by Dara Horn
Daniel looked over his shoulder. Luckily, he had come to dinner early. The gallery was mostly empty; the other not-yets were still lolling in the pool of love. “The teachers, everyone,” he whispered. “We’re not allowed.”
“Why not?” the mortal Daniel asked, one eyebrow raised.
Daniel sputtered, wondering if his brain was permanently affected by too many books. “We’re just—not,” he hissed. “Besides, it’s dangerous. There’s a revolving sword.”
The mortal Daniel laughed again. “What do you care about a stupid revolving sword?” he snorted. “You’re not a mortal, you’re a natal. What, are you worried that your mother will miscarry you?”
This possibility had never occurred to him. He trembled in utter horror until the mortal Daniel grinned. “Trust me,” the mortal Daniel said, “it would take a lot more than that for your mother to have a miscarriage. For somebody else this might do it, but your mother is tougher than she seems.”
The curator knew his mother? Daniel was intrigued, but still cautious. He racked his not-yet brain for a reason not to go. “Anyway, it’s on the farthest eastern side of nowhere,” he muttered, trying to sound casual. “It’s impossible to get there, so what’s the point of talking about it?”
But then the curator sat down at the table across from him. The two Daniels faced each other, one already-was, one not-yet. “We can get there,” the already-was Daniel said under his breath, and then he leaned toward the not-yet Daniel’s ear. “I built a road.”
Daniel breathed in and gasped. He didn’t speak.
“Come with me,” the already-was Daniel whispered. Excitement coursed through his words. “You’re going to be born soon, and then it will be too late. Let’s go, now. Tonight.”
The not-yet Daniel’s head whirled. The tree of life? How could he? But how could he not? And how many days did he have left in paradise? He realized with a jolt that when he had started drinking, he had stopped counting. There were fewer than twenty-one days left, of course, but how many really? Two weeks’ worth? One? Suddenly he remembered something he had learned in school, months earlier: When it matters, don’t wait.
He nodded, and held his breath. And then the two of them rose and walked on together, walking and running and flying for three whole days and nights until they reached the farthest edge of the world to come.
“EVERYBODY AROUND HERE likes to pave their roads with good intentions,” the already-was Daniel muttered, “but those roads never seemed to get me anywhere. So I built this one out of stupid mistakes instead.”
They had crossed most of paradise on their journey, at least most of the paradise the not-yet Daniel had seen. They took the main roads first, moving quickly along the good intentions past all of the schools in paradise, thousands of schools, one for every hour of the year of births to come. They passed the dormitories with their musical hammocks and beds, passed the baths, passed the museum restaurants and the library bars, raced by the gardens of paradise. As they hurried past it all, the not-yet Daniel realized, with a cold chill, how little time he had left. In just days he would have to face his birth sentence, dropped to the earth. But he wouldn’t be like the other mortals. The curator had saved him from that. He was going to stay on earth forever, to matter forever to the living. Immortal. That was what everyone wanted, wasn’t it? The forbidden desire is immortality, he remembered Rosalie saying. Or was it innatality? Which was forbidden, and which was innate?
And now, after three days and nights, they had reached the farthest edge of paradise. Suddenly the land had stopped, and darkness loomed before them. At the natal Daniel’s feet yawned an enormous chasm, stretching open for miles, bottomless. All that he coud see before him were the cyclones of garbage blown up from the depths by cold circling winds, hovering spirals of feathers and tears and regrets. And blasted bones. And stretching out from the edge of the land over the giant expanse to some unseen place beyond, out from the ends of Daniel’s feet on the brink of the precipice, was a very narrow bridge.
“Mistakes are a very durable building material,” the mortal Daniel was saying. “Most people just throw them away as soon as possible and never realize that you can learn from them. But if you do, they can actually hold you up pretty well.” He stretched out a foot and tapped it on the bridge. The tap resounded through the chasm, echoing through the universe. “See? Solid. Let’s go.”
The natal Daniel shook his head, and backed away from the edge. “No,” he whispered, fighting not to swallow his own words. “Can’t we just fly?”
