The Angel of Losses (3 page)

And still Manasseh slept.

Solomon fled his home without a glance behind. The storm had passed, and the trees were strung with cottony fog. The village path took Solomon past his father’s study at the yeshiva, and he slowed his steps as he approached. The building was dark, silent, empty. The rebbe was gone.

SOLOMON TRAVELED FOR MANY WEEKS, WALKING HIGHWAYS
and deserted roads, through villages and cities, farms and markets, past castles and mountains, and always there was a Jew generous with a meal or in need of a scroll for his doorpost, and Solomon accepted charity and did what work he could to earn a bed, until it seemed his hand had written a totem for God across the homes of half the world.

Finally he came to a city, floating on the watery seam of the world, where the dead had their own island and even the Jews had their own stitch of earth between a guarded wall and the lagoon. Solomon paid a ferryman to take him to their quarter, and he walked through the alleys, across the humped bridges and the stones pooled with water, and the whole place was imbued with the sound of the tides, as if the city were at the center of a giant’s heart. By nightfall, he was inside the gates of the Jewish quarter, not a neighborhood but a prison, they said. They called it a
ghetto.

The residents ventured out by day and returned by night. The city was built into the sky, a stack of dwellings and prayer rooms, a great compression of humanity. It was awful and wonderful, and Solomon felt something new. He wondered if it was the feeling that the traveler had sought—that he had inspired the young man to find. Perhaps he felt at home.

Perhaps it was because of Zipporah, the eldest daughter of the family that had taken him in. Her father was a prominent man, a publisher. Solomon soon learned that this city, despite the ghetto walls and the church censor, fed all the surrounding lands with Jewish books. Though Solomon did not use his real name, he admitted to studying at the rebbe’s school, and so the publisher hired him immediately and gave him a home and fed him at his table. They were a wonder to the young man, the books the publisher printed—art and philosophy and history. He printed the arguments of the rabbis too, but they were just one part of his work, just one shelf in an infinite library.

Solomon was amazed that his employer, his wife, their younger children asked again and again for stories of the rebbe’s village—they with their world of stone and gold and ink in the palm of the sea, enchanted by his world of prayer and mud. He was surprised to learn that tales of his father had come so far, while his father had traveled not at all.

And when he pretended that his father was not his father, he was ashamed.

The little ones, especially, begged for stories. To them, the Wonder Rebbe was a magical man, something out of a legend, not the imperious man his sons knew. Solomon didn’t want to see the light in their faces go out, so he learned to equivocate. Is it true that an angel is his tutor? It’s true that he studied with great teachers. Is it true that when a man lies, the rebbe sees the truth written on his forehead? It’s true that he is a good judge of a man’s character. Is it true that he can heal the sick?

Solomon imagined his infancy, his burning skin, his mother’s tears, his father’s chanting surrounding him like the sea now did.

It’s true, he said.

After some time, the mood in the ghetto turned dark. The fearful talk was endless—shooting stars, twins born with their bellies joined, half a leviathan floating in on the tide, bad omens all—but the publisher’s family said nothing, their silence so thick and cold the young man didn’t dare knock against it and ask for an answer.

The Jews worried about the people outside the ghetto the way others worried about volcanoes. There were only so many quiet years until the earth would shake and smolder, until the church remembered the Jews’ books, written in a sinister code, and their mouths, hungry for blood. First they would burn the books, the young man was told, and then they would burn the people who made them, their families maybe, their friends even. That’s how it had happened last time.

So that was why the publisher had withdrawn inside his body, and his wife and Zipporah and the others were white-faced with fear. The old story was beginning again. But if death came for Zipporah, Solomon swore, he would help her outrun it.

Zipporah began slipping away at night while her family slept. Solomon lay frozen, barely daring to breathe, watching her shadow on the ceiling in the brief flare of her lantern as she hurried through the common room where he slept. Finally, one night, he rose and went after her. She negotiated the alley maze with the grace of a ghost, and Solomon struggled to keep pace with the soft percussion of her footsteps until he turned a corner and felt a hand on his chest. He squinted against the sudden light of Zipporah’s lantern, which turned her face gold and her eyes black.

