by Dara Horn
Rachel flung Hannah’s hand aside. Hannah jolted, alarmed.
“Hannah, whatever you’re doing with my genes, with the pieces of me you stole, you have to stop it,” Rachel said, trying to steady her voice. “You’re in danger.”
“How exactly am I in danger?”
Rachel breathed, paused, breathed again. “It’s—it’s happened before, whenever someone came too close. With—with—with other Hannahs, even,” she stuttered. It surprised her, how much it hurt to say it. The burned girl rose before her, dissolving into smoke in a bright blue sky. “You’re not the first Hannah, you know. You’re the eighteenth Hannah in this family, going back to my mother, may her memory be a blessing.”
Hannah grunted, an exasperated noise. “I know I’m named after your mother. You still didn’t explain. What’s dangerous about my work?”
“Everything,” Rachel said. “I can’t prove it, but—”
“Then how am I supposed to believe it?”
Rachel blinked, cringed. Children! “It’s like anything else you believe. You believe in God.”
“As a scientist I’m more of an agnostic.”
“You can agnosticate all you want. It only means that your life is much, much bigger than you are, bigger than you can ever know. It only means that those seventeen other Hannahs are all within you.”
Hannah smirked. “That last part is true, genetically speaking.”
“Everything I’m telling you is true. I’ve been lying for your entire life until now.”
Rachel dug her toes deeper into the mud. Hannah’s gaze traveled up a tree trunk toward the sky. Rachel watched her granddaughter and could hear her thoughts, listened between the rustling leaves as Hannah weighed what she knew against what she loved. Then Hannah straightened herself on the rock and turned back to Rachel.
“Okay, Gram,” she said. Her voice was level, stingy, cold. “I’d be lying if I said I believed any of this. But I’m listening. Explain to me how this happened. Explain to me how you got to be two thousand years old.”
The mud was warm around Rachel’s feet. She drew the warmth up through her body, like a plant drawing strength from the earth.
“When I was eighteen, I made a mistake,” she said. “Like you, I was in love, and like you, I was stupid. I just wanted to save my baby boy. He was sick, and then he was dying.”
Hannah had been marking time, but now her face shifted, a sudden recognition of something true. “What baby boy?” she asked. “You mean Dad or Uncle Jake?” Then her eyes widened. “You had a—a child who died?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Rachel said softly. “There are so many people you never met.” And so many people I never met, Rachel thought, the children of the children, and their children too. “Long ago I was like you. I was a mother like you, a mother with a little boy,” she said. “He was my baby, he was dying, and I wanted to save him. And I did, I saved him! But he still grew up, and in the end he died anyway. A lifetime in a breath. It goes by so fast, Hannah. It goes by so fast.”
Hannah opened her mouth, confused, but Rachel did not stop.
“I know what you’re trying to do, Hannah. It’s beautiful that you’re trying to do it. But I don’t even know how to tell you how wrong you are.”
Rachel was standing now, her feet sinking in mud as she reached for the girl who sat motionless before her, the girl whose face Rachel was now committing to memory, the girl whose still, small presence Rachel did not want to forget.
“You know how you were crying at Ezra’s kindergarten show? That tunnel of sorrow that flows through everything?”
Hannah nodded, a tilt of the head that was barely a pulse.
“You need that tunnel, Hannah. Nothing means anything without it.” Rachel heard her granddaughter’s breathing, smelled the rot of the forest, breathed in the air her granddaughter breathed. “Not dying doesn’t make it better. It only makes it longer.” She closed her eyes and let the tears come, the world overflowing. “I’m so old, Hannah. I’m so, so old.”
Rachel tried to preserve in her memory the tug of her granddaughter’s arms around her waist, the weight of the young woman’s cheek on her shoulder. She felt Hannah’s body against hers and imagined her own arms stretching upward like a living tree, toes growing into the earth and fingers reaching for the sky.
CHAPTER
13
HOUSE FIRE
. . .
“Yochanan, you IDIOT!”
