by Dara Horn
“It will be.”
She shut down the car, skeptical, and he began to get out. She followed him. The underpass was dark but warm, smelling only of burnt rubber. The traffic overhead sounded like waves.
“Don’t you have an apartment?” she asked him.
“I have a feeling you aren’t about to invite me over for dinner,” Elazar said carefully, “and I’m not going to ask you why. Please, do me the same honor.”
She was silent. He walked behind the car and began pulling on a railing in the side wall between two columns of scaffolding. To her astonishment, a large barred gate followed him, sliding out of the wall and closing off the passageway with the car within it. He secured it closed behind them with some sort of key.
“I told you, your car is safe,” he said. He removed a flashlight from his coat pocket. “Follow me.” They walked a short distance on the gravel until they reached a high cinderblock wall with a small metal door in it. Again he took out a key, working the lock.
“How do you have these keys?” she asked.
“I know people,” he told her, “without them knowing me.”
She knew better than to ask more questions. A moment later he took her hand and brought her through the door.
Behind it was a large deep tunnel, about sixty feet wide, its unfinished walls and ceiling lined with pipes, its floor moist earth. Hand in hand they walked its stunted length. It stretched before them about three hundred feet, and then stopped abruptly at a dirt wall.
“A few years ago some government agency tried to dig a new train tunnel under the river to the city,” Elazar said, sliding English words between his own. “They started digging, but then someone didn’t want to pay, so they stopped digging. Supposedly they’re going to start digging again, but it will probably take years before everyone approves.” He paused, and turned to her. “Obviously it was much easier to build these things with kings and slaves.”
She looked around at the dark soulless space, at the pipes and steel panels and cinderblocks, and marveled. Everything about it was hideous, unnatural and untouched. Her body hummed with electric power.
“It was the best I could do,” he apologized. His face opened, an expression of pure kindness. “It’s so hard to find a place where a person can feel at home.”
“Elazar,” she said, and seized him.
She stripped away his coat, his shirt, his belt, casting off layer after layer of strange chemical fibers until she discovered him, the same tense warm breathing body as ever, and devoured him, filling herself with her only hope in the world of not being alone.
“SO WHERE ARE YOU going next?” he asked her one evening.
They had brought blankets and a hurricane lamp, camping out like children as they met in the aborted tunnel each week. The lack of human evidence in that industrial box—no chisel marks, no inscriptions, no fingerprints, no mistakes except the enormous mistake of the tunnel itself—was strangely comforting to both of them. Even after they put their clothes on, they still liked to linger there, lying together on the floor of their dark hole in the earth.
“Elazar, please. Don’t make me think about it.”
“You need to start thinking about it. I highly recommend Jerusalem.”
“Not so appealing right now,” she muttered. But her body filled with a thick and heavy longing. Her hands withered at her sides.
“Come home, Rachel. You won’t regret it. Don’t wait until you have to.”
“No one has to, Elazar. This place really is different from everywhere else,” she said. It was something her husbands and children had had drilled into their heads for the past hundred years as an article of faith: America, the eternal exception to everything. It reminded her of how she had once been taught about the center of the universe, the Temple, eternal home of an eternal God.
Elazar looked at her sadly, as though she were a teenager about to do something stupid. “That sounds nice,” he said. “I saw the idiots outside your store.”
She grimaced. The tiny group of protestors had returned, with remarkable regularity and imperviousness to logic. Some of the younger grandchildren occasionally argued with them, demanding to know why they were there, redirecting them to the Bukharian guy, making daily calls to the police—all to no avail. For the most part the family ignored them, following Rachel’s lead. After thousands of years it amazed her that she still didn’t know the right thing to do. “Exactly,” she said, “idiots. We don’t make decisions based on idiots.” But she had to force out the words. She could hardly think of a time when it hadn’t started this way, with people yelling outside her store.
