The Angel of Losses

by Stephanie Feldman

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you find me?” I didn’t believe in synchronicity, fate—but still, it disturbed me. He gave no indication that he remembered me, and the small flutter of panic at being stalked gave way to a new fear: that something unearthly was happening to me and that I might never understand it.

  “I’m Eli’s granddaughter,” I began again. “Marjorie. I just saw you—”

  “I told you we would have plenty of time to talk,” he interrupted. His gaze was fixed on the book before me. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “This? It’s about Russia in the decades after the war.”

  “The czar?”

  “The czar?” I repeated. He watched me expectantly, and my heart quickened at that particular expression of elderly confusion. Wide-eyed. Heartbreaking.

  “The USSR,” I said carefully. “The Communists.”

  He frowned, weighing my answer. He tapped the table, once, twice, three times, far more concerned with the books than with me. Of course he hadn’t come here looking for me. But then what was he doing here, all the way uptown—an hour from the bar, two hours from Coney Island, where he must live? “All right,” he said, nodding. “Trade.”

  We exchanged books.

  “Page eighty-three,” he said, and turned to his reading.

  There was something off about him, but if it was senility, it was a strange kind. I followed his instructions and opened the book to page 83. Something cold clenched inside of me. I suspected there was a connection between the Berukhim and White Rebbes, but I hadn’t wanted to be right.

  “The Berukhim Rebbe and the Angel of Death”

  The Berukhim Rebbe lived many decades among his people and performed many wondrous feats. He saved his village from an evil king, healed the sick, traveled across the earth and back on the wings of the prophet Elijah.

  But his days were not endless, and the Berukhim Rebbe grew old. He took to wandering the small village and its woods as he had once wandered the face of the world, and he sat with his little black dog beside him and stared at the leaves. Once, they bore commands to an earlier generation, their veins whorled into words: Stop. Rest. This is your home. Now, they were blank.

  At night, he lay in his bed and waited, peering at the door frame edged in darkness, listening to the wind for the approach. He rarely slept, for he had completed the hours of sleep allotted him, and his remaining minutes and hours were conscious ones. Finally, one midnight, his window turned from black to gray; the gaps at the door turned from gray to white; and the wind took shape, from a hiss to a roar, the rustling of a gown, the motion of a wing.

  The door opened, and there stood the Angel of Death. The rebbe’s little black dog jumped from his bed of rags in the corner of the room and set to growling and nipping at the angel’s robes.

  Arise, the angel said, his lips unmoving, his voice sounding inside the rebbe’s head. It is time for you to join your fathers.

  I have seen an angel before, the rebbe replied. But I have never seen such splendor.

  The angel looked down at his robes, a whirlpool of silver. He examined his fingers, twice the length of any man’s and gleaming like ivory.

  And your sword, the rebbe continued. A work by the hand of our master in heaven.

  The angel seemed to gaze upon it as if for the first time: the silver handle inlaid with jewels from paradise, blood red and sky blue and green of the deepest jungle, the blade polished with sand from the desert of the Messiah’s exile. When the Angel of Death came to take a life, he held his sword aloft, and a blue light fell upon the face of the dying. The dying saw their own reflection in the blade, and watched as their veins rose up against their skin and wrote an alphabet there. The blade descended and the dying’s reflection grew larger, their name with it, black and glittering. The angel touched his sword to a cheek, a forehead, a chin, and with a hiss of frozen air, dissolved the letters, broke the name, and severed the soul from the body.

  Please, the rebbe said. Before I leave this earth, let me see your sword.

  The rebbe was a great man, and his words were heard in the celestial academy, where the patriarchs looked up from their books, and Moses set down his pen, and the prophet Elijah paused in his lecture, and Bar Yochai the mystic broke his meditation and opened his eyes, and Luria the lion halted his calculations, and Della Reina the madman, who had been forgiven, came to the window.

