The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  When Jakub was nine, Bubbe decided that it was time to cultivate their spirits as well as their minds and bodies. She revealed that she had been having dreams about G-d for decades, ever since the day she left the camp. The hours of her rescue haunted her; as she watched them replay, she said, the world seemed to shimmer with awe and renewal. Over the years, she had come to believe that was the presence of G-d. Knowing Zayde’s feelings about G-d, Bubbe had kept her silence in the name of peace for decades, but that year, some indefinable thing had shifted her conscience and she could do so no longer.

  As she’d predicted, Zayde was furious. “I am supposed to worship a G-d that would make this world?” he demanded. “A G-d like that is no G-d. A G-d like that is evil.”

  But despite the hours of shouting, slammed doors, and smashed crockery, Bubbe remained resolute. She became a frum woman, dressing carefully, observing prayers and rituals. On Fridays, the kitchen became the locus of urgent energy as Bubbe rushed to prepare for Shabbat, directing Jakub and his brothers to help with the chores. All of them worked tensely, preparing for the moment when Zayde would return home and throw the simmering cholent out of the window, or – if they were lucky – turn heel and walk back out, going who-knew-where until he came home on Sunday.

  After a particularly vicious argument, Zayde proclaimed that while he apparently could not stop his wife from doing as she pleased, he would absolutely no longer permit his grandsons to attend shul. It was a final decision; otherwise, one of them would have to leave and never come back. After that, Bubbe slipped out alone each week, into the chilly morning.

  From Zayde and Bubbe, Jakub learned that love was both balm and nettle. They taught him from an early age that nothing could hurt so much as family.

  SOMEHOW, JAKUB HAD expected the new child to be clumsy and vacant as if she were an infant, but the moment she initialized, her blank look vanished. Some parts of her face tensed and others relaxed. She blinked. She looked just like Mara.

  She prickled under Jakub’s scrutiny. “What are you staring at? Is something wrong?”

  Jakub’s mouth worked silently as he sought the words. “I thought you would need more time to adjust.”

  The child smiled Mara’s cynical, lopsided smile, which had been absent for months. “I think you’re going to need more time to adjust than I do.”

  She pulled herself to her feet. It wasn’t just her face that had taken on Mara’s habits of expression. Without pause, she moved into one of the stretches that Meryem had taught her, elongating her spine. When she relaxed, her posture was exactly like Mara’s would have been, a preadolescent slouch ameliorated by a hint of dancer’s grace.

  “Can we go upstairs?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Jakub said. “There are tests to perform.”

  Tests which she passed. Every single one. She knew Mara’s favorite colors and the names of the children she had studied with in attic space. She knew the color and weight of the apples that would grow on their trees next fall and perfectly recited the recipe for baking them with cinnamon. In the gruff tone that Mara used when she was guarding against pain, she related the story of Meryem’s death – how Meryem had woken with complaints of feeling dizzy, how she had slipped in the bath later that morning, how her head had cracked against the porcelain and spilled red into the bathwater.

  She ran like Mara and caught a ball like Mara and bent to touch her toes like Mara. She was precisely as fleet and as nimble and as flexible as Mara. She performed neither worse nor better. She was Mara’s twin in every way that Jakub could measure.

  “You will need to stay here for a few more days,” he told her, bringing down blankets and pillows so that he could make her a bed in the workshop. “There are still more tests. You will be safer if you remain close to the machines.”

  The new child’s face creased with doubt. He was lying to spare her feelings, but she was no more deceived than Mara would have been. She said, “My room is upstairs.”

  For so many months, Jakub and Mara had taken refuge in mutual silence when the subject turned uncomfortable. He did not like to speak so bluntly. But if she would force him –” No,” he said gently. “That is Mara’s room.”

  “Can’t I at least see it?”

  Wheedling thinned her voice. Her body language occupied a strange lacuna between aggression and vulnerability. She faced him full-on, one foot advancing, with her hands clenched tightly at her sides. Yet at the same time, she could not quite meet his eyes, and her head was tilted slightly downward, protecting her neck.

  Jakub had seen that strange combination before. It was not so unusual a posture for teenagers to wear when they were trying to assert their agency through rebellion and yet simultaneously still hoping for their parents’ approval.

  Mara had never reached that stage. Before she became ill, she had been calm, abiding. Jakub began to worry that he’d erred in his calculations, that the metrics he’d used had been inadequate to measure the essence of a girl. Could she have aged so much, simply being slipped into an artificial skin?

  “Mara is sleeping now.”

  “But I am Mara!” The new child’s voice broke on her exclamation.

  Her lips parted uncertainly. Her fingers trembled. Her glance flashed upward for a moment and he saw such pain in it. No, she was still his Mara. Not defiant, only afraid that he would decide that he had not wanted a mechanical daughter after all, that he would reject her like a broken radio and never love her again.

  Gently, he laid his hand on her shoulder. Softly, he said, “You are Mara, but you need a new name, too. Let us call you Ruth.”

  He had not known until he spoke that he was going to choose that name, but it was a good one. In the Torah, Ruth had given Mara hesed. His Mara needed loving kindness, too.