“Incorrect. We always make decisions based on idiots,” Elazar said, switching in and out of English. “Idiots are the prime factors in our decision-making process. I should have paid a lot more attention to idiots the last time around.”
“There are only seven idiots,” she muttered. It was as if she were apologizing. “You haven’t been living here, so you don’t know. It’s not a problem.”
“Right now it isn’t,” Elazar agreed. “You definitely have at least another century or two here until it is. That’s a nice long time for some people. Just not for you.”
“Elazar, you are the most pessimistic person I’ve ever met,” she announced.
“I disagree. I’m a very optimistic person. One day the Messiah will come, and then my father will come back from the dead, and he and I will go back to slaughtering goats. I believe with perfect faith that I’ll live to see that day. See how optimistic I am?”
“There’s no shortage of idiots where you are,” Rachel said. “In any case, you must have a wife there, right? You’re never long without a wife. And children too. I know you, Elazar. You’re not a person who can be alone.”
Elazar frowned. “In general you are correct. But at the moment none of those things apply. I recently died in Gaza.”
The tunnel dripped idly, the air heavy and damp. She had so many questions for him, but she already knew that she did not want his answers. There was only one thing she needed to know, and she could ignore it no longer. She entered the subject sideways, using hidden keys.
“And now you’re doing—what is it? Making money out of computer code? How did you even learn computer code?”
A stupid question, of course. Everything in the world was learnable—languages, professions, technologies, skills that didn’t yet exist. The only reason that curious and intelligent people didn’t master it all was a simple lack of time. But Elazar’s answer still surprised her.
“Programming is the most familiar thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “Everything is about step-by-step instructions, with conditionals built in and no room for error.” He switched languages again, breaking into her father’s verse-chant: “For one who is exposed to a dead body, locate a red heifer without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid. If the heifer has been blemished or yoked, it may not be used. If the heifer is unblemished and unyoked, slaughter it in the priest’s presence. Sprinkle its blood seven times toward the front of the sanctum . . .” He broke off the chant. “Honestly, coding is the same thing. Just with less blood.”
The mention of blood sent a chill through her skin. The thought she had been avoiding now bored its way into her mind. She sat up and faced him. “What are you doing with Rocky?” she asked.
“Just helping a friend.”
She glanced around the empty industrial tunnel and heard Rocky’s voice in her head, with a strange metallic clarity: A photo of me holding my photo ID. She stared at Elazar. “You want to steal his identity.”
Elazar sat up beside her. His eyebrows rose along with him. “Stealing identities really isn’t something you can do with this system, unfortunately,” he said. “The whole beauty of it is that everyone is anonymous.”
Rachel looked around at the hideous tunnel and felt an old fear. She kept talking, to hide it. “He told me he got into it because his computer was ransomed three months ag
o. He assumed it was someone hired by his ex-wife. I’m thinking it wasn’t.”
Elazar sighed. “You really need to learn to let your children grow up, Rachel. Let them make their own mistakes. Like you did in Hamburg.”
“I’m serious, Elazar.” The anger rose, hot and shimmering and horribly familiar.
“How many children did you have that time? Twelve, right? Each one parked in a different city of the Hanseatic League, with a different branch of the business, your own little empire. Except for that one son who wanted to do things his own way. As I recall, he nearly ran the whole enterprise into the ground.”
“Fuck off, Elazar.” English was one of her favorite languages—the least poetic, the one where insults required no imagination at all.
Elazar seemed not to be listening. “Do you remember when he got a new influx of capital, the investor who came in at just the right moment and made a deal with him in Rotterdam, to save all of you from bankruptcy? A gift from on high, your husband called it, even if the incompetent son took the credit.”
Rachel ignored him. “You’re going to kill him and make it look natural, like a heart attack or a suicide, and then help yourself to his social security number. Or not even that. Maybe you’d kill him outright and then just sit through a prison sentence.”
Now he was listening. “I want to point out that a few minutes ago, you called me a pessimist. Someone who expects the worst.”
“Yes, I did. Because you are.”
“But you’re the one who now thinks that I’m about to murder your son.”
“Is that so impossible? Is that something you’ve never done before?”
He stared at her, with palpable pain. She looked at him, then looked around the tunnel, their tunnel, their filthy, abandoned tunnel, their tunnel that led nowhere. Rage animated her, as it always had.
“Why are you here, Elazar? It isn’t only because of me. You know I’m not going to stay with you.”
Elazar cringed as though she had struck him. The color left his face. When he spoke, his voice was low and small, sorrow distilled into sound.
“Maybe it’s still worth it to me, even if it doesn’t last forever,” he said. “Maybe you’re still worth it to me. Maybe you’re the only thing worth it to me.”
His voice stirred something within her, something she had forgotten was there. But she steeled herself. “I know you, Elazar. That can’t be all. You want something more.”
Now he lifted his face to hers, stricken. “You think I would kill your child? Why in the world would I want to do that? Rachel, what are you doing to me?”
“You’ve killed all of my children,” she seethed.
“I did the opposite,” he said. “The only reason I’m here is because I wanted to help your child. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, from the very beginning. I’m not a monster, Rachel. I’m just a man who understands you better than anyone else in the world. Perhaps even including God.”
IT WAS AFTER ANTIOCH, about three hundred years in, that she discovered the horrible truth about herself and Elazar. Three hundred years in—which included five cities, six husbands, seventeen children, and five of her own deaths. The Romans, who had flayed her sixth and seventh sons alive for teaching Torah, had recently been replaced by people she thought of as new Romans, people who used the same roads and tax systems and plumbing and only differed in their execution methods. They had protested outside her ink and parchment shop in Antioch and finally torched the synagogue, along with her and many others, including her husband and children. She had woken up on the beach outside of Cilicia shortly before dawn, still wearing her old clothes, her face and skin as soft as a newborn baby’s. In a rare coincidence, Elazar, his face also new, was lying beside her. She had never been happier to see him.
“Elazar,” she whispered.
He hadn’t woken yet, his mind still working its way from one life to another. He lay on his back in the sand under the dim light of a slowly brightening sky, still dressed in a filthy robe, surf rolling beyond his bare pale feet. His beard was grown in the way it was when they first met, centuries ago, a sparse boy’s beard that barely covered his soft cheeks. She touched his face, surprised, again, to find herself elated, a thrum of beauty running through her renewed body, in rhythm with the rush of the ocean behind her, the steady eternal power of water wearing away land. The tide was coming in.
“Elazar.”
He stirred, then awoke and bolted upright, jolted out of a nightmare. He let out a frightened, agonizing moan, his mind still inside the flames.
“Elazar, it’s over,” she said softly.
“Over,” he whimpered, like a little boy, without registering her presence. She watched as his eyes focused on the waves, then on the shore, dragging his fingertips across the soft damp sand. He carefully raised a hand before his eyes and moved his fingers one by one until his jaw went slack with disappointment. He shook his hands violently in the air, willing his body away. Then he saw her.
“Rachel!”
He grabbed her, clutching her like a drowning man, kissing her as if only her mouth could quench his burnt body’s thirst. She burned with thirst too, and kissed and kissed him until she collapsed on his shoulder, too worn to move or think. They listened to the waves until Elazar spoke.
“Each time I hope,” he said, still holding her. “Every time I burn, I get through the pain by thinking that maybe this time will be different. Just now I opened my eyes and saw the sky and the sea, and I thought, here I am, finally, freed beyond the borders of this world. I don’t know how many times I’ll burn before I give up that hope. But you’re more practical than I ever was. You probably don’t even think of it anymore.”
“I do,” Rachel said quietly. “Sometimes I walk around for days still hoping. I wake up and wander through whatever desert or valley I’ve woken in and I tell myself, This is a test, I’m about to reach the gate of judgment, I just need to find the gate. I just need to walk a bit farther and I’ll find the entrance to the next world, and someone will let me in.” She inhaled salted air, her throat still burning. “And then I walk and walk and walk until the sun sets and rises again, and all that time I pretend that the earth beneath my feet isn’t real. I only give up when the thirst and hunger take me. I suppose that’s why we still feel them, the hunger and the thirst and the pain. To remind us.”
He stroked her thick new hair and sighed, his breath soaked with sorrow. The weight of his hand on her hair comforted her more than she knew possible.
“What will you do now?” he asked. He avoided her eyes.
She, too, looked away. “Go back to Antioch, I think,” she said. “My mother-in-law might still be there. And my husband’s brother. He was on his way back from Damascus, so he’s definitely alive. When they see I’ve survived, he’ll marry me. In fact, I owe it to my husband, may his memory be a blessing.” But already she knew she wouldn’t go back.
Elazar stared at her. To her astonishment, his face was wide with pain. “Go back to Antioch?” he cried, his voice high with disbelief. “Are you insane? There’s nothing left in Antioch now. It will take fifty years to rebuild, and by then everyone but us will be dead again. You know it and so do I.”
“Then I’ll go to Sura in Babylonia. My husband had another brother at the academy there.” She spoke as though mumbling to herself, as she usually did on those days when she awakened alone—working through options, figuring out what was left, what would hurt the least.
“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel—”
His voice rose and fell with the waves. In each repetition she imagined hearing a different man saying her name, a different husband or son. But now she could only hear that voice from the tunnel, the one that could see her light, the one that told her, long ago, that she was almost there.
“Why are you still fighting me, Rachel? Why do you keep marrying everyone but me?”
She shook her head, looking down at the sand. “Don’t make me explain it, Elazar.”
El
azar snorted. The noise took her by surprise, a catch in her throat. “That can’t be why. I know he meant nothing to you.”
“He was my husband.”
“According to the scrolls.”
The words stung. Suddenly she was a girl in her father’s house again, running out the door with her father’s documents, hair flying in the wind, about to be caught and bound. She steeled herself. “It doesn’t matter whether he meant anything to me or not,” she said. “He was an innocent person, and you weren’t. I can’t trust you, Elazar.”
He took her hand in his. She let him, feeling the grit of sand beneath her legs with her soft new skin. How beautiful it was, not to be alone!
“I sinned, Rachel. I know it. I confess it. But now I’ve wandered for so long, and if I ever sinned, it was only for you. Rachel, it’s been so many years. Can’t you forgive me?”
She looked down at his fingers, then up at his face—the same face, always, as the rest of the world shifted and changed and burned and disappeared.
“Marry me, Rachel. I’ve waited for you for three hundred years. You’re the only thing in the world that matters to me.”
She said yes.
To her surprise Elazar wanted an actual wedding. The community in Cilicia was happy to provide for the two orphaned refugees, especially a young virgin marrying a descendant of the priests; there had been an epidemic in the city, and such a wedding could only bring good fortune to all who rejoiced in it. At Rachel’s many weddings she had often missed her parents, even though the only wedding of hers that her parents had attended, her marriage to Zakkai, was the most miserable of all. At the other weddings, she always looked around at her young groom’s young parents, his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and everyone else as she stood hennaed and veiled and battered on all sides by a relentless phalanx of other people’s love, and each time, smothered in light and music, she endured a sudden and debilitating sorrow—aware, as she rarely was on ordinary days, of the bottomless void into which she had plunged, forever a girl falling through darkness, alone. But that night in Cilicia, she looked silently at Elazar’s fresh and solemn face amid hundreds of oil lamps carried by strangers, and an unfamiliar wedding feeling rose up within her: pure, incandescent joy. Like a bride—was she really a bride?—she stood in awe of her new husband’s radiance, watched the dancing strangers swirling around her through the night, and saw a boundless future.