  The rebbe opened his hands to the angel, and the angel lay his sword against them, and frost spread across the fingers of the great man. He brought the edge of the blade to his forearm, where the letters of his name pulsed black, and when he touched the point to the very first letter of his name, he did not smudge it, he did not deform it, but he turned it into something new, the secret letter, the lost letter that will complete our alphabet in the time of the Messiah.

  I will abolish death! the Berukhim Rebbe proclaimed. The rebbe released the sword, and it hovered above him, and he saw himself in its light, and he was changed. He fled into the night, his little black dog close behind.

  Just as I finished the tale, the fluorescent light timed out with a click, and for an instant I imagined I was in the basement of my parents’ house, bookshelves rising above me, the notebook in my lap. Their cellar too was a library of sorts; and so had been Grandpa’s apartment by the sea, crammed with the volumes he collected, and Holly’s nursery, the fresh blue paint veiling the ghostly imprint of books. I imagined each as a room in a vast repository, imagined that if I continued through this university hall, narrow and dusty, feeling my way, my fingertips trailing along the canvas spines, I would eventually find my way home.

  The light switched back on. The old man had hit the button affixed to the bookcase, just beneath the cardboard subject marker. We were sitting in the Geography section.

  “I believe the tales of the angels are greatly exaggerated,” the old man said. Before him, the book I had traded was open to the same page I had consulted, the description of the Berukhim Penitents’ origin—or the refutation of it, depending on your point of view.

  “That’s a definitional impossibility,” I said, and when he looked at me curiously I added, “How can you know what angels do?” What I had meant was, you can’t judge a fiction on its accuracy, but Holly had sensitized me to the existence of true believers—I didn’t want to offend him.

  “It was written down once,” he said, gesturing to the book I held. “It was all written down—but I destroyed it. Now, gossip and hearsay.” He shook his head. It was a deliberate seventy-two degrees in the stacks, but he still wore his full-length coat and hat. “You could say it backfired on me.”

  “Is the White Rebbe the Berukhim Rebbe?” I asked.

  “There were many Berukhim rebbes.”

  “The last one,” I said. He didn’t answer. “Did you tell Eli about the White Rebbe?” I continued.

  “No. Everyone knew those stories back then. Back there.”

  “Where?”

  The old man slid the stack of books against the shelf.

  “You think if you hide something, it will disappear,” he said. “But some people become even more driven to find it.” He laughed, and there was bitterness in it. “I told old Eli that. But the stubborn boy wouldn’t listen to me.” He pushed himself to standing. “Good-bye.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  He shuffled past me, head down.

  “I’ll walk with you,” I said.

  He paused, and so did I, half standing.

  “Oh, poor girl. Don’t make me take pity on you,” he said, just a voice from under the shadow of his cap. “I walk alone. You’re not ready to believe what I have to tell you.”

  “About the White Rebbe?”

  He lifted his face and the sickly fluorescent light settled in the grooves of his skin and the capillaries of his eyes. He was smiling slightly. I drew back into myself.

  “No. About Eli.”

  Four

  After Grandpa’s black Christmas, I called
him every day to check in. I didn’t always reach him right away—he was in and out of his apartment, playing chess at the senior center, sitting on the boardwalk chalking blue oceans in a sketch pad. I left messages and he returned them, quickly and cheerfully at first, and then slowly and with evident, inexplicable irritation. “I’m calling to tell you I’m still of this world,” he would mutter.

  “Don’t study so hard.”

  “Put your books away. Put all of them away.”

  “Don’t come here again. This is no place for you.”

  After his last message, he didn’t answer the phone—for any of us—for three days. I hated how much it worried me, how I could only imagine him alone as vulnerable. He was truly and finally old now.

  Mom called his friend and neighbor Sam. He said he had seen Grandpa the day before at the bus stop—Grandpa had been sitting with another man, someone Sam recognized but couldn’t name. The bus had stopped, but neither man had gotten on board. Now no one was answering my grandfather’s door.

