Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

  A sound came from Adger’s office. Jon stepped out of his cubicle. Adger’s door was closed and there was no light coming through the crack underneath. Something fell, the impact muffled by the Persian rug—a small object, maybe a book. Whispers ensued. Jon pressed his ear to the door and held his breath. He could hear cars speeding down Peachtree below Adger’s window, he could hear the party below. Adger’s office by comparison was not just quiet but free of sound.

  “You are so exotic,” Jon heard Adger say, finally. “You turn me on!”

  “I thought you were just interested in me for my idea,” Ali teased. “I mean, it was no big deal. I just noticed they were women.”

  “Shh, shh,” Adger said.

  “I mean, hello, what man would wear a green velvet tunic like that, unless he was a drag queen,” Ali said. He always got very talky when he was drinking.

  “It was the Renaissance,” Adger snapped. “That’s what men wore. Now shut up and give me a little sugar.”

  “I don’t care if it was the Renaissance or whatever,” Ali said, giggling but adamant. “Those aren’t men, they’re women.”

  “Well, you don’t have to convince me,” Adger said. “I don’t give a damn.”

  “You mean you don’t think they’re women?” Ali asked.

  Again that terrible, total quiet.

  “I think we sold it, that’s what I think,” Adger finally said. “And a good time was had by all. Now shut up or I’ll shut you up with this. You’re prettier than a striped snake and you’re turning out to be double the trouble.”

  “Don’t say ‘Shut up,’” Ali giggled. “Say ‘Show some silence, sir.’”

  “Shh,” Adger said, “I think I hear something.”

  The door cracked open, the weather balloon of Adger’s head squeezed out. Jon pitched forward. Adger screamed. He tried to shut the door but Jon’s legs were in the way—now it was Jon crying out as the door slammed into him again and again. When the door swung free of his legs he shot forward, then crawled to relative safety under Adger’s coatrack. Did they have coatracks on plantations? was the dangerously irrelevant thought that came into Jon’s head. Adger loomed over him. Jon squirmed away and rolled against the wall, rubbing his throbbing shins.

  Adger stood by the closed door with his head bent, his long arms hanging straight down, pulled by the weight of his clasped hands. A streetlamp rose in a window across the room, a sickly pinkish-yellow light slanted in, casting a nimbus around a figure on top of Adger’s desk. Its face was dark and featureless but it appeared to be naked, all thin limbs and sharp angles, and just above the level of the desk, something jutted out—Jon and Gloria Scipi could easily agree on the gender of this one. He could have been modeling for a portrait or carved from stone. He must have sat in perfect stillness and perfect arousal as all hell broke loose on the other side of the room, and he continued to sit this way as Jon and Adger caught their breath.

  Jon’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. The look in his lover’s doe eyes was a little sad but didn’t waver, and Jon understood he had not seen more than he was meant to see.

  Fire Year

  I

  The town sprang up at the intersection of roads leading to the district center and to the city. It was a region of lakes, banked with soft carpets of grass in summer, covered with crystalline ice in winter. But from the start, when the king granted its charter, the town was a rude place, with a plain wooden church and an assembly hall and an alehouse around a square, with pestilential ditches and muddy lanes. The townspeople were craftsmen and merchants, they traded anything they could make or grow in the dirt behind their houses. There were Jews in this town, and the king granted them the right to work and to build their own house of worship, as long as it wasn’t as tall as the church. The Jews made a living and survived periodic slaughters and lived their lives mostly unchanged as war came and went. The area already divided into quadrants was further divided among three kingdoms, with districts and counties and even cities split in two, along natural borders like rivers and unnatural, invisible lines. But the town remained whole. The kingdom became the dukedom and then the dukedom ended, and the Jews multiplied until they were the town’s most numerous inhabitants.

