The Angel of Losses Read online

  “I thought it was against the evil eye.”

  “Yes, yes,” Nathan said. “But the word on it—Zariel. Micah said it’s a name of Lilith.” He had this way, which my sister had picked up, of dropping names with no explanation. I didn’t know who was a neighbor’s cousin, who was a minor biblical hero.

  “Lilith, the demon,” he continued. “She comes for babies. That’s why Moishe and Yossi and Aaron are coming over. It’s the Night of Watching. Eli’s vulnerable. We’ll keep him safe.”

  Eli sighed all the air from his lungs, a tiny puff. I stared down at him, looking for Holly in his face, for Dad, for Grandpa. But already he looked like his own person.

  “Have you found the books you were looking for?” Nathan asked. I didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t blink. “The notebooks,” he clarified.

  I looked at him then but could read nothing in his expression.

  “Not yet,” I said. “They haven’t turned up, I guess?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head slowly, once to the right, once to the left. Then he extended his arms, and I returned the baby to him.

  After dinner Holly took the baby upstairs to feed him, and I helped Yael clean the kitchen. When we were done washing the dishes, she tore a trash bag in two and laid it on the floor, then placed one of the kitchen chairs on top. “Come,” she said. “I’ll cut your hair.”

  I put my hands to the bundle of curls against my neck. “What?”

  “It’s tradition,” she said.

  “Are you doing theirs?” I asked, gesturing to the other room, where Nathan sat with his friends, shouting cheerfully in Yiddish.

  She followed my gaze and then looked at the ceiling, biting back her judgment. “No, only family.” She paused. “Just a little,” she prodded, the edge slipping from her voice. “Just to say we did it.”

  I liked Yael. She was always nice to me. I didn’t want her to think I was uncooperative—and when I was uncooperative, at least she could defend me by saying I had gone along with this. I took the tie out of my hair and pulled it smooth, sat before her.

  She tugged slightly at the ends, which fell to the top edge of my tattoo. It was healed now, the scabs fallen away, the black less brilliant and more organic. I heard the slice of the scissors, a whisper, and felt the slight pull of the blades. “You should wear it down more,” Yael said. “So beautiful. So different from Chava’s.” Holly’s hair was dark and straight like Dad’s, mine strawberry blond and curly like Grandpa’s.

  Another snip. “It’s sad that Nathan’s father’s not here,” she said. He had passed away years ago. I thought of my own father, on the phone in the backyard, running to the store for things we didn’t need, dusting and sweeping while the rest of us passed the baby around.

  The day that Grandpa had returned from his wandering the beach, his lost weekend, Holly and I stayed with him after our father left—after Grandpa dismissed him. At the end of the afternoon, saying good-bye at his apartment, he told us, “Tell your father I love him.” Quickly, turning away from us even as he said it. When I repeated the message to my dad on the phone, there was just silence on the other end. Later, at the funeral, my father spoke only briefly. Eli was a devoted grandfather. He loved his girls.

  “It’s sad,” I agreed. “I wish my grandfather could be here too.”

  “Oh, the one Eli’s named for.” And just like that, the baby claimed his name, and Grandpa receded a little more.

  Soon my mother declared it was time for everyone to go to bed. Holly sat on the couch, the baby pressed into her chest, tears shining on her cheeks. She didn’t want to let Eli out of her sight, even for the hour or two before his next feeding. She seemed unprepared for the reality of him being outside of her body, separate. My mother wanted her to sleep, and Nathan wanted to pray over his son, and they sat on either side of her, trying to coax Eli out of her arms. They spoke in quiet, sympathetic tones, like she was a child, overtired and irrational.

  Just let her hold her baby, I wanted to say. Don’t you see she’s afraid? But I had privately sworn to be quiet and helpful, not to remind anyone that Holly and I could barely stand each other, and no one noticed when I slipped upstairs. I just need to get through tomorrow, I thought. And then I can leave.

