wasn’t what he said at all,” Srulik muttered.
Schechter felt the blood drain from his own face. The Mediterranean sun burned against Schechter’s pale skin as he tried to think of something comforting to say, something to suggest that Srulik’s entire life hadn’t been built on a misunderstanding. But was it a misunderstanding? Perhaps Schechter was the one who had misunderstood. Why should his memories of their father be any less distorted than his twin’s?
He was about to speak again when he was overtaken by a coughing fit, one that lasted a long time. His twin watched him with a sympathy Schechter hadn’t seen on another man’s face in many years.
“That old cough again,” Srulik said. Schechter could feel his brother’s relief as he changed the subject, and recalled what once had come to him unbidden: the ability to feel his brother’s thoughts. “I had that stinking asthma for years after you left,” Srulik added. “Here I don’t get it much. When I do, there’s a tea they sell in Haifa that helps. I’ll have to remember to buy you some.” And then the brothers disembarked in Zikhron Yaakov and greeted Srulik’s children and grandchildren, native speakers of a language long dead.
Now Schechter was in the library, breathing in clouds of nostalgia and regret. He glanced at his notes for an essay he hoped to publish about this astonishing cache of forgotten lives: Every discovery of an ancient document is, if undertaken in the right spirit—that is, for honor of God and truth and not for the glory of the self—an act of resurrection in miniature. How the past suddenly rushes in upon you with all its joys and woes! And there is a spark of a human soul like yours come to light again after a disappearance of centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy. You dare not neglect the appeal and slay this soul again. Unless you choose to become another Cain, you must be the keeper of your brother and give him a fair hearing.
He had written those lines on the ship from Alexandria to Haifa, but now he wondered if they were true. The twins were at his side, exuding their aura of eternity. The hour was urgent, the light was fading, and Schechter decided to ask them.
“When you found the Syriac Gospel, I know it was a religious experience for you,” Schechter said with hesitation. The twins nodded. “But I wondered,” he continued. “Did you ever feel that its discovery was a religious experience not only for you, but for the person who had written it as well? That is, did you ever sense that by finding that forgotten book, you were bringing its author back to life?”
The two women looked at each other, as if unsure whether to tell him he was mad.
“I regret to say that it’s impossible to resurrect the dead,” Margaret replied. “Even Christ wasn’t resurrected, according to the Gospel manuscript we found.”
Agnes snorted. “Margaret, sometimes I think you will never forgive me for that.”
“I only mean that people find what they wish to find, and remember what they wish to remember, regardless of the evidence presented to them,” Margaret said.
Agnes frowned. “Are you suggesting that if you were the one who had learned Syriac, you would have managed to locate a Syriac manuscript that announced Christ’s resurrection?”
“That is exactly what I am suggesting.”
“But what if there were no such manuscript to be found?” Agnes asked.
“Look at this room,” Margaret answered, waving at the heaps of parchment behind her. “Think of all the rooms in the world that might be like it. If one wants to find something, one finds it. Especially now. Our dear friend Mr. Schechter has brought back hundreds of thousands of documents, and he didn’t even bother with the printed material. But just consider how much material there will be for historians in the future, now that we have printing presses, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and mail deliveries two or three times a day. For every book and letter we find in this genizah, the genizah of the future will surely have hundreds of thousands. It will be endless. The past will become a bottomless pit. In that kind of archive, one can find anything one wishes to find.”
Schechter coughed again, and glanced at the piles on the table before him. “Putting Christ’s resurrection aside,” he began, “I’m referring to a much more earthly act of recovery. Just consider the letter I showed you yesterday, the one from Moses Maimonides when he was in mourning for his brother. Suddenly the great philosopher becomes human.”
“He always was,” Agnes pointed out. “It was merely a failure of imagination that made him otherwise.”
“But when one reads that letter of his, about the death of his brother, one senses his—his—” Schechter faltered, coughing again. “His desperation. And then you see, in this stack”—he coughed more, then stepped over to the table behind him, where he had two weeks earlier labeled what he identified with wonder as a handwritten draft, by Maimonides himself, of his Guide for the Perplexed—“you see how deeply he believed that God was just. Listen to his words.” Schechter picked up one of the parchments he had already sorted, and translated into English as he r
ead aloud: “‘The most marvelous and extraordinary thing about the story of Job is that Job is not said to be wise or intelligent, only morally virtuous. For if he had been wise, his situation would not have been obscure to him.’ Maimonides has an entire chapter where he explains that Job’s adversary is actually his own evil impulse, and that the story of Job is merely an allegorical description of Job succumbing to his own evil impulse and enduring its consequences. In effect, he claimed that Job deserved it.”