  My father didn’t want us to go with him to Brooklyn, but Holly and I insisted. He picked me up first, and we drove downtown to get Holly. At first I didn’t recognize the girl waiting outside the dorm. Her hair was combed back under a prim headband, and she wore a black knee-length skirt and striped blue tights underneath.

  Apparently, she had given up the torn T-shirts, skinny jeans, and black flats that had been her uniform for her first semester. I became conscious of my grubby sneakers, my split ends, the hole starting in the inner thigh of my jeans. I had been living on a diet of bagels and grapes, doing little besides research, rarely answering my phone, and I hadn’t seen Holly since Christmas.

  The three of us were silent the entire drive, and when we finally arrived at Grandpa’s, Dad made us wait downstairs in the lobby. Holly and I chose to stand out front. I wondered if Holly had also realized that Dad expected to find Grandpa dead in the apartment, was protecting us from the sight—if not, I didn’t want to tell her. She bent over her phone, sending a message to someone I didn’t know.

  I recorded the details in my mind, in case these were the last minutes of my life before Grandpa was taken away from me. A seagull pecked at a hot dog wrapper. A city bus slowed to a stop across the street, expelling an old woman with a cane. There were the fast food stores, the Russian grocery, the blocky condominiums and brick apartments hung with dingy terraces. And beyond, the amusement park, perpetually about to be demolished, perpetually celebrating its last summer. And then. Beyond that. My grandfather. Walking toward me. Holding one arm against his chest.

  “Holly, look.”

  She lifted her head, and her eyes grew wide.

  “Grandpa!” I shouted. He was a block away. He couldn’t hear us. “Go get Dad,” I told her, and ran across the street. “Grandpa!” I called again. He paused for a second and then continued toward me at the same slow pace. When we met, I threw my arms around him and kissed his cheek. We were the same height now.

  “Do you hear the train?” he asked. “I hear the train.” His eyes swiveled, right to left to right, looking everywhere but my face.

  “Grandpa!” I said again, shouted nearly, and he finally met my gaze.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. The words were soft. “I told you not to come.” Slurred.

  “You didn’t answer your phone, and Dad freaked out.”

  I expected him to make a guttural sound, his usual dismissal, but he just rubbed his left forearm, which he still held crossed over his heart. “Tell him when it’s time for me to die, I’ll call him first so he shouldn’t rush down here. He can take his time.”

  “Grandpa,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be so Russian.” I meant dark. Cold. Hopeless. It was how I had started responding to his morbid talk, trying to joke instead of plead.

  He looked me in the eye. “In America we die too.”

  I took my hand away.

  He was staring beyond me now, and I turned. Holly was coming toward us, leaving Dad alone at the front door, watching us, his phone at his ear.

  Holly put her arms around Grandpa. “Where have you been?” He was still staring past me, but not at my father, I realized—at the bus shelter on the corner. I strained to see what he was looking at, but there was no one there.

  “What happened to your arm?” Holly asked. Now I saw a dark stain on the cuff of his sleeve.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said.

  He extended his arm. His palm was dusky, the grooves in it a deep red, like he had taken a pencil to his fate lines.

  “Dad!” Holly cried, backing away from us. Grandpa’s eyes locked on mine. He didn’t seem confused now. He seemed determined, and I became determined too, to hold his gaze with the same resolve; maybe then he would trust me with whatever was happening to him.

  “Call an ambulance,” Dad said, appearing behind me.

  “I’m not going in any ambulance!” my grandfather shouted. His pronunciation was sharp, perfect. His previous speech wasn’t muffled by confusion or injury. It was pulled by an accent, long suppressed but not vanquished. “Leave me alone.” He tried to pull his hand away, but it was secure in my father’s grip. Holly gasped, but neither man flinched. My sister and I looked at each other. There were tears in her eyes. We were thinking the same thing, and both afraid to say it. You’re hurting him.

  My father finally spoke, his voice ugly with anger. “Dad, you’re confused.”

  “I’m a grown man,” Grandpa growled back. “I walked across Europe, and if I want to walk on the beach, I will. Day or night.”

