The Angel of Losses (2 page)

“I should go through the books,” I said. “That’s why I came.”

“Yeah,” she repeated. Her voice as blank as her face.

SITTING IN THE BASEMENT AMONG THE BOXES AND SHELVES, I
knew why Nathan wanted to get rid of it all. He was out of his element, and he was out of control. It was his gentile in-laws’ house, and their words all around him: Holly’s art books, my classics and theory textbooks, our parents’ thrillers. I opened one box and then another, releasing Grandpa’s as well, and sorted the artifacts of his mind at work. Histories of Rome.
The Odyssey
and
Beowulf
and
Gilgamesh.
A half-sized copy of Whitman.

I removed a sixty-year-old British literature anthology, the paper jacket faded to white, the inside pages brown and stiff, the spine glossy with tape. I wondered if these books tempted Nathan, the fallen world they celebrated.

As a young man Grandpa had perfected his English on these poems, wearing down his accent on the verse as if it were a whetstone. He recited the lines until the Russian was erased, a colorless imprint behind the thick strokes of midwestern newscaster. A perfect match for his truncated, Anglicized surname, Burke.

The book opened along an old fault line in its spine, revealing Wordsworth’s tribute to a girl who disappeared during a snowstorm on the moor. I remembered standing in the back room, Grandpa at his desk with the open book in his lap, my fingers knotted behind my back and my memory straining from stanza to stanza. I remembered the encouraging smile evaporating from my mother’s face as I proudly recited Lucy’s mother’s cries to heaven when she learns her daughter is dead. I trusted Wordsworth’s coda more than the mother’s grief.

Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

I put the anthology aside and returned to the box, inspecting and stacking each volume on the floor until all that was left was a slim notebook with a marbled cover. Grandpa used to write in composition books just like this one. Once, in high school, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to his door. He had been writing in a notebook but closed it immediately when he realized I was there.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

“Memories,” he answered.

He smiled, but the strange light in his eyes startled me; they were the blue of chemically treated water and frosted corporate glass. I went back to bed, listened to the oceanic draw of Holly’s breath, awake and alone.

The year before I left for college, Grandpa moved back to Brooklyn, to Coney Island, where he and my grandmother had lived when my dad was a little boy. Grandpa announced his surprise decision to us with uncharacteristic grimness—preemptive anger, even. He was prepared to battle us. In retrospect, it was the first moment he revealed that he was moving beyond us, becoming a different man as he prepared to die.

Later, after we cleaned out his apartment, we visited with his neighbor and chess partner Sam one last time. He handed Dad a plastic bag of notebooks—a few, maybe three, maybe five—and kneaded his thick fingers in front of his chest. “Eli wanted me to destroy them,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

On the way home that day, I held the books in my lap. They were so slight for things that contained my grandfather’s last words. When we reached home, my father took them away from me. “Please don’t,” I said.

“It’s what he wanted,” he replied.

“I promise I won’t read them,” I lied. He didn’t answer me. I got out of the car, expecting him to follow, but he drove off alone, returning hours later, Grandpa’s clothes delivered to Goodwill and the magazines to the recycling. And the notebooks? Trashed, I assumed. I didn’t speak to Dad for days. Later I wondered if I had had the right—I’d lost my grandfather, but he had been orphaned. Perhaps I should have been kinder. I should have cared less about material things. I should have forgiven.

And now here the books were, one of them, anyway. Dad couldn’t bring himself to destroy it after all. I felt a queasy happiness. No matter the passage of time, his final requests, our efforts to move on—Grandpa was too stubborn to go.

The inside cover was inked with a vague spiral. I rotated the book in my lap, and the sketch became a snail shell, or maybe an eye, or a tree with curling branches, or a grasping hand. Grandpa had painted but not well—landscapes and seascapes almost identical to one another, except for their tendency toward green or blue. I had one framed in my apartment: a purple-blue sea, a blue-white sky, a scattering of black V-shaped gulls. This sketch was something else entirely—complex, geometric yet soft, like lace.

On the first page, the letters were thick and black, a right-slanted script of wobbly globes and blunt tails. The force of his pen had engraved the page with a short list.

The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light

The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses

The White Rebbe the Wanderer

The White Rebbe in the Ghetto

I knew that word, scratched on the page where
magician
should be. Holly had explained it to me.
Rebbe
—a Jewish master, a guru. I shook my head against the strange feeling. Drawn by my grandfather’s hand, the word became the fulcrum of an optical illusion. Shut one eye or the other, and the world before you reverses itself.