“Poor old Job,” Margaret murmured. “For thousands of years, no one has left him alone.”
Schechter shook his head. “My point is about the letter from Maimonides,” he said. “It’s impossible to imagine that the drowning of his brother wouldn’t have changed his mind. There simply isn’t any way he could have honestly believed that his brother’s death at sea was something he or his brother had done anything to deserve.” The light from the windows was growing dim; soon it would be impossible to read anymore. The remaining minutes were precious. But Schechter couldn’t stop himself. “But then he writes his Guide, years later, claiming exactly that. Was he denying what he really believed? Or had he convinced himself that he was being punished for some obscure sin? Don’t you think that if we dig through this pile for long enough, we might find out?”
“Don’t you think that if Maimonides had dived deep enough into the Indian Ocean, he might have found his brother’s body and resuscitated it?” Agnes asked.
Schechter looked up at her, startled. Before he could reply, Margaret looked at her sister. Schechter knew that they were sharing one mind now, the way he and Srulik once had, thinking each other’s thoughts. “Or put it this way,” Margaret said gently. “Mr. Schechter, would I be correct in assuming that your parents have passed away?”
“Yes,” Schechter said. He thought of his father, and then remembered the argument with Srulik. What had his father tried to teach them? Did it matter what their father had said? Or did it only matter what each of them imagined he had said?
“Mr. Schechter, do you honestly think that your parents would want you to know everything about them?” Margaret asked.
“Or for that matter,” her sister added, “would you want your children to know everything about you?”
The room had dimmed by now; the inked letters on the brown leather piles of parchments were no longer visible in the shadows. On the table before him lay stacks of dead animal hides, their words erased.
“Our mother died when we were two weeks old,” Agnes said. “Can you guess what our father told us about her?”
Schechter looked up, weary.
“Nothing,” Agnes said.
Schechter stared. He thought of his own parents and siblings, of the endless conversations that had raged through their three-room house at every hour of the day, on every subject, about every person any of them had ever met. “Nothing?” he asked. It was unfathomable.
The twins were looking at each other, shaking their heads. “He never spoke of her to us,” Margaret confirmed. “Not one word.”
“But weren’t you—weren’t you curious?”
“Of course we were,” Agnes said. “But after so many years of that kind of silence, one gives up asking questions. Instead, one searches for evidence.”
“We have a great deal of experience hunting for manuscripts, you see,” Margaret added. “We’d been through our father’s papers hundreds of times. That was where we found our first palimpsest.”
The twins laughed. Schechter thought of the many palimpsests on the table before him, parchments where one text had been written over another. He had worked with palimpsests many times, enough to think of himself as one. “It was a letter to our father from our mother,” Agnes explained. “Our father had written a draft of a legal brief over it. But underneath his handwriting we could make out hers.”
Schechter breathed, relieved by their laughter. “What did it say?” he asked.
“There were only two phrases that were legible,” Margaret answered. “The clearer of the two was the signature, ‘With affection, Margaret.’ I was named for her, of course.”
“The other phrase was ‘They strive with me,’” Agnes continued. “Or possibly ‘They strive within me.’”
Schechter processed the words, hearing echoes of other twins within them. “Referring to the two of you, before your birth?” he asked.
“Of course,” Margaret said.
“‘Of course,’ indeed,” Agnes snorted. “Frankly, Mr. Schechter, it could just as easily have been about the farmers down the road. But you see, that was irrelevant to us. From those seven words we summoned an entire person into being, like the Lord creating the world. It’s quite possible that the mother we imagined was better than the mother who actually existed.”
“Probable, even,” Margaret added. “Because we never troubled to imagine any flaws.”
Agnes smiled. “I don’t think either of us would entertain the thought that what we discovered wasn’t exactly what she wrote,” she said. “Even now that we are old women. We treasure that tiny discovery of a world that was. Even if it was a world that wasn’t.”
