The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (16 page)

Zayin could not stop looking at him. She wondered if she’d met him before, if she’d saved him and was drawn to him protectively, as mother to son. She wondered if she was somehow related to him, if they shared the same blood, a continent apart, as distant cousins. She wondered a hundred wonders, but nothing she had known, or even imagined, could explain the intensity of his presence, his absolute singularity in a marketplace crowded with men and donkeys: A glimpse of him made her lose sight of all humanity. In his dawn-blue eyes, the girl Messiah perceived all that she had never thought to desire.

The first time that she saw the man, she tried to approach him, but found that many dozen of her devotees stood between them, awaiting her care. For a moment she didn’t—care, that is—wouldn’t have been bothered to see them slaughtered, if only they weren’t in her way. She attempted to push past the hordes, yet couldn’t move a limb. She looked down. She couldn’t even see her legs and arms, so fiercely were folks grasping them, in want of her ministrations. Their troubles overwhelmed her. Their expectations overcame her. She yielded. Zayin was a good girl. Did it matter that she hadn’t asked to be the Messiah? Her followers hadn’t asked to suffer.

She returned to the marketplace the next day and the day after. Folks gathered around her with small aches and abrasions, but she couldn’t find her peddler among them. She wanted to ask about him, wished she had his name. What could she say? She worked and she waited.

It was on the fourth day that news of Zayin’s father at last found her, early morning in the marketplace. In the time that it took her to read the letter, ten more came, and then a hundred, a thousand. Before the blizzard of paper could smother her, the fastest horse was fetched from the mayor’s stables, and saddled. A man lifted her up by the waist. In his grip, she felt a shimmer, like first light, within her. She caught his dawn-blue eyes, their blaze. His cheek brushed hers. He whispered some words in her ear. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he said,
I’m here for you, Zayin.

Then the horse carried her across a landscape, smooth with fallen paper, to the next town, where she changed to a fresh horse, and so forth, all the way home. The rabbi received her in an embrace, and took her to Menashe. The apothecary hadn’t been awake in days, the rabbi told her. He didn’t drink or eat. His emaciated body rattled with death whenever he breathed.

Zayin mounted the stairs and entered his bedchamber alone. From the window, she saw that the whole town had gathered below. She turned away from them. She knelt on the floor beside Menashe’s cot, and, beneath the blankets, found his hands.

The nails were already long and sharp like a cadaver’s subterranean claws, yet she didn’t wince, so often had she done this before, drawing men and women back into the world for an other day or year. She began chanting. She put her ear to his chest to hear her words hum within him. They didn’t. Instead there was a rumbling: Menashe, clearing his throat, coughing.

— Enough with the singing, Zayin.

— Hush, Papa. It’s good for you. This is how I save people.

— First you run away from home and make me old because I can’t rely on you. Now I’m dying and you’re telling me what to do.

— You won’t die.

— I’m an apothecary. I know these things.

— I’m the Messiah. Things are as I say.

— No, daughter, you’re delusional. You’re just an ordinary girl. I’m your father, Zayin. I’d have noticed if you had the wings of an angel. I’d have seen if you’d fallen from the heavens.

— What about my miracles?

— Don’t you recall what I told you about my medicines? Do you remember how I said that they don’t do anything on their own, but sometimes they work wonders just because people believe in them?

— Since the body is the best apothecary?

— Yes, Zayin. Your miracles are like my elixirs: the tricks of a charlatan.

— You’re certain?

— As certain as you will be, shortly, when, in spite of your magical intervention, this sickness finally kills me. Find love, Zayin. Make a family. Life is the only miracle, and it’s brief.

— At least may I sing to you?

— Sing me a lullaby, child.

As she chanted, he shut his eyes and hummed along. When she could no longer hear him, he was gone.