  I HAD TO GET THROUGH THE NIGHT TOO. I LAY ON THE FLOOR of the nursery, unable to sleep. There were a few stacks of diapers against the wall, a narrow changing table, and the old rocking chair, but otherwise the room was empty. I watched the curtains billow around the half-open window, thinking about my grandfather, about all of the things I didn’t know about him, and about Nathan’s question about the notebooks. He hadn’t taken my search seriously that day, and he had never spoken to me with such seriousness, and respect even, as he did tonight.

  It was the necklace, I realized. He was treating me differently because of the necklace.

  A bit of melody rose up through the window. Nathan and his friends, singing something, chanting. I went downstairs, through the laundry room, and found the back door open, several pairs of dress shoes on the mat. Outside, the sky was a muggy darkness, just a handful of pinpoint stars and a weak sliver of moon. Four black figures knelt on the grass, bending their bodies down, straightening again, their arms stretched skyward, dirt falling from between their fingers. Behind them, ignored, the baby carrier, its handle raised.

  I burst through the doorway. Three of the men started, turning toward me. Only Nathan remained undisturbed in his chanting. Eli squirmed in his blankets, his hands waving, his cries lost in the wind.

  “Your son is crying!” I shouted. I reached in to tuck his blanket around him and found he was snug inside, his chest warm but his cheeks cold with the first September chill.

  “You scared him,” Nathan said, still on his knees, crawling toward us. There was dirt on his face. “He was fine.” He reached for the baby, and I yanked the carrier away. Eli wailed.

  “Look at you. What’s the matter with you?” I shouted, struggling to wrap my arms around the bulky plastic. The other men, their faces also shadowed with dirt, were careful not to look at me.

  The screen door squeaked again. “What are you doing out here?” It was my mother, in her bathrobe, holding it closed at her neck.

  I handed Eli to her. “Take him inside.”

  She hooked the carrier in one arm, reached down to soothe him with her other hand. “Let’s all go inside. I’ll take him upstairs.”

  “No!” Nathan cried, the chords in his throat strained in the dim light filtering from the second floor. He had always been skinny; now he appeared malnourished, sick. He breathed loudly through his nose, and then showed us his palms, begging us to wait. “The ritual isn’t complete.”

  “You’ll make him sick,” Mom hissed. She glanced over her shoulder, worrying, I knew, that we would wake Holly. “Is that what you want?”

  “He’s my son,” he said quietly, but I could see that he was furious, his mouth tight and his eyes burning.

  “He’s my grandson,” Mom said. “And this is my house.” She turned toward the door, and Nathan turned away from us. He wandered to the back of the yard, his dirt-caked hands on his head. His friends stood in a silent cluster, their faces pale and eyes wide. I imagined them floating up into the sky like the three men in Holly’s painting, on the edge of a new existence, waiting for their fourth.

  I CRASHED BEFORE DAWN, AND DAD WOKE ME MINUTES BEFORE the guests were set to arrive. I had meant to pack the navy suit I’d worn to my oral exams, but I’d accidentally grabbed the black one, which I hadn’t worn since Grandpa’s funeral. I unrolled it on the carpet and stared at it, the shape of myself in mourning, as car doors snapped in the distance and unintelligible, happy voices filled the house.

  Downstairs, the men were in the dining room, the women outside watching the children run in the yard, everyone waiting for the ceremony. I noticed the men from the night before standing apart, as out of place among Nathan’s family as I was. When they first met, Holly might have be
en the only one who didn’t disapprove of Nathan’s interest in the Penitents. She had always been curious about the secretive school, and unfazed by Grandpa’s slurs. Tell me more, she might have said, genuine and open-minded.

  My mother handed me a glass of water and sent me upstairs, where Holly was feeding Eli in her bed. She didn’t look up when I entered, and I put the glass on the nightstand. “Can you do one other thing for me?” she asked.

  “Sure, what?”

  “Don’t talk to my husband,” she said, and spoke no more to me that day.

  ON THE WAY TO THE TRAIN, I ASKED MY FATHER TO STOP AT THE cemetery where Grandpa was buried.

  “Sure,” he said. We had left the house early. My parents were flying back to Florida in the morning, and I wondered when my father would be back again—I suspected my mother would arrive alone for Thanksgiving.

