The Angel of Losses

by Stephanie Feldman

  Phylacteries. That meant amulets. There was a new forbidden vocabulary; I sealed my lips against the s word—superstition—and especially the c word—cult. “At least it’s a skill,” I said.

  “Yes, only a little less practical than postmodern literary analysis,” she replied.

  I felt my face flush. This was the room where we had whispered and laughed until we couldn’t stay awake any longer; where we had imagined our futures, trips abroad, a shared apartment in the city, the glamours of young adulthood; where we lay side by side in her twin bed the night before Grandpa’s funeral and wept.

  I stuck out my forefinger and thumb and pointed at her. “Got me,” I said.

  “Got you.” She smiled.

  I looked away, my gaze landing on a waist-high canvas propped against the closet door. Four black figures were suspended against a swirling, midnight-blue background, hovering over a row of trees studded with apples. Their arms and legs were extended like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. One’s eyes were open as wide as eggs; another’s were shut and bloody at the corners; another’s were as black as his coat. The fourth’s face was unfinished.

  “It’s a Jewish legend,” Holly explained. “A rabbi and three followers attempt to enter paradise, even though it’s forbidden. One goes mad, one dies, and one becomes a heretic.” She pointed to the figure with the unfinished face. “Rabbi Akiba’s the only one who survives intact.” She paused, considering the image. “I can’t figure out what that looks like.”

  We continued down the hall. “I’m painting the baby’s room blue,” she said. “Tell Mom that’s not a hint. We still don’t know the sex. Blue is just so calming, and I love this shade.”

  I stopped, staring at the light spilling through the doorway. The room at the end of the hall had always been dark, the walls lined with bookshelves, the sun blocked by forest-green blinds. In all the time I had spent stewing over Nathan in our house, my house, I hadn’t thought about what his presence meant for the back bedroom, where Grandpa had painted watercolors and read old books. After he moved to the apartment in Brooklyn, we had left his room as it was, even the bulletin board papered with comic strips and the nicked wooden desk, postcards sealed beneath the glass overlay. After he died, my parents filled the room with cartons from his apartment. We had never unpacked them. In death, his claim on this space only grew stronger.

  “When we took away all the bookcases and stuff, it actually turned out to be bigger than our old room. Strange, right?”

  “You already moved everything?” My voice was quiet. She walked down the hall, and I had no choice but to follow.

  The room shone as if it were the source of light for the whole house. The floor was clear—no stacks of books, no file boxes, just a fluffy blue area rug over the old carpet, a rocking chair, and a crib. Three of the walls were white. The fourth was a patchy sky blue.

  Holly turned proudly in the center of the room. “What do you think?”

  I felt tears rise. It was as if Grandpa had been erased.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. Her smile disappeared. “You look—”

  “I’m fine,” I interrupted her. I didn’t want her to say anything else before I managed to choke out something nice. “It’s perfect for a baby.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment. Finally she said, “It always wakes up after lunch. I think it just kicked my kidney.” She paused. “Do you want to feel it?”

  I looked at her, and she looked away, down at her fingers bridging the hump under her shapeless clothes. I realized she was a little afraid to be kind to me. I could be cutting.

  “Yes,” I said, and then, “Thank you.”

  I put my hand on the front of her belly, and she put her hand over mine, sliding it down to the side and pressing my palm against her. There was a sudden aquatic motion, a limb slipping along the inside of her skin and withdrawing again, and I was startled—how solid they both felt, how strong and unknowable. She let go of my hand, and I let it fall to my side.

  “Have you picked out names?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, and then quickly, “We’re not telling anyone.”

  There was a time when I would have been an exception to the “anyone.”

  “Do you remember special breakfast at the diner?” she asked.

  “ ‘Make the toast hard. Hard,’ ” I said.

  “ ‘Black and hard,’ ” she said, simulating Grandpa’s gruff tone and careful enunciation.

