by Dara Horn
“It’s eight years old already, which means you’ll have to renew it almost immediately, in two years,” Elazar explained. Two years, for him and for her, was almost immediately. “They just introduced some new biometric features that I couldn’t replicate without you, so here you are in the last of the old version. Like we always are.” He smiled. “I included a credit card for you too, and a phone,” he told her, digging deeper into the envelope and flashing plastic. “There’s also a bank account, with money to get you started. The language isn’t the quite the same as what you remember, but after two months of TV you’ll catch up. You’ve been living in America since you were a child, according to the documents, so no one will expect much. Just remember this address.” He unfurled a piece of paper with words in what she still thought of as the new Hebrew script, the cursive that was under a thousand years old. His handwriting was beautiful. “It’s your apartment in Tel Aviv. Not even in the same city as me, see? Your own life. But look where it is.” She read the address, in the eternity cast by Elazar’s shadow. 18 Son-of-Zakkai Street. “I thought you would appreciate that.”
“I don’t understand how you did this,” Rachel said.
“If I told you I would have to kill you,” Elazar joked.
She tried to frown at him, but couldn’t. She swallowed a sob.
“I had to do this for you, Rachel. You haven’t burned for seventy years, so you don’t know how much you need it. Without all this you’d be a beggar on the side of the road, or worse. Much worse.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Rachel murmured. But when he took her hand in his, her body throbbed with a cruel ache, the pain, deep and never-ending, of being too young.
“I’d happily live with you in this tunnel from now until the end of the world,” Elazar said. “But I understand that isn’t what you want.”
“Elazar,” she whispered, and ran out of words. Instead she overflowed, and cried as they clutched each other in the dim tunnel, both of them crying until they ran out of tears. Because the tears did run out, even if nothing else did.
THAT NIGHT RACHEL LAY in bed, listening to Rocky and Meirav’s muffled laughter downstairs, and closed her eyes. Beneath her eyelids the room grew dark, then illuminated with an old light, an oil lamp in her sister’s hands.
“Rachel,” her sister whispered, touching her shoulder. “Come. Now.”
Her sister’s fingers on her shoulder made her imagine she was a small child. Time collapsed in Rachel’s mind even then, a condition of being alive within it. But as she rose from the mat on the floor, she took her place again in the firm column of days in which she lived: she was a thirty-year-old widow, not yet remarried, waking up at midnight in her sister’s house, roused from her sleep by her childhood companion because their mother was dying. She hurried silently to the next room.
Her mother lay on a stack of sheepskins, curled under three woolen blankets, though the night was warm. As it happened, it wasn’t the last time Rachel would hear her mother’s voice; two weeks still remained when her mother continued to speak, pray and insult her daughters in ways Rachel chose to blame on delirium. Two weeks later Rachel and her sisters would strip her mother’s body, wash her, purify her, stand guard over her corpse until dawn, and then carry it forth from the city teeming with soldiers and angry boys, out to the cemetery on the mountain just east of the Temple, where her grandparents and great-grandparents and everyone before them were already buried, going back a thousand years. Yet for now her mother was still alive and had woken in the night, searching for her youngest daughter.
“Rachel,” she rasped, as Rachel’s sister slipped out of the room.
“Here I am,” Rachel answered.
Her mother’s body was swollen from illness, and the swelling made her younger, erasing her wrinkles and easing her face back to the one Rachel remembered, a young woman’s face, plaintive and hopeful. Rachel sat beside her mother and did not know what to say. When she first met Elazar, her mother had transformed before her eyes from a loving, devoted, righteous woman into entirely the wrong kind of woman—a woman who stupidly bent her head and worked and prayed and buried her imagination deep in the ground beneath her feet, a woman who followed every rule because she didn’t know better. But since Zakkai’s death, Rachel could not bear her mother’s presence. Her every gesture, even from her sickbed, reverberated through the air like the blast of a ram’s horn in Rachel’s face: I knew so much more than you ever imagined. Rachel looked down at the woolen blankets, afraid to meet her mother’s eyes. She felt her mother’s hand on her forehead as though she were a little girl.
“May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah,” her mother murmured, reciting a script. Rachel tried not to cringe. She was already the Rachel from her father’s scrolls, already the youngest sister, already beloved and betrayed. But then her mother added: “May God grant you a long life, and many children.”
“Many children?” Rachel asked. Rachel was widowed, mother of one, already old and angry. Was it a curse?
“I pray to God that you will have more children,” her mother said softly. “When you do, remind them that God is with them, that someone is watching.”
Rachel felt a river of sorrow well up inside her, pain mingled with regret. She was raising Yochanan; wasn’t that enough? And besides, who could forget that God was with him? They were in Jerusalem and always would be, right across the valley from the everlasting House of God itself. How could anyone forget? But her mother was in pain, and dying people said all kinds of irrelevant things. Her father had collapsed while sputtering a verse about sheep. “I will,” Rachel conceded.
“I am watching,” her mother said. And breathed.
CHAPTER
12
IT GOES BY SO FAST
. . .
The children climbed up to the stage carefully, following a teacher’s whispered prompts as another teacher leaned over an old piano, bumping out pediatric chords. There were many of them—a hundred kindergarteners in single file, the girls in little dresses, the boys in tiny collared shirts—and the line moved slowly, but eventually the risers in front of the row of microphones filled up with children of identical vintage, gathered together like the offspring of some indifferent egg-laying reptile who had abandoned its young.
Seated on a metal folding chair beneath the stage for Ezra’s end-of-the-year kindergarten show—she and Hannah had arrived early for front-row seats, making up for Daniel’s absence while he finished a business trip—Rachel felt a creeping unease. This routine massing of children was still new for her. Years ago, no one forced children to assemble this way until they were older, and then only the boys, for wars. But now this parading of identically-aged children before their parents to sing forgettable songs had become a ritual, the children replacing the flocks of lambs once brought for sacrifice, reminding the adults of their obligations. The ritual induced visions. Rachel looked at the sea of small people as they began their forgettable song and suddenly saw all of these children old, very old. Their heads were gray or bald; their arms flabbed; the girls’ faces sagged under clownish makeup; the boys’ temples caved in, cadaverous. Their sunken eyes squinted behind thick lenses, gazing into a void. One by one they wandered off the stage, disappearing into the wings, until the assembly dwindled to nothing: empty risers, exactly as before. Everything fades, everything returns. Rachel shook her head, returning to the present. It was then that Hannah’s son Ezra broke ranks, squirming to the front of the stage and yanking a microphone from its stand. He managed to shout, “I got the microphone! Hello, Mommy!” before a teacher dragged him away. The audience guffawed. Rachel recognized her granddaughter’s boy, the one who lightened everyone’s burdens, as one of her own. Elazar was right: it was time.
In the car afterward as she drove Hannah to the train, Rachel noticed her preternaturally rational granddaughter wiping her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked.
Hannah turned to Rachel and smiled
, her makeup smeared with an errant tear. “Nothing,” she answered, and tried to smother a sob with a laugh. “I just—I look at Ezra up there with the other kids, and I know he’s only five, but he’s my baby, and I know I’m not going to do this again.”
I can’t take this anymore, Rachel thought. “Lucky you,” she said aloud, and tried to make it sound like a joke. She imitated the little boy’s voice: “ ‘I got the microphone!’ ” The boy, she knew, was another Rocky.
Hannah laughed, but barely. “He certainly knows what he wants,” she sputtered. But in an instant she was gulping air, fighting tears again. “I’ve never told anyone this, but I still imagine him crying at night,” Hannah said. “I wake up in the middle of the night because I think I hear him crying, the way he did when he was a baby. Then I realize it’s a memory, but it isn’t any less real than when it really happened. Has that ever happened to you?”
Driving still felt new to Rachel, uncomfortable; she blamed it on her less-than-seventy years behind the wheel. There seemed no point in answering Hannah’s question, certainly not while the car careened along tight turns through the nature reservation, the hilly forest on the east end of town. Rachel had more urgent things on her mind. She glanced up at the tall thick trees, plotting an escape—or more accurately, a rescue.
“Maybe it’s because of work,” Hannah was saying. “All day long I’m thinking about how to stop people from dying. My life is so perfect, right? I have no reason to be unhappy, none at all. But somehow everything that happens with Daniel and the children, all the wonderful things—it’s as if there’s this tunnel of sadness flowing through it. That’s how I imagine it, like a secret passage underneath everything that’s always flowing with this constant stream of sorrow, and no one can see it, but we all know it’s there. And I just keep thinking that if no one had to die, that tunnel would dry up and disappear, and all these happy things wouldn’t be so sad anymore.”
Rachel gripped the steering wheel and hoped that Hannah would shut up. She scanned the sides of the road for a time before she spotted a turnout coming up, a little parking area on the road shoulder at the head of some trail. Hannah kept talking.
“At work I keep telling myself that that’s why I’m here, that’s what I’m striving for, just to get rid of that sadness. I feel like it’s just out of reach, but I’m so close to it, and—” Hannah paused, tried, failed. “Anyway, it’s very stressful emotionally and I never express it, I guess. So instead here I am, crying over Ezra’s kindergarten show. Sorry, I know it’s stupid. It’s just that it . . . it . . . it goes by so fast.”
Rachel yanked the steering wheel, jerking both the car and Hannah to the right, and then screeched the car to a stop beneath the trees.
“Gram, what the hell are you doing?”
Rachel killed the engine and sat for a moment in the stopped car, enjoying the odd silence beside the trailhead, at the gate of the forest. Then she turned to Hannah and said, “I need to talk to you. Can we please get out for a minute?”
Hannah’s mouth crimped. “I have to get to work.”
“No, you don’t. I need to talk with you, and not in this metal box.”
Hannah sat up, imperious, insulted. “I’m going to miss my train,” she announced. She theatrically glanced at her watch. “It’s really late, Gram. Whatever it is you want to say, how about if we just—”
“Hannah, get out of the fucking car.”
Hannah leaned back, shocked. She was frightened now, Rachel could see. But Rachel did not linger. She was done lingering. She thrust open the car door and jumped out, slammed it shut, and started down the trail into the woods. She glanced behind her and saw Hannah stumbling out of the car, tapping out something on her phone with one hand as she raced to catch up with Rachel. Rachel walked faster, and then started running, tripping over rocks and branches as she made her way toward—she wasn’t sure what, just somewhere where no one would find them. Her shoe snagged on something, a branch or a thorn, and she yanked it off, yanked the other shoe off, and ran barefoot along the path, her thick feet callused and impenetrable. At last, past three twists in the trail, she saw a boulder under a thick clump of old gnarled oaks. She sat down, panting, until Hannah caught up, her mud-spattered skirt and shoes jerking to a stop in front of Rachel. Her face shimmered with fear.
“Gram, are you okay? What’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” Rachel said, a reflex. Lying had become so natural for her, like eating or breathing, and just as necessary. But now she looked at her granddaughter, the young woman who looked more like her than anyone else had in two thousand years—the young woman who was almost the same age Rachel was when she was first widowed, when Elazar killed Zakkai, when her mother died, when she first understood that she was the adult, that Elazar wasn’t her rescuer but her pursuer, that being loved was nowhere near as necessary as loving, that it was suddenly her task, her only task, to protect her children—and the flood rose within her.
“No, it’s not true. I’m not fine, Hannah,” Rachel declared. “I haven’t been fine in a long, long time.”
Hannah stared at her, her mouth slightly open, her forehead creased. She looked to Rachel like a little girl, confused and frightened. She sat down next to Rachel and waited. The forest rustled with birds and wind, ever changing. Rachel drew in her breath, braced her trembling hands against the rock, and spoke.
“I want to talk to you about your research,” she began.
Hannah’s face reverted to a sneer. “God, Gram! Really? You can’t just—”
But Rachel wasn’t listening. “You know how you told me I have the genetic deterioration of a teenager?”
Hannah raised an eyebrow, a shadow of her father. “Yes,” she said. The word rose between them like an offering, a plume of incense.
“Why do you think that is?”
Hannah hesitated. “I don’t know,” she murmured, and then pounced. “I don’t know yet, but I’m getting close. I think it might be an answer to something, maybe even an answer to everything. If I could get you to come to the lab, I could—”
Rachel dug her fingernails into the rock’s surface, the rock that was older than she was. “You don’t know, but I do.”
Hannah eyed Rachel, her body still. “Why? Why do you have the genes of a teenager?”
“Because I am a teenager,” Rachel said softly. “I’m eighteen years old, and I’ve been eighteen years old for the past two thousand years.”
Hannah looked at Rachel for a moment. Then she laughed, a long, loud laugh. “That explains so much.”
Trees rose around them, a curtain of leaves and tree trunks, hundred-year-old tree trunks, babies. Rachel shook her head. “Listen, Hannah,” she said. “I know you want me to come to your lab.” She watched as Hannah’s smile faded. “But the only way I’ll do that is if you can fix me—if you can change my genes, so I’m not like this anymore.”
Hannah cocked her head. “You mean like gene therapy?”
Hannah’s voice sounded normal, casual, as if Rachel had asked her to pick her up after work. Was this really happening? “What’s that?” Rachel asked.
“Like you said, changing genes. You take out the mutation and deactivate it, or replace it with something else.”
Rachel couldn’t believe how simple Hannah made it sound. Was this what she had been waiting for, for two thousand years? “That’s it,” Rachel crowed. “That’s what I need.”
Hannah’s eyes were on the trees, distracted. She was speaking as she always did, thinking as she spoke. “In theory it’s possible, but it’s only in Phase 1 trials for toxicity. Nobody does that except with terminal patients.” She turned back to Rachel. Hannah was so small, Rachel thought, underneath these trees, these tall and silent trees that would outlive her. “Gram, I don’t get it. Can you be serious for a minute? What are you really talking about?”
Terminal patients, Rachel seethed, boiling with envy. But no, it wasn’t envy anymore! The excitement made her legs tremble. She le
aned forward, pressing her bare feet into the mud. “Remember how I hadn’t signed my will?” she asked Hannah.
Hannah nodded, a small, frightened nod.
“Yesterday I met with the lawyer and signed off on everything. I’m ready.”
“What do you mean, you’re ready?”
Rachel tried to laugh, and failed. “I don’t even know what I mean,” she pleaded. “All I know is that I want to die. To die for real.” The sky seeped between the trees, deep and blue and silent, like it always did when she awoke, again and again and again. She turned again to her granddaughter, to her younger self, to herself. “Hannah, you’re the first person in two thousand years who can help. Hannah, please,” she begged. “I need you to kill me.”
Rachel bowed her head before her granddaughter as though Hannah were Elazar’s father, smelling her hair on fire. But she had forgotten that Hannah was a mother. Now Hannah was regarding her the way Rachel had so often looked at her own children, whenever they begged her for more stories or more playtime or for their dead father to come back: thinking of the kindest way to tell them that what they wanted was impossible.
“Gram, I’m not going to kill you,” Hannah said.
“Why not?”
“Do I really need to explain this? First, I’m a doctor, and there’s the whole Hippocratic do-no-harm thing. Next, I’m a person, and there’s the whole I-don’t-murder-people thing. Then on top of that—oh, I don’t know, I guess there’s the whole you’re-my-grandmother thing. No, Gram. I’m not going to kill you.”
“Can’t you at least try?”
Hannah rested a hand on Rachel’s, and spoke again in her mother voice. “Gram, you need help. More help than I can give you. You mentioned that you were on lithium. Maybe you need—”