  Twenty years after it was built, the synagogue burned down. Seven years later a fire swept through the town and seven years after that another fire blazed. The town’s actual age continued to appear in official histories, but for the Jews the destruction of the synagogue became year zero. Even a century later the fires continued to return, and in those years the town, with its modest houses clustered around the market square, knew once again the suffering it had in the quiet years forgotten. It was a town full of numerologists, they counted things obsessively, and not just years—and to count they used letters as well as numbers, for every letter corresponded to a number, and so words of more than one letter were not just words but also sums. The number seven and the seventh letter of the alphabet, while unavoidable, could at least be used sparingly, so as not to tempt fate.

  Rabbi Aryeh led no congregation and had no formal training in Talmudic studies—but he had a group of devoted students. He preemptively pointed out to his fellow numerologists, many of them his elders, that it was tempting fate not to use the letter zayin in names, and that if the Lord so blessed a family with seven sons and the mother of these sons was tired, then may she be entitled to a little rest! (At the time of this remark Reb Aryeh had only one son himself and didn’t seem to acknowledge or even notice the misfortune of having so small a family.) And so it came as a shock but not such a surprise when he did what no one in living memory had done: to his second son born in a seventh year, he gave the name Zev.

  His wife, Rokhl, was delighted with this slap in the face of superstition. She understood without ever having discussed it with her husband just what his choice of name meant. She herself had fallen under suspicion two years earlier for parading her firstborn baby, Isaac, in the market square. She left his face uncovered despite his blue-eyed beauty, thereby affronting the townspeople with her lack of fear of the evil eye, a lack that seemed to stand for some greater and more threatening one that nobody, out of respect for her husband, dared even think. For her part she felt that the presence of such beauty in that rotten mouth of a town should be made known, so as to increase the general happiness; and she was proud of him. The townspeople avoided looking at the baby when they greeted the rabbi’s wife in the square—but the subject was never discussed, and so she never had to defend herself. Two years later Reb Aryeh had to defend his own affront only once, when Reb Shimon, head of a rival school and of the Society for Morality in the Young, appeared at Reb Aryeh’s schoolroom door and asked if the prohibition against using the letter zayin in the name of a male child born in a seventh year, whether this prohibition that perhaps, for who knew God’s mind, was responsible for the new synagogue never having burned again and for the town never having burned down to the ground, whether this prohibition was now declared over.

  “The new synagogue is made of stone,” Reb Aryeh pointed out, then invited Reb Shimon to come in.

  They sat across the long scarred table from each other. Reb Shimon looked around. It was a rougher room than his own school, it certainly didn’t look like the site of a teaching phenomenon. He could not imagine it packed to the rafters with students, though he knew Reb Aryeh got more than his share of students, and not just from the town but from as far away as the district center, where they had their own, superior schools. But of course it had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with Reb Aryeh, whose every word his students took as holy. The new synagogue is made of stone—was this an example of Reb Aryeh’s famous wisdom?

  Reb Shimon had come hoping for Reb Aryeh to admit his error or at least clarify his position, explain how much weight it was meant to carry. The entire town was waiting for guidance from this strange man. Reb Shimon had no illusions about the task at hand. For despite the town’s long-standing bias against sevens, t
he number was, as everyone knew, the luckiest of all. He had expected Reb Aryeh to bring this up, perhaps not even bothering to cite the Midrash: “All sevens are beloved.” Reb Aryeh might simply have moved on to the more obscure Talmudic recipe to combat tertian fever that began, “Take seven prickles from seven palm trees, seven chips from seven beams, seven nails from seven bridges . . .” Like a good chess player Reb Shimon made no move without knowing how his opponent would respond, and he had an answer prepared for each citation Reb Aryeh might bring up. But Reb Aryeh (who, despite Reb Shimon’s suspicions, was as wedded to numbers in his daily life as any of the town’s other numerologists) did not talk about numbers at all.

  “The town already has a lion,” Reb Aryeh said, referring to his own name, Aryeh. “Why not a wolf as well?” he added, referring to Zev’s.

  “Reb Aryeh,” Reb Shimon said. “There are reasons behind traditions. In this case, the reason is so that the town will be spared from fire.”

  “But even with entire classes free of Zevs and Zaks, classes full of misnamed Josephs and Aris and Moishes, it is still God’s will that the town burn.”