She couldn’t help it, though later she couldn’t forgive herself for it. Yochanan was already an old man, sick, and this time dying for real: dying in a nothing of a village after retiring from teaching in Yavneh, a beach town with nothing in it but Roman soldiers and, thanks to Yochanan, an academy of scholars studying the Torah. For what, Rachel wondered, when everything is already lost? It had been years since she had seen him. Ever since the destruction, since she had first witnessed the effects of the vow, she had been bewildered, terrified, afraid of herself. She looked now exactly like she had looked when she was eighteen years old. When she found out Yochanan was still living, she counted it a miracle. But when she found out how he had managed to survive and thrive, the rumors about her son that had infected everyone in Yavneh, she could not contain her rage.
He was confined to his bed by then, but she had begged permission to see him from his disciples, pretending to be a great-niece, offering facts about his family as proof. When she walked into the room, both of them were stunned: she that he was dying, and he that she had been reborn.
“Mother? But it’s—it’s impossible.”
“My baby,” she whispered. She barely recognized him. Yochanan was cadaverous; his skin stretched like parchment across his knobby bones. She struggled not to weep.
“I’m ill, Mother. Very ill,” Yochanan said. His voice was labored, but familiar, each word carefully chosen, clipped and clear. “Time is already changing for me, folding on itself. You look to me like you did when I was a child.”
“You’ll always be a child to me,” she said simply. She thought of explaining, though she saw now there was no need to explain, that explaining would only bring him confusion and pain, things his withered body had no more room for. She was stunned by how peaceful he was, and not merely because he was lying in bed. His voice was low and soft, his face eased into a sad smile, as though every last drop of anger had drained from his body, every passionate flame of his character quenched by a calm, steady, endless sea. It unnerved her. She still felt the fire. She remembered the rumors she had heard, and dared to speak.
“I heard what you did after you escaped the city in the coffin,” she said, swallowing rage. She held his hand, stroking his shriveled knuckles to avoid crushing his fingers in hers. “Is it—is it true?” How could I have raised someone so stupid?
Yochanan looked at her, his face still peaceful, a man who knew he had done right. “Mother, I was thinking about the future. I can explain.”
“Good,” she said slowly, “because I need to understand this. I’m an old woman, Yochanan. Your time isn’t my time, and maybe there’s something you understand that I don’t.”
“But Mother, you aren’t old anymore,” Yochanan smiled. His grin shrunk him down to a child again, running through the city.
“And to me you will always be a boy,” Rachel said. “Maybe that’s all this is, a foolish boy’s mistake. But you were never foolish, Yochanan.”
“I wasn’t foolish this time either,” he insisted. In his voice she heard him half-grown, challenging the adults: How could anyone know the day he’s going to die? “It was the wisest thing to do. The only thing.”
Rachel clutched his hand. “Then explain. Is it true that after you were carried out of Jerusalem in the coffin, you were brought to Vespasian?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Vespasian, as in the Roman emperor Vespasian?”
“He wasn’t the emperor then. He was just running the campaign to end the revolt.”
“I know that, Yochanan,” she muttered, snapping at her son the way she had once snapped at her mother, long ago. Another thought horrified her, as frightening as that first glance at her reflection in a cistern after she had burned: Has my soul gotten younger too?
“He knew I was coming,” Yochanan said. “His spies were in the city. They arranged for me to see him.”
Rachel breathed out, expelling anger and grief. “So it’s true. You had an audience with the future Roman emperor.”
“Yes,” Yochanan said. A strange energy seemed to seize him. His voice sped up, the way it had when he was a young man, ready to prove a point. “And I already knew he would become the emperor, even if he didn’t know it yet. When I rose from the coffin, I greeted him with ‘Vivat Imperator!’ He laughed at me. But a few days later, he received a message announcing that Nero had died in Rome.”
