The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  Sara watched the air in front of her, then suddenly smiled. Her eyes glowed as she looked up at him. “So go meet her,” she said.

  Ben dug his fingernails into his palms. “But I can’t. First of all, I’m not going to return the painting. It’s ours, no matter who made it, and we’re keeping it. And second, even if I went, I don’t believe her that she wouldn’t turn me in. Every time I believe someone, I get screwed. Every time anyone in our family believes someone, we get screwed.”

  “You’re not going to get screwed. We’re going to forge the painting ourselves.”

  Ben was struck dumb. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out but cold breath. At last he found his voice. “But how—how—”

  Sara grabbed his hand. “Go meet her tomorrow night, and get her to show you more details about the painting. Play tough with her. Tell her you won’t return it unless she shows you some evidence that proves she’s for real, something that would compromise her if she tried to turn you in.”

  Ben was stunned. It was a side of Sara he rarely saw—a practical bent that she rarely showed him, though it was clearly visible that day when she had tagged along to Leonid’s apartment. And he had seen it in some of her paintings, in shadowed landscapes with an unexpected, brilliant hidden light. “Evidence? Like what?” he asked.

  “Anything about the original condition of the painting. Even though we have the original, museums still have records of things we would miss if we tried to copy it ourselves, details we wouldn’t notice. We need to make sure we know everything, so it can be perfect. Then I’m going to make the copy, and you’re going to bring it back.”

  He felt Sara’s fingers on the back of his hand, the second time that evening that a woman had touched him. He shuddered. “But Sara, it’s—I thought you—”

  Sara grinned. “Mom did it, so why shouldn’t we?”

  At first Ben thought she had changed her mind, that she now believed what the letter claimed about their mother forging the painting. Then he realized what his sister really meant: their mother’s books.

  “Sara, you don’t have to do this for me. This is my problem, not yours.”

  “There’s no such thing as a problem that’s yours and not mine.”

  For a moment they sat together in silence. Then Sara lifted Ben’s wrist off the couch, turning it to see his watch. He wasn’t wearing one. She stood up.

  “I have to go home. Leonid is waiting for me,” Sara said.

  Ben heard Leonid’s name and jolted, realizing something. She’s beautiful, he heard Sara repeat in his head. And he wondered—after Sara’s marriage to Leonid, after Ben’s divorce, after the new idea growing within her—what his twin sister thought she owed him. But as he stood and moved across the room to see her out, she was already at the door.

  “See you soon,” she called.

  The door closed before he could thank her.

  When a person dies, he doesn’t go from one room to another, Ben’s mother had once told him. He goes to the opposite side of the same room. Ben stood by the door and looked at the far side of the room, where his mother’s book was seated on the couch like a person, propped up against the back cushions. He crossed the room carefully, afraid to disturb the air, then sat down on the couch beside it. He opened the book and began to read Erica Frank’s copy of The World to Come.

  * * *

  Let me tell you a story of how I once took on a burden that almost ruined my life, because when you’re young, you do all kinds of stupid things.

  One winter night, when I was still a very young man and newly married, I had to travel all alone from Metropolis, the town where I lived, to Megalopolis, the big city. It was snowing hard on the night when I planned to go, and if I were smart I would have stayed home. But I had just bought a brand-new car, a big one with giant tires, and I knew I could make it. So I set out in the snow, on the long and lonely road to Megalopolis.

  I soon found out that even with a new car it’s very hard to travel all alone in the snow, and slow going, too. It wasn’t long before I became so lonely and tired and hungry that I decided to stop at the first place I could. But the road between Metropolis and Megalopolis is a long country road where almost no one lives. After hours in the blizzard, I saw a tiny inn—a lonely place, like an abandoned gravestone, but with a dim light glowing in its windows. I stopped, and though I will regret it for the rest of my life, I went inside.

  I opened the door and saw a scene I hope I’ll never see again. In a small room, a dead person was lying in the middle of the floor, covered by a thick black cloth and with two lit candles resting above its head. A man stood at the head of the body, and many little children surrounded it, weeping and screaming. I wanted to close the door, get back in the car, and keep driving to Megalopolis, but then the man saw me, and then it was too late.

  “Help us! Help us! My God, my God, my God, what will we do?!” the man cried. “My poor wife! She needs to be buried! It’s not respectful to keep her like this! She must be buried right away! But the cemetery is all the way in Necropolis! We can’t go anywhere in this weather! My God, what will we do?!”

  With that, the man broke into a strange sobbing, sobs without tears—a weird and horrible sound from his throat, almost like laughter. And then I forgot all about myself. What did it matter that I was cold, and tired, and hungry, and miles away from where I needed to be that night?

