by Dara Horn
“Why are you still here?” he asked.
He had closed the door behind them. Now he stood facing her in the hurricane lamp’s dim fluorescent gleam, brandishing a plasticized white envelope in one hand.
“What do you mean? You told me to come.”
Elazar let out an irritated grunt. “I mean, why are you still here, in this life? Why am I the one calling you here, instead of you calling me?” He waved the envelope, its white plastic shining in the lamplight. “I have everything you need to leave right here. You can go right away.”
“What’s the rush?” Rachel asked. She had forgotten, in the intervening century since they had last been together, how exasperating Elazar was, how controlling, how paranoid—or perhaps, she thought now, how anxious, how traumatized. She reached for him, but to her astonishment he stepped away from her. She followed him deeper into the tunnel, to a muddy patch beneath a spiderweb of black wires, along a wall oozing moisture and regret. They stood facing each other, equals.
“Rachel, I hope you’re joking. This is urgent. You cannot stay here. Not one more month, not one more week. If I could have made you leave yesterday I would have. You cannot wait.”
“Why? Because of Hannah?”
“Yes, because of Hannah. Because of this Hannah.”
He still liked to wound her; he enjoyed the power. Hannah after Hannah poured through Rachel’s mind, a cascade of anguish. She stepped closer, edging toward him until his back was against one of the tunnel’s grime-coated walls. She enjoyed the power too.
“That’s ridiculous, Elazar,” she retorted. “There’s nothing urgent about this at all. Even if we really believe it’s dangerous for her, scientific research takes years and years.”
“Not with money. And not with a discovery like this.”
Rachel tried to keep her voice even. “Elazar, I can’t leave now. There’s—there’s a situation I need to address.” Rocky rose in her imagination as the child he once was, a boy with a bloodied face and an endless future.
“The situation you need to address is your granddaughter’s imminent death.”
The words lacerated her. She swallowed, rallied. “Elazar, please. We don’t know that. We absolutely don’t know that.”
“We know that.”
Rachel glanced up, away from his angry eyes. Above his head hung a white sign with red gleaming letters: This work site has gone 0 days without an accident.
“We know that it’s happened before, yes,” she admitted. “But those other times, they—they were accidents, they were coincidences, they were guesses. They were meaningless.”
“They were consistent,” Elazar announced. His hands were at his sides now, the envelope pressed against his thigh. She could feel the energy in his hands, the tension in his chest, his body coiled like a spring. It still amazed her, how she felt his body in her own. “Rachel, we aren’t like other people. But we are like other people in this one respect: we don’t know everything either. Whatever’s gone wrong with us, or gone right with us, it seems eminently clear that other people knowing about us is very, very bad, even if we don’t know why. Though I don’t think it’s hard to guess why.”
“Why?”
Elazar breathed, a long thick breath, and said, “So no one will ever make the mistake of wanting it.”
“People already want it,” Rachel objected.
“That doesn’t matter. As long as they know for a fact that it’s impossible, that it doesn’t exist, they can dream about it until they die and it won’t change how they live.” Elazar’s voice was trembling. “But if it does exist, if we exist, if they find out for a fact that it’s possible for someone, even if only for the two of us—then suddenly no one’s life will matter anymore. Because then the entire goal of everyone’s life on earth will only be to attain this curse.”
Elazar was glaring at her, his face tight with fury. But Rachel recognized what was suppressed beneath it: a vast, unbridgeable pain. She took hold of his shaking shoulders and spoke to him like a mother. “Elazar, for just one moment in your endless life, can you stop prophesying doom?”
Elazar ground his teeth. “I’ve had at least eighteen moments in my life when I wasn’t prophesying doom,” he said. “And in at least fourteen of those, I was wrong.”
Rachel held him, stroking his neck as though he were a child. “Maybe you’re wrong again,” she said, with preternatural cheer. “It might not work the way we think. It’s just as you said. We really don’t know. We only—”
He jerked away from her. “So you’re going to risk this child’s life, just to prove a point?”
