The Angel of Losses Read online

  Someone’s crying, he said.

  A voice hung over the night like a shroud. O Israel, it cried. Arise, arise!

  It could have been one of the ghetto’s mournful mystics. Their number was growing as fate closed in. But I believed it was the Angel of Losses, the original penitent. He had finally arrived.

  I came to the hole in the wall and scratched at its edges. Mortar crumbled to the ground. I moved my face into the gap. A breeze blew from the invisible other side.

  And then the earth rumbled and there was a flash of light, and I saw him, the Angel of Losses, right in front of me—his hair rippling smoke, his eyes slick river stones, his teeth sparking flint, his beard a dark cataract, his skin veined green, his eyes roiling flames, his teeth hailstones, his blood a stream of boulders hurtling like a train.

  I jumped back. Fire bubbled into the sky, like God appearing to Israel in the desert. A bomb had exploded in the ghetto center; someone, some group, was sabotaging the performance. Before I could collect myself, another went off. I grabbed Josef and we plunged through the wall. We ran through the streets until we came to the home of the Christian janitor who had saved the temple books. He and his wife sheltered us until morning. When they fed Josef an egg for breakfast, I cried, my first tears of sorrow since the demons had come to our home.

  Daylight brought news that the ghetto was on fire. The janitor left, and his wife sent their children to school. My husband said you’re a very hard worker for such a young boy, she told me. Since my parents had been taken, I had been very busy, it was true—I was always busy. But it wasn’t a sense of duty or love of work. I just wanted to be alive.

  She looked over my shoulder. How long has he been like that?

  Josef had fallen asleep on the floor. His face was gray. His hands were curled into fists the size of cat’s paws. His breath was a ragged labor. It sounded like an animal had colonized the empty cabinet of his chest. He coughed.

  He was far sicker than I had realized. No egg would cure him.

  The janitor returned from the Jewish library. Weiskopf had arranged with another woman, a Christian librarian at the university, to hide us at her sister’s farmhouse at the edge of the city. The janitor would take us as far as the woods, and then we would follow the creek until we came to her house; we were to look for a green barn, a chicken coop, and a dying tree split in half by lightning.

  In the company of a free Christian man, we would probably be safe from the police, especially since they were distracted by the unrest in the ghetto. I held Josef close to me as we went on our way, and for the first time I saw how different we looked, his hair black and my hair blond, his eyes brown and mine blue. It wouldn’t be hard for someone to mistake me for the janitor’s son. Josef looked nothing like him.

  Before leaving us, the janitor took me aside. You’ll have to be very quiet when you’re hiding in her home. Her neighbors will not only turn you in if they learn about you and Josef, but they’ll turn in her family too. I wanted to promise that we would be quiet, but before I could, Josef’s cough began, possessing his whole body.

  If she hears him cough like that, she’ll turn you away, he said.

  For the second time, I led my brother into the woods. Only once did Josef speak. What happened to our uncle and all his books? he asked.

  I had no answer. I hated our uncle. And then, as if the strength of my fury had conjured him, he appeared beside the creek. His clothes hung on his body, as caked with dirt as our own. No coat. Empty hands. Blue eyes blazing.

  He had come for me after all. But I had sat with his story for two days, and it had bloomed inside of me like mold. I had seen the Angel of Losses, and it had frightened me more than anything—more than the war, the wizened children, the train that emptied Ghetto 2, even more than Josef’s cough. I could not survive the ghetto only to be beholden to that creature.

  I grabbed Josef’s wrist and ran. I dragged him across the thick rot of fallen leaves, over roots broken through the mud, and finally we hid behind a tree. I held him against me and peered around the thick trunk. The White Rebbe came toward us, undaunted by the rocks and pools of mud and snaking roots. A golden aura rose from his shoulders like steam. The letter burning in his flesh—he had called it the light that maintained the world, that illuminated the passage between this realm and the next. He wanted to carve it into my own skin. He wanted me to become like him. I didn’t know what he was, exactly, but I knew he wasn’t a man like the rest of us. He was strange and he was wrong, and I would never, never put my life in his hands.