  We’d spent so many Sunday mornings, just Grandpa and his girls, ordering the same breakfasts in the same peeling booth, buying more Nancy Drew and Baby-Sitters Club paperbacks, standing at the bus stop with our hands in his. “We should go sometime,” I said.

  Holly didn’t say anything. She couldn’t eat there anymore.

  My chest contracted. I had always been easily irritated—by my classmates and their frivolous interests, by the boys who couldn’t keep up with me, by my parents’ oblique good intentions. It had been different with Holly. We understood each other. Losing her had spun my impatience into a tornado, an anger I couldn’t put to rest. I didn’t like who I was becoming, but I couldn’t stop it either. “I’m going to get a glass of water,” I said.

  I charged down the stairs and waited for her in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, afraid to disturb her carefully arranged dishes and cups, listening to her slowly descend the steps. “It’s just hard to see all of his stuff gone,” I said when she entered the kitchen.

  “Yeah.” We looked at each other. I had no idea what she was thinking.

  “I should go through the books,” I said. “That’s why I came.”

  “Yeah,” she repeated. Her voice as blank as her face.

  SITTING IN THE BASEMENT AMONG THE BOXES AND SHELVES, I knew why Nathan wanted to get rid of it all. He was out of his element, and he was out of control. It was his gentile in-laws’ house, and their words all around him: Holly’s art books, my classics and theory textbooks, our parents’ thrillers. I opened one box and then another, releasing Grandpa’s as well, and sorted the artifacts of his mind at work. Histories of Rome. The Odyssey and Beowulf and Gilgamesh. A half-sized copy of Whitman.

  I removed a sixty-year-old British literature anthology, the paper jacket faded to white, the inside pages brown and stiff, the spine glossy with tape. I wondered if these books tempted Nathan, the fallen world they celebrated.

  As a young man Grandpa had perfected his English on these poems, wearing down his accent on the verse as if it were a whetstone. He recited the lines until the Russian was erased, a colorless imprint behind the thick strokes of midwestern newscaster. A perfect match for his truncated, Anglicized surname, Burke.

  The book opened along an old fault line in its spine, revealing Wordsworth’s tribute to a girl who disappeared during a snowstorm on the moor. I remembered standing in the back room, Grandpa at his desk with the open book in his lap, my fingers knotted behind my back and my memory straining from stanza to stanza. I remembered the encouraging smile evaporating from my mother’s face as I proudly recited Lucy’s mother’s cries to heaven when she learns her daughter is dead. I trusted Wordsworth’s coda more than the mother’s grief.

  Yet some maintain that to this day

  She is a living child;

  That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

  Upon the lonesome wild.

  I put the anthology aside and returned to the box, inspecting and stacking each volume on the floor until all that was left was a slim notebook with a marbled cover. Grandpa used to write in composition books just like this one. Once, in high school, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to his door. He had been writing in a notebook but closed it immediately when he realized I was there.

  “What are you writing?” I asked.

  “Memories,” he answered.

  He smiled, but the strange light in his eyes startled me; they were the blue of chemically treated water and frosted corporate glass. I went back to bed, listened to the oceanic draw
of Holly’s breath, awake and alone.

  The year before I left for college, Grandpa moved back to Brooklyn, to Coney Island, where he and my grandmother had lived when my dad was a little boy. Grandpa announced his surprise decision to us with uncharacteristic grimness—preemptive anger, even. He was prepared to battle us. In retrospect, it was the first moment he revealed that he was moving beyond us, becoming a different man as he prepared to die.

  Later, after we cleaned out his apartment, we visited with his neighbor and chess partner Sam one last time. He handed Dad a plastic bag of notebooks—a few, maybe three, maybe five—and kneaded his thick fingers in front of his chest. “Eli wanted me to destroy them,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

  On the way home that day, I held the books in my lap. They were so slight for things that contained my grandfather’s last words. When we reached home, my father took them away from me. “Please don’t,” I said.

  “It’s what he wanted,” he replied.

  “I promise I won’t read them,” I lied. He didn’t answer me. I got out of the car, expecting him to follow, but he drove off alone, returning hours later, Grandpa’s clothes delivered to Goodwill and the magazines to the recycling. And the notebooks? Trashed, I assumed. I didn’t speak to Dad for days. Later I wondered if I had had the right—I’d lost my grandfather, but he had been orphaned. Perhaps I should have been kinder. I should have cared less about material things. I should have forgiven.

  And now here the books were, one of them, anyway. Dad couldn’t bring himself to destroy it after all. I felt a queasy happiness. No matter the passage of time, his final requests, our efforts to move on—Grandpa was too stubborn to go.

  The inside cover was inked with a vague spiral. I rotated the book in my lap, and the sketch became a snail shell, or maybe an eye, or a tree with curling branches, or a grasping hand. Grandpa had painted but not well—landscapes and seascapes almost identical to one another, except for their tendency toward green or blue. I had one framed in my apartment: a purple-blue sea, a blue-white sky, a scattering of black V-shaped gulls. This sketch was something else entirely—complex, geometric yet soft, like lace.

  On the first page, the letters were thick and black, a right-slanted script of wobbly globes and blunt tails. The force of his pen had engraved the page with a short list.

  The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light

  The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses

  The White Rebbe the Wanderer

  The White Rebbe in the Ghetto

  I knew that word, scratched on the page where magician should be. Holly had explained it to me. Rebbe—a Jewish master, a guru. I shook my head against the strange feeling. Drawn by my grandfather’s hand, the word became the fulcrum of an optical illusion. Shut one eye or the other, and the world before you reverses itself.

  I turned the page.

  When Solomon was a baby, a fever took him. His tiny body convulsed in his mother’s arms. The story of his illness was told so many times during his childhood that it became like a memory to him: his skin burning like a torch; the faces of his mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles floating above him; his bones chattering and locking and sighing away from one another again. For three days and nights, the story goes, Solomon suffered. Finally, his father arrived. The great rebbe lifted his hands over the boy and prayed, his chants rising and falling like the river in tumultuous weather. Soon Solomon’s fever broke and his body grew still. He opened his blue eyes to the world again. He was saved.

  The familiar cadence was a tuning fork, eliciting Grandpa’s voice from deep inside my memory, and I felt like I had run down a steep hill and come to an abrupt stop, my insides inverted and ringing. Past and present meeting each other.

  Above me a door swept open. It was Nathan, coming downstairs from the kitchen—Holly’s footsteps were so much slower, and lighter, even as her body grew. He pounded the steps like he wanted to imprint his trail on them.

  “Oh. Marjorie. I didn’t know you were down here.”

  I retrieved the poetry anthology and opened it again.

  He hesitated on the bottom step. Shadows clung to his angular face, making him seem more gaunt than usual beneath his beard. I wondered if there was some rule against us being alone together—a corollary to the prohibition against shaking my hand. My mother had her own theory about why he barely spoke to me, never looked me in the eye. “You can be intimidating,” she insisted, though I didn’t believe it. Nathan was too sure of himself to be intimidated by anyone.

  “I was just looking through some of our grandfather’s things.”

  “He loved books,” Nathan said. As if he knew anything about Grandpa. “We have my great-grandfather’s prayer book from Lithuania,” he continued. “My brother and I used to fight over who would get to use it.”

  What a shame for your sisters, I thought, but I said nothing.

  He cleared his throat. “I imagine this . . . for you and Chava . . . it’s similar.”

  He was being nice, I realized, in his own awkward way. I tried to imagine him as a child, clamoring for the fragile book, but the theater of my mind remained dark. I knew so little about him. Maybe he wouldn’t share, and maybe I couldn’t understand, but all I knew for sure was that I had never asked.

  Nathan crossed the room, held out a hand. His fingernails were black with ink. “May I?”

  I looked at his face. He had clear, gray eyes, bright even in the shadowy basement. I wondered what he looked like without the beard. He never even shook my hand, and now he wanted my grandfather’s things.

  I handed him the anthology. He held the base of the book against his heart, tucked his chin down, and read, “ ‘I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea.’ ” The verse was encircled by the soft tracery of Grandpa’s pencil. The cryptography that lives inside other readers’ books.

  “Poetry,” Nathan said dismissively.

  “Doesn’t the Bible have poetry in it too?”

  He looked me in the eyes now. “Have you read the Bible?”

  My face grew hot. “I assume my things are safe here. Until you and Holly find a place of your own.”

  “Of course,” he mumbled, and balanced the anthology on a shelf. He began to turn away but stopped, his eyes on Grandpa’s notebook. I was hugging it against my chest, like someone might try to snatch it away from me.

  “I need to know. Are all of my books here?” I asked. “All of my family’s books?” I clarified. Color rose in his face, a rash of freckles beneath his eyes, and he drew his perpetually hunched shoulders back, looking down on me from a few inches higher than usual.

  “I don’t know where you left your things. They mean nothing to me,” he said, and stomped back up the stairs.

  When I heard him shut the kitchen door, I let out my breath and turned my attention back to the notebook. The first page listed four titles—there must be three more books. I called my father but he didn’t remember what he had done with the notebooks—he didn’t remember a set of marbled notebooks at all. I went through Grandpa’s shelves, item by item, tipping the spines to check for extra books tucked inside. Nothing. I checked the rest of the shelves, but they hid no secrets either. I searched Grandpa’s room, the new nursery, and then the laundry room that led to the backyard.

  Nathan watched me through narrowed eyes as I passed through the kitchen once, and then again, on my hunt, and Holly insisted she didn’t remember seeing any notebooks when she arranged Grandpa’s things to be moved into storage.

  “You’ll miss your train,” she said, pretending to worry. I hadn’t told her which train I was taking, but I nodded and collected my bag. I kept it on my lap, the light but unmistakable weight of the notebook calling my attention, as we drove in silence to the station parking lot.

  “Are you sure Nathan didn’t throw anything away?” I asked. She nodded without looking at me. “Just tell me if you find anything, okay?”

  Holly sat with her foot on the brake. She was
n’t going to park and wait with me. That was fine. The sooner we parted, the sooner I could read Grandpa’s story.

  “What has you so worked up?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just want to keep them safe. There’s not much left of him.”

  She sniffed and looked out her window. She didn’t turn back when I opened the door, just lifted her hand in wordless farewell.

  The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light

  WHEN SOLOMON WAS A BABY, A FEVER TOOK HIM. HIS tiny body convulsed in his weeping mother’s arms. The story of his illness was told so many times during his childhood that it became like a memory to him: his skin burning like a torch; the faces of his mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles floating above him; his bones chattering and locking and sighing away from one another again. For three days and nights, the story goes, Solomon suffered. Finally, his father arrived. The great rebbe lifted his hands over the boy and prayed, his chants rising and falling like the river in tumultuous weather. Soon Solomon’s fever broke and his body grew still. He opened his blue eyes to the world again. He was saved.

  It was a miracle, but it wasn’t a surprise. Solomon’s father was a rabbi by education and a wonder-worker by profession. His neighbors lived under the shelter of his power, and men and women traveled from distant towns and cities to ask his blessing, to receive cures, to seek counsel. They sent their sons to study at his yeshiva. The rebbe and his school were the shining stars of that piece of earth. The only other notable feature in the village was the mud—from first thaw until first frost, it rose like an ocean, and speckled all the people like Adam.

  The men of this family were leaders and wonder rabbis, passing their secret from father to first son, a lineage that went back ten generations to the Holy Land, where the great mystics had practiced. They were so holy that they did not die; they ascended directly to heaven, like the prophet Elijah, disappearing at the end of their lives in a haze of lightning and smoke.