by Dara Horn
“My God, my God, my God, Elazar!” she gasped, after she had explained it as best she could. She wondered briefly if Elazar understood, then knew that was foolish. Elazar always understood. “Elazar, what are the odds that my granddaughter is the one doing this research? My granddaughter, of all the people in the entire world?”
“The odds of that are exactly one hundred percent,” Elazar said. He took her hands in his, pulling her down to the dirty floor. The damp air between them comforted her. “Eventually everything will happen to us. You know that, Rachel. Your job is to never be surprised.”
Rachel felt her breathing slow as his hands warmed hers. She said, “No, my job is to keep her from dying.”
“Good luck with that,” Elazar smirked.
“I don’t mean from dying someday. I mean—I mean from knowing. You know exactly what I mean, Elazar.”
Elazar knew.
A century and a half earlier, as they lay naked together one evening in fading lamplight, newly and briefly together once more, she had told him about the first Hannah—the angry Hannah, the Hannah she had killed. He had stared at her, horrified. Long and terrible moments passed before he could speak.
I killed three of my sons, he finally said that night. The same way.
She had looked at him, washed with pain.
The first time was in Byzantium, he said. I needed to show him. You know what that’s like, needing to show them. I had held back so many times. But that night I tried to show him, just like you did, with fire. And he—he—
She stopped him. You don’t have to tell me, she said. It was an accident, Elazar.
I thought that, too, Elazar said. I told myself that for hundreds of years. But then it happened again recently. Only eighty years ago. With a pistol.
A pistol? She had tried a gun once herself, one night when a drunk army officer had passed out in her tavern near Krakow. She took his revolver out to the empty alley behind the tavern, checked the loaded bullets, and put the barrel in her mouth, pointing up toward her brain. She felt like one of her own little boys, shouting “Bang.” The sound was deafening, and there was a great deal of blood. But by the time the neighbors came out to see what had happened, she was already back inside, her bloody shirt and headscarf changed, and the gun back in the drunk man’s holster.
A pistol would do nothing to you, Rachel pointed out. You might not even wake up somewhere else.
Exactly. But it would prove something to him, Elazar said. His voice had dropped. Or at least that’s what I thought. I told him beforehand. Of course he didn’t believe me. I made him promise to watch while I proved it. But he—it was as if he couldn’t. He wrestled the gun out of my hands, and when I tried to take it back from him, he fell, and the latch was loose, and—
Elazar swallowed, blinking. It was an accident, I told myself over and over that it was an accident, he continued. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened in Byzantium. And in Spain, in Cordoba. Especially in Cordoba, he said. In Cordoba it happened differently, but the ending was the same.
Rachel’s skin crawled. What happened? she made herself ask.
I decided to come back, he said. Just one time. Just once.
Rachel thought of all the times she had considered coming back—to burn and return, not merely to see what had become of those she had left behind, but to reveal herself to them, to prove it. But there had always been a reason to leave, some terrible reason to give her children the freedom of her death. And all that returning would have given her, in the end, was the opportunity to see more of her children die. The deepest truth was that she had never wanted to come back. But she wasn’t Elazar.
I had a reason, he said, as if expecting her to object. Rachel didn’t object.
I had been burned at the stake there by the Inquisition, he began. It was a public event, in front of a crowd. It’s amazing how much crowds enjoy that sort of thing.
Rachel nodded. She knew.
They had my son right beside me, and they would have burned him too, except that he agreed to pray to their god, or whatever it was they wanted then. He was smart, a scribe, like your father, Elazar said. He had consulted with scholars about it, about whether it was better to be martyred or to simply pretend. He had the idea that he could fake it.
He sounds like you, Rachel said with a smile.
But he saw that I had chosen to burn instead of convert, Elazar said. I could see in his face how betrayed he felt. I thought, he’s going to live his life thinking I’m angry at him, or that he disappointed me. I just wanted to spare him that.
I woke up in another part of the country; it took me weeks to come home. I went to his house where he was living with his family. It was nighttime. I woke him up, and he was stunned. He kept screaming, “Papa, papa!” like he was a child. I wanted to explain everything to him, but he was hardly awake more than a moment when four soldiers and an Inquisitor burst into the room. It was a walled city, I had entered just before the gates closed at dusk, and someone had recognized me at the gate and followed me. They said it was witchcraft, that I was a devil, they arrested all of us—me, my son, his whole family—and they burned us all alive, though this time it was a private burning, just before the soldiers and the priest. Then I had nothing, there was nothing left to lose. I don’t know what you would have done then.
The same thing we always do, Rachel said softly.
That time I couldn’t, Elazar said. I had to go back and kill those soldiers and that priest.
Rachel heard the anger in Elazar’s voice, the familiar anger, the fire within him that was so much more powerful than hers. In centuries she had never dreamed of killing.
I came back to the city again, this time just looking for those five men. But when I finally arrived, I learned that the priest and the soldiers’ company had left on a campaign against the Moors, a battle the Moors won. They never came back. And then in the city there was a plague, bodies piled in the streets. Rachel, are you listening?
Rachel was listening, present, witnessing.