“Oh, Yochanan, you’re a living oracle. Who needs the Temple when we have you?” Rachel tried to shield herself with sarcasm, but she could barely sustain it. The Temple in ruins was nothing compared to her child in ruins, lying before her, desolate.
Yochanan took a long, labored breath, then another, wincing with pain. His body was a smoking wreckage, a burn Rachel could feel in her own body. But his mind was the same.
“Everyone talks about the prophecy,” Yochanan said, almost cheerfully. “But Vespasian didn’t care about the prophecy. He cared what I could tell him about what was happening in the city, about the effects of the siege and the rebels’ plans.”
The bottomless double-crossings churned Rachel’s stomach like foul meat. It made her long for Zakkai, for his insane, savage innocence. She sucked down bile, and came to the part she refused to believe.
“Is it true that when Vespasian heard that Nero had died, he offered to grant you any wish?”
“Yes,” Yochanan said.
“While his camps with tens of thousands of soldiers were surrounding Jerusalem, while we were all starving inside the city and being slaughtered by the Zealots for any attempt at surrender, while we were waiting for the Romans to smash down the walls and kill or enslave whoever was left, while the Temple was still standing, while we hadn’t yet lost the war? That was when the future emperor offered to make your deepest wish come true?”
“Yes.”
Rachel could no longer see her son through her tears. “Yochanan, you could have saved the country. You could have saved the city. You could have saved the Temple. You could have saved the Holy of Holies, the House of God. And instead you saved—a story?”
IN THE DRAMATIC AND FRIGHTENING years before he left Jerusalem, Yochanan had been the opposite of stupid. As an adult he had his own academy, meeting with his disciples on the stairs of the Temple mount each day to study Torah, perfecting their moral aim like bowmen perfecting their shots. Life for Yochanan was all obligation, a devotion to the future at any cost. “If you’re planting a tree and someone says to you, ‘The Messiah just arrived,’ ” Rachel once heard him teach, “finish planting the tree and then go greet the Messiah.” He hated the Zealots with an anger that scared Rachel: anyone who took up arms against Rome wasn’t a hero fighting for freedom, but a death-seeking fool who cared nothing for his children. He preached it endlessly, going from house to house and begging every able-bodied man to surrender to the Romans and make peace; the Zealots were idiots to think they could beat the greatest army the world had ever seen, an army which had already surrounded the city with elaborate camps on every side. But it was only when the Zealots took control of the city, barred the gates so no one could defect, and burned up the food stores—someone had the idea that this might convince more people to fight—that Rachel, already widowed again and a grandmother of twelve, began to agree with her son, even when half her grandchildren joined the Zealots. When the Zealots stormed the Temple and strung the old high priest Hanania up by his neck, Rachel sent a blank scroll and, for the first time in fifty years, returned to the tunnel.
She was old then, or so she believed. Her hair had turned light and brittle, her skin had creased after years of sun, and her body was crimped and worn from children, and aching from hunger. But the water in the tunnel was cold and fast as it ran against her thin bare feet. As she climbed she felt a quickening within her, washing years down through the cut stone into the pool below, as if they had never existed. Before she knew it, his light loomed around the corner.
She had braced herself for him to look older, imagining him as his father once was, fat and bristling. She had forgotten the hunger. He emerged around the corner like a shadow from his lamp, thin and flickering, in a filthy robe stained with brown blood. His hair was still thick, but matted and lighter; his beard was patchy over his gaunt face, skin stretched across old bones. He smiled at her for an instant, before his face melted into a quiet agony. He fell into her arms, and she couldn’t stop herself from crying.
“Elazar,” she said, “your father, your father.”
“It was inevitable.” His voice was deeper than she remembered it, heavy in his throat. “He knew he was doomed.” He pulled away from her and composed himself. For a moment Rachel remembered how he once had stood before her, the cocky young priest who couldn’t stop smirking. “The Temple itself knows,” he added, his voice thick with misery. “A few times at night I’ve seen the bronze gates open by themselves.”
“From the wind?” Rachel murmured.