The library room was dark now, a deep pit of wordless shadows. Schechter rose from his chair and walked with the twins toward the door, to the dusk beyond it. He let the twins precede him through the door while he lingered at the threshold.
He looked over his shoulder at the dark shapes behind him, stacks of parchment and ink and dust. Someday, he had once dreamed, there would be a way of reading every word in that room, of searching through those hundreds of thousands of bits of trash to find anything one wanted. But for him, now, there was no point. Instead he patted his pocket with the letter from New York, turned around, and walked out the door. It was time to begin again.
13
WHEN YOU OPEN a door for the first time, you imagine you have perfect freedom. You can enter through that door, or close the door and abandon it; you can proceed through the vestibule and into the hall, where more doors await your choosing; you can climb up the wide staircases to the upper floors or down the narrow ones to the underground rooms below. Each step you take is entirely your decision, each discovery behind each opened door entirely your own. The fact that the doors and the rooms behind them already exist, have always existed, does not interest you in the least. You imagine—you are convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary—that you have brought these rooms into being yourself, just by opening their doors.
Fourteen-year-old Tali knows what happened in that horrific year when she was six years old, knows what everyone knows happened. She has read the news reports about her mother’s kidnapping; she has seen the broadcast interviews with local and international authorities; she has watched the initial cell phone video of her terrified, young-looking mother reading aloud, and then the second cell phone video—the astonishingly convincing one—of her mother’s supposed execution. She has met Nasreen, the brave Egyptian woman who found her mother in her sister’s house, and with Tali’s aunt, rescued her. She has read the profiles of the kidnapper, a notorious ganglord who had apparently reformed himself enough to be elected to the new parliament, and of his wife, an abused woman whose elite family in Alexandria knew almost nothing of her squalid life. Tali has even read the translated articles from Egyptian bloggers claiming that the whole kidnapping was a hoax, that her mother was an Israeli spy who had invented the entire affair to smear the new government, that it was all an elaborate Zionist plot—a failed plot, presumably, since after an eighteen-month prison term, the ganglord returned to office.
And of course Tali has read over and over again about her aunt’s great sacrifice, as her mother described it and as it was subsequently reported in every possible news outlet: how the ganglord’s wife had hoped to set Tali’s mother free, but hadn’t thought through how to do it without her husband killing her; how Tali’s aunt was the only one to believe her mother’s secret message from the dungeon, and how she had come to Egypt to see what might be po
ssible; how her aunt had valiantly volunteered herself as a hostage to replace her mother—and how her aunt had died in the raid that followed. This is the story—no, nothing so trivial as a story; it is the fundamental life-enabling fact—of her family, Tali knows: a family that could not exist but for the miraculous truth of her aunt’s bottomless lifelong devotion to her mother. It is a truth whose bravery and commitment she knows she could never match.
She proceeds through her memories of these events the way she moves through the house where her family now lives in Israel, climbing the exterior stairs over the house built into the hill below it (it amazed her seven years ago, when they first moved to Israel after her American grandmother’s death, how every house in Israel seemed to be built on top of another house) in order to arrive at her own future: entering through the front door with its half-lying family nameplate (“The Mizrahi Family,” it announced, which seemed not to include her Ashkenazi mother), padding through the kitchen and hallway with their stone floors and continuing up the stone stairs, passing the closed door of the office where her mother often takes home work from her job running software systems for a digitized medieval archive, passing the closed door of her parents’ bedroom where her father prepares for the university classes he teaches in computer science, passing the closed door of the bomb shelter where she keeps her bicycle, until she reaches the open door of her own little bedroom, where she drops her school bag and pats her pocket to check for her inhaler before turning around to leave again. It feels normal to her, casual, the initial strangeness of the family’s move to Israel now engulfed by a new forgetfulness, by the impossibility of recalling her life before the move, like her old house in Massachusetts, whose halls and doorways and rooms she no longer remembers, although she occasionally tries. Her mother has password-protected the terabytes of photos and videos Tali would have loved to look through on her own. Her mother only occasionally shares them, while looking over Tali’s shoulder. Often, now, Tali even forgets English words, as though the first seven years of her life were no more than a vanishing dream. But the things that happened that terrible year, thanks to the news reports, are familiar, intimate. The articles and broadcasts of every part of the story, from the initial kidnapping to her aunt’s devotional death, seem like open doors, the rooms she passes through every day until she barely notices they are there.