The mortal Daniel waved a wing over the abyss. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “This is the universe’s dumping ground for human tragedy. You’d never be able to fly in these winds. That’s the whole reason I built the bridge. Just crawl over the mistakes and you’ll be fine.” The not-yet Daniel began shaking his head again, and soon the headshaking turned into a full-bodied trembling as he hovered on the edge. But before he knew it, the already-was Daniel had crawled onto the bridge over the abyss.
“Come,” the curator called over his shoulder. “The most important thing is not to be afraid.”
The not-yet Daniel watched the already-was Daniel pulling himself along, moving across the mistakes one by one like rungs on a ladder. Then he steeled himself, lowered himself onto the bridge, and clung tight, watching feathers and agony whirl through the cold winds around him as he struggled to catch up.
The mortal Daniel was right, the natal Daniel discovered. The mistakes themselves were pure weakness, soft elastic errors that barely seemed to support his weight. But like all great roads and bridges, this one’s strength was in its construction, in the wise placement of pressure points and angles of approach. Large wars alternated structurally with smaller disasters, with struts built out of bad investments, drug addictions, and extramarital affairs. He crawled carefully across several medieval Crusades, nearly losing his balance before he regained his footing on the edge of the Chernobyl meltdown. The bridge swayed under his weight as a stock market bubble popped beneath his feet. He cringed before moving farther, keeping the already-was Daniel in his sight as he squirmed hand over foot across the Bhopal disaster, the gift of the Sudetenland, a drunk-driving accident, several bad marriages, and the First World War. He looked up and saw the already-was Daniel straight ahead of him, wriggling across the domino theory and then deftly crossing the Rubicon. And then, at last, rising from the shadows, he saw the tree of life.
IT WASN’T AT all what he expected. Daniel had envisioned something fantastically bright, gleaming with radiant leaves and fragrant flowers and singing birds in a brilliant cone of sunshine. But this tree was feeble, gloomy. Its thin gray trunk rose up out of the abyss, stretching up from so far down below that Daniel couldn’t even see where it was rooted to the earth. There were no flowers, no birds, no sunlight. Instead, there were just a few shy, drooping branches, hanging low like a weeping willow’s. A few pale yellowed leaves flickered in the cold wind. Between them, Daniel could just make out the one remaining fruit—a lonely overripe piece, burnished in dull browns and greens like an old forgotten painting with a tiny glint of polish in the corner, swinging sadly in the cold winds of the driven detritus of the universe.
“I see we’re in an autumn of belief in eternal life,” the already-was Daniel muttered. “Look at this. The four-faced guards aren’t even here. Whenever you think you have adequate security, that’s exactly when—”
Suddenly a brilliant flash of light sliced into their vision. Daniel clung to the end of the bridge as the light blinded him, searing his face. When the light shifted, he looked up and saw it: the bright blade of the revolving sword, sliding fast beside his neck. He ducked. It passed.
“I hate that thing,” the mortal Daniel said, trying to laugh, as it swung back. But the natal Daniel looked up and saw the mortal Daniel shaking, covering himself with his wings before he straightened his back. “But you, of course, should have no problem at all,” he added quickly, his voice stiff. “Just ta
ke the fruit.”
“What?” the not-yet Daniel gasped. Just take it? He looked again at the fruit, then stared at the revolving sword. “But how can I take it?” he stuttered.
“Just take it.”
The not-yet Daniel watched the revolving sword as it arced again and swooped over his head (blinding flash of light), then out toward him (he ducked again), then back above the tree. As he held his breath with the sword’s movement, though, he suddenly realized it was moving in a rhythm. There was a pattern to its murderous swivel, a pace, like the churning jets of water in the pool of lust. He just had to feel its rhythms, and move against them, keeping track of them, counting in his head.
He waited one more cycle, ducking on cue as the sword moved in its rhythm like a heartbeat. Or like a breath. Breathe in, thought Daniel with his not-yet breath. He sucked in the cold hard air and closed his eyes against the blinding light. Then, after ducking below the blade, he leaned over so far that he nearly fell into the abyss, reached for the fruit, and wrenched it off the tree. Eternity rolled heavily in his hand as he fell backward onto the bridge in a blinding flash of light. He opened his eyes to see the fruit resting in his palm, foaming juice along a thin line in its sweet skin—sliced ever so slightly by the revolving sword. He closed his eyes again, breathed out, and raised the fruit to his lips.
“DANIEL!”