  “Not lately!” Reb Shimon said. “We haven’t had a fire in a seventh year in decades.”

  In fact it had been nearly half a century since the seven-year cycle had been regular, the fire coming six years after its predecessor, then eight years, then seven, then five, then four, then nine.

  “You see?” Reb Aryeh said. “Perhaps God has freed the number seven of its curse.”

  “Reb Aryeh,” Reb Shimon said, “I do not need to remind you that even in irregular times such as these, the fire returns every seven years on average.”

  “And so how is a fire in a sixth year any less terrible than a fire in a seventh?” Reb Aryeh asked impatiently.

  Reb Shimon had no answer for this. Instead he asked, “Do you see the town still standing?”

  “Reb Shimon,” Reb Aryeh said, “the town burns because we make fires in our homes and most of them are made of wood and still have straw roofs. For this reason the fire will return periodically like a beggar to whom you’ve given charity once, even if we give our sons the names of fish. Don’t worry, nothing will change.”

  Reb Shimon felt a little sad, as he always did when someone he knew gave up a habit, even a bad one. What next, he wondered, what next? The second synagogue had been called the new synagogue for a hundred years, Reb Shimon suddenly realized, the modern-sounding Aryeh himself having used the word “new.” But the second synagogue wasn’t new at all! If anyone other than Reb Shimon himself realized this, would they all then be obliged to start calling the synagogue something else?

  “Don’t worry,” Reb Aryeh said again, this time sounding a little worried. “The sum represented by my younger son’s name is nine, and in this regard the name could be considered safe.”

  In addition to Reb Shimon’s Society for Morality in the Young, that town of three thousand Hebrew souls had a Society for the Dissemination of Russian Culture, a Society for the Dissemination of German Science, a Resettlement in the Holy Land Society, a Resettlement (Anywhere) Society, a Society for Talmud Study, a Society for Torah Study, a Society for the Study of the Prophets, a Sickbed Society, a Burial Society, an Interest-Free Loan Society, and a Society for the Dissemination of Knowledge Among the Jews. Some of these societies were homegrown; others were funded by contributions from as far away as St. Petersburg. Out of the ashes of every fire rose a new society, as villages and capitals, as Jews and non-Jews, came to the town’s aid, opening it up to money and new ideas. To the great numbers of these societies Reb Aryeh had added another one, the Society for the Prevention of Fires. It was only thirteen years old, founded in the aftermath of a fire with money from a reform-minded nobleman in a nearby village, and already the municipal decree that it had engendered was responsible for nearly two dozen brick homes. The decree banned the construction of wooden houses in the center of town. The Society raised the money and provided the manpower to fight fires and help householders rebuild. In this way the fires became less and less destructive.

  Some of the townspeople worried that the brick homes were a way of taunting God, who could easily find another way to torment them as He saw fit. Perhaps even a worse way. To this Reb Aryeh said, “Nonsense. This is just being careful. On occasion,” he conceded, “it’s careful to heed a superstition, as the Sefer Hasidim states. But to believe in a superstition at the expense of your livelihood and even, God forbid, your life, this is not showing proper care for God’s creation. We must stop the fires from destroying our town.” The municipal council agreed. Rarely again was the concern raised, though as the years passed, the townspeople could not help noticing that the Society for the Prevention of Fires had not prevented any fires—they came and devoured what houses they could. And though it was commendable that the Society always seemed to have the money to help a ruined townsman rebuild with the mandated but more expensive brick, it was also suspicious, considering the numbers of houses that burned. Was there not also the possibility—the unspoken question arose—that people were burning down their own houses in order to receive one otherwise reserved for the rich? Evidently those who held such suspicions did not notice the barren places everywhere in the town center. Although nearly two dozen houses had been rebuilt in the last thirteen years, almost twice that number had been lost, many of their inhabitants having lost their lives along with their homes, many more having left that cursed town for good.