  “I could give you a ride there,” I said. And I told him about my new car. “I’m on my way from Metropolis to Megalopolis. It would be easy for me to stop in Necropolis on the way.”

  “But I can’t leave the children alone!” the man cried.

  Suddenly I felt heroic, as if I could do anything. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can take her there myself.”

  “Thank you! Thank you!” the man wept. “There is no good deed equal to burying the dead, because it is the only thing a person can do without ever expecting to be repaid in this world. For this good deed, young man, you have earned a place in the World to Come! The World to Come!”

  He helped me put the body in the back of the car, and I listened carefully to all of his directions. Everyone knew him in Necropolis, he told me. All I had to do was say his name, and everything would be taken care of. Nothing to worry about. And for all that, I had earned myself a place in the World to Come!

  As I drove to Necropolis, the snow came down even harder, and I could barely keep the car moving. I repeated his directions in my head, over and over again. But the entire time, all of my thoughts kept returning to one thing: I was sitting in the car with a dead body. It seemed to me that I could see the woman’s half-closed eyes looking at me, as if her locked dead lips might suddenly speak. On that snowy road I thought I might die from fright alone. Soon my wonderful car got caught in a drift. It was very late, and I tried to sleep in my car, but I was afraid that if I fell asleep, I might join my passenger and never wake up. As I drifted in and out of snow and sleep, I imagined that the woman shuddered out from under her shroud to watch me. I heard the wind whistle with her voice, and I began to wonder which one of us was dead.

  * * *

  It didn’t end well, of course. When the man arrived in Necropolis, he realized he had forgotten the name of the deceased, and when he tried to have her buried, he was accused of murdering her until, in a panic, he started claiming that the corpse was his mother-in-law’s, which worked just fine until his real mother-in-law showed up and demanded to know why he was burying her alive, and then…

  Ben read the book over and over again on the edge of that night, as if reading could somehow stave off bad dreams. When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had s
uddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come—the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

  He woke up the next morning and knew he would go back to the museum.

  12

  AS A CHILD, Der Nister had once heard a story that the head of the rabbinic academy in Volozhin used to tell his students. One night when he was still a young man, the headmaster dreamed that he had died, and had arrived in the next world. When it was the headmaster’s turn to appear before the divine throne, the Holy One took him by the hand and brought him to a small door. The door opened, and the headmaster found himself in a luminous room filled with books: shelves and tables loaded with books, manuscripts in high stacks all over the floor. The headmaster looked around the secret library and smiled. He was sure this room was the place that had been reserved for him in paradise. But as he reached to take a volume off the shelf, the divine hand suddenly grabbed his shoulder and held him back. “These are all the books you were supposed to have written,” the Holy One said. “Why didn’t you write them?”

  In 1942, Der Nister began to live in such a room.

  The wife he no longer loved had long since left him, and had taken their little boy with her. His beloved Hodele had moved to Leningrad, where there was rumored to be work in factories for young women like her. And Der Nister himself had hidden in place after place, fleeing city after city, until he finally arrived in Taskhent, Uzbekistan—where, in a tiny room in a concrete hovel outside of the clanging gongs of the bazaar, he had assembled all of the paper bridges of the book he still needed to finish while he was hiding from death.

  Paper bridges stretched across the floors and walls and shelves of his room. In a town where so few people could read that no one had even bothered to erect street signs, Der Nister’s room was a secret library paradise. Words hung in the air: in sheets, in scraps, in strands, black ink on white pages like the veils of blunt beads that hung in the doorways and markets in Tashkent’s streets. The first volume of his novel, The Family Crisis, had been published in 1939, to considerable acclaim. It had been called a Yiddish masterpiece. He had cleverly positioned little pieties in the text—damning asides about how the bourgeois family in the novel was doomed, of course, because of their backward religious beliefs, their juvenile refusal to believe in progress, their exploitation of the masses—inserting them every forty pages or so to placate the censors. But in Tashkent, amid the orange smells of horses and the thick clouds of brilliant yellow dust that blew in through his broken windows and painted his eyebrows and mustache, Der Nister forgot about the censors and wrote. He was acutely aware that he was losing his mind, slowly releasing his mind from his head and emptying its contents onto scraps of paper with which he plastered the walls. He had almost completed Volume Two.