  I ran without a destination, out of hope, out of fear.

  When I lost my breath, I braced myself against another tree, studying the woods in every direction, remembering how he had appeared at my back—impossible—in the cellar. But now he was gone. Maybe he had never been there at all—just a figment of my imagination, a delusion.

  Something broke the eerie silence of the woods. It was my brother’s lung-shredding cough. I’d run a great distance—when I looked in the direction of the sound, I couldn’t see him. I hadn’t meant to drop his hand, to speed away and leave him alone—I had been driven by fear of the White Rebbe, the promise he meant to extract from me, to deliver me to the terrible angel.

  Panic rose within me. I nearly bolted into the clearing. I nearly shouted his name. But then I heard him again. The whole forest, which at that moment was the whole world, shook with Josef’s uncontrollable hacking.

  The sound of his illness and the space between us forced me to admit the truth.

  There was no blessing coming our way. There was no passage to the Holy Land. There was no green barn for us—no Christian woman who would open her door to a child who could not be hidden. If I brought him with me, she would turn us away. If we returned to the ghetto, we would never escape again. Either way, there was only death.

  I didn’t want to die.

  I survived by killing my brother.

  I left him in the woods. I left him by a tree, coughing in the cold forest of Lithuania. I left him all alone.

  FOR DECADES AFTER I LEFT RUSSIA, I DIDN’T DREAM. No fleeting images. No nightmares. No sharp sensation of tumbling. Just a sweet, thick blackness. The space where my soul once was. But in old age I dreamed again. Dreams about the great wonders performed in the small villages of Europe. Dreams about the White Rebbe, who traveled the world on the back of an angel; and the Gaon of Vilna, leading his congregation in prayers that repelled the bullets of Catherine’s army; and all the Hamans of history, defeated by tzaddiks born into each generation; and Miriam the priestess and her well of memory; and the faithful celebrating the Torah in the camps. I dreamt about the Artists’ Association of the Vilna Ghetto, and how if only they had gone into exile before the war, they could have performed on the Yiddish stages of the Lower East Side while Strashun Street was sacked.

  I began to write my dreams down. I am a man without a village who has authored a hundred memorial books. I am a librarian, charged with watching over a small but essential wing of an infinite collection, the very stories the White Rebbe labored to hide: not his magical tour, his domestic miracles and isolated wonders, but his biography, the man who lived so long he became inhuman, just as his enemy, the Angel of Losses, became a specter.

  WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WRITING, I WENT TO the beach. I stayed there all day. I love the sight of the sea. In the evening I returned home and took a paring knife to my forearm. I had only seen the letter once, glowing in the flesh of an old man who sat in a labyrinth of books beneath a ghetto, but in my dreams it was as clear as my own reflection in a mirror—every curve, every slash. My skin tore easily, like tissue paper, and beneath the sheen of blood I watched it grow, that hieroglyph, something like a flame, something like a flower. My arm began to ache, and my body began to tremble. My mind’s eye had gone dark, and the letter was incomplete. But it was close. I opened my front door and I waited.

  Day turned into night, and I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, the
windows were black, and a man stood in the hall, an old man, old like me. Come in, I said. He sat in the armchair, and we stared at each other across a table piled with notebooks. His eyes were blue as frost.

  I have found you, he said.

  He no longer looked like that ancient scribe haunting the corridors beneath Vilna Ghetto Number 1. He looked like any other old man giving his final steps to the streets of New York. He looked like me.

  No, I said to the man I had once called uncle. I found you. I extended my arm. Blackened. Torn. Trembling.

  Men like you, he said. Nothing moves them but fear of their own death. You will give me what I want. Let me rest. Let me join that eleventh Lost Tribe, lost on the vast plains of war. My life is an error. Let me correct it. Take the Sabbath Light from me, he continued. Give me your death that I might cease my wanderings. Do for me what my brother did for my father, and what I did for my brother.

  Look at me, I said. I’m not the man for it.