  II

  When Zev was seven years old the town burned. The townspeople hadn’t foretold the season—it was the month of Sivan, when spring was giving way to summer—but no one was surprised by the year. Zev had been born in a seventh year but not a fire year—the town had burned the year before. The regularity of the fires had come to seem like a divine gift—forewarned, you could take precautions, like not naming your son so as to provoke. Once the pattern was broken, seven decades after the old synagogue burned, the townspeople saw they had no way to prepare. Although they were comforted that the cycle had righted itself—they knew the town would reliably burn again in seven years—they shunned the boy whose own father had so presumptuously made him an agent of history.

  They shunned him out of fear but he gained no power from this, because he could not believe that he, a skinny timid boy, could possibly be the cause of this fear. He was left alone at the religious school he attended, even by the teacher, who returned his work without a word and with no mark but a perfect score, as if the teacher were afraid to touch the paper any more than necessary. In the town there were almost as many schools as societies, and indeed many of the societies were affiliated with schools, whose curricula reflected the primacy of their concerns. There was even a school, sponsored by the Society for Workers, that taught no religion at all. This was the school Zev’s older brother, Isaac, attended. (He could have studied with Reb Aryeh, but he was not a scholar and anyone could tell he was not meant to be one, as his mother told his disappointed father, who finally conceded the point.) It was a rowdy place, with arguments settled by fistfights and, as Isaac recounted it, a recess ritual that involved a well-built boy named Josef, whose father was a coachman, standing in the field behind the school and silently daring the other boys to take him on. With horror and fascination Zev pictured the entire student body, the bravest on the front line, moving toward this Josef and then shrinking back at the least of his moves—a step taken forward, an arm raised.

  At age fourteen Zev still enjoyed frightening himself in this way; it made him feel better about attending his father’s school, where his classmates left him alone. He even liked imagining that this Josef would take him over his knee and break him in half. Surely this would feel good, or at least come as a relief, the way a piece of putty stretched to its limit wants nothing more than to snap. But this terrible pleasure seemed entirely out of reach. Josef, along with a couple of other boys he had chosen, made himself very present in the market square; one had no choice but to engage
them or avoid the place entirely. These bullies knew Zev was Isaac’s brother. Isaac was not one of the bullies, but he was one of the brave boys from the front line and as such had earned Josef’s respect; sometimes Isaac even appeared with them in the square. Still, this was not why Zev could pass with nothing but the darts of their gazes on him—they too wanted to avoid contamination. But whenever he approached the square Zev’s blood pulsed in his fingertips at the prospect of the rough handling he risked.

  When he was not in school, studying, or reciting his morning, afternoon, or evening prayers, Zev ran to the lake nearest town. It was the smallest of the region and, perhaps as a result, had no name. Its banks were less grassy than those of the other lakes. Trees grew right up to the waterline. This lake was almost perfectly round and its water was freezing even in summer. It was reputed to have no bottom, for those who had stood in its rocky shallows just under the trees and then taken a single step out found they had no footing.

  The nameless lake belonged to Zev. He couldn’t swim. But he had a place to sit between trees and stare out at the water and try to engage in the silent meditation his father taught. It was either this or plunge into the freezing lake, for in this fire year, this year when everyone expected the town to burn—knew, feared, and half hoped it would—Zev himself was about to combust. The only question was when, though there was the faint yet definite terror that the answer might be never. But you could forget about all that, at least for a moment. You could forget about the seething of your body, you could forget about it all. You closed your eyes. Zev’s father taught that you just had to close your eyes—and breathe. “It is God’s spirit in your breath,” Reb Aryeh would say. “Listen to yourself breathe. Breathe evenly, but not clop clop clop like a horse—let your breath flow like a stream. Let your head empty of words and picture yourself at the foot of the Divine Throne. It isn’t covered in rich velvet, nor is it threaded with gold—and yet what a beautiful sight! A throne made entirely of light.” Zev closed his eyes and saw the throne. It was beautiful—but always about to vanish. He breathed in, he breathed out. He tended to breathe with such determination that more than once in class his father had told him to stop trying so hard.