The Angel of Losses

by Stephanie Feldman

  If I was the passionate one, then Holly was the cheerful one, the easy one. I didn’t know if my parents had a favorite, but I always thought that if they did, it was she. But that was before she had absorbed Nathan’s self-righteousness, grown withholding, pretending she had not been the one who pushed us away, waiting with an innocent look for us to meet her in her world. Well, she had gotten her wish, and I was going to meet her there now.

  The old man laughed at my anger. He did sound like Grandpa, and he looked like him too. The resemblance wasn’t my imagination. “You hold him in such regard,” he said, raising his hands in a questioning wonder. “Him. After what he did.”

  “He only wanted to protect us,” I said, repeating what he had told me in his dreams as if I believed it too. I was a convincing liar, I thought, my frustration transmuting into sincere defense. I wouldn’t allow this man to pass judgment on my grandfather.

  He laughed again. “Look at you. You know everything, do you? Just like that poor sick baby’s father.” He leaned toward me. “Did he tell you what he plans to do? What the Angel of Losses has promised him?”

  His words were met with the susurrus of the machinery, the faint crackle of the PA system like a distant bonfire. The angel was here. Holly had told me she heard Nathan speaking with a teacher late at night—the old man, I had thought, but I was wrong. How arrogant to think I was the only one the angel would come for.

  “Grandpa told me not to trust you,” I said.

  “And will you listen to him? Now that you know he was a liar? A liar just like you, Marjorie.” His voice was low and solid, unassailable, a wall that cannot be brought down, a border that cannot be crossed. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a marbled notebook. “I have some magic left. Look what I conjured with it. Wouldn’t you like to know the truth? Wouldn’t you like to know about Josef?”

  Yes, I thought. Yes.

  “A sad story. I’ve forgotten many things, but I still remember him.”

  The boy in the Russian woods was twinned by the ghost child from Grandpa’s final bedtime story, the murdered boy who had frightened Holly. Don’t make my sin be for nothing.

  “I remember his cough. A terrible sound,” the old man continued. “Like death itself.”

  “You shouldn’t say that word in here,” I hissed, and his expression turned to amusement.

  “Growing superstitious, are you?” He rose from his seat—easily, it seemed, after how he leaned on the nurse—and came to stand beside me. I felt uneasy, like the weather was changing or I was standing too close to power lines. I remembered Grandpa’s last living words to me. He’s coming for me. Then he’s coming for you.

  The old man put his hand, heavy and warm, on my shoulder.

  “Here is your little book.” He held it in front of me. “Awful handwriting for a descendant of mine. The world is lucky the art has not died out entirely—lucky to have a professional like your sister.”

  I snatched the notebook out of his hand.

  “You think you’re the White Rebbe,” I said.

  “Is that what I think?” he challenged, mocking my effort to have it both ways, a miraculous cure whose source could remain a simple fairy tale, a dime-store book on a basement shelf.

  “You don’t frighten me,” I said. “Solomon.”

  He withdrew his hand from my shoulder.

  “Perhaps Eli was right to hate me,” he said, the cruelty gone from his voice. “I took my burden out of selfishness, not out of duty—and I will give it up for the same reasons. It should be you, but in truth, I do not care if the boy lives or dies, and I do not care if the boy’s father lives or dies. All I care about is myself. But perhaps, once you read this, you will give me what I want—perhaps you shall all live yet.” His mouth drew into a slight smile. “Yes, perhaps you shall live a very long life indeed.”

  I don’t know how long I cradled Eli against my chest after the old man left. It felt like hours, but even so, when my mother arrived, I wasn’t ready to let him go. I had to though. I had to see what was in the third notebook.

  The White Rebbe and the Ghetto

  ELI WAS TWELVE THE MORNING THE GERMANS CAME TO his village. He was helping his mother gather eggs, while his father studied and his little brother, Josef, kicked a ball against the side of the house, ran to catch it, kicked it again. The roar of a car engine rolled through the sky like thunder. Then there was shouting, maybe a few streets away, and Eli’s mother dropped the hem of her apron and the eggs broke in the grass. She held his face in front of hers. Run, she whispered, and when he stepped back, she grabbed him again and kissed him roughly on each cheek before pushing him away, as if she never wanted to see him again, or as if she might not otherwise be able to let him go.

  Eli grabbed Josef’s hand, and together they ran into the woods. Eli looked over his shoulder once, twice. The third time he dared glance back, the distance was clotted with brush. They were deep in the woods. The boys came to a halt, bent and heaving in the crackling wilderness.

  Stop crying, Eli hissed. They’ll hear.

  But the demons will eat us, Josef whined. Josef was absentminded, fantasy-addled, prone to wandering away from the village, as if some iron deep inside him was repelled by safety, clean wells, warm stoves. Eli was charged with protecting his younger brother—small for his years, half Eli’s age and less than that in size, born after many years of prayers—and Eli had told him the woods were haunted to keep him from running into them, from getting lost or drowning in the creek or being bitten by a winter-starved wolf.

  A crack echoed in the distance—was it a deer, stepping on a branch? A hesitant bit of thunder? A gunshot? Eli led his brother farther into the woods. The movement would keep them warm. Soon Josef forgot his fears and played with a split branch taller than he was. He clutched it with both hands and struck a boulder. You will give us water! he cried, playacting Moses, pretending he had been commanded by the Lord.

  Shut up, Eli said. The demons will hear you.

  Josef’s little face turned white.

  Eli was ashamed of his impatience. He thought of himself as nearly a man, his brother as practically a baby. The body heat built by their trek was fading, sweat chilling on the skin. Come, Eli said, and gathered his brother beneath the wing of his coat. As they walked, Eli told Josef their favorite fairy tales about the White Rebbe. When he realized he was mimicking his father’s telling, his intonations, his phrasing, he paused and coughed to dislodge the ghost in his throat, and Josef patted him on the back until he settled into a trembling silence.

  Their parents never came to find them. No one did.

  Finally twilight arrived, bringing a sky grim as smoke, and they crept back toward the house. Chickens roamed the living room, their coop destroyed. Otherwise, the rooms were the same: the pots polished, the books carefully stacked, the beds made. The village streets were empty. For an instant, Eli believed his own stories of the haunted woods, believed that they had ventured into the land of the dead, and returned as ghosts to haunt the world in which they once lived.

  Their parents were gone. Everyone was gone.

  The brothers put on extra shirts and pants and set out for the capital, where they had family. Eli comforted Josef, whose fingers were like ice, who had gone quiet, who faltered on the road, wrapped in their father’s prayer shawl for warmth. Josef had never seen the city before. It’s like Jerusalem, Eli promised him. It’s filled with schools and libraries and temples, and there are no demons, only Jews.

  Their father had taken Eli with him just the year before. They had gone deep into the Jewish quarter, where the streets turned around one another like a snail shell, to visit their great-uncle the scribe, a man with pale blue eyes and curling white hair, whose home glowed from the single wick of a lamp, burning what must have been the miraculous oil of the Maccabees. The old man had been silent, cold, as if he had withdrawn deep within himself. He had frightened Eli, but there was nowhere else to go; he was their only family now.

&nbs
p; Soon Josef could go only a few steps without falling. Together they ventured beyond the road and lay in the grass, crackling with frost. Josef curled into himself until he was no bigger than a cat. Sleep, and in the morning we’ll be there, Eli lied. He believed they were still a day’s journey away. And yet, when morning came they saw men and horses on the road. The city was just over the hill. The earth had shifted beneath them while they slept. He did not wonder how. He was too grateful.

  Josef clutched his brother’s hand as they wandered through the streets. There were more people in the city than Josef imagined could live on the whole of the earth, all moving toward the quarter where the boys’ uncle lived. The people were huge—the men, women, and children all—and Eli realized that they too were dressed in multiple suits of clothing, coats opening to reveal other coats, buttons closing over more buttons, girls dragging a rainbow of hems across the cobblestones.

  See? Eli comforted Josef. So many Jews it’s as if we’re in the Promised Land. Josef wiped his nose on his cuff and said nothing. Eli stopped one of their fellow travelers, a boy who looked to be his age. Have you come from the countryside too? he asked.

  We come from the other side of the city, the stranger answered. But we must all live together now.

  For the rest of his years, Eli would maintain a vivid memory of these words, as if the boy he was in that moment still lived within him. For a shining instant, Eli believed they had joined a great pilgrimage, that they had found their nation and they all walked together toward redemption, instead of the real future that awaited them, the farthest exile of all. The brothers arrived in Vilna on the day the Jews were forced to leave their homes and move to the smallest corner of the city. Josef never saw the Jerusalem that their father had shown Eli—he only saw the ghetto.

  Like every new world, the ghetto came forth from chaos. Where hundreds once lived in close quarters, thousands now fought for space. Families lived in courtyards and open streets for days until they were able to build nests in other people’s homes, taking strangers’ blankets and dishes for their own use. The brothers watched the elderly gather in an abandoned bakery, lying on the floor, their only sustenance the hint of stale flour in the air.

  Unlike the others, however, the boys had a home waiting for them. Their uncle’s house was at the very end of a narrow alley, a single story attached to the tenements, its stoop crumbling and its door slanted.

  Eli knocked, waited, and knocked again. He wondered if his uncle had left, if he had died, if he had disappeared the moment their parents were taken, completing their orphaning. Finally, their uncle came to the door, an old man taller than their father, with eyes like blue glass and a white beard flecked with ink. He took them in and fed them bread and soup. Josef’s feet were swollen inside of his shoes, and when Eli finally pulled them free, they were brown with dried blood.

  The brothers slept beneath the kitchen table, huddled together beneath their father’s prayer shawl and Eli’s coat. The blanket their uncle had given them was riddled with moth holes—it was his only blanket. He said he hadn’t slept in years. The slow beat of their uncle pacing the cellar, where he kept his study, rose through the floorboards beneath them. Josef slept soundly.

  It didn’t take long—a week, maybe two—for the ghetto to resolve itself into a society. Though the pantry was bare, the old man always had a crust of bread for the brothers to share in the mornings before he turned them out into the streets. He expected them to occupy themselves during the day, greeting them in the evening with questions about the ghetto: Had there been a fire? He thought he smelled smoke. Was a storm coming? His joints ached.

  The brothers were forbidden from entering the cellar. The old man had demonstrated for them: You come to the door. You open it. Do not step inside it. Do not go so far as to see the first step. If you call me, I will hear you. He spent his days there, copying prayer books and mezuzot scrolls and marriage contracts, for as there was no shortage of people, there was no shortage of the desire to write homes and hopes and loves into existence.

  In the morning Eli delivered Josef to the ghetto school, where he would have children to play with and something to eat. Though their father would have insisted on years of further study, Eli decided that his own formal education was over. He continued on, past the courtyard where the Socialists gathered, the street corner where the Zionists met, and the alley where the Hasidim sang. When he saw a line of people winding around a small plaza, he joined the wait. They were offering bowls of horse meat—unclean, forbidden—and Eli didn’t hesitate to accept one. How easy it was to break a rule he had lived with his entire life. He swallowed his meal, and though the hunger that had clawed at his insides for days now slowed, he still felt empty.

  Arise! a voice cried. A man in a suit, with a bald head and a full brown beard, spoke in the center of the square. A small audience was seated before him, some on splintered chairs, some kneeling on the ground, men and a few women too. The man held a paper above his head, gesturing wildly as he spoke from memory. Arise and go now into the City of Slaughter! Into its courtyards, wind thy way. Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, he shouted. The splattered blood and dried brains of the dead!

  Quit shouting! yelled another man, invisible in the crowd. Stop shouting such terrible things!

  But the man didn’t stop. Pass over the shattered hearth whose charred stones reveal such wounds that no mending shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal. Is there a price for death? How shall that price be paid?

  Thank you, another man said, rising. I think that is a sufficient introduction. The man who had spoken like a prophet tipped his head and took his seat.

  And with that, the second man continued, I call to order this first meeting of the Artists’ Association of Ghetto 1. The people in the circle clapped. They sat straight in their chairs. They made themselves apart from the rest of the ghetto.

  The association met each day at the same kitchen, and Eli ate his unclean horse meat and listened to them. They delivered lectures on the importance of art, and on the works of painters and poets he had never heard of, and on arguments that unfamiliar critics made about these creators, and on one another’s opinions of these arguments. Little of it had meaning for Eli, but he enjoyed listening to their voices.

  One day he came across the bald man with the brown beard buying eggs from one of the Christian women who squeezed through the hole in the brick wall on Strashun Street. The man rubbed his thumb across the eggs in his palm. Eggshells are a great natural wonder, he said, like silk or stars. I never realized that until now.

  Are you a rabbi? Eli asked him.

  The man laughed. I’m an actor.

  Your speech was like Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, Eli said. The Lord opens the graves and breathes flesh onto the bones and brings our people to Israel.

  The actor looked troubled. That wasn’t the end of the poem—that was barely the beginning.

  How does it end? Eli asked.

  The actor cleared his throat. Rise, to the desert flee! The cup of affliction thither bear with thee! And send thy bitter cry into the storm!

  That night Eli couldn’t sleep. He left Josef wrapped in the prayer shawl—growing dark with dirt, like a shroud—and nudged the cellar door open. The landing glowed a soft gold, like the light of fireflies. He was not supposed to step beyond the threshold; he braced himself against the frame, leaned inside, and took his first forbidden glance at that top step. Uncle? he called quietly. Behind him, Josef shifted on the floor. Eli didn’t want to wake him. He crept down the stairs—down and down and down uncountable stairs.

  He found himself in a strange hall where the walls were made of books, rows and rows and rows of them, disappearing into darkness above his head. He brushed his fingers against them—the leather charged, like living skin. The hall was barely wider than the span of his shoulders. It veered to the right, and then the left; it made a sharp turn and doubled back, all the while the light growing stronger, warmer.

  Fin
ally Eli came to a small room lined with bookshelves. In the center stood a desk dwarfed by the open book atop it, the quill the length of a man’s arm, and a single candle that burned with the strength of a torch. Eli examined the exposed page. The handwriting was tiny, with archaic flourishes, but the letters were perfectly even, the lines perfectly straight. It appeared to be a list of names.

  I told you never to come down here, a voice said. His uncle emerged from the narrow hall to stand beside him.

  I couldn’t sleep, Eli said. He was unnerved by his uncle’s sudden appearance; he saw no nook or path that would have allowed him to enter behind the boy.

  The old man tugged the end of his beard and then pointed to a chair against the wall, nearly hidden between two stacks of books. Sit.

  Eli did. His uncle sat in the armchair behind the desk. Have you been called to the Torah yet? he asked Eli.

  No, but my father’s been helping me study.

  Your father is gone now, his uncle said, without any malice, without any sympathy.

  Eli swallowed his tears. He wanted to sound fearless, like an adult. What are you writing? he asked.

  There is a woman on Strashun Street, his uncle said. She is expecting, but she and her baby are ill. I’m inscribing their names in the Book of Life.

  Eli was shocked to hear the old man speak such blasphemy. Only the prophet Elijah can write our names in the Book of Life, he answered.

  There are many Books of Life. His uncle pointed at the volumes lining the walls. For a long time I would not write in them. But times are changing.

  When he returned upstairs, Josef was crying. Where did you go? he begged. He squeezed Eli tighter than Eli would have thought he had the strength for. He knew Josef’s stomach ached with hunger, and his shoulder blades stuck out of his back like folded wings. Why did you leave me? Josef cried.