The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (25 page)

As a husband, Hebel showed neither competency nor diligence. His work kept him away from home all day long, and at night his many mistresses occupied him. He tolerated Motke on the job—the boy was free labor after all, capable of mixing mortar and tying down scaffold—but Sisel he ignored when he wasn’t teaching the kid a lesson by banging her like a board.

Shortly after Motke’s twelfth birthday, Hebel was crushed under a mislaid pile of bricks. That effectively ended the boy’s apprenticeship. He went to find work in other cities. Five years lapsed, and then five more. Sisel waited for him, a little sadder and poorer each season, expectant at every knock that he’d come back—only to be faced with another meddlesome matchmaker.

The knocking stopped for a time, and then returned in the third month of her eleventh year alone. She unhitched the latch.

Yod-Alef stood in front of her. Sisel dropped to her knees, instantly repenting everything she’d ever said and done: He burned with such fury that she imagined he actually had been taken in by the angel of death, and, apprenticeship served, became damnation itself. Then she saw that Yodal had aged, which, as she knew, supernatural creatures don’t do, at least in human ways. She stood up. She held out her hand.

He didn’t move. He tried to speak, but his heat was too great. The words simmered over in sobs, and Sisel had to pull him across the doorstep by clasping his wrist. She sat him down. She stroked his hair as she had years before.

He bristled. He stared at her.

— How could you do this to me, Sisel? How could you marry Hebel? How could you have a son?

— You abandoned me. You ran off with another girl.

— Is that what Hebel told you?

— Isn’t it true?

Of course it wasn’t, though poor Yodal, who’d scarcely spoken in two decades, had a very hard time persuading her: Even after he’d told her every detail about his life, from Akiva Alter and the comet to Motke and the broken hod, she refused for hours to believe that Hebel had had so many mistresses while Yodal had had none. But even jealous Sisel could hold on to her delusion for only so long. Yodal’s love for her had made him leave her, and what had she gone and done?

— No, no, Yodal. I hated you for what you did, but I married Hebel for your sake.

— You might as well have slit my throat.

— I was pregnant when you left me. I couldn’t raise Motke alone. He was all I had left of you. Yodal, Motke is your son.

— Does he know?

— I told him when Hebel died. That’s why he went away. For the past eleven years and three months, he’s been searching for you.

Both parents wanted him back then, but who could say where he’d gone in the week since Yodal abandoned him to avenge Sisel’s infidelity by fulfilling Akiva Alter’s prophecy? His warrant had no expiration date. He’d come to implement it, and now he couldn’t rescind it. He couldn’t leave Sisel, even for a moment, without taking her life away. He couldn’t run off to fetch Motke, and even for them to travel together was too risky: A misstep could separate the lovers, young again to each other, for an eternity.

So they stayed. Yodal hitched the latch on her door. Sisel brought him to bed. In their embrace, they encompassed their world.

Half a century passed. Motke traveled to every country, other continents even, searching for his father. In all those years, only one man had moved him to believe that Yod-Alef could be found. But then that man had dropped his hod from a cliff and vanished. And now that he was too old to labor, Motke was walking home.

In his native city, he no longer knew anybody. New buildings, more imposing, had replaced old ones. None of his brick-work remained. He asked old folks what had happened to his mother. Only one man recognized Sisel’s name, and said—he had to smile—that she lived with her husband in a stone hovel from which they hadn’t emerged in decades. He pointed to the hill. He described the trail.

Motke was a sensible man. He didn’t believe the codger any more than he’d trusted those fables, popular when he was a child, about the grim reaper losing his way to the city. Motke was sensible, but he also needed a place to stay. He followed the trail. He climbed the hill. He knocked at the door of the stone hovel.

For a while, nobody answered. Then he heard a single pair of feet shuffle across the floor. The latch rattled and fell. The door opened. Motke looked into the blind eyes of the oldest creature he’d ever seen.

At first he guessed it was a woman. Next he figured it was a man. Then he perceived, from the serene expression, that it was both his mother and his father, so many years together, so close to each other, that they had cleaved into one being.

YOD-BEIT THE REBEL

Ousted from the heavens for crimes against paradise, angels burn bright as they fall through the night. Folks call them shooting stars, and even wish on them, but no one believes the euphemism: Wish what they will, folks can only hope that those shamed angels incinerate in the descent, for a seraph that endures the plummet will bedevil humanity forever.