Trouble is coming for us, she said.

It had been so long since he had heard her voice rise above a whisper in the oppressive air of her home, and now it shot through him, as clear and hard as a blade.

You’ve never left the city of your birth, Solomon said. But I have. I can show you the way. When trouble comes, we’ll be a long way from it.

No, she said. I won’t leave my home. You have to save us.

How can I save you, or anyone? How can I stop the church?

The church, she sneered, and seeing her so angry, so brave, he loved her all the more. She dropped her gaze and took a deep breath, and when she lifted her face again, her expression was composed. I heard a tale of the Wonder Rebbe, she said. There was a woman who met a young man by the river. He gave her a gold bracelet and shared a meal with her, and later, when she disappeared, her sister realized that the man was a demon and had kidnapped her. She appealed to the rebbe, and he summoned this demon. The fiend declared the missing woman his wife: because she had accepted his gift and feasted with him, and because he had spoken the words
I am yours and you are mine,
she was bound to him eternally. But the rebbe prevailed and the girl was returned to her family. Is that story true?

It was before I was born, Solomon said.

But you cannot be so ignorant as you claim—not of your father’s feats.

Like the rebbe, Zipporah could see the truth written on a man’s face even as he lied to her. She was a creature Solomon had never encountered before, something like a tzaddik, but a woman.

My sister was seduced by a man, she continued, a wealthy gentile merchant as terrible to me as a demon. He took her away from the ghetto. To us she was dead, while in the city, she lived on. But now she
is
dead, truly dead. I do not know what killed her—a sickness, an accident, maybe. They say her ghost haunts the rich man and the people of the city. They see her wandering the alleys, standing on the bridges, her gown shining with moonlight. Two men have drowned—drunks, of course, but the people blame the ghost. They think she is a Jewish curse. As long as she stalks the city, any misfortune will be attributed to her, and therefore blamed on us.

All the times I went beyond the gates to spy on her, all the times I paid the ferryman to take me past her windows, I could never see inside—the glass was opaque with daylight. Now when the sun sets she goes outside, and I’m locked in the ghetto all night. It’s not death that keeps me from seeing my sister. It’s this prison.

I can bring her to you, Solomon said.

Zipporah’s eyes shone with tears in the instant before the lantern burned out.

The next night, while everyone slept, Solomon paced the ghetto. He reached back into his memory to the time his father, who always bathed alone, invited Solomon to accompany him to the river. When the rebbe removed his robe, a great light forced the boy’s eyes shut—the sun cutting through the clouds, he thought—but not before he glimpsed the blemish covering his father’s breast, rich black ink on parchment.

This is the emblem of our line, the rebbe had said. Someday it will be yours, and with it, my power.

Now Solomon bared his own chest in the cruel breeze of the lagoon, and in his mind’s eye the symbol appeared as if at a great distance. He knelt and put his hand in the water, warm as blood despite the nighttime chill. He brought his wet hand to his chest and approximated the figure, something like the crawl of ore in stone, like flame in wind, like the veins of a leaf.

He stood. The wind blew. His breast was cold and wet along the slopes and swells of the mystical letter written on his body. He didn’t know what the symbol meant, or what it might conjure. He waited for his father’s magic—whatever form it may take—to come to him.

The tides coursed around him, dragging at the earth, fog rose from the canals, and Solomon squinted to see the stone alley, the tall buildings with their secret pockets of temples and sleepers. The lagoon’s murmur grew into a roar, and the water leapt onto the stone paths. The mist burned, a lightless smoke transfusing the dark night, and when he thought the world had spun away from him, he heard a sound, the rhythm of footsteps punctuated by the tapping of wood against stone.

At first glance it appeared to be an ordinary man, but then Solomon saw the veins reaching from his sleeves and collar, green and undulating like the sea, and his eyes, red and flickering like flame. He held the Wonder Rebbe’s staff in his hand. Solomon had never before seen it out of his father’s possession, and he grew afraid for his family.