Rachel stood bereft, wordless.
“I didn’t think so,” he said. He sank to the floor against the wall, laying the envelope beside the lamp. Without thinking she followed him down, sinking with him into the earth. For a moment they were silent, the air thick with dripping rainwater and ghosts. Then Elazar turned to her and grinned.
“Beginning again is easier now than it used to be,” he remarked, nudging her back to life. “You might even like it.”
Everything that maddened her about Elazar still maddened her. That was oddly comforting. “You’ve been telling me over and over how much harder it is,” she said.
“To get started, yes,” he explained. “Much harder. You need all kinds of documents. You need to forge things. You need to lie. But you always needed to lie. The good part that’s different is that now you can keep up with everyone you leave behind.”
“What do you mean, keep up with them?”
Elazar smiled again, and sat up against the wall. “Tell me this, Rachel. Is it really true that you never saw your children again after leaving them? That you never even tried to see them again? You’ve said that before, but I never believed you.”
Rachel thought. Surveying her memory took time, but Elazar was patient. “It’s true, I never did,” she said. “Once or twice it happened by accident.”
“And didn’t you try to talk to them when it did?”
“One time I tried,” she answered. The tunnel’s ugliness was aggressive, dank industrial incense wafting through rusted metal. How hideous the world had become, Rachel thought, a carrying case for the ugliest of memories. “I was at an airport baggage claim, watching the suitcases going around, when I saw one with my son’s name on it,” she confided. “A son I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years.”
Elazar was still grinning. “Tell me you didn’t run after that suitcase, and I will never ever believe you.”
Rachel tried to smile back, but couldn’t. “I did,” she admitted. “That time I did. I followed that suitcase all the way around that carousel to the other side, and I saw him. I still regret it.”
“How could you regret that?”
“He was an old man,” Rachel said softly. “Not just an old man. He was in a wheelchair, being pushed by a woman I didn’t recognize—maybe a second wife? Or an aide? I don’t know. I stood right in front of him to make sure it was him. It was. The eyes were his, exactly like my father’s. But he didn’t look back at me. He was just gazing into space, an empty shell. I told him that I loved him. Then I ran away before the wife could call the security guards.” Rachel bit her lip. “Elazar, I don’t want this. I don’t.”
Elazar shook his head. “You can’t only think about endings,” he said. “There’s no point to that. Endings are something you and I will never understand.” He took her hand in his, and the thrum of his skin warmed hers. “There must have been other times when you heard things about someone you left behind, good things, beginnings.”
“Of course,” she said. She remembered subscribing to synagogue newsletters in New York years ago, searching for great-grandchildren’s birth announcements. Occasionally she spotted one, though she couldn’t always be sure. Then there were the officially successful children, the ones whose stories reached her wherever she went. There was the daughter in Neapolis who, at thirteen, had the bizarre idea of tying moldy bread to her brother’s leg where he h
ad gashed it at the foundry. We want the skin to grow back, Mama, she had explained, and everything grows on old bread, so isn’t it worth trying? It certainly can’t hurt! Decades later in Rome, busy with new children, Rachel still heard legends about the woman healer of Neapolis, the miracle worker people traveled for days to see, the one who could cure any illness and who twice brought people back from the dead in the marketplace by breathing into their mouths and pumping their hearts for them with her hands. Rachel’s thirty-fourth son wrote a monumental code of religious law whose manuscript copies soon appeared in every community from Babylonia to France; whenever she heard someone cite it during a long sabbath meal, the world gleamed with unearthly light. For decades Rachel bought multiple copies of the novels written by her sixty-third son, giving them as gifts to his half-siblings. She listened to recordings of concertos played by another daughter, a violinist, until the wax cylinders were damaged beyond repair. Rachel often fantasized that death meant encountering answers, a revelation of the purpose of being alive. But instead she had these smaller revelations, moments when the curtain between the potential and the actual was suddenly pulled back, bathing the world in light. Those moments were fleeting, incremental. In the congregational newsletters where she hunted for births, she more often recognized the names in the obituaries. The wax cylinders wore away, leaving only grooves in her mind. But the grooves in her mind remained, waiting to be played again. She never forgot a child.
“That part, the good part—that’s the part that’s gotten easier,” Elazar was saying. “Obscenely easy, in fact. You used to hear about your children through other people three times removed, or read about them in newspapers, or hunt down rumors. But now there’s no need for that. Now you disappear, you begin again, you create a few new identities online—and before you know it, you’re tracking down your children. I’m not talking about spotting a few famous ones in the news. I’m talking about being able to follow everything all of them do, forever. You can see where they’re living, who they married, watch their children taking their first steps. You can see what they ate for lunch. And if you’re very, very, very careful, you can even still tell them what to eat, or who to marry.” He smiled again, his eyes gleaming.
“That’s terrifying,” Rachel said.
“Why?” he asked.
“The responsibility is terrifying,” she told him. “And it’s also a lie.”
“Why is it a lie?” Elazar asked. “I think it’s the deepest truth I’ve discovered in the past two thousand years.”
Rachel tried to find the words to explain, but Elazar wasn’t waiting. “Every intelligent person alive today wants to accomplish something grand—invent something, create something, dramatically change the world,” he said. “Some of the smarter ones actually do it. You and I weren’t born thinking we could do that. We were born thinking it was our job to be servants of God.”
“Were we wrong?” she asked.
“No. That’s what parents are. Not only parents; everyone who provides new possibilities. That’s exactly what they are, even if they don’t think of it that way.” Water dripped from the ceiling onto his hands. “Today a lot of people aren’t content with that. They expect to complete something, to see how their works or their children ‘turn out’—as if anything ever ended. But you and I know that we can only make beginnings. We can’t even create anything ourselves, not really,” he said. “All we can try is to help the people who do. Like Rocky and Meirav.”
The name startled Rachel. “How do you know Meirav?”
Was that a stupid question? She had long accepted that Elazar had special powers; he was a priest, and even if his powers since then had become tawdry and manipulative, he was still a priest. But in the pallid light of the hurricane lamp, Rachel saw that Elazar was avoiding her eyes.
“Because she’s my daughter,” Elazar said.
Rachel leaned against the tunnel’s wet wall, stunned. She heard Meirav’s voice in her head: My father always used to say, Don’t worry, Meirav, I can still die, and then you can go to university for free! She sucked in air, and tasted something sweet.
“She was only sixteen when I left. But I’ve been watching her since then. She’s my favorite of all my children, which is saying a lot.” He forced a smile. “Of course, I never really knew Yochanan, and I did like his mother best.”
Rachel leaned back against the tunnel’s wall and allowed herself to feel Yochanan beside her. In her mind she inspected him: his curls, the curve of his lip, his laugh. Obviously I’m taking it seriously if I’m laughing about it!
“Why is she your favorite?” Rachel asked. When Elazar didn’t answer, Rachel dared to add: “Because of her mother?” A lump of irrational jealousy rose within her throat, flavored with absurdity and acid.
“No, no, no,” Elazar intoned. “That woman was crazy. She was born in America because her father was some kind of diplomat, but she was from an old Jerusalem family that had been in the city for thousands of years. You know how that city makes people lose their minds. Imagine a hundred generations of inherited lunacy.”
“Thousands of years?” Rachel repeated, and finally smiled. “Do we know them?”
Elazar laughed. “Probably, right? That must have been my fantasy when I married her. But she looked down on everyone, everyone. Nothing was good enough for her, nothing met her standards—to a demented level. She wound up in a mental hospital. She reminded me of my father, actually.”
Rachel recalled kneeling before Elazar’s father, inhaling smoke from her own burning hair. “But your father really was above everyone else,” she said.
“Yes, and today he would probably be in a mental hospital too.” He paused, as if acknowledging a presence. “Meirav is something different. Part of it was just the time of her birth. For almost two hundred years before her, all my children felt obligated to spit in my face. It wasn’t just me, it was every parent I knew. I’m sure it happened to you too. If you were religious, your children became atheists; if you were a freethinker, they ran off to the rebbe. If you spoke Yiddish they spoke Hebrew; if you spoke Hebrew they spoke German. If you were a Socialist they became Communists, and on and on. It was so degrading. But Meirav is only fifty-two. She was the first child in over a hundred years who wasn’t afraid to love me.”
Rachel eyed Elazar with heartsinking pity.
“I don’t only love her because she loves me,” he pleaded.
“Did I say that?” Rachel asked.
“You thought it.”
Rachel laughed, and was relieved when Elazar laughed with her.
“That isn’t why,” he insisted. “Meirav is—she’s a free person. She does what she wants, not what other people want. Sometimes it gets her into trouble, but she isn’t troubled by it. That’s what amazes me about her. Nothing troubles her. All my other children inherited my fears, except for her.” What are your fears? Rachel considered asking, but she already knew the answer: being alone. “She always reminded me of you.” Then he added, “Rocky reminds me of you too.”
Rachel snorted. “Whatever he’s inherited from me, it hasn’t served him well.”
“Not yet,” Elazar conceded. “That’s why I sent him Meirav.”
“What do you mean, you sent her?”
“Not sent. Guided, maybe. She already had reasons to be here. Let’s just say I gave her more reasons.”
This was absurd, Rachel knew. “But Rocky met her by chance,” she protested. “No one arranged it. They were sitting together in a courthouse waiting room.”
Elazar shrugged. “If they hadn’t met there, they would have met somewhere else. For everyone but us, the whole world is a courthouse waiting room.”
Rachel stared at him, aghast. “Elazar, this is cruel.”
“How is it cruel?”
“You said you admire your daughter’s freedom, and my son’s freedom.” And mine, she thought. “But that’s exactly what you’re trying to take away, any way you can!”
Elazar held his pa
lms in the air, a gesture that reminded her of Rocky. “So maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe they’ll be miserable together. But that’s their business, and they were already miserable alone, so why not? I have a lot of faith in your children, Rachel.”
A sickening thought wormed its way into Rachel’s mind. “Have you—have you done this before?”
Elazar laughed. “No,” he said. “At least, not intentionally. I’ve thought about it, many times. But I always wanted my children to have children, if they wanted them. And with yours and mine together, I wasn’t sure they could. So I never tried. And until now it wasn’t so easy. Now it’s the simplest thing. You can find out exactly where they are, every minute of the day—even if they’re fifty-two years old and sitting on the other side of the world. Now you can be with them forever. This is what I’m explaining to you, Rachel. You and I don’t change, but the world does.”
“Elazar, you can’t follow your children around for eternity!”
“Of course I can. That’s what parents do, whether they’re dead or alive. Why, do you really think your parents aren’t guiding you? Or that mine aren’t guiding me?”
“Are they?” Rachel asked.
Elazar looked at her, and in his face she saw his father. “They are in my every breath.”
The tunnel around Rachel was becoming crowded with ghosts. She was relieved when Elazar abruptly turned from her, reaching for something on the floor beside him. “I need to show you this,” he said. He held up the large white plasticized envelope as details rattled from his mouth. “There’s a metal box for it just down there, so it’ll be waterproof and fireproof. I’ll show you where I keep the key to the tunnel right outside, so you can find that too. Everything will be waiting for you here.” He paused, embarrassed, and placed the envelope in her lap.
The envelope was unsealed. Rachel slid her hand inside it and pulled out a passport.
The passport was the same shape and color as her current American one, but embossed with Hebrew letters. On its cover was an image of a seven-branched candelabrum like the one Elazar’s father once lit each day. Her hands shook as she opened it. Inside was an old passport photo of her, altered slightly, with a much fresher face than the one she had now. Instead of her current surname, the Hebrew text read Bat-Azaria, Daughter of Azaria. Her birthplace was listed as Jerusalem.