All of these things by themselves, they mean nothing, right? Elazar tried. His voice caught, and she heard the boy within him. Accidents, those times with the fire and the gun. And in Cordoba it wasn’t even my fault, was it? All three of them, those three sons, their deaths were just coincidental disasters. It’s just my restlessness that makes each son remind me of the others. When you live like we do, everything seems connected to everything else, everything reminds you of something.
And everyone reminds you of someone, Rachel thought.
I’ve told myself that it all meant nothing, for hundreds of years. Just three dead sons out of so many others, three coincidences, three moments of meaningless misfortune, Elazar said. But I didn’t know it had also happened to you.
Suddenly the full veil of horror lifted as Rachel understood.
They can’t see it, she whispered. She swallowed wonder. We can tell them all we want, but they can’t see it. It’s like the verse my father copied: No man shall see me and live.
Elazar snorted, a shadow of the noise she remembered hearing from him long ago. You’re not God, he said.
But I’m not human either, she told him. Not anymore. And neither are you.
Now Elazar looked at her, his eyes in the industrial tunnel hardened into steel. His voice was cold.
“You need to leave them,” Elazar said. “Immediately. Don’t say goodbye.”
CHAPTER
10
DO UNTO OTHERS
. . .
What does a mother think of when she thinks of her first child—especially a child who has grown up, even grown old? For a first child is more than just a child. Other children get to be blessings, gifts, burdens, even, occasionally, people. But a first child is something else: a witness, an opportunity and, above all, a test.
Does she imagine that child as he once was, a small soft animal sucking at her breast, or red-faced and screaming and spewing hot tears, or curled up in his cra
dle like a baby bird enfolded in an egg? Does she imagine him as a boy, hunched over a scroll with a finger resting on a letter, his dark curly hair hanging over his eyes like a curtain between him and the world? Does she imagine him taller, head cocked back, smirking as he challenges the grownups with his new deep voice? Does she imagine him bald, with sagging jowls, surrounded by his devoted students, his voice rough and worn as he teaches, heavy eyebrows above eyes that still burn with an inner fire? Are each of those people hidden inside the old man whose body lies in a coffin, each previous person contained within the one that succeeded it like nesting sarcophagi, so that she might open each lid and find each person’s predecessor, the person who died before he did? Does she have the imagination to think of him beyond the body that contained him, to think of some essence of the person that exists beyond the baby, the boy, the man, the corpse?
Or does she not think of him at all, but of herself, and wonder whether she passed the test?
WITNESSING YOCHANAN’S RECOVERY was like watching time flow backward, dry bones restored to life. First the little boy’s breathing calmed; then he swallowed water, then goat’s milk, then a bit of porridge, then bread. In days the sores on his skin healed; then his color returned. In a week Rachel held his hands as he shakily rose to his feet, and Rachel felt the power flowing from her body into his. Within a month Yochanan was singing his grandfather’s verses again as he ran away from her, forcing her to chase him through the streets as he screeched nonsensically: “I place before you the blessing and THE CURSE, THE CURSE, THE CURSE!” She cursed him, laughed at him, immersed herself in the ritual bath of cold rainwater, her naked skin shocked and shivering and alive as her shorn head broke through the water’s surface. Rivers of living water ran down her back. Zakkai went to the Temple and bowed before God, offering sacrifice after sacrifice of thanksgiving. Rachel went to the Temple and delivered a blank scroll for the high priest’s son. At sunset she raced to the tunnel, her bare feet dancing through rushing water as she climbed further into the mountain. She imagined throwing herself into his arms, joy overflowing. But when Elazar arrived, she held her breath.
She had forgotten about his shaven head. He came around the tunnel’s corner with his beard still sparse, his head covered with a weak shadow of dark down. In the dim light of his lamp, she saw his bare skull and touched her fingers to the thin skin of her own shorn scalp. A dense silence hung suspended between them, the pulse of the world interrupted. Rachel looked at Elazar and saw not her lover but a living corpse.
“He—he survived,” Rachel whispered, when she finally spoke. “Yochanan is alive. God answered our prayers.”
Elazar looked at her, unsmiling. “Not prayers,” he said. “Vows.”
Was there a difference? She thought of the smell of her own burning hair. “Did you—did you vow?” she asked.
Now Elazar smiled. His smile should have restored her joy, but his face in his shaven head seemed drained of its old exuberance. “Yes. I gave up my own death. Or some nonsense like that.”
“It isn’t nonsense. Yochanan recovered!” Wasn’t that all that mattered?
Elazar sighed, a heavy sigh, like an old man’s. “Yes, I know. And now I have an eternal bond with God.” The light from Elazar’s lamp shifted. Rachel glanced down and saw that his hands were trembling. His eyes in his deadened face met hers. “I don’t want an eternal bond with God. I want an eternal bond with you.”
She took his open hand in hers, and tried to recover the happiness she had brought in with her. “You have one. You saved our child,” she said. Why didn’t it seem like enough? “He’ll outlive us one day,” she added. The vow she had made didn’t cross her mind; it was like the ground a hundred cubits above them, unreal and irrelevant. She looked at Elazar and imagined: she could bring Yochanan to the tunnel and the three of them could flee to the countryside together; they could raise Yochanan there and even have more children; they could embrace this blessing that they had been given; they could—
“I’m getting married, Rachel.”
