The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  Where have you hidden my dreams?

  Respectfully submitted,

  The Hidden One

  To Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylonia (may your name be erased):

  I write to you on the occasion of the ninth day of the month of Av, to congratulate you in the next world—where surely you are celebrating today, the 2,528th anniversary of your destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, where my ancestors once served as priests before God.

  I send my tidings to you from the ends of the earth, from a city and country high in mountains that even your once-great empire never reached, to inform you that I am here, on the last ridge of the far end of nowhere, because of you. For it was your choice to set the House in flames that inspired all the others who followed. You were merely the first.

  On this day, those with more faith than me sit on the bare ground, remove their shoes, tear their clothes, fast and weep. Even here, on the last ridge of the far end of nowhere, they mourn, pouring ashes on their heads, calling to the heavens: “Because of our sins, God cast us out from our land,” just as they have done for the past 2,528 years.

  I understand why. It is much easier to say that it was God—to believe that no mere human could be capable of such pointless savagery, that there must have been a reason for it, that it must have been deserved, that it must have had some kind of meaning.

  But I know that it didn’t. And that it wasn’t God, but you.

  Respectfully submitted,

  The Hidden One

  To the Eternal (may the name of your honored majesty be blessed forever and ever):

  Forgive me for interrupting your divine and important work. I hope you will grant me the gift of your mercy and be particularly forgiving of my interrupting you at this juncture in the history of our world. It is my humble assumption that you are presently involved in extremely essential, unfathomably life-sanctifying creative endeavors that we shall all (may it be your will) be privileged to witness in the near future, speedily and in our time—for I cannot otherwise explain your current absence from the face of the earth.

  I write regarding the letter that recently reached me (after a journey of many months) from your earthly city of Leningrad, which has been besieged and laid waste and where thousands have already starved to death, and where children and adults have begun to eat filth from the gutters and to kill insects and each other for food. The letter regretted to inform me that my daughter, my one-and-only, the one I love, my Hodele—much like all evidence of your divine presence—has died and vanished from the earth.

  I am quite confident, dear God Full of Wombs, that the millions of others whose cries reach your throne—those of them who still dare to believe you will hear them, that is—demand to know why. Why, of all the millions of children in the world, did you insist on killing mine? Is there something more you wanted of me, of her, of us? Had she earned your wrath with her twenty-nine-year-old soul? Or did you want her as much as I did, and then steal her from me like a man steals another man’s wife? Were you in desperate need of her particular radiance to complete the work which I am sure is engaging you at this very moment? Why—I know these other parents ask—why my child?

  But I am not asking you why. Instead, I hope you will take a moment from your busy eternity to answer a different question, the only one I will ever ask of you:

  What did she mean?

  Respectfully submitted,

  The Hidden One

  There was nothing to eat in Uzbekistan, but that did not matter, because Der Nister was no longer hungry. Instead he sat in his room among the untouched stacks of paper from his book yet to be written. And he tied himself up in long ropes of memory, caged himself in with iron bars of memory, drew the curtains and hid himself in a dark tomb which he filled with an entire world of memory—until all that was missing was color and light.

  13

  IT WAS DEFINITELY him. Erica knew that now. By noon of the day after she had confronted him on the sidewalk, she knew he hadn’t called the police to turn her in, which meant he was afraid. But that wasn’t all. That morning she had gone through the file for the missing painting again, and had discovered two documents in plastic folders, both labeled Found lodged in canvas frame. The Russian gallery had probably never even exhibited the painting, she realized, since her museum was the first to find the papers in the picture’s backing; if the Russian museum had bothered to display it, they would have discovered these things themselves, just as she and the others at her museum had discovered them when they began preparing for the exhibition. In the Chagall murals (big paintings, really, canvases stretched on wooden struts) from the Moscow State Jewish Theater, one of Erica’s colleagues had discovered dozens of manuscript pages behind the pictures, stuffed into the edges of the canvases’ wooden supports like so much insulation. The more she read through the files, the more she realized that everything about the stolen painting’s condition—from the scraps of paper in the backing to the mildewed right edge where it had been left resting on a storage-room floor—suggested that it probably hadn’t been displayed in fifteen years. The same was probably true of many of the works in the show. Paintings that no one looked at, left to rot in private vaults or in thieves’ closets, might as well have been destroyed or never created at all. The waste infuriated her. But the papers that had been found in the frame outraged her even more.

  One of the documents was a series of printed pages that looked like a chapter or story torn from a book; the other was handwritten, scribbled in ancient brown ink. She couldn’t read either of them. Both were in Yiddish. The characters were the same as Hebrew, which she knew, yet she still couldn’t understand a word. But Sam, one of the older curators (who had once lived on the same street as her father, and whose grandson had gone to camp with her), could. When he translated the title of the story on the printed pages and named the author, she was so bewildered that she spent her lunch break at the public library, paging through a thick anthology of translated stories and discovering one astonishing thing after another until her stomach swayed. She returned to work livid. All the anger that she hadn’t let herself feel with Saul slowly gathered and rose in her throat, aimed at Benjamin Ziskind. But when the old curator saw her, he laughed.