I am Yode’a, the holy creature said. The Angel of Losses.

He held out the staff. Here is your torch.

Solomon gripped the staff, and the angel swelled into a towering figure with eyes vast as an inferno and a beard that churned like a storm-wracked sea. The rebbe’s son turned away from the terrible sight and found that the ghetto was filled with people, clustered at the doorways, clawing soundlessly at the locks. They stood in groups, swaying like grass in the wind, children playing with marbles, women holding babies. Who are they? he breathed.

Yode’a closed Solomon’s cloak over the young man’s chest. They are the dead, he answered. With the staff, you are Akiba; you will recognize them, and they will recognize you. Now he placed a smoldering hand on the young man’s shoulder, and the rebbe’s son was outside the gates, standing between the two sleeping guards. Yode’a was gone.

Solomon walked through the city. The dead floated on their backs in the canals, looking up at him. They crowded the windows, glowing like reflections of the moon. They sat on the bridges, weeping.

He followed the path until it uncurled along the water and a great house rose across the canal. The gilded door was set behind a dock littered with crosses and flowers and icons, and standing among it all was a woman in a long white robe, her hair blowing around her like a second cloak. Her voice laced the wind with mourning.

My love, she moaned, and Solomon’s blood ran cold. Let me come back to you, my love.

Solomon gathered his courage. He closed his eyes and gripped the staff, and when he dared to look he was across the water, standing on the dock, flowers beneath his shoes, the woman before him, three inches of air between her bare white feet and the ground.

Even though he was close enough to touch the space she occupied, her voice came from far away. My love, she cried. Her eyes were two dark holes in her face. Her cheeks and chest were streaked with blackened blood, and he pulled his shirt aside, the mystical letter stinging in the night air, her unseeing face turned toward it. Then she vanished.

Solomon stood in the new silence for a moment, and then the door creaked open and a man holding a lamp appeared.

Who are you? he demanded.

I was sent by the Jews, Solomon said. I’ve come to put the woman to rest, so that no harm will come to the city, and no harm will be visited upon the ghetto.

Come inside, quickly, the man said, and Solomon entered the parlor, with its towering ceiling, its walls draped in brilliant tapestry, its door frames edged in gold, its floors a mosaic of rainbow tile. He had seen such wealth only in his imagination, conjuring the rooms of the celestial academy, where the holiest souls spent eternity studying the Almighty’s law. He could not guess what it was—the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes—that had convinced the man he should be invited into such a place.

There were tears on the rich man’s face. It is my fault, he said. Yes, I made her a whore, a case of death-in-life to her family. But we loved each other more than we loved our own lives, and we couldn’t be apart. Others see her and flee, but I wait for her each night.

What have you done? Solomon asked.

The rich man covered his face with his hands. She is buried on one of the islands, he confessed. But her heart and eyes remain with me, in a golden box hidden in the wall of my chamber.

You must bury them with her body, Solomon said, and in his voice he heard the authority of his father. It’s the only way she can rest.

The rich man looked at him in awe. What kind of magician are you?

No magician.

Have you come from far away?

Very far.

And then a new cry filled the house, the tender and naked cry of an infant. Because how does a young, healthy woman in love die? She dies in childbirth.

You have challenged the Almighty’s law, Solomon said.

The rich man hung his head, for he knew the rebbe’s son was right.

You must do as I say, Solomon continued. When you return I will be gone. You will not find me. You will live in peace so long as you never trouble my people again.

Solomon watched from the parlor window as the rich man sailed off, the golden box clutched to his chest, the ferryman taking him to the island where the dead slept. When they disappeared from sight, the young man followed the sound of the baby’s cries.

Solomon had never held such a small baby, but when he lifted him, swaddled in thick blankets, the child stopped crying. The tides surged outside, and a wisp of smoke threaded his throat. The angel had returned. One hand, heavy as ice, capped Solomon’s shoulder, and another, soft as cinder, took his staff. The young man held the baby close, and in an instant they were standing in the little ghetto plaza, and the dead were invisible once again.