The Angel of Losses (7 page)

Holly took extra classes and went to summer school so she could graduate a year early, and three weeks after she received her diploma, they were married.

THE DAY AFTER MY TRIP TO WARSAW, I HEADED TO THE LIBRARY
and sat down at an open computer with my list, the strange names that had inserted themselves into my world, and ran each one through the search function. There was an explanation for the surviving notebook, something solid and rational, some banal answer waiting to be uncovered. I had been trained to research, to find agreement between all kinds of texts. Maybe I had been training for this very task.

I entered “White Rebbe” into the catalogue, and the screen went blank. Nothing. I tried another database, and then a third. Still no results. That was impossible, not unless Grandpa had invented it—invented him—and that was impossible too. I searched for the Sabbath Light, and Yode’a, Angel of Losses. Still nothing.

I ran my fingers over the keys, rattling them, thinking. Simon was probably downstairs in his office. He had found the Wandering Jew in Mexico, and me in the library’s network. I had a feeling that if the White Rebbe existed in a book or pamphlet or manuscript, Simon could find him.

But I had run away in the middle of a conversation, like a madwoman freed from an attic. Plus, he would ask me where I had heard of the White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses. He would ask to read the notebook—I would, in his position—and I didn’t want to share it with anyone yet.

I searched for Rabbi Akiba, the faceless man in Holly’s painting, the man the angel claimed could see the dead. The screen filled with titles and codes, legal essays and biographies, more than a hundred items. Just dry history, no magicians, no men floating upward to meet their fate in a turbulent sky. There were four items on Joseph Della Reina, the mad rabbi in Simon’s book, who seemed to be a folkloric version of Akiba: all the abstracts summarized his futile attempt to summon the Messiah, his hubris, and his punishment.

I sat back in my chair. I couldn’t stop thinking about the White Rebbe’s forebears, ascending to heaven at the end of their lives, just like the Berukhim Rebbe, and about Nathan’s casual embrace of immortality at our first meeting. There are many versions, he had said. I thought, also, of Grandpa’s abrupt hostility at the sight of the Berukhim Yeshiva, almost as if he knew something about the group that no one else did.

I tried Berukhim Yeshiva, and then Berukhim Rebbe, the patriarch who presided mutely over his disciples from the other side. The search returned seven items, four of them in English, three in this library. I wrote down the codes, all indicating the fifth floor of the stacks: Anthropology and European History.

The semester had just begun, and the library was still mostly empty, the fifth floor dark except for a single fluorescent panel flickering at the end of the hall. I found the first two history books, but the third one, a volume of folktales, was missing. I thumbed through the indexes of its neighbors, half a shelf of Jewish folktale collections wedged beside Russian legends, but none contained the names now familiar to me.

The fluorescents blinked off and then on again; the switches on the shelves allowed for ten minutes of light at a time. At the end of the hall I found two people sitting at opposite ends of a heavy wooden table, one hunched between two piles of books, the other with headphones on, tapping on a white laptop.

Forgoing the ornate, sunny reading room for these intermittently and artificially lit corridors, claustrophobic with books—I approved of that. It spoke of a certain commitment. I took the last seat and examined my two finds.

The index of the first book, an ethnography of postwar USSR, offered an entire paragraph on the Berukhim:

The only group that does not organize itself around a rebbe’s court is the Berukhim sect, and they are often viewed suspiciously, as they follow a rebbe who died in the seventeenth century. Most scholars locate their origin in the ruins of post-War Jewish Lithuania, and argue that their veneration of the dead is a reaction to the destruction of European Jewry.

The Berukhim Penitents, however, claim an unbroken lineage to Rabbi Berukhim’s Fellowship, one of many brotherhoods of mystics practicing in sixteenth-century Palestine. Berukhim was famous for the practice of channeling angels and conducting midnight rituals mourning his people’s spiritual exile. His modern-day followers maintain his dedication to prayer and meditation was intended to repent for the nation’s sin, thus hastening the arrival of the Messiah.