  “If we can’t call an ambulance,” I said, “let’s at least go inside.”

  Upstairs, we pulled off his coat and rolled up his sleeve to find a wound that was mostly clotted, scabbed over.

  “There must be something in the bathroom,” Holly whispered, looking away from the blood. When I was younger, I had crashed my bike and taken all the skin off my knee. Holly, first on the scene, had fainted.

  Blood didn’t bother me. I looked at what he had done. It wasn’t a single cut but a series of them. Not a line but curls and circles, inscribed carefully, midway between his wrist and his elbow. He wouldn’t tell us what happened, and Dad surmised he had fallen, suggesting it to us later, repeating it as truth to my mother, but from that first moment, I knew Grandpa had done it to himself.

  Holly found a roll of bandages, and we taped up his arm. “Dad, should I call . . . ?” she said quietly. She was afraid of making my grandfather angry.

  “Dad,” my father began, his voice loud, directive. Grandpa felt so far away, as if even though he was there in front of us, he still wasn’t answering his phone. “When did this happen?”

  Grandpa had been looking into the middle distance, but now he fixed his eyes on my father’s. The corner of his mouth curled into his cheek. “A long time ago,” he lied. “I’m fine.”

  “Since we’re here,” I said, “let’s go out.” Dad looked at me with irritation. “Grandpa,” I continued, “when was the last time you ate?”

  He thought about this. “I’m not so hungry these days.”

  “Me either,” I said. “But right now I could really go for a waffle. With ice cream.”

  “I don’t think so—” Dad said, but Grandpa interrupted him.

  “We’re going!” he said. “I’m taking my girls for breakfast.”

  Holly and I walked on either side of him. A gull sat on a trash can, pecking among the debris, sending litter onto the curb, where it was caught by the breeze. I watched the bird’s careful movements divide the moment into seconds, pieces of a memory I could carry with me after he was gone. I knew then that it wouldn’t be long.

  THE DAY AFTER MY RUN-IN WITH THE OLD MAN IN THE STACKS, I returned to the library. I sat in my customary spot, with my dissertation notes open, but my eyes kept lifting off the pages, looking for the stranger. He never appeared, and my draft remained unwritten, and the mystery of Grandpa’s story spread like a stain, dyein
g the wasted hours an unbearable red. It was nearly five o’clock—I could still salvage the day. I took a deep breath and went to the library loan office. The door was open, but no one was at the counter. I took a step inside, and then another—and there was Simon, sitting in his office, looking up. He waved at me. I held up the slim, canvas hardback, Juan Espera en Dios in the Americas. “Your book.”

  “And?” he asked, coming to lean across the counter.

  “Very interesting,” I said. “It’s not what I’m doing for my dissertation. But I might be able to use it for another paper I’m working on.”

  “Because your dissertation research isn’t enough to keep you busy.”

  “Well . . .” I hesitated. “I have a lot going on.” I could never tell him about the notebook and the strange old man; but at the same time, their hold on me was so strong—and Simon’s demeanor was so open—I found it difficult to lie. “Anyway, this thing. I mean paper. I’ve had some trouble finding what I’m looking for. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “Sure,” he said, stepping behind the computer to call up the library database.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not there.”

  “Maybe if you change the parameters.”

  “No,” I said again.

  “This is all there is,” he said, clicking through the initial screens. “I don’t have a secret librarian archive or anything.” He paused and looked up at me. “Oh.” He smiled. “The map.”

  Simon gestured for me to follow him behind the counter. I stood in the doorway of his office, a windowless room crammed with a desk and a filing cabinet, manila folders poking from the drawers and stacked precariously on top. He moved a pile of books from a folding chair. On top was a bound manuscript titled “The Lost Tribes of Israel: A Digital Map of History and Myth.”

  “What are you looking for?” he asked, sliding into the seat behind the computer.

  I sat down and studied my list, a performance only, the words standing at the ready. “The White Rebbe.”