  He had heard rumors of Chagall’s success in America. The artist had had huge museum shows, had received commissions to decorate public halls and opera houses around the world, had stayed with his family in hotels and resort towns where other Jews couldn’t even rent a room. He was hailed in papers throughout the Western world for his vast, joyous canvases filled with nothing but color and light. But the artist’s wife (the woman painted in blue), Der Nister heard two years ago, had died suddenly of pneumonia on a country vacation in the mountains. Chagall had taken her to the nearest hospital, but it was a Christian hospital, and—depending on which rumor you believed—she had either been refused treatment or had seen the registration form asking for her religion and had refused to be admitted. That’s what it’s like in America, Der Nister’s more loyal comrades claimed. They had persuaded him to join the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, to raise support from Jews overseas to help the Soviets defeat the Nazis. So far it hadn’t helped, as far as Der Nister could tell. Later, he heard exuberant reports that Chagall’s old friends—Shloyme Mikhoels, the head of the Jewish theater whose murals Chagall had painted, and Itsik Fefer, the hack poet whose books Chagall had illustrated—had been sent by the government on a tour of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (with Soviet secret police escorts, of course) to raise money and support from the American Jews. Chagall, Der Nister read in a Party newspaper, had even met with them in New York. The tyrannical Americans had so completely misunderstood the mission that they had sent the FBI to interrogate Chagall immediately after the visit, but still—Der Nister read—there was hope for a united front for triumph against the Fascist beast. Der Nister doubted it. If it were true, he wouldn’t be hiding in Tashkent.

  His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink.

  In the depths of the paper forest in Der Nister’s room lay a shining imaginary kingdom—the nineteenth-century town of Berdichev, where Der Nister had lived as a child. It was a boomtown in the woods, full of merchants and workers and students and nobles, and even more full of the courts of the “righteous ones,” the dynasties of religious leaders who ruled their followers’ spirits. On every piece of paper were the members of the family in crisis: Moyshe, the scrupulous businessman who always planned for everything and supported everyone, and had even done the service to his children of buying his own cemetery plot in the very first chapter of the book before his fortunes began to fade; Luzi, the follower of the dead mystic storyteller Nachman of Bratslav, who irritated his brother Moyshe with his religious fervor but never failed to act as Moyshe’s conscience; and Alter, the idiot savant, who could see time and who sensed changes in his brothers Moyshe and Luzi as he sensed changes in the seasons, and who in his rare lucid moments wrote letters to biblical figures, to the angels, and to God. In his mind, for years, Der Nister lived in nineteenth-century Berdichev. It was a place to hide.

  But one day in the dust-laden summer of 1942, Der Nister received a letter, and the paper bridge tore. He sank to the floor of his room, and stopped writing.

  For a week he sat in silence in the paper forest, with his shoes removed and his shirt torn, and with bright yellow dust from the windowsill rubbed on his forehead. At the end of the week he still did not write. Instead he left his room and wandered into the dust-billowed streets of Tashkent, through the bazaar with its horses and fabrics and grilled meat smells and teenage girls. He walked and walked, circling the city with his feet, afraid to ask anyone how to get where he needed to go. At last, as the sun sank in the heated yellow sky, he found what he was looking for.

  He entered the synagogue—the old one, not the new one populated by his fellow refugees—where the Jews didn’t even speak Yiddish, but instead spoke another Jewish language of their own. He could only communicate with them in Hebrew, and he had to listen hard to their Hebrew full of gutturals that he could barely understand. But he stayed for their prayers because he had to, and muttered words he wished he could believe. He returned every day for the rest of the year.

  After thirty days of daily prayers that he wished he could believe, he began to write again. But he did not write his book. Instead, he remembered the letters his character Alter had written, and decided to write letters himself. He consulted letter-writing manuals that he had stored in the piles of papers, old pamphlets that instructed people on proper forms of address. He wrote the letters, as Alter did, in archaic formal Hebrew, and addressed his letters to those who would neve
r write back.

  To the Angel of Dreams

  (may your light shine for all eternity):

  Forgive me for disturbing your difficult and essential work. I am aware that you have been very busy lately, because many around the world complain of nightmares. But I hope you will indulge me with a few waking moments of your time to consider my predicament. My concern is that I have stopped dreaming.

  As a child, as I am sure you recall, I dreamed all the time—long dreams, beautiful dreams. In my dreams I was always flying on air over the town. I would lie down to sleep and receive your nightly deliveries of stories like letters slipped into the mail-slots between my eyelids, and I would open each landscape as if unfolding a piece of paper before my eyes. The world unfurled at my feet, and I would rise up above it, floating above the cities between the clouds. I would wake up with a crash, as though I had fallen to the earth. Later, you began bringing me your messages while I was still awake. I don’t know if you did this in error, or if you were trying to frighten me with the horrible nightmares you gave me while I failed to sleep. Yet even the most terrifying landscapes you brought me were still gifts of ferocious colors.

  But now, I no longer dream at all. When I close my eyes at night, I see nothing but darkness, the same darkness that wraps me in thick blankets of shadow during the day. There are no stories and no colors, just heavy gray and black. I lie in bed trembling like a child, afraid of the closed curtain that awaits me when I sleep.