  The new child’s gaze flickered upward as if she could see through the ceiling and into Mara’s room. “Mara is the name Ima gave me,” she protested.

  Jakub answered, “It would be confusing otherwise.”

  He hoped that this time the new child would understand what he meant without his having to speak outright. The other Mara had such a short time. It would be cruel to make her days harder than they must be.

  ON THE DAY when Jakub gave the automaton her name, he found himself recalling the story of Ruth. It had been a long time since he had given the Torah any serious study, but though he had forgotten its minutiae, he remembered its rhythm.

  It began when a famine descended on Judah.

  A man, Elimelech, decided that he was not going to let his wife and sons starve to death, and so he packed his household and brought them to Moab. It was good that he had decided to do so, because once they reached Moab, he died, and left his wife and sons alone.

  His wife was named Naomi and her name meant pleasant. The times were not pleasant.

  Naomi’s sons married women from Moab, one named Orpah and the other named Ruth. Despite their father’s untimely death, the boys spent ten happy years with their new wives. But the men of that family had very poor luck. Both sons died.

  There was nothing left for Naomi in Moab and so she packed up her house and prepared to return to Judah. She told her daughters-in-law, “Go home to your mothers. You were always kind to my sons and you’ve always been kind to me. May Hashem be kind to you in return.”

  She kissed them goodbye, but the girls wept.

  They said, “Can’t we return to Judah with you?”

  “Go back to your mothers,” Naomi repeated. “I have no more sons for you to marry. What can I give if you stay with me?”

  The girls continued to weep, but at last sensible Orpah kissed her mother-inlaw and left for home.

  Ruth, who was less sensible; Ruth, who was more loving; Ruth, who was more kind; Ruth, she would not go.

  “Don’t make me leave you,” Ruth said. “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your G-d my G-d.”

  When Naomi saw that Ruth was committed to sta
ying with her, she abandoned her arguing and let her come.

  They traveled together to Bethlehem. When they arrived, they found that the whole city had gathered to see them. Everyone was curious about the two women traveling from Moab. One woman asked, “Naomi! Is that you?”

  Naomi shook her head. “Don’t call me Naomi. There is no pleasantness in my life. Call me Mara, which means bitterness, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.”

  Through the bitterness, Ruth stayed. While Naomi became Mara, Ruth stayed. Ruth gave her kindness, and Ruth stayed.

  JAKUB MET MERYEM while he was in Cleveland for a robotics conference. He’d attended dozens, but somehow this one made him feel particularly selfconscious in his cheap suit and tie among all the wealthy goyim.

  By then he was living in the United States, but although he’d been born there, he rarely felt at home among its people. Between talks, he escaped from the hotel to go walking. That afternoon, he found his way to a path that wound through a park, making its way through dark-branched trees that waved their remaining leaves like flags of ginger, orange and gold.

  Meryem sat on an ironwork bench beside a man-made lake, its water silvered with dusk. She wore a black felt coat that made her look pallid even though her cheeks were pink with cold. A wind rose as Jakub approached, rippling through Meryem’s hair. Crows took off from the trees, disappearing into black marks on the horizon.

  Neither of them was ever able to remember how they began to converse. Their courtship seemed to rise naturally from the lake and the crows and the fallen leaves, as if it were another inevitable element of nature. It was bashert.

  Meryem was younger than Jakub, but even so, already ballet had begun taking its toll on her body. Ballet was created by trading pain for beauty, she used to say. Eventually, beauty vanished and left only the pain.

  Like Jakub, Meryem was an immigrant. Her grandparents had been born in Baghdad where they lived through the farhud instead of the shoah. They stayed in Iraq despite the pogroms until the founding of Israel made it too dangerous to remain. They abandoned their family home and fled to the U.S.S.R.

  When Meryem was small, the Soviet government identified her talent for dance and took her into training. Ballet became her new family. It was her blood and bone, her sacred and her profane.

  Her older brother sometimes sent letters, but with the accretion of time and distance, Meryem came to think of her family as if they were not so much people as they were the words spelled out in Yusuf’s spidery handwriting.

  Communism fell, and Meryem’s family was given the opportunity to reclaim her, but even a few years away is so much of a child’s lifetime. She begged them not to force her to return. They no longer felt like her home. More, ballet had become the gravitational center of her life, and while she still resented it – how it had taken her unwillingly, how it bruised her feet and sometimes made them bleed – she also could not bear to leave its orbit. When Yusuf’s letters stopped coming some time later, she hardly noticed.

  She danced well. She was a lyrical ballerina, performing her roles with tender, affecting beauty that could make audiences weep or smile. She rapidly moved from corps to soloist to principal. The troupe traveled overseas to perform Stravinsky’s Firebird, and when they reached the United States, Meryem decided to emigrate, which she accomplished with a combination of bribes and behind-the-scenes dealings.

  Jakub and Meryem recognized themselves in each other’s stories. Like his grandparents, they were drawn together by their similarities. Unlike them, they built a refuge together instead of a battlefield.