  Dad drove along the grassy planes of tombstones, and the road unfurled before us, less like a path and more like a tether with one end rooted in my chest. We went past the office, took the curve to the right. Dad stopped the car by the bank of mausoleum doors, flat and featureless as the Coney Island Senior Center.

  “I wish you would look at Grandpa’s notebook,” I said. “Maybe something in there would be familiar to you.”

  “He didn’t talk to me the way he talked to you girls,” he said. “He didn’t tell me anything, and he didn’t want me to read that book.” He insisted he had no memory of what happened at the end of that day long ago when we cleaned out the apartment. If he had said he was throwing them out with the rest of Grandpa’s unwanted belongings, then that must have been what he did; he didn’t know how one had managed to survive.

  “Maybe his friend Sam, then.”

  “I think he died last year.”

  “You never told me,” I said. He just shrugged. “Then what about his children?” I asked. “You must have a phone number or a name. Someone called to tell you he was gone—“

  “I don’t know,” he interrupted, and he sounded nearly as angry as me. His relationship with his father had always been formal, even cold. The only memories Dad shared were superficial—he’d smile wistfully over his sandwich and say, Your grandfather loved brown mustard, or shake his head at the sports section and say, The Yankees won again; I’m glad your grandfather’s not here to see it.

  “Go ahead,” Dad said. “Take your time.” He wasn’t coming with me.

  My grandparents’ graves were back beneath the willow trees that lined the edge of the cemetery. I walked over the dead, their nameplates lodged in the bright sod. Mud caked the surfaces of my grandparents’ grave markers. I got down on my hands and knees and scraped the dirt away. How long had it been since any of us visited? I began counting the years back, but then noticed the stones—tiny pebbles lined up along the edges of the plaques. Had Holly been coming here? I couldn’t imagine her visiting but not cleaning the graves, unless she had been too big to get down on the ground.

  But someone had been here, just out of sight, marking the days.

  Six

  When his shift ended, Simon met me at the carrel I was illegally keeping as my own, a splintered maple cubicle stacked with books and protected by a piece of card stock folded in half that read RESERVED.

  “Did you make that yourself?” he asked.

  “No, the provost issued it,” I said.

  “On his personal printer.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I can’t believe that works.” He sighed.

  “I have a roll of caution tape too.”

  “You are out of control.”

  “You have no idea,” I answered, turning over a fresh sheet on my legal pad. I had begun charting elements from The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light against what I knew about the Berukhim Rebbe. The dynasty of men who don’t die. The angels armed with swords and contracts. The White Rebbe must be a version of the Berukhim Rebbe, I thought, but I couldn’t rule out that it might be the other way around. The old man himself hadn’t confirmed that they were the same person, but he hadn’t denied it either.

  Simon had been investigating the Berukhim Penitents and their angels, and I copied down everything he told me. That the mystics they descended from conjured angels as teachers, along with the spirits of dead sages, a holy magic of words and names and graveyard rituals. That angels are manifestations of God but sometimes misbehave and are punished. That they could be manlike, messengers, but they could also be physical forces, the energy that shapes babies in the womb or the pestilence that destroys a nation. That they sit on the juries that judge men’s souls, and if even one in a thousand votes to acquit, God acquiesces. That each person has four accompanying angels. That each of the first seventy nations had its own ministering angel, who lobbied God on its behalf, and who suffered if they sinned. That the Berukhim Rebbe said there was a seventy-first angel, the Angel of Losses, named Yode’a, who came into existence when ten of the twelve tribes of Israel were exiled by Assyrian invaders twenty-eight centuries ago.

  “And that’s all I could find. It’s from a nineteenth-century biography of an eighteenth-century rabbi, one sentence in his correspondence,” Simon said. “But something else must have survived in the oral tradition. I could put your brother-in-law in touch with the student who collected that item on our map.”

  “I’ll suggest that to him,” I said, and put down my pen.

  “What exactly is he working on?” Simon asked, not for the first time.