“The wind? It takes ten men to close them! The priests say that our Father himself is abandoning the house, that we’re about to be banished from our Father’s table.” Rachel listened and heard the words between the words, the father who had abandoned the house, leaving his son behind. She clutched his hands.
“Are you in danger?” Rachel asked.
“No,” he said, with a sad smile. “I’m not that good a person. The Zealots took over my house, and I give them whatever they want.” Rachel did not ask what they wanted. “Unfortunately I’m not much like my father.”
“I remember,” Rachel said. “But you are powerful, Elazar.”
Elazar cringed. Rachel imagined, for a brief hallucinatory moment, that he was still a teenage boy. “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he mumbled. For the first time Rachel realized that that was exactly what he expected.
“I’m not here to forgive you,” she said. “I’m here because I need you. Yochanan has been trying to convince people to make peace with the Romans, and the Zealots have him on their list of traitors. Since your father died, men have come to the house looking for him.”
Elazar leaned against the tunnel’s damp wall, his gaunt body spent. “I can’t do anything for him, Rachel. I—”
“Just listen, Elazar.” She tried to think of a way to explain it that didn’t reveal her overwhelming failure as a parent and grandparent, the horror her life had become. There was no way. “My grandson is one of the Zealot leaders,” she began.
In the cool tunnel her face burned, but Elazar merely shrugged. “One of my sons is, too.”
“Your son?” She hadn’t seen him for fifty years, she remembered. For the first time, she thought: It goes by so fast. “How many children do you have?”
“None anymore, except the Zealot,” he said. He cleared his throat, hiding a sob.
“That’s not true. You have Yochanan.”
“Rachel, don’t do this to me,” he whispered.
“Please listen, Elazar. Yochanan went to my grandson and asked what he would have to do for the Zealots to—to let him leave the city.” She did not use the words her daughter had used: defect, betray, surrender. “My grandson told him that the only way out is if he’s dead.”
“Dead,” Elazar muttered. “So you want me to protect his body? I can’t even do that, Rachel. I—”
“No, Elazar. There’s another way. My grandson told him that dead people are allowed out of the city for burial—only important dead people, people whose followers the Zealots want on their side. They would allow the person’s body to leave the city in a
coffin. Do you understand?” Elazar watched her, unblinking. “But the Zealots never agree on anything, and I can’t imagine how it could work unless we bribed the right people, convinced them not to open the coffin, and then convinced them to open the gate.” Since the siege began, hunger had fatigued her, but the tunnel’s thick wet air blew life into her lungs. “I need you, Elazar.”
Elazar’s body had been limp, the tired figure of an old man. But now he straightened. His face was wide and wild as though he were a boy searching the tunnel for ancient letters. When he seized her hands, a power gripped her that she had not felt for fifty years.
“Bring him in a coffin to the Dung Gate tomorrow morning,” he said. “I can take care of everything else. Trust me.”
In that moment she did.
BEFORE DAWN THE NEXT MORNING, Yochanan’s disciples, including several of his nephews, brought a plain pine coffin to Rachel’s home. Yochanan had been up all night waiting for them, studying and praying. Rachel also could not sleep. She sat beside him, reading the scrolls over his shoulder until Yochanan fell silent, and raised his eyes to hers.
“I keep thinking about Father,” he said.
Which father, she wondered. The thought lodged in her mind like a grain of sand, the irreducible understanding that he would never, ever know.
“If he were alive he would be furious with me,” Yochanan said, and watched her, waiting. It was heartbreaking how even old children still needed approval, still needed someone to say Yes, you’re right, or more so, Yes, you’re right, and even if you’re wrong, I and the world forgive you. But it wasn’t Rachel’s job to forgive.
“If you were going to leave the besieged city in a coffin,” Rachel answered, “I think he would have preferred if you were actually dead.”
Yochanan tensed his mouth into a sad grin. “I hated him for so many years. But now that I’m old, I think he was just young. He made a young man’s choice.”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “And yours is an old man’s choice.”