I turned the page.

When Solomon was a baby, a fever took him. His tiny body convulsed in his mother’s arms. The story of his illness was told so many times during his childhood that it became like a memory to him: his skin burning like a torch; the faces of his mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles floating above him; his bones chattering and locking and sighing away from one another again. For three days and nights, the story goes, Solomon suffered. Finally, his father arrived. The great rebbe lifted his hands over the boy and prayed, his chants rising and falling like the river in tumultuous weather. Soon Solomon’s fever broke and his body grew still. He opened his blue eyes to the world again. He was saved.

The familiar cadence was a tuning fork, eliciting Grandpa’s voice from deep inside my memory, and I felt like I had run down a steep hill and come to an abrupt stop, my insides inverted and ringing. Past and present meeting each other.

Above me a door swept open. It was Nathan, coming downstairs from the kitchen—Holly’s footsteps were so much slower, and lighter, even as her body grew. He pounded the steps like he wanted to imprint his trail on them.

“Oh. Marjorie. I didn’t know you were down here.”

I retrieved the poetry anthology and opened it again.

He hesitated on the bottom step. Shadows clung to his angular face, making him seem more gaunt than usual beneath his beard. I wondered if there was some rule against us being alone together—a corollary to the prohibition against shaking my hand. My mother had her own theory about why he barely spoke to me, never looked me in the eye. “You can be intimidating,” she insisted, though I didn’t believe it. Nathan was too sure of himself to be intimidated by anyone.

“I was just looking through some of our grandfather’s things.”

“He loved books,” Nathan said. As if he knew anything about Grandpa. “We have my great-grandfather’s prayer book from Lithuania,” he continued. “My brother and I used to fight over who would get to use it.”

What a shame for your sisters, I thought, but I said nothing.

He cleared his throat. “I imagine this . . . for you and Chava . . . it’s similar.”

He was being nice, I realized, in his own awkward way. I tried to imagine him as a child, clamoring for the fragile book, but the theater of my mind remained dark. I knew so little about him. Maybe he wouldn’t share, and maybe I couldn’t understand, but all I knew for sure was that I had never asked.

Nathan crossed the room, held out a hand. His fingernails were black with ink. “May I?”

I looked at his face. He had clear, gray eyes, bright even in the shadowy basement. I wondered what he looked like without the beard. He never even shook my hand, and now he wanted my grandfather’s things.

I handed him the anthology. He held the base of the book against his heart, tucked his chin down, and read, “ ‘I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea.’ ” The verse was encircled by the soft tracery of Grandpa’s pencil. The cryptography that lives inside other readers’ books.

“Poetry,” Nathan said dismissively.

“Doesn’t the Bible have poetry in it too?”

He looked me in the eyes now. “Have you read the Bible?”

My face grew hot. “I assume my things are safe here. Until you and Holly find a place of your own.”

“Of course,” he mumbled, and balanced the anthology on a shelf. He began to turn away but stopped, his eyes on Grandpa’s notebook. I was hugging it against my chest, like someone might try to snatch it away from me.

“I need to know. Are all of my books here?” I asked. “All of
my family’s
books?” I clarified. Color rose in his face, a rash of freckles beneath his eyes, and he drew his perpetually hunched shoulders back, looking down on me from a few inches higher than usual.

“I don’t know where you left your things. They mean nothing to me,” he said, and stomped back up the stairs.

When I heard him shut the kitchen door, I let out my breath and turned my attention back to the notebook. The first page listed four titles—there must be three more books. I called my father but he didn’t remember what he had done with the notebooks—he didn’t remember a set of marbled notebooks at all. I went through Grandpa’s shelves, item by item, tipping the spines to check for extra books tucked inside. Nothing. I checked the rest of the shelves, but they hid no secrets either. I searched Grandpa’s room, the new nursery, and then the laundry room that led to the backyard.

Nathan watched me through narrowed eyes as I passed through the kitchen once, and then again, on my hunt, and Holly insisted she didn’t remember seeing any notebooks when she arranged Grandpa’s things to be moved into storage.