  “You’ve got to stop thinking about this theft, Erica,” Sam said. “I know Max gave you a hard time about it, but he’s over that now, trust me. He just wanted to scare you a little, whip you into shape. He’s the type that flames and then fizzles. And anyway it really doesn’t matter. The painting is insured. It’s not a major work, relatively speaking. Everything else in this show is worth millions more. And besides, it’s not your job, no matter what Max tried to tell you. The police are taking care of it.”

  “They’re not. And I know this guy has it. I’m sure of it,” she told him.

  He had heard it from her before. “So tell the police,” Sam said. He grinned, and in his grin she could see that he thought of her as a child, like his grandson.

  “I told the police. They’re doing nothing. They’re convinced it’s an inside job,” Erica said. She decided not to mention that she had pestered them so much that they were now investigating her.

  “The police already questioned him,” Sam told her. His patient tone teetered on the edge of condescension. “Isn’t that enough? I heard them talking to you. They said he clearly didn’t fit the type, everything he told them checked out, and going after him was a waste of time. Do yourself a favor and worry about something else.” He smirked.

  Erica clenched her fists behind her back. Only two people had the right to talk to her like a child: her mother and her father. And her mother was dead, and her father was going insane. “You want me to worry about something else,” she said, her voice rising. “All right, how about this? I’m worried that despite the absurd ease of this theft, no one at yesterday’s meeting seemed to think it necessary to invest in an alarm system for the future.”

  Sam grimaced. “You know what the budget is like.”


  “But we’re considering paying for bomb-sniffing dogs.”

  “That’s important,” Sam insisted. “The latest fax from the FBI said that Jewish institutions need to—”

  “Bomb-sniffing dogs,” Erica repeated. “Is this an art museum or a fortress?”

  “I don’t have to tell you about the reality we’re dealing with here, Erica.”

  “The reality we’re dealing with here is that people are walking out of this building with million-dollar works of art and nobody cares, so long as the place doesn’t blow up.”

  Sam sighed and turned back to his desk. “You should read that story that was in the painting file,” he called as she left the room. “You can find it in translation. You’d like it.”

  But Erica had already found it, and now she was furious—not just at the thief, but at the museum, too. She almost wondered whether it was worth trying to get the painting back at all. It would serve them right, she thought, if it was never returned. But it was the principle of the thing, she felt. What made her angry was art that no one looked at, things that were hidden that needed to be seen. As the hours dragged by, her anger swelled in her gut until she couldn’t wait to meet the thief that evening, to confront him about his mother’s books and to catch him with the painting on the museum’s new security camera—which, of course, only pointed at the street, designed not to record works of art coming out, but to record people going in.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK that evening, it was strangely quiet. Outside the museum’s front door, Erica waited on one of the few stretches of New York City street that could give one the illusion of being in another city, somewhere more civilized and beautiful. Twin rows of thick trees formed an arcade along the avenue to her right, their leaves rustling softly over the stone-bricked sidewalk. A block away, a woman stood waiting for a bus; over the low wall, deep in the darkness of the park, a man was singing in a drunken stupor; past the park, in her brother’s apartment, her brother and sister-in-law were already kissing on the couch while her little nieces trembled through their six-year-old nightmares; in a house eighteen miles to the west, her father was swallowing his nightly pills, pacing the rooms, afraid to go to sleep alone; in the next world, her mother was watching her, worried. But on this warm late summer evening, traffic was slight. Even the doormen of the gilded apartment buildings down the street had vanished, idling indoors.

  She had expected a long wait, or a never-ending one. She had even promised herself that she would wait until a quarter to ten, but no later. But she had barely positioned herself to the side of the camera when she saw a man appear across the street. Even before she could see his face, she saw the hesitation in his step, the rigid back and the stiff neck of the silhouette, and recognized him instantly. Benjamin Ziskind. He stood still, uncertain, waiting for the light to change even though the street was empty. He was holding something small and flat under one arm, a pale rectangle glowing orange under the streetlights. And then he began to cross the street.

  The painting! Erica’s heart danced. It was astounding, how easy this had become. As he reached her side of the street, she could make out the darkness of the landscape on the painting’s lower half below his wrist, and then the shadow of the floating figure above it. But he must have removed the frame; it was smaller than she remembered. As he came closer, she saw that it was too thin, too. And then, as he stepped up onto the sidewalk where she stood, she saw the words printed across the figure in the picture. Now he was standing in front of the security camera, right where she had led him. He looked at the camera, then looked at her. In his hands he was holding her copy of The World to Come.

  “You didn’t bring the painting,” she said.

  “That’s right, I didn’t bring it,” he answered. His voice was lighter than she had expected; less angry, more assured. “I’m not hiding anything. I’ll even prove it.” He bent down to place the book on the sidewalk at her feet, raised his arms as if he were at gunpoint, and then lowered his hands to his hips and turned the pockets of his pants inside out. They were empty except for a few folded dollars, three keys on a ring, and a subway pass, which he waved in front of her. It was a joke, but he kept it up too long, pulling up his shirt out of his pants and spinning in a circle to let her admire his bare waist. Erica took advantage of the joke to scan his body, checking for—a knife? a gun? The man had stolen a million-dollar painting, after all. But there was nothing. He couldn’t even be hiding a weapon in his socks; his toes poked out of ratty sandals. And there he was, spinning in front of the security camera. She wished, for a moment, that the camera had a microphone, but she knew it didn’t. Meanwhile, she was surprised to find herself enjoying the show. There was something disarming about seeing him with his shirt pulled up, the dark hair on his pale stomach bristling around his navel and above the band of his boxer shorts—and something even more disarming about his face, the soft boyishness of his features hardened slightly along the edges. He reminded her of her high school boyfriend, the only boyfriend her mother had ever liked. Her first kiss.

  “That’s right, I didn’t bring it,” he said again, picking the book up off the ground and holding it in front of her. “I’m returning your book instead.”

  What was this, she wondered, some kind of game? He was smiling at her, a nervous smile. Maybe he didn’t have the painting after all. Could she have been wrong all this time? But then she looked down at the book, and remembered her anger from the afternoon. The painting could wait. He held the book up toward her, offering it, but she pushed it away.

  “I discovered something disturbing today,” Erica said. She pursed her lips. “I found some stories in Yiddish that had been hidden in the painting’s frame, and a curator who reads Yiddish took a look at them for me. Do you know what one of them was called?” She paused. He watched her, but he didn’t take the bait. “‘The Dead Town,’” she finished.

  “Your favorite,” Ben said.

  Erica was startled, then remembered that she had mentioned it to him before, when she had interviewed him in her office. Why had he remembered? She bit her lip, hiding her surprise. “But the story wasn’t by Rosalie Ziskind,” she said. “It was by a famous Yiddish author named I. L. Peretz.”

  She watched to see if he would care. He did. He winced, a subtle contraction of eyebrows and shoulders that he tried to hide by idly scratching at his stomach with his free hand underneath his shirt. But it was as if he were tugging at his own umbilical cord, trying to loosen the knot.

  “So I went to the library at lunch to read the translation, to see if the title was just a coincidence,” she continued. “But it wasn’t. The story was almost exactly the same. And then, in the anthology with the translation, I found other stories that were familiar.” She took a breath. “Like ‘The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World,’ which was by someone named Moyshe Nadir. And ‘My Last Day in Paradise,’ which was by someone named Itsik Manger. And—and this one,” she said, pointing to the book in his hands, “which was by Sholem Aleichem. Even I’ve heard of Sholem Aleichem. I mean, his version had a wagon or something instead of a car, but otherwise it was the same. There were others, too.”

  She watched as Ben brushed his free hand against his forehead. His attempt at pretending disinterest was feeble; she could see that he was wiping away sweat. She heard him force a snort. “What’s your point?” he asked.

  “The point is that your mother, whose work I had very much admired, is a plagiarist and a fraud.”

  He looked down at the book, and in the streetlight she saw his knuckles whitening as he gripped the book’s spine. “That’s not what I thought the point was,” he said.

  “Why, what did you think the point was?” she snapped.

  But Ben was avoiding her eyes. He held the book with both hands now, and rubbed a finger across the hair of the flying woman. “I thought the point was that my mother rescued all these stories that were buried in library vaults and that no one would ever read again.”

  This surprised her.
“That’s a very generous way of putting it,” she said. She meant it to be pointed, vicious. But she thought of how the painting had been buried in the vault in the Russian museum, and her voice fell flat.

  Ben wasn’t finished. “And when she tried to publish them with the dead authors’ names, nobody wanted them,” he continued, “and when she decided to publish them under her own name, her greatest dream was that someone would notice that they weren’t hers, because that would have meant that someone finally cared.” He paused, breathed in the dark. “Congratulations. You are the first person in fifteen years to care.”

  Erica stared at the book’s cover, at the dead woman hovering over the town, and thought not of Ben’s mother, but of her own.

  One of the pale hands holding the book moved. She looked up and saw Ben glancing over his shoulder, stepping to the side. She followed him like a shadow until they had moved a few yards away from the museum’s door—and away, she realized when she began thinking again, from the security camera.

  “You shouldn’t even bother looking for that painting,” he said under his breath. “It’s a waste of your time.”

  The time had come. Erica was nervous, but she forced a laugh. “Why?” she asked. “Because I’ll never find the thief?”

  “Because the painting isn’t real.”

  Erica jolted. Her back was against the museum’s wall now, and he was leaning toward her, inches from her face. His glasses gleamed in the orange light. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean it’s a forgery. My mother tried to sell it, but the buyer never paid her for it. Because it’s not a real Chagall.”

  She stared at him. “You’re lying,” she murmured.