  Do not underestimate yourself. You’ve done what none of us did. Created yourself as a new man. And I let you have that—decades of that—before calling in your promise.

  If that’s so, I said, then I am a golem. Soulless.

  Then it will be your son.

  My son knows nothing.

  Then it will be your granddaughter.

  I realized I hadn’t escaped him after all. He had always been here, watching, waiting. My whole life was for nothing.

  THAT NIGHT THE WHITE REBBE GRANTED MY REQUEST for one last dream, that I might know my brother’s final chapter.

  There was no miracle for Josef. He spent his last hours on earth watching dark descend on the woods, and frost rose from the ground and seeped between his ribs. Every sound was the footstep of a demon. He cried, as quietly as he could. He cried for his brother and mother and father. His coughing tore agony through his body. His hands and feet went numb. Soon he lost the strength even to cry or speak. There was only the shivering of his body giving way to a profound warmth, numbness, sleep. And then he died.

  I see him dying in the corner of my bedroom. I see him dying under my kitchen table. I see him cowering in the stairwell, staring past me, his eyes wet, his teeth chattering. I see him on the corner of Mermaid Avenue, hiding behind a trash can crowned with seagulls, his blue fingers against the metal. I can no longer pretend that he hasn’t been with me all along.

  The old man is coming for me again.

  He’s coming for me tonight, but I’ll be at the sea, the churning stomach of the earth. I will sit at the water’s edge. Across the dunes, a young boy with frozen eyelashes and a bone-shattering cough will make his own place in the sand. We will wait in the waning day, in the darkness that dwells far from the Sabbath Light. We will listen to the storming anguish of the world soul, a soul exiled from its body, a people exiled from their God, a man exiled from his family, never to be known.

  It is time for me to claim the death I left behind so many years ago. A train is speeding through a forest, flanked by starved wolves galloping between the trees, frenzied by the scent of fear. But here there is just a small boy with blue lips and black eyes, and when he puts his arms around my legs, the cold burns through my trousers, my skin, my bones, and swims in my veins toward my heart, now beating slower and slower and slower.

  I have come home.

  Ten

  He’s coming for me, Grandpa told me before he died. I came to believe he meant the old man—dangerous, demanding—but now I knew he was talking about the ghost child, moon white and tubercular, emerging from the dark woods. The child he told me never to ask about. The one he killed.

  The hospital smelled like rubbing alcohol and plastic. I went outside and stood on the corner drinking milky coffee, letting the crisp air sneak under my collar. The counselors told Holly there was little the doctors could do for Eli; that she should think about suffering and quality of life and the inevitable.

  After Grandpa disappeared and returned an angrier version of himself, my father was sure he had had a stroke. Grandpa had submitted to an evaluation, but it was inconclusive, and his doctor could only speculate about a possible “neurological event.” A seismic occurrence. The plates of his brain moving. Something trying to get out. Something collapsing in. There’s no coming back, the doctor had explained. Once the brain falters, it can’t right itself. As long as baby Eli lived, we would be waiting for the damage left by the seizures to reveal itself, the motions he couldn’t make, words he would never say. Waiting, also, for the next seizure. For Eli to die.

  Unless Nathan or I did something about it. There was an awful price to pay, though, which the Angel of Losses would someday exact, something that had driven the White Rebbe to run for centuries and Grandpa to abandon his own brother and his entire history.

  Or maybe Grandpa was lying. Rationalizing. Hadn’t he said it himself—how desperately he had wanted to live? Desperately enough to kill the little boy who depended on him?

  All along, I had imagined that once I knew Grandpa’s secrets, my relationship with him—with his memory—would be stronger. But let it be ruined. I was grateful for the truth. It reminded me that I would never, never abandon Holly. Even this Holly—Chava—whom I couldn’t speak to, not really, whom I couldn’t understand, who didn’t understand me, who didn’t even want to anymore. Even if we were never Marjorie and Holly again. It didn’t matter.

  I couldn’t let Nathan take the Sabbath Light. It would destroy him—somehow—and that would destroy Holly and orphan Eli. We had to find the final notebook, The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses, the secret history Eli had learned in the ghetto cellar. It would show us another way. It had to.

  In the waiting room, Yael sat amid a collection of discarded coats and duffel bags, chewing her nails and staring into the linoleum.

  “Where’s Nathan?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me and her face crumpled. Oh God, I thought. Eli seized again.

  “Your sister collapsed,” she said. “They’re giving her fluids.”

  I looked around the hall, at the uniform plastic-upholstered chairs, the ice-blue floor, the distant hint of the sun from the atrium. I couldn’t take any more of this, and I wouldn’t.

  “Where’s Nathan?” I asked.

  She looked over her shoulder, as if he were standing behind her—but no, she was checking to make sure no one could hear us. “I told Holly he went to the house to get clothes.”

  “He didn’t?” She didn’t answer. “What about Brooklyn?”

  She shook her head. “But he’ll come back soon, I’m sure.”

  “Come back? How could he leave now?” She looked away. She was ashamed by his disappearance but perhaps not surprised; I knew his family thought him strange, but I hadn’t realized just how little they expected from him.

  If moments before my head was filled with stories of magic and redemption, of immortals and God’s own language, now I was consumed by something greater than all the metaphysics the ancients could devise—my sister’s pain doubled by her husband’s abandonment, and the love I had for her.

  In a rush it came out. “I never liked him.” I said. “In fact, I hated him. And I was right. Look what he’s done.”

  Yael’s face flushed, and for an instant I was sorry. She had always been nice to me, and none of this was her fault. But then she said, “Yes, you were right all along. I hope you enjoy this moment, Marjorie.” She stalked away.

  AFTER HOLLY’S VEINS HAD DRAINED THE WHOLE IV BAG, THE doctors released her, and my mother and I decided to take her back to my apartment. She protested weakly about leaving Eli alone with the nurses but let us guide her outside. In the cab, while the city darkened around us, I slid my sunglasses onto her face and only took them off again after she was in my bed.

  I gave her a sleeping pill. Only one left now. She swallowed it and lay back on the pillow. “Where is he?” she asked. I glanced at my mother—did Mom know that Nathan was gone, that no one could find him?

  She did.
“Nathan’s at the house,” she lied. “And Daddy’s flying in tomorrow.”

  “Not Daddy,” Holly said. Her eyes were liquid, half-dreaming. “Grandpa. He’s watching Eli. When are they coming back?”

  A chill went through me. The dead had no claim on that baby. Not even Grandpa, Eli’s namesake.

  “Close your eyes,” I answered. She did, and she slept.

  FIRST THERE IS THE LONG FLUORESCENT LIGHT, A FLICKERING chemical path running toward infinity. Then I’m standing beside a pilled brown couch, a water cooler with its sleeve of paper cones, a rabbit-eared TV, a folding table with a chess set, and there, in the middle distance, an old man rising from an armchair. Eli.

  I never wanted you to find me here, he says, and his voice is so close, no waver to it, just the soft grip of his faded accent. I flinch. But now that you’re here, Marjorie, I’m so happy to see your face. His left leg trembles—but no, there’s something moving behind him. A child emerges, a little boy in a ragged coat and too big shoes. Black eyes. He takes my grandfather’s hand.

  I turn and run over miles of carpet, dodging rows of plastic plants and hills of magazines. Multiplying televisions flash a riot of tinsel. I barely feel anything, my body just an aura haloing my hammering heart, its pounding joining with the field of static. There’s one more element to their symphony: Grandpa’s voice, small, like a radio in a hurricane. My little girl. My love. I did a terrible thing. Forgive me.

  But I can’t. If I keep running, I’ll never have to see him again.

  SIMON WAS WORRIED. “YOU WERE SHAKING.”

  “It was just a dream,” I said, but my legs were still tingling, my breath was still coming in uneven wisps, as if I had actually been in two places at once, asleep beside Simon and also racing through my grandfather’s eternal punishment, terrified that if I lingered, it might become my own.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not real.”

  “What if it is?” I asked.