  I took my RESERVED sign and hit his knee. “Happy hour,” I said. “You need to relax. You need a beer.”

  WE HAD A DRINK, THEN ANOTHER. HE HAD SUCH AN EASY laugh, like Holly, or how Holly used to be—or maybe how she still was, with Nathan. We talked about the people we knew in common and how we came to be at the university. We went to dinner. We talked about work. Simon had joined his project as a technical expert, coding a visualization of myths about the Lost Tribes of Israel. The database encompassed Wandering Jews from legend and history who had searched for the missing Israelites, and he was captivated by the medieval scribes who had documented their travels across Christendom and the Orient, their tales a mix of meticulous observation and outright fantasy. Censuses and cartography alongside monstrous creatures, fabled cities, and messianic wonder-workers.

  “I want to see the map,” I said.

  He lived in a studio near the cathedral, a studio dominated by a desk with two flat computer monitors. They blinked to life when Simon nudged the mouse, one screen displaying a map of the world, the nations shaded in green and taupe, the other screen an array of menus labeled for nations, languages, centuries, and narrative classifications.

  “Here, sit.” He offered me the computer chair. “This is the folklore map. Go ahead. Choose.”

  I felt his weight on the back of the chair as he leaned against it. I keyed in “Wandering Jew” and scanned the country options. I clicked, lighting up England, a puzzle piece near the top of the screen, then selected Argentina, and the other corner of the map glowed. “The country function is a bit restrictive,” Simon said, reaching over my shoulder to uncheck my selections. “Try narrative classification; you’ll like that.”

  The list offered poetry, legend, drama, pamphlet. Newspaper too. I clicked on it, eager for the contemporary and factual, and stars lit across the globe. I checked English under language, and the stars dimmed across Latin America, Europe.

  “Go to Manhattan,” he said. I zoomed in until a star appeared on the southern tip of the green, streetless island and brought up a white text box.

  A sensation was created in William Street on Thursday morning, by the appearance of a man with a long floating beard, and dressed in loose pantaloons, with a turban on his head. He carried in his hand a little Hebrew book, out of which he read to the crowd that gathered around him. He represented himself as the veritable Wandering Jew. Nobody knows who he is or where he came from. A learned Jewish Rabbi was sent to converse with him, which they did in the
Hebrew language, and the stranger was found to be perfect in his knowledge of that most difficult tongue.

  The Rabbi tested him in Arabic, in Phoenician, and in Sanskrit, but soon found that the aged stranger far surpassed him in his intimacy with them all. The Rabbi invited him to his house but, said the stranger, “Nay, I cannot stop. The Crucified One of Calvary has pronounced the edict, and I must not rest. I must move on—ever on!” He was last seen on Thursday, but to where he departed no one can tell.

  I scrolled to the bottom, where the source and date was noted in italics. The Deseret News. 1856.

  “That was a New York paper?” I asked. He was sitting on the bed now, a few feet away.

  “Salt Lake City. Still going, actually. The Mormons were really into the Wandering Jew. And the Pennsylvania Dutch, for some reason.”

  I voided the filters and the screen resolved into an impressionistic globe. “So you got a grant to track the Wandering Jew on Google Earth.”

  “We got a grant to create a cross-referenced digital archive of folklore about the Lost Tribes of Israel. We have an undergraduate—he gets free summer housing as long as he can show twenty hours a week of research—so we got an extra unpaid intern. I give him all the Wandering Jew stuff to scan. I think he spends the rest of his time working for a law firm.”

  “But the Wandering Jew—that’s a whole other legend.”

  “What about Benjamin of Tudela, and Abraham Abulafia, and David Reubeni?”

  “I don’t know those names.”

  “Wandering Jews.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m serious; they were real Jews, and they wandered around looking for the Lost Tribes, or the Messiah, or claimed to be the Messiah. You haven’t run into any of this, in your extracurricular research?”

  “All I know about the Lost Tribes I learned from the guys with a megaphone and a map of Haiti on a Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street.”

  “Shit,” he said. “I forgot about them. I should send our intern up there. They probably have pamphlets. The Black Israelites, right?”