“You’ll miss your train,” she said, pretending to worry. I hadn’t told her which train I was taking, but I nodded and collected my bag. I kept it on my lap, the light but unmistakable weight of the notebook calling my attention, as we drove in silence to the station parking lot.

“Are you sure Nathan didn’t throw anything away?” I asked. She nodded without looking at me. “Just tell me if you find anything, okay?”

Holly sat with her foot on the brake. She wasn’t going to park and wait with me. That was fine. The sooner we parted, the sooner I could read Grandpa’s story.

“What has you so worked up?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just want to keep them safe. There’s not much left of him.”

She sniffed and looked out her window. She didn’t turn back when I opened the door, just lifted her hand in wordless farewell.

The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light

WHEN SOLOMON WAS A BABY, A FEVER TOOK HIM. HIS
tiny body convulsed in his weeping mother’s arms. The story of his illness was told so many times during his childhood that it became like a memory to him: his skin burning like a torch; the faces of his mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles floating above him; his bones chattering and locking and sighing away from one another again. For three days and nights, the story goes, Solomon suffered. Finally, his father arrived. The great rebbe lifted his hands over the boy and prayed, his chants rising and falling like the river in tumultuous weather. Soon Solomon’s fever broke and his body grew still. He opened his blue eyes to the world again. He was saved.

It was a miracle, but it wasn’t a surprise. Solomon’s father was a rabbi by education and a wonder-worker by profession. His neighbors lived under the shelter of his power, and men and women traveled from distant towns and cities to ask his blessing, to receive cures, to seek counsel. They sent their sons to study at his yeshiva. The rebbe and his school were the shining stars of that piece of earth. The only other notable feature in the village was the mud—from first thaw until first frost, it rose like an ocean, and speckled all the people like Adam.

The men of this family were leaders and wonder rabbis, passing their secret from father to first son, a lineage that went back ten generations to the Holy Land, where the great mystics had practiced. They were so holy that they did not die; they ascended directly to heaven, like the prophet Elijah, disappearing at the end of their lives in a haze of lightning and smoke.

As the first son granted to the rebbe, who was already late in life and parent to three daughters, Solomon was called to study as soon as he could speak. He was too small to hold his father’s books, and so they were spread before him like the fields of a kingdom are spread before a prince.

Solomon wished to set all the letters free.

The other boys in the rebbe’s school read and studied and argued, and pulled books from shelves and unfurled scrolls and examined the minutest corners of the law, and invoked the rabbis of twenty centuries in their grand debates.

Solomon ignored the books, captivated instead by the quill in his hand, its tip glittering through the ink like a star at midnight. Touching it to paper was like opening a vein, releasing all the beauty of his short life: the delicate wildflowers swaying at the side of the road, the clouds like words of the Almighty frozen in the blue, the rash of pink light in the darkest distance of night, clear water in a thick glass, his mother’s voice guiding him into a safe sleep. It was all there in the clean edge, the deep color, the swelling staffs, the snail-shell spirals of the universe of the alphabet.

His father told him stories from the rabbis, and Solomon’s favorites were fables about the alphabet. How the Torah was written in fire on the arm of the Almighty. How each letter petitioned to be the first in the alphabet, with humble aleph being chosen, and proud tav promised a place on the crown of the Messiah. How the Secret Name of God was a string of seventy-two jewels. How in the perfection of the Messiah’s paradise, a twenty-third letter would be added to the alphabet, a letter now cocooned in the hidden depths of creation, like the pearl at the center of a grain of rice.

And what laws did the letters, strung into a net around every daydream and fancy, enumerate? This, Solomon had no interest in learning.

The boy was pummeled by the words of family and neighbors, exhorting him to study, insisting that someday he would be a great rebbe like his father, but Solomon would not be persuaded. He didn’t want to be a scholar or a leader, he didn’t want worldly fame or spiritual favor, and the threats and grand promises only hardened his resolve.

His mother conceived again, and a second son was born. From his earliest days, Manasseh was pious. He cried uncontrollably on days of penance and mourning. He giggled and played during celebrations. On fast days, he refused his mother’s breast. On Sabbath midnights, the hour that the exiled Messiah feasts, he cried for his meal.

His first words were read from the book his brother pretended to study.