There is little historical documentation to justify this claim, and only a small body of folklore. Tales of the Berukhim Rebbes echo those of the prophet Elijah, who ascended to heaven at the end of his life, and returns as an old beggar, helping those in need and joining the great rabbis in study.

Yes, it recalled the White Rebbe, but literature was half-built of doppelgängers, legend more so, tropes and archetypes and allusions and outright theft. Men who skip death and go straight to heaven, men who trespass in paradise. There could be hundreds of stories like this, a little different, a little the same. Maybe Grandpa’s story was just that—a quilt, the stitching nothing more than an old man’s taste in myth. But with his clear distaste for our new neighbors at the time, that was no easy explanation either.

Anyway, there were no angels here, no binding sigils, no clues about the White Rebbe’s double life.

I opened the second book. It was a twenty-year-old study on Orthodox groups in Jerusalem, which contained only a couple of references to the Berukhim sect:

Hasidim famously dress in black, a symbol of grief for the exile. One famous exception is the small Berukhim sect, also known as the Berukhim Penitents, whose followers wear rainbow fringe representing the cabalistic concept of mystical harmony with the universe. They espouse a complex system of the transmigration of souls, and have established elaborate linguistic and numerological formulas for tracing incarnations of a soul over time.

Reincarnation—that was the subject of Holly and Nathan’s first conversation. Rachel, the famous roommate, had explained it to me at Holly’s Sunday-brunch bridal shower, which I had attended because
not
attending would have been a thing—just as not inviting me would have been.

“The last rebbe,” Nathan had said, “didn’t die. He was brought up to heaven like Elijah, because after a thousand incarnations, his soul had become perfect.”

“You believe in reincarnation?” Holly asked. It was the third Friday-night dinner she had attended and the first time she had joined the conversation.

“Of course,” Nathan said, smiling at the notion that anyone might believe in the finality of death.

Nathan told her that Grandpa was still alive, somewhere, and that we would all be together again. I, Mom, Dad—none of us could compete with that.

I had been bad at sharing Grandpa’s memory with Holly. She loved him too, he was hers too—it’s just that he was mine more. I knew it was unfair to think that, but I did, still, and I probably always would.

The reader to my right clapped his computer shut and, headphones still lodged in his ears, left. The other reader, his face hidden by a brown cap, shifted in his seat. His movements were slow, and his pale, spotted hand trembled. Retired faculty, maybe. Some people never leave.

I glanced at the pile of books between my place and the old man’s—it had grown a few inches higher. The top volume was bound in maroon canvas and stamped in all-capital serif letters:
Hasidic Tales of Wonder.
It was the third book I had been unable to locate on the shelves.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Can I see that book?”

The old man looked at me, eyebrows raised. It was Grandpa’s friend.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you find me?” I didn’t believe in synchronicity, fate—but still, it disturbed me. He gave no indication that he remembered me, and the small flutter of panic at being stalked gave way to a new fear: that something unearthly was happening to me and that I might never understand it.

“I’m Eli’s granddaughter,” I began again. “Marjorie. I just saw you—”

“I told you we would have plenty of time to talk,” he interrupted. His gaze was fixed on the book before me. “What’s that?” he asked.

“This? It’s about Russia in the decades after the war.”

“The czar?”

“The czar?” I repeated. He watched me expectantly, and my heart quickened at that particular expression of elderly confusion. Wide-eyed. Heartbreaking.

“The USSR,” I said carefully. “The Communists.”

He frowned, weighing my answer. He tapped the table, once, twice, three times, far more concerned with the books than with me. Of course he hadn’t come here looking for me. But then what was he doing here, all the way uptown—an hour from the bar, two hours from Coney Island, where he must live? “All right,” he said, nodding. “Trade.”

We exchanged books.

“Page eighty-three,” he said, and turned to his reading.

There was something off about him, but if it was senility, it was a strange kind. I followed his instructions and opened the book to page 83. Something cold clenched inside of me. I suspected there was a connection between the Berukhim and White Rebbes, but I hadn’t wanted to be right.

“The Berukhim Rebbe and the Angel of Death”

The Berukhim Rebbe lived many decades among his people and performed many wondrous feats. He saved his village from an evil king, healed the sick, traveled across the earth and back on the wings of the prophet Elijah.

But his days were not endless, and the Berukhim Rebbe grew old. He took to wandering the small village and its woods as he had once wandered the face of the world, and he sat with his little black dog beside him and stared at the leaves. Once, they bore commands to an earlier generation, their veins whorled into words: Stop. Rest. This is your home. Now, they were blank.

At night, he lay in his bed and waited, peering at the door frame edged in darkness, listening to the wind for the approach. He rarely slept, for he had completed the hours of sleep allotted him, and his remaining minutes and hours were conscious ones. Finally, one midnight, his window turned from black to gray; the gaps at the door turned from gray to white; and the wind took shape, from a hiss to a roar, the rustling of a gown, the motion of a wing.

The door opened, and there stood the Angel of Death. The rebbe’s little black dog jumped from his bed of rags in the corner of the room and set to growling and nipping at the angel’s robes.

Arise, the angel said, his lips unmoving, his voice sounding inside the rebbe’s head. It is time for you to join your fathers.

I have seen an angel before, the rebbe replied. But I have never seen such splendor.

The angel looked down at his robes, a whirlpool of silver. He examined his fingers, twice the length of any man’s and gleaming like ivory.

And your sword, the rebbe continued. A work by the hand of our master in heaven.

The angel seemed to gaze upon it as if for the first time: the silver handle inlaid with jewels from paradise, blood red and sky blue and green of the deepest jungle, the blade polished with sand from the desert of the Messiah’s exile. When the Angel of Death came to take a life, he held his sword aloft, and a blue light fell upon the face of the dying. The dying saw their own reflection in the blade, and watched as their veins rose up against their skin and wrote an alphabet there. The blade descended and the dying’s reflection grew larger, their name with it, black and glittering. The angel touched his sword to a cheek, a forehead, a chin, and with a hiss of frozen air, dissolved the letters, broke the name, and severed the soul from the body.

Please, the rebbe said. Before I leave this earth, let me see your sword.

The rebbe was a great man, and his words were heard in the celestial academy, where the patriarchs looked up from their books, and Moses set down his pen, and the prophet Elijah paused in his lecture, and Bar Yochai the mystic broke his meditation and opened his eyes, and Luria the lion halted his calculations, and Della Reina the madman, who had been forgiven, came to the window.

The rebbe opened his hands to the angel, and the angel lay his sword against them, and frost spread across the fingers of the great man. He brought the edge of the blade to his forearm, where the letters of his name pulsed black, and when he touched the point to the very first letter of his name, he did not smudge it, he did not deform it, but he turned it into something new, the secret letter, the lost letter that will complete our alphabet in the time of the Messiah.

I will abolish death! the Berukhim Rebbe proclaimed. The rebbe released the sword, and it hovered above him, and he saw himself in its light, and he was changed. He fled into the night, his little black dog close behind.

Just as I finished the tale, the fluorescent light timed out with a click, and for an instant I imagined I was in the basement of my parents’ house, bookshelves rising above me, the notebook in my lap. Their cellar too was a library of sorts; and so had been Grandpa’s apartment by the sea, crammed with the volumes he collected, and Holly’s nursery, the fresh blue paint veiling the ghostly imprint of books. I imagined each as a room in a vast repository, imagined that if I continued through this university hall, narrow and dusty, feeling my way, my fingertips trailing along the canvas spines, I would eventually find my way home.

The light switched back on. The old man had hit the button affixed to the bookcase, just beneath the cardboard subject marker. We were sitting in the Geography section.

“I believe the tales of the angels are greatly exaggerated,” the old man said. Before him, the book I had traded was open to the same page I had consulted, the description of the Berukhim Penitents’ origin—or the refutation of it, depending on your point of view.

“That’s a definitional impossibility,” I said, and when he looked at me curiously I added, “How can you know what angels do?” What I had meant was, you can’t judge a fiction on its accuracy, but Holly had sensitized me to the existence of true believers—I didn’t want to offend him.