She leaned back against the tunnel’s wall. This shouldn’t have hurt; as Yochanan recovered, she had promised herself that she ought to feel nothing but gratitude, to be immune from any pain but death. Elazar kept talking. “My father told me about it that day, right after you made your vow and right before I made mine. She’s the daughter of his deputy. I turned down every girl he proposed for the past two years, but this time he knew I couldn’t refuse him. He wouldn’t have given me the vow.” He paused, and swallowed damp air. “I thought it was worth it.”
Rachel did not cry. How could she cry, when her son was alive? “It was,” she agreed.
“I know we can’t meet here again,” Elazar said.
Rachel opened her mouth to argue, but could think of nothing to say. She thought of her fantasy of flight and knew how impossible it was. The two of them only made sense here, in a vein within the earth.
Then Elazar grinned. “But if what we vowed is really true, then anything can happen,” he said. “Your marriage won’t last forever, and mine won’t either, but maybe we will.”
Rachel laughed, to hide her fear. In the days since the vow she hadn’t thought about what it meant. She had thought only of Yochanan, of Yochanan eating and walking and singing, of Yochanan living. But there was an eagerness in Elazar’s gaunt face that frightened her. And now he was waiting for her answer.
“Please don’t do this to me, Elazar,” she said. Her voice shivered along with the water at her feet. “You might think it’s nice to hope and dream, but it isn’t. You’re only hurting both of us. You haven’t been married yet, so you don’t know.” She thought of Zakkai, of his earnestness, his innocence, of how he waited for her at home, of how he held Yochanan on his knees, of how, when he peeled off her robes and touched her in the dark, her body convulsed with a humiliating, sickening pity. “Marriages do last forever,” she said, and stared down at the water running between her feet. “You know and I know my husband will never divorce me. Even if he did, priests can’t marry divorced women. And how would you ever divorce your wife, with your fathers both priests, unless you had a reason? You would have to wait until your fathers died.” She looked back at him, at the ruin he had become. “Please, Elazar. Don’t make impossible promises. You’ve given me my life’s greatest blessing. You saved Yochanan. It’s enough.” But it wasn’t enough.
“I thought of a way to save our child, and it worked,” Elazar continued. His voice was louder now. “That means I can think of a way to save us too. It may take me a long time, but I will, as soon as I can.”
Rachel managed to hold back her body, to release his warm thin hand. “Thank you for Yochanan,” she said simply. And then she turned around.
She was relieved when Elazar did not follow her. But as she turned the corner into the darkness, she heard his voice again. “I’ll come back for you,” he called behind her. “Wait for me.”
She did not wait for him. Instead she returned to the city, to her parents, to her husband, to her child, to scrolls and parchments and ink. She taught herself, slowly, day by day, to live with incompleteness and ambivalence, to face each incomplete and ambivalent day not with certainty but with wisdom. And she taught her son to become a sage.
WHEN YOCHANAN WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, while Zakkai sat recording the judgments of the High Court, in the heat of the day, Rachel sat with the boy on the roof of their house and taught him what it means to read.
“You’re very good at reading,” she told him. She was carding wool, and her little boy had an open scroll in his lap. He had his grandfather’s dark eyes, but they were half closed now; his body drooped over the scroll. “I know you’ve been reading for years.”
“Reading is boring,” Yochanan informed her. The roof was hot, and the boy was impatient. Already he was tugging on a lock of his dark hair, and edging away from her. “There’s no reason to read, because I memorized all the words already.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “B
ut today I want to see if you can read the words between the words.”
She had thought he would be curious, and was hurt when he laughed. He pointed at the scroll on his knees. “You mean the empty spaces?”
She drew in her breath, fighting disappointment. “There are thousands of words between the words,” she said. “And even if all the skies were parchment and all the seas ink, no scribe could ever record them.”
“That’s stupid,” seven-year-old Yochanan announced. “I can already read all the words. I don’t even have to look at them.” He launched into his grandfather’s chant: “For in six days God made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all it contains, and . . .” He was a boy who loved rituals, who loved answers, who loved being right. He would have made an excellent priest.
Rachel put down the wool, and rested her hand on his. The boy stopped. “Tell me again, Yochanan,” she said. “How long did it take God to create the world?”
“Six days,” Yochanan said, and then returned to the chant, from a different verse this time: “Six days shall you labor and do all your work, and on the seventh day—”
She cut him off. “And when was the sun created?”
He answered her, still in the chant: “And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.” He beamed at her.
“So how long were the first three days?” Rachel asked.
Yochanan hesitated. He narrowed his eyes, and she could see him searching for the answer. He still thought there was an answer. “Three days long,” he said in his high little boy’s voice.
“But if there was no sun, then how long was each day?”
He snorted. The noise caught in her ear, a tiny rip in the curtain separating reality from dream. “The same as a day with a sun, except with no sun.”