Some say that one need not be learned to be a great tzaddik—the most ignorant man can be the most holy, if his heart is filled with sorrow for the exile and desire for the Messiah. Manasseh’s heart was hungry for redemption, just as his eyes were hungry for Torah. He pored over the books in the library; he triumphed in debates with students twice his age. He was the product and apotheosis of a hundred generations of wonder rebbes, and no one could see it but his brother. The court still expected Solomon to succeed his father, and he felt the sting of rejection on Manasseh’s behalf, for while Manasseh expressed no ambition, Solomon was furious that his brother’s gifts remained unrecognized.

When Solomon was eighteen years old and Manasseh fifteen, a stranger came to the village. He appeared ageless. His hair was black but his beard was white. The skin of his face was a mask cured by the sun. And his eyes. His eyes were like two candles in his skull.

He waited in line with the other visiting supplicants, the mud climbing his boots, and when he was invited into the rebbe’s audience, he declared that he had been sent by the prophet Elijah. Or so the rebbe relayed to his family later. He’s a madman, he said.

Soon everyone was talking about this traveler, who sat with the other students in the rebbe’s classes and prayed with the congregation on the Sabbath, his voice rising from the chorus in an alien melody. The village families invited him into their homes for dinner, a dry bed for the night, and he told them of his journey across the continents. He had seen thousand-year-old pillars stolen during the sack of Jerusalem in a church in Rome, and on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, he watched them sweat until the city was deluged. He had visited the schools of Alexandria, the asylums of Baghdad, the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel in Persia, the holy city of Jerusalem, where the inhabitants collect rainwater or go thirsty, and where the Mourners of Zion dress in black and fast in huts, begging God to bring mercy to his children in exile.

The two brothers were fascinated. They asked each other, how could any man travel so many miles for so many years and see so many wonders? How could any man walk all the way to Jerusalem, the refuge of his fathers, and walk away from it? It was as if the man had been made of water, reflecting a different image to each brother. To Manasseh, he was an ascetic, a tzaddik, wearing the robe of a penitent, a holy fire in his heart. The boy believed him to be a chosen soul with a keen eye. The hill tribes of Wallachia, who descend upon the Greeks but spare the Jews, and the Hebrew-speakers of India, who live beyond an unnamed desert, were all remnants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. This was the true purpose of the stranger’s journey, Manasseh was sure—to discern the limits of their people’s dispersal, and to prepare for reunion and the end of exile.

To Solomon, the traveler was strong, weathered and polished by the wind and the rain and infinite steps on a hard road, an explorer, a free man. He quickly forgot the stories that captivated Manasseh and instead thought only about the island of Corfu, and the town of St. George, places where just one Jew lived. One Jew. Unburdened of his nation.

Not long after the traveler’s arrival, the rebbe called Solomon into his study, a room filled with precious books of leather and parchment. It was here that the rebbe studied with angels, or so claimed the legends—or gossip—that circulated among the villagers, the pilgrims, and the students. The rebbe himself would not respond to such tales—he rarely responded to questions or musings on any subject beyond the law—though Solomon, who was often sleepless, had spied a blue light in the window on nights when he walked the village alone, a light that was not from a lantern or torch.

We must speak of your studies, the rebbe said. You’re not demonstrating the dedication of a firstborn son.

Solomon stared out the window at the mud, rising like a tide that could either drown him or sweep him far, far from this place.

You’re silent. Are you ashamed? his father asked. His voice was gentle, as if he were asking if his son was in pain, if he was sick.

No, Solomon answered.

The rebbe’s face transformed. No? You should be ashamed. Your brother is three years younger than you and has already mastered the arguments of Maimonides. Your brother’s devotion rouses him at night to lament our exile, and still he rises with the sun to continue his studies.

My brother is blessed, the young man replied. We are each blessed with different gifts. Now Solomon felt as if each word was a step along a perilous cliff, but he could not turn back. My brother was born to be a student and a teacher, he said. He was born to be a leader. Isn’t that clear?

And what were you born for, my eldest? the rebbe asked. Besides bringing disappointment to your family.

I was born to put the beauty of the world onto paper. I was born to be a scribe.

Ah, the rebbe said. Then you give me nothing, nothing but disappointment.

Having finally spoken the truth, Solomon could not contain his words. Don’t you understand? he demanded of his father. There was a mistake in heaven. Some angel confused the calendar. Manasseh has the soul of a firstborn son.

The rebbe’s chin began to tremble, and he spoke with a fury his son had never heard before.

Do not speak to me of my first son’s soul. Never speak to me of my first son’s soul.

Solomon exited the school into a great field of mud. He felt terribly lost and terribly free. And there was the traveler, dragging through the muck with the aid of a staff, a branch twisted and gray. Not like the proud staff that the rebbe kept, which he had always believed he would pass to his eldest boy. Solomon wanted to take the branch from the traveler’s hand and break it over his knee.

Why have you come here? the young man asked.

I was told your father was at the school, the stranger answered. I’ve come in the hopes that he’ll give me another audience.

No, Solomon said. Why did you come to this place? Why do you want my father’s attention so badly? You’ve seen the entire world. You’ve turned your back on Jerusalem. Why do you persist?

I’m looking for my home, he said simply.

Then why don’t you return to the place you were born?

This is the place
you
were born. He stretched his arms. Is it your home?

Solomon decided to leave that night.

He had little time to prepare, and he told himself that good-byes would be nothing but invitations to abandon his plan. Instead, he would leave without warning, and no one would suspect, no kind inquiry would provoke him to confession, and no pleading would persuade him to change his mind.

He said nothing even to Manasseh, who quickly fell asleep on the straw mattress beside him. His sleep was restless but consistent, Solomon knew; his younger brother roused himself each midnight to mourn their exile from the Holy Land, from paradise, and exhaustion claimed him entirely in the evening.

Outside their single window the trees whipped in the wind, their silhouettes silvered by occasional lightning snaps. Solomon would not allow the weather to deter him; the village was plagued by lightning storms, many of which brought little rain at all. If he did not go now, he would never go.

It was nearly midnight. Solomon rose in the darkness and dressed in a second set of clothes. He hid a few coins in his sack, in his pocket, in his shoes; he selected two inkpots, two pens, a knife; he wrapped a single blank scroll and kissed it once, praying it would remain dry if rain began to fall.

Suddenly, the hinges on the door began to grind. Solomon plunged into his bed and pulled the blanket to his chin. A spectral glow swelled around the door until it opened to reveal his father. The lines in the rebbe’s face were deep-drawn by the moonlight coming through the window, and his eyes shone blue in the silver night. He looked at Manasseh and then at Solomon, who had intended to feign sleep but had been trapped by those strange eyes, feverishly bright.

So this was why his father had been so consumed lately by the question of succession. He had reached the end of his reign, and just as the stories of their fathers dictated, heaven had come to claim him. Solomon had witnessed the results of the rebbe’s power, but he had never seen his father’s magic like this. The old man was transformed into something otherworldly, and for the first time Solomon felt a desire to be alight with wonder himself.

The rebbe crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. He put his hand on his oldest son’s forehead, and Solomon briefly felt his childhood illness again—his bones trembling with the heat.

You are arrogant, the rebbe said. A son should require no argument in exchange for obedience. You are willful, but so am I. I believed I would have what I wished, that you would bend to my demands in the end. And now the end is here. Shall I be proven right on my last night on earth, or shall my tragedy be the same as my father’s?

Solomon didn’t understand, but the rebbe’s question troubled Manasseh’s sleep, and he moaned softly, and turned toward them, his brow pinched over his sealed eyes. Solomon marveled that the rumble of the rebbe’s voice didn’t rouse Manasseh; nor did the moonlight, which lingered in their father’s eyes; nor did the sizzle of lightning or the iron scent of rain.

There is no time now, the rebbe said. No time to persuade, no time to argue. You must rally your little bit of faith and place it in me. You think that you honor your brother by deferring to him; in fact, you will only destroy him.

You will take my place, his father continued. The angel will come to you. I don’t know when, but he will. He will tell you a terrible story, that I am suffering, and that only you can save me from my fate. Do not believe him. If you do believe him, then recall the father who was impatient, who cared little for the things you loved, and who wore a mask of disappointment. And let him be.

The rebbe kissed Solomon’s forehead and stood. As he turned away, a cloud passed over the moon and shadows rose like steam, licking the hem of his robe. As he passed through the door, a soundless bolt of lightning turned the sky to chalk and the trees to bone, and for an instant the rebbe stood alone in the bleached night. The darkness returned, a wave swallowing the rebbe and slamming Solomon’s door. Solomon counted his heartbeats until they slowed, and prepared to rise—when thunder exploded, shuddering through the walls and floor, through Solomon’s joints and the hinges of his jaw.