In the realm of human experience, only watching your parents die is more terrible than seeing your Messiah cry. After many hours, Zayin went to the window, bathed in tears, to share what had happened, and what she now knew.
My father is dead,
she exclaimed.
I am not the Messiah. Please go home.

But how could they possibly believe Zayin? There was too much evidence against her blasphemous claims, evidence carried in their own bones: Were she not the Messiah, they wouldn’t be there to be forsaken by her.

Why would she save them from the demon plague, only to abandon them? What sin had they committed to bring her to tears? What evil had they done to make her take Menashe’s life and leave them? They demanded that she at least condemn them, requested the small justice of knowing the crime for which they were punished.

Zayin came down to them. Even in her anguish, she recognized that the only sin had been her messianic arrogance, and that the atonement must be her silence. She would simply let folks believe about her what they had to believe: Her crime would become her punishment.

A placebo Messiah, the apothecary’s orphan wandered the land. She no longer performed miracles, nor expected them, but rather watched, breathless, as they happened, seemingly spontaneously, wherever she went. In her presence, folks found health and wealth, wisdom, even. Families ended feuds, and countries brought wars to truce. The miracles appeared more incredible than before, as if to test her, to taunt her, to torment her with the awareness she alone possessed, that she’d nothing whatsoever to do with the world in its mystery. Zayin felt like a scapegoat, except her burden wasn’t blame, but credit. She had to keep moving, to escape the wrath of acclaim.

She traveled in silence for a year, and witnessed every possible astonishment, save for the one that might have moved her: the wonder of being embraced again by the man with eyes of dawn. Every day she doubted more the words she thought he’d whispered. She realized that he couldn’t be there for her if she was everywhere and nowhere, a placebo human: Zayin, false Messiah, had become entirely what she was not, at the expense of who she’d once been. When miracles happened in her midst, she no longer knew who was being acclaimed. She felt neither pride nor shame. She lost all delusions, could neither see nor hear. The air gave way around her.

Zayin fainted. She’d been standing in a pasture. Folks set her on a bed of straw there. The villagers didn’t know what else to do, for they’d never seen a Messiah before, much less one who was ill.

The town had neither rabbi nor shul. The mayor sent his sons to the three nearest cities. Each returned leading a veritable country. Aldermen and holy men, tradesmen and peasants: If this was the apocalypse, who didn’t want to be in the midst of it? The crush to see Zayin on her cot was suffocating. She was barely breathing. She responded to nobody, nothing. Her eyes were open, unblinking. Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her skin, radiant white, began to blue.

Or so some claimed. Others insisted that the change came from up above, as the afternoon sky darkened overhead—enfolding Zayin in deepest ultramarine—and the last light vanished under a fringe of fiery red.

Zayin was swept away in the light. She cast off her body like a slip as she was carried through the night. At last she came to rest, she knew not where, only that it was not a world she had traveled before. Still she felt no fear, for she was in the grasp of something long wanting, cradling her, easing her to sleep.

Sometime later, the dawn awoke her. She looked up—into the blue eyes of her lost peddler. He wore a mantle woven of the sun’s spectrum, in which he held her. She heard herself speak.

— What are
you
doing here?

— Don’t you know, Zayin? I’m the Messiah.

— But you were a peddler before.

— It was something to do. The world didn’t need me while you were alive.

—
I
needed you.

— You have me now.

— Will you never leave me again?

— I’ll leave you every day, to cross the sky. At night, you’ll be my bride.

Holding her tight, he pierced her with light. Then he left, to lead in the new morning. She watched as folks awoke and looked around, each finding that the apocalypse had not happened. One by one, they then gazed up into the dawn, and smiled. It was well that a Messiah passed above, now that Zayin, their savior, had shown them how to live.

CHET THE CHEAT

From the day that he was born, Chet was an orphan. By no means was he the only one in his town, for birth was often fatal back then, but, even by the standards of the local poorhouse, the child was pitifully thin. That may be why, on Chet’s thirteenth birthday, the village sin-eater, a sallow old widower named Ephraim, picked the boy to be his apprentice.