Both Daniels turned. A few steps behind them, a female figure floated in the darkness, standing, balanced, on the narrow bridge.
“Rosalie!” the mortal Daniel called, and smiled. The natal Daniel looked at her, puzzled, the uneaten fruit dripping juices in his hand. How did they know each other?
“Daniel!” she said again. But which one did she mean? She stepped toward the natal Daniel, leaning over him as he lay at the edge of the bridge, and stared at him, glowing with rage. “Don’t you remember? You’re supposed to be born tonight!”
Tonight?
His mind raced, glancing back at the revolving sword, and then at the fruit in his hand. But he wasn’t ready!
Tonight?
“I’m so sorry, Rosie,” the mortal Daniel murmured. “I forgot.”
Rosalie snorted. “You didn’t forget. You brought him here on purpose.”
The mortal Daniel grinned. “Maybe.”
Rosalie grimaced, then shouted at him. “What was the point of this? Are you just teasing him? So he’ll spend his whole life wanting something he can’t have?”
“What if I am? It’s not any different from what you’re doing to him in the bar,” the mortal Daniel shot back.
But the words were feeble, and even the not-yet Daniel could hear that the curator didn’t mean them. Rosalie listened, and then looked at the curator in genuine surprise, a sudden shock illuminating her face. “Or do you really expect him to eat it, and live forever?” she whispered.
The mortal Daniel didn’t answer. He looked down at the natal Daniel, and the natal Daniel saw the flutter of the mortal Daniel’s wings.
Rosalie watched, then spoke quietly, her firm voice confining a roar. “You really expect him to eat it,” she said. “You actually, genuinely want him to be born and never die.”
For a moment the mortal Daniel stood still. There was no sound on the edge of the abyss but the howling of winds.
Then, in a flash of the revolving sword, the mortal Daniel flew into a fury. “WHY NOT?” he shouted over the cyclone. “Why not, Rosalie? Why can’t he have what we didn’t have? Why should his children have to watch him die? Why should—”
“Because that’s what makes it matter,” Rosalie breathed.
The already-was Daniel looked down into the abyss, humbled and ashamed. She took him in her arms. The not-yet Daniel watched as they kept each other warm, and he shivered in the cold wind.
“We don’t have time to go back,” Rosalie said suddenly, glancing up at the sky. Daniel followed her eyes and discovered that in the thick darkness, he could just make out the stars. She bent down and pulled him to his feet by his wings, as he clutched the fruit in his hand. “We’ll just have to send you down here. Now.” She looked again at the already-was Daniel, who winked at her, then back at the not-yet Daniel, who was struggling to keep his balance on the edge of the narrow bridge. Something strange ran its hands over his back, a sudden chill. He looked over his shoulder and saw his wings detached from his body, blasted into bones and feathers swiveling in the cyclones of cold wind. He screamed.
“Listen to me, Daniel,” Rosalie said, and grabbed the hand that held the fruit. She waved an arm behind her, at the paradise beyond the bridge. “This whole world to come is just an imitation of the real one.”
“A forgery, if you will,” the curator said, winking at Rosalie.
What? Daniel stared at them, bewildered. A forgery? He thought of all the things he had spit out in the past nine months—the copied paintings, the doctored photographs, the sour plagiarized wine. But surely this was the real—
“We’ve tried to approximate here what you might expect later. But that’s all it is,” the mortal Daniel told him. “A copy.”
“The real world to come is down below—the world, in the future, as you create it,” Rosalie said. “The world, to come.”
The natal Daniel felt sickened, drunk. He reeled, and then lost his footing. He almost fell off the bridge before Rosalie grabbed him and pulled him back up. Teetering on the edge, he stared at them both, the man who had nourished him, the woman who had enriched him, and then glanced again at the tree of life, which stood motionless in the wind. Was this it? The end of paradise? Was there really no paradise at all? But surely there was something more! Suddenly he remembered something from the night he was conceived.
“What about the test?” he asked. “In school they said there would be a test.”
The two mortals looked at each other for a long moment. Then both of them laughed.
“The test comes later,” Rosalie said.
Later? Daniel wondered.
“Later,” the mortal Daniel repeated. “During every moment of every day of your life.”