One morning after a terrible celestial downpour, a crippled little girl shambled from town to town, begging for a place to rest. She was as pale as fright and as slight as chance. Evidently she’d been a victim of the nocturnal mayhem—bloody and broken as if ravaged by demons—and if anyone asked what had happened, she bowed her head, shrouding her face behind hair of tarnished silver, and started sobbing.

She didn’t answer when folks inquired who her parents were or where she’d come from. In each village, the story was the same: Questions hardened into suspicions, and, when the girl couldn’t even say her name, sharpened into accusations. These were dangerous times, the villagers informed her, peering through her veil of hair into blue eyes washed pale with tears. How could they be sure that she wasn’t herself a beast? She opened her mouth. They pointed at her teeth, small and serrated. She was the devil, they decreed, and if heaven didn’t want her, they sure as hell didn’t either. Too stunned to protest, she was chased out of each village, pelted with dirt and cursed as a monster, the cause of man’s anguish on earth.

She’d begun to wonder whether what folks told her was true, when she wandered into a village quite unlike the others. The town had no walls, but was built on a swamp. Nor were there buildings of brick and stone as she’d seen elsewhere, merely dirt huts. Sunk to her knees in muck, she knocked on the first door she reached. Silence. She looked around. Not a soul to be seen, though it was past noon. She pushed the door open. Into the darkness, she plunged.

The muck was much thicker inside, a soft bed beneath her aching body. She curled up. She slept. She dreamed that she was home again. All was immaculate, a land unsoiled: a life of gilt and polished marble. The air was fragrance on a breeze of music. She tried to inhale—and could not breathe. All at once awake, she found herself under a crush of rancid flesh.

With her lungs’ last draft, she screamed. Pressing closer, her captors urged her to hush. They asked, with a trace of offense,
Yod-Beit, don’t you recognize us?

She opened her eyes wide. She had not heard her name in many days. The last time,
Yod-Beit
had been uttered as a curse. If she’d lamented never to hear it again, this was worse.

— Are you demons?

— We don’t say that here. I’m your cousin Boaz. These are your cousins Hudes and Pinchas.

Try as she might, Yod-Beit could not see the family resemblance. Of course every seraph had heard rumors about what happened to outcast angels, the monstrosities they became in the shadow of heaven, but even death was more fathomable to Yod-Beit than so terrible a fate. She ran trembling fingers across her face.

— Do I look like you now?

— Only a few broken bones, some bruises. It’s miraculous.

— But my skin isn’t . . . My nose and ears haven’t . . .

— It makes no difference, Yod-Beit. You’re one of us.

For several months, they nursed Yod-Beit to health. Pin-chas dressed her wounds. Hudes fed her soups. And Boaz talked to her through the blackest hours of night.

He told her about the cruelties of humans. In heaven, she’d been taught, like all young seraphim, that humans were good yet easily misled, and, while her education had been abbreviated by her fall, Yod-Beit tenaciously held on to this wisdom, her only celestial souvenir, and repeated it often. Boaz was patient with her—she’d never had to reason before—but persistent.

— What do angels know of human nature? They’ve never lived here.

— In our classes they said . . .

— When you were neediest, were people kind to you?

— They thought I might be a demon, and dangerous. Why do you torment them?

— Since the beginning of time, they’ve shunned us. They’re more heartless than the angels above. They’ve pushed us into the swamps and raised their town walls, just because they don’t like the looks of us.

Yod-Beit had to confess, if only to herself, that the looks of the demons she’d met didn’t appeal to her either. On the other hand, no angel in heaven, as pretty as they were, had ever cared for her as these coarse devils did.

Even demons she hadn’t known in heaven would come to visit her, bearing delicacies that couldn’t possibly have come from the swamps, sweets that would sparkle on the palate of a princess. They also brought her luxuries, silks and satins unfit for their bloated bodies, that complimented her fine figure like a courtly suitor. And while she modeled that lacy clothing, nibbling on those dainty morsels, her new companions told their stories.

They’d strayed for decades following their fall, some of them, shuttered from civilization, without finding others in their condition. They’d been chased by peasants, taunted by children, jumped by vagabonds. Dogs and vultures had fed on their festering flesh while they slept. The stories never ended before Yod-Beit began to sob.

Crying still bewildered her. In heaven, there’d been no bodily fluids. Emotions never spilled. The only water was in reflecting pools, perfectly calm, eternally still. Her tears embarrassed her. She tried to constrain them as fitfully, to conceal them as falteringly, as a first menstruