The Angel of Losses Read online

  HER SECOND SEMESTER AT COLLEGE, HOLLY HAD TO START HER social life all over again. Her roommate, Rachel, was surprisingly sympathetic, and stayed up late that first week of classes listening to Holly’s story and describing her own breakup with her high school boyfriend, a passionate but chaste relationship that ended at graduation when he said he didn’t want to marry her.

  Instead of studying alone in the dorm, Holly went to the library with Rachel, who had a particular spot by the window in the social science reading room. Holly started going to dinner with her and her girlfriends, at the kosher dining hall. When Rachel invited Holly to a Sabbath dinner in a senior dorm, where they had their own kitchen and a folding table in the common area, Holly went. She was uncomfortable at first, she told me—when we finally spoke, a month into the semester—not knowing what to do when they prayed, racked with anxiety when two guys got into a heated argument about some religious law, every other word foreign to her, but the older girls had cooked so much food—chicken and fish and potatoes and rice—that it felt like a holiday. When one of the girls invited her to the next dinner, she accepted immediately, and at the third Shabbat dinner, she met Nathan.

  That same semester, my department accepted my application to finish my PhD, and Grandpa went missing for two days and then died within weeks of his return. I imagine the events of those months like a Chagall, like the picture Holly was painting while her baby slept inside her, the men floating amid stars on a deep-blue vortex. Grandpa appears in the distance after two days of wandering, a little old man beneath seagulls and billboards. I spend nights in the library, searching for a book that will explain ghosts to me. Holly and Nathan watch each other across a folding table piled with mismatched plates of food, in a cramped dormitory kitchen suspended above Manhattan. The bay gains on Coney Island, Hebrew and Yiddish voices circle my sister, obscure but comforting, a quilt of unreadable symbols.

  I graduated, Holly finished her first year of college, and Grandpa was buried, according to his will, in a shroud and a simple wooden box. I moved into grad school housing and made a little money grading summer school papers. Holly won a scholarship to a six-week graphic design program in Chicago, and when she came home, she packed away her jeans and tank tops and registered to take Hebrew instead of Spanish. In September I heard his name for the first time. Nathan, the man she had been exchanging letters with all summer—real letters, pages and pages of handwriting, sent via post.

  Man—that’s how my mother described him. “He’s a man, for crying out loud,” she said. He was twenty-six years old. Holly was nineteen.

  “But it’s not like they’re doing anything,” I said, defending Holly out of habit, though it did seem bizarre. “I don’t think he’ll even hold her hand. She’s not going to get pregnant.”

  “Marjorie, stop, I can’t even think about that.” Mom sighed. “I worried about you girls going away and, I don’t know, boys convincing you to drink or get tattoos. Not men helping you find God.”

  “It’s just a phase,” I said. Because of losing Grandpa, I wanted to say; but I had no real reason to think that, so I kept quiet.

  “Maybe I should meet this man.”

  “Don’t get involved,” I said. “I’ll meet him.”

  So I let Holly pick the time, and I rearranged my schedule for a Monday-night dinner with her and the man. She suggested an Indian restaurant downtown.

  “It’s our favorite,” she said.

  Our. I cringed. High school had been a series of occasionally requited crushes, anticlimactic encounters, and awkward flirtations for both of us. But Holly had left home and immediately become the kind of woman for whom having boyfriends was easy, natural.

  I arrived early and stood outside the restaurant reading a 1798 Gothic novel about a woman with a religious fanatic for a brother and a mysterious stalker intent on driving her insane. I was trying to keep an open mind about my dissertation, but I knew that I wasn’t going to change my topic. My heart belonged to the Wandering Jew.

  Still, it was a good book. I read with a pen in hand, bracketing and underlining. My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; but if I live no longer, I will, at least, live to complete it. What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?

  Holly came around the corner, her hands in the pockets of her long coat. She was nodding. The man beside her—the man—was speaking and gesturing animatedly, his eyes intent on her face.

  I don’t know what I had expected him to look like. All I knew was that he was an Orthodox Jew and twenty-six, but in my mind the former had dominated the latter, and I had pictured a cartoon: small, round, with a white beard and a wide-brimmed black hat. Instead, he was tall and slight—towering above Holly—hatless, with light-brown hair and a faint beard. Holly looked up, and in the instant before she smiled and waved, I saw something else on her face, as if seeing me here was an unpleasant surprise.

  She introduced us, and when she said his name, she looked up at him and smiled. I realized that he wasn’t quite as tall as he had seemed at first—he was so lean, he appeared taller than he was. He wore a black skullcap, and under his frameless glasses a rash of freckles spread across the pale skin of his nose and cheekbones. My shoulders were the same from summers at the beach. He had spent a lot of time outdoors.

  I knew that he wasn’t allowed to touch women and had prepared myself for an awkward introduction, but now I felt a sudden urge to extend my hand, to challenge him. I reminded myself that I was an agent of peace, protecting Holly’s personal life from our mother. I just nodded at him, my hands by my side, the book in one, the pen in the other. In that first moment, I let him win.

  We sat down in the small maroon dining room. I watched him drum his fingertips on the glass tabletop, and in the first quiet moments, I thought it wouldn’t take us more than forty-five minutes to eat. I had carved out two hours for them in my schedule, and I was relieved to take some of it back.

  “So,” I said, breaking the silence. “The food here is good?”

  Nathan looked at Holly. “We like it a lot,” she said.

  “It’s the most authentic,” he said, his gaze still on her, like she had asked the question.

  “Nathan lived in India,” Holly continued.

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. I expected his experiences to have been more insular. Maybe he was a convert, like Holly.

  Like Holly. That was the moment I realized this wasn’t a phase at all. Anyone who walked in would look at us and think that the two of them were of a piece, and I was the outsider. A coworker, a friend of a friend.

  Nathan wasn’t a convert, but he was, I came to learn, a black sheep in his community. In Israel, he had fallen in with a rabbi searching for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled from the Holy Land millennia ago during some conquest or another; he had sent Nathan to India to minister to an ethnic group he believed to be their descendants. Nathan was unconvinced, ultimately, and had returned home only to join the Berukhim Penitents, or the Fellowship of Penitents, or the Berukhim Fellowship, a small, secretive group, the same group that had built their American home in our town. It was meant to be, Holly said later of that coincidence, “it” being moving home after their marriage, or her conversion, or her relationship with Nathan, or all of it. One couldn’t, of course, argue against Providence. Holly believed and I didn’t, and that was the end of it.

  I had learned what I could about the Berukhim before our first meeting. I knew that the fringe on the prayer shawl peeking from his coat was rainbow-colored instead of white, and that the shadows under his eyes were likely due to rising from bed each midnight, the Messiah’s hour, to pray. The Berukhim were ascetics, it seemed, mystics who wore amulets and appealed to spirits; no one was really sure, exactly.

  Nathan ordered, and when Holly whispered, “Marjorie doesn’t like spinach,” I realized he was ordering for all of us.

  “Marjorie�
��s dissertation is on the Wandering Jew,” Holly said, smiling bravely, and then turned to me. “Nathan’s stepmom jokes that he’s the next incarnation, with all of his traveling.”

  “Of course, you know, that’s an anti-Semitic myth,” Nathan said. He was looking at the table but clearly addressing me. Holly’s smile faltered.

  “Originally.” There was nothing he could tell me that I didn’t already know—and if there was, I would fake it well enough to win an Oscar.

  “He taunted Jesus while he carried the cross,” Nathan said. “Wandering is his punishment.”

  “Immortality is the punishment,” I said. “In early British stories he lives in an Armenian monastery. And in German, he’s known just as the immortal Jew.” I could go on—I loved the many differences, the profound meanings to be found in each variation—but now I just wanted to be right. I could tell Nathan didn’t like to be corrected.

  “Immortality is not a curse,” Nathan argued. “Our rebbe was too holy for death.”

  “At the end of his life, he ascended straight to heaven,” I said. It was one of the few facts I had found on the Internet.

  Nathan shrugged. “Maybe. There are different stories. But he didn’t die.”

  “Immortality can’t be anything other than a curse,” I said, irritated that our conversation about the supernatural had leapt from fiction to reality. Irritated by his use of our. “Death makes us human, and a human who doesn’t die is, well, not human.”

  Nathan tapped his fork against his plate. Holly glared at me.

  I cleared my throat. “So are you going to go back to India?” I tried not to sound too hopeful.

  Again he looked at Holly. I saw something pass between them. She had told him about our family’s skepticism; the two of them were already weaving a bulwark against us.

  “No,” Nathan said. “Maybe after I start a family.” Now he looked at me. It was the first time he had held my eye longer than an instant.

  The next day I called Holly. She didn’t pick up. I waited two days for her to call me back, and when she didn’t, I sent her an email.

  What are you doing with him? I wrote. He is totally and completely wrong for you.

  Sixteen hours later she wrote me back: How do you know what’s right or wrong for me? You barely even talk to me anymore.

  You barely talk to me, I responded, and let her be the one who broke off the thread, let the ensuing silence be her fault.

  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, al
so 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.