Rosalie reached under her wing and brought out a large book—not a bottle this time, but a real book, a thick one with many pages. Daniel looked at it and recognized it: it was the roll call book from his first day of school. She flipped through it until she arrived at a certain page, then turned it around to face him. A long blank space stretched below his name. “Now either eat that fruit,” she said, “or go down and fill this page with your deeds.”
Daniel looked at the book, at the wide blank page stretching before him, and then down at the fruit. Its bruised skin was glowing now, pulsing blue beneath the surface. He dropped it into the void.
“Thank you,” Rosalie whispered.
And then his grandfather Daniel pressed a finger to his lips.
As he fell off the bridge, he looked back and saw two strangers watching him fall, a man and a woman, their faces contorted with tears. But he heard laughter in the cold wind, laughter painted into the dark sky between the tears and blasted bones, laughter so loud that he started laughing himself. He turned in midair to face the earth, still laughing, and tumbled down to the land of the living.
Everyone was waiting for him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
IN JUNE 2001, a small painting by Marc Chagall entitled Study for “Over Vitebsk” (1914), on loan from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, went missing from a temporary exhibition of Chagall’s Russian works at the Jewish Museum in New York, after a singles’ cocktail hour. In a bizarre sequence of events that would never be convincing in fiction, the painting was recovered months later in a mail room in Topeka, Kansas. This book is a work of fiction. While inspired by the story of this unusual theft, it in no way reflects the actual history or provenance of this painting; nor does it reflect any factual information or actual persons connected to any galleries or museums in Russia or the United States.
Marc Chagall did spend a period in the early 1920s living at the Jewish Bo
ys’ Colony at Malakhovka, a home for Jewish children orphaned by the massive pogroms that swept the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War in 1919. In his early memoir, My Life, he described his experiences teaching art there:
These colonies are composed of some fifty orphans each, under the supervision of intelligent teachers who dreamed of applying the most advanced pedagogic methods. These children had been the most unhappy of orphans. All of them had been thrown out on the street, beaten by thugs, terrified by the flash of the dagger that cut their parents’ throats. Deafened by the whistling of bullets and the crash of broken windowpanes, they still heard, ringing in their ears, the dying prayers of their fathers and mothers. They had seen their fathers’ beards savagely torn out, their sisters raped, disemboweled…And here they are before me…I taught those unfortunate little ones art. Barefoot, lightly clad, each one shouted louder than the other: “Comrade Chagall! Comrade Chagall!”…The clamor came from every side. Only their eyes would not, or could not, smile. I loved them. They drew pictures. They flung themselves at colors like wild beasts at meat. One of the boys seemed to be in a perpetual frenzy of creation. He painted, composed music and wrote verses. Another boy constructed his art calmly, like an engineer.
The colony served as a meeting point for many Yiddish writers, including Der Nister (the “Hidden One,” pen name of Pinkhas Kahanovitch), who lived there with Chagall and who later perished in a Soviet prison camp, and poets such as Dovid Hofshteyn and Itsik Fefer, who were among those executed in 1952 for their activity in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Chagall illustrated Yiddish poetry books and children’s books for all of these Yiddish writers. While living in Malakhovka, he also commuted to Moscow in order to design stage sets for the Moscow State Jewish Theater, which was under the direction of the Yiddish actor Shloyme (Solomon) Mikhoels. Mikhoels later became the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; his murder by Soviet agents in 1948 was staged to look like a traffic accident. Chagall left the Soviet Union in 1922 and was ultimately one of the very few Jewish artists in his circle to die a natural death. For information about the circle of Yiddish writers and artists connected with Chagall, see Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004), as well as the many biographies of the artist. For a record of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee trial as well as an informative introduction on the history of the ill-fated committee and its members, see Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). For this novel, I also drew upon Yiddish and occasionally Hebrew essays and memoirs of Der Nister’s life and art, which provide details about various incidents in his life, such as his meeting with Peretz and how he responded to his own arrest. Very little is available on Der Nister in English, and his few translated stories are scattered among various anthologies. However, his masterpiece, the unfinished novel The Family Crisis, is available in English as The Family Mashber (Mashber, the family’s name, is the Hebrew word for “crisis”), translated by Leonard Wolf (New York: Summit Books, 1987), and includes a thorough translator’s introduction addressing the author’s life and work.