  After Meryem died, Jakub began dreaming that the numbers were inscribed into the skins of people who’d never been near the camps. His skin. His daughter’s. His wife’s. They were all marked, as Cain was marked, as the Christians believed the devil would mark his followers at the end of time. Marked for diaspora, to blow away from each other and disappear.

  “IS THE DOLL awake?” Mara asked one morning.

  Jakub looked up from his breakfast to see her leaning against the doorway that led into the kitchen. She wore a large t-shirt from Yellowstone that came to her knees, covering a pair of blue jeans that had not been baggy when he’d bought them for her. Her skin was wan and her eyes shadowed and sunken. Traces of inflammation from the drugs lingered, painfully red, on her face and hands. The orange knit cap pulled over her ears was incongruously bright.

  Jakub could not remember the last time she’d worn something other than pajamas.

  “She is down in the workshop,” Jakub said.

  “She’s awake, though?”

  “She is awake.”

  “Bring her up.”

  Jakub set his spoon beside his leftover bowl of chlodnik. Mara’s mouth was turned down at the corners, hard and resolute. She lifted her chin at a defiant angle.

  “She has a bed in the workshop,” Jakub said. “There are still tests I must run. It’s best she stay close to the machines.”

  Mara shook her head. It was clear from her face that she was no more taken in by his lie than the new child had been. “It’s not fair to keep someone stuck down there.”

  Jakub began to protest that the workshop was not such a bad place, but then he caught the flintiness in Mara’s eyes and realized that she was not asking out of worry. She had dressed as best she could and come to confront him because she wanted her first encounter with the new child to be on her terms. There was much he could not give her, but he could give her that.

  “I will bring her for dinner,” he said. “Tomorrow, for Shabbat.”

  Mara nodded. She began the arduous process of departing the kitchen, but then stopped and turned back. “Abba,” she said hesitantly. “If Ima hated the ballet, why did you build her a studio?”

  “She asked for one,” Jakub said.

  Mara waited.

  At last, he continued, “Ballet was part of her. She could not simply stop.” Mara nodded once more. This time, she departed.

  Jakub finished his chlodnik and spent the rest of the day cooking. He meted out ingredients for familiar dishes. A pinch, a dash, a dab. Chopping, grating, boiling, sampling. Salt and sweet, bitter and savory.

  As he went downstairs to fetch Ruth, he found himself considering how strange it must be for her to remember these rooms and yet never to have entered them. Jakub and Meryem had drawn the plans for the house together. She’d told him that she was content to leave a world of beauty that was made by pain, in exchange for a plain world made by joy.

  He’d said he could give her that.

  They painted the outside walls yellow to remind them of the sun during the winter, and painted blue inside to remind them of the sky. By the time they had finished, Mara was waiting inside Meryem’s womb. The three of them had lived in the house for seven years before Meryem died.

  These past few weeks had been precious. Precious because he had, in some ways, finally begun to recover the daughter that he had lost on the day her leg shattered – Ruth, once again curious and strong and insightful, like the Mara he had always known. But precious, too, because these were his last days with the daughter he’d made with Meryem.

  Precious days, but hardly bearable, even as he also could not bear that they would pass. Precious, but more salt and bitter than savory and sweet.

  The next night, when Jakub entered the workshop, he found Ruth on the stool where she’d sat so long when she was empty. Her shoulders slumped; her head hung down. He began to worry that something was wrong, but then he saw that she was only reading the book of poetry that she held in her lap.

  “Would you like to come upstairs for dinner?” Jakub asked.

  Setting the poems aside, Ruth rose to join him.

  LONG BEFORE JAKUB met Meryem – back in those days when he still traveled the country on commissions from the American government – Jakub had become friends with a rabbi from Minneapolis. The two still exchanged letters through the postal mail, rarefied and expensive as it was.

  After
Jakub sent the news from Doctor Pinsky, the rabbi wrote back, “First your wife and now your daughter… es vert mir finster in di oygen. You must not let yourself be devoured by agmes-nefesh. Even in the camps, people kept hope. Yashir koyech, my friend. You must keep hope, too.”

  Jakub had not written to the rabbi about the new child. Even if it had not been vital for him to keep the work secret, he would not have written about it. He could not be sure what the rabbi would say. Would he call the new child a golem instead of a girl? Would he declare the work unseemly or unwise?

  But truly, Jakub was only following the rabbi’s advice. The new child was his strength and hope. She would prevent him from being devoured by sorrow.

  WHEN jAKUB AND Ruth arrived in the kitchen for Shabbat, Mara had not yet come.

  They stood alone together in the empty room. Jakub had mopped the floors and scrubbed the counters and set the table with good dishes. The table was laid with challah, apricot chicken with farfel, and almond and raisin salad. Cholent simmered in a crock pot on the counter, waiting for Shabbat lunch.

  Ruth started toward Mara’s chair on the left. Jakub caught her arm, more roughly than he’d meant to. He pulled back, contrite. “No,” he said softly. “Not there.” He gestured to the chair on the right. Resentment crossed the new child’s face, but she went to sit.

  It was only as Jakub watched Ruth lower herself into the right-hand chair that he realized his mistake. “No! Wait. Not in Meryem’s chair. Take mine. I’ll switch with you –”