The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  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 good-bye, 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-in-law 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 staying 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 self-conscious 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 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—”

  Mara’s crutches clicked down the hallway. It was too late.

  She paused in the doorway. She wore the blond wig Jakub had bought for her after the targeted immersion therapy failed. Last year’s green Pesach dress hung off of her shoulders. The cap sleeves neared her elbows.

  Jakub moved to help with her crutches. She stayed stoic while he helped her sit, but he could see how much it cost her to accept assistance while she was trying to maintain her dignity in front of the new child. It would be worse because the new child possessed her memories and knew precisely how she felt.

  Jakub leaned the crutches against the wall. Ruth looked away, embarrassed.

  Mara gave her a corrosive stare. “Don’t pity me.”

  Ruth looked back. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Turn yourself off,” said Mara. “You’re muktzeh.”

  Jakub wasn’t sure he’d ever before heard Mara use the Hebrew word for objects forbidden on the Sabbath. Now, she enunciated it with crisp cruelty.

  Ruth remained calm. “One may work on the Sabbath if it saves a life.”

  Mara scoffed. “If you call yours a life.”

  Jakub wrung his hands. “Please, Mara,” he said. “You asked her to come.”

  Mara held her tongue for a lingering moment. Eventually, she nodded formally toward Ruth. “I apologize.”

  Ruth returned the nod. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. She didn’t take nutrition from food, but Jakub had given her a hollow stomach that she could empty after meals so she would be able to eat socially. He waited to see if she would return Mara’s insults, but she was the old Mara, the one who wasn’t speared with pain and fear, the one who let bullies wind themselves up if that was what they wanted to do.

  Jakub looked between the girls. “Good,” he said. “We should have peace for the Sabbath.”

  He went to the head of the table. It was late for the blessing, the sun skimming the horizon behind bare, black trees. He lit the candles and waved his hands over the flames to welcome Shabbat. He covered his eyes as he recited the blessing. “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam…”

  Every time he said the words that should have been Meryem’s, he remembered the way she had looked when she said them. Sometimes she peeked out from behind her fingers so that she could watch Mara. They were small, her hands, delicate like bird wings. His were large and blunt.

  The girls stared at each other as Jakub said kaddish. After they washed their hands and tore the challah, Jakub served the chicken and the salad. Both children ate almost nothing and said even less.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve had three for Shabbat,” Jakub said. “Perhaps we can have a good vikuekh. Mara, I saw you reading my Simic? Ruth has been reading poetry, too. Haven’t you, Ruth?”

  Ruth shifted the napkin in her lap. “Yehuda Amichai,” she said. “Even a Fist Was once an Open Palm with Fingers.”

  “I love the first poem in that book,” Jakub said. “I was reading it when—”

  Mara’s voice broke in, so quietly that he almost didn’t hear. “Ruth?”

  Jakub looked to Ruth. The new child stared silently down at her hands. Jakub cleared his throat, but she did not look up.

  Jakub answered for her. “Yes?”

  Mara’s expression was slack, somewhere between stunned and lifeless. “You named her Ruth.”

  “She is here for you. As Ruth was there for Mara.”

  Mara began to cry. It was a tiny, pathetic sound. She pushed away her plate and tossed her napkin onto the table. “How could you?”

  “Ruth gives hesed to Mara,” Jakub said. “When everyone else left, Ruth stayed by her side. She expected nothing from her loving, from her kindness.”

  “Du kannst nicht auf meinem rucken pishen unt mir sagen class es regen ist,” Mara said bitterly.

  Jakub had never heard Mara say that before either. The crass proverb sounded wrong in her mouth. “Please, I am telling you the truth,” he said. “I wanted her name to be part of you. To come from your story. The story of Mara.”

  “Is that what I am to you?” Mara asked. “Bitterness?”

  “No, no. Please, no. We never thought you were bitterness. Mara was the name Meryem chose. Like Maruska, the Russian friend she left behind.” Jakub paused. “Please. I did not mean to hurt you. I thought the story would help you see. I wanted you to understand. The new child will not harm you. She’ll show you hesed.”

  Mara flailed for her crutches.

  Jakub stood to help. Mara was so weak that she accepted his assistance. Tears flowed down her face. She left the room as quickly as she could, refusing to look at either Jakub or the new child.

  Jakub looked between her retreating form and Ruth’s silent one. The new child’s expression was almost as unsure as Jakub’s.

  “Did you know?” Jakub asked. “Did you know how
she’d feel?”

  Ruth turned her head as if turning away from the question. “Talk to her,” she said quietly. “I’ll go back down to the basement.”

  * * *

  Mara sat on her bed, facing the snow. Jakub stood at the threshold. She spoke without turning. “Hesed is a hard thing,” she said. “Hard to take when you can’t give it back.”

  Jakub crossed the room, past the chair he’d made her when she was little, with Meryem’s shawl hung over the back; past the hanging marionette dressed as Giselle; past the cube Mara used for her lessons in attic space. He sat beside her on her white quilt and looked at her silhouetted form against the white snow.

  She leaned back toward him. Her body was brittle and delicate against his chest. He remembered sitting on that bed with Mara and Meryem, reading stories, playing with toys. Tsuris, tsuris. Life was all so fragile. He was not graceful enough to keep it from breaking.

  Mara wept. He held his bas-yekhide in his large, blunt hands.

  ACT III: RUTH

  Échappé

  (Escape)

  At first, Ruth couldn’t figure out why she didn’t want to switch herself off. Mara had reconciled herself to Ruth’s existence, but in her gut, she still wanted Ruth to be gone. And Ruth was Mara, so she should have felt the same.

  But no, her experiences were diverging. Mara wanted the false daughter to vanish. Mara thought Ruth was the false daughter, but Ruth knew she wasn’t false at all. She was Mara. Or had been.

  Coming into existence was not so strange. She felt no peculiar doubling, no sensation that her hands weren’t hers, no impression that she had been pulled out of time and was supposed to be sleeping upstairs with her face turned toward the window.

  She felt more secure in the new body than she had in Mara’s. This body was healthy, even round in places. Her balance was steady; her fingernails were pink and intact.

  After abba left her the first night, Ruth found a pane of glass that he’d set aside for one of his projects. She stared at her blurred reflection. The glass showed soft, smooth cheeks. She ran her fingers over them and they confirmed that her skin was downy now instead of sunken. Clear eyes stared back at her.