Ephraim was the region’s first sin-eating professional, a godsend, some said, for, in many rural stretches, the practice was still carried out communally: When a man or woman died, relatives would set a parting meal atop the sealed coffin, and anyone who ate a bite would consume a bit of the sin weighing down on the deceased, a portion of the wrong that the poor soul hadn’t survived to metabolize. The sin would become, by common understanding, the entire family’s digestive, and penitential, burden. Yet, no matter how fine the cooking—how rich the truffles or heavy the cream—folks seldom had much appetite for dead people’s troubles. How much simpler folks found it, how much less expensive and more efficient, to dispense with the graveside buffet, to put out some stale bread or moldy fruit, and hire a man to eat it at night while the village slept.

Nevertheless, professional sin-eating wasn’t easy. The sin-eater had to be penitent every waking hour, and had to take care never to sin, even in his dreams. While the price for Ephraim’s services varied from corpse to corpse, based on his estimation of how folks lived their lives, his calculations were necessarily approximations: His rudimentary actuarial tables couldn’t account for forgotten childhood slights, say, or uncon-fessed fratricides. The sin-eater carried in his gut the speechless guilt of all society, underbelly-by-proxy, and, if he was to avoid eternal damnation, much less sustain people’s confidence in him, he had to be both more and less than human.

Ephraim accomplished that by living the life of an ascetic, and this was the basis of Chet’s education. The old man had cleared a den in the side of a mountain several miles from the cemetery gates, where the boy came to live with him. Every little luxury that Chet had known—warm gruel, straw bed, sickly girls—was denied to him, and, had Ephraim not so carefully watched the boy, he might have been the first ward ever to run away
to
an orphanage.

Ephraim drilled Chet every day, to build his stamina for consuming and carrying sin, by filling his belly with sand and pebbles and rocks, and sprinting him from mountaintop to mountaintop. When he wasn’t mute with agony, or bleeding too profusely, Chet questioned his master’s tactics.

— Sins aren’t made of stone, you know.

— That’s their danger. They’re much easier to swallow, Chet, and far harder to expel.

But Chet wasn’t about to fall for that old-world-wisdom shtick. He taught himself to fake his swallow, and learned other tricks, too. He worked the geological gamut: With the cunning of a con artist, he chewed up granite and spat out garnets. With the bombast of a carnival showman, he made boulders vanish in a cloud of dust. Ephraim watched with horror his pupil’s hunger for attention, and decided that the time had come for a new lesson.

He brought Chet to the cemetery late one night. Candles burned where meals lay in wait, table scraps slopped atop each coffin in its open crypt. There was also money, the negotiated fee, which Ephraim set aside as alms after counting it and issuing a receipt. Chet watched his master eat, the only food he’d ever seen the old man take in. Ephraim was silent, but the candle illuminating his pained face appeared to flicker, and each morsel seemed to cry in his throat. When he was done, the candle flared up, and went out.

At the final crypt, he gave the boy a crust of bread. The bread was hard, but Chet had eaten staler loaves at the orphanage. He felt none of the trembling that appeared to afflict Ephraim as it passed his gullet. He reached for more. With a broad hand, the master held him back.

— Sin is poison. You have no tolerance for it yet.

— I’ll be fine. I’ve swallowed stones.

— You must do good before you eat again.

Ephraim made his apprentice help out the local stream, which could scarcely keep up a trickle that spring, by easing its load: For three full days, Chet hauled buckets of water to town. When he was done, Ephraim asked if he’d received gratitude from anyone.

— Folks took the water, but they laughed at me when I said that I was carrying it for the creek.

— Good. If you’d accepted praise, you’d have had to start over again.

Chet nodded, appreciating the master’s point. He noted that showing off with stones and sins was not the only trick in the books, that sometimes it paid to act with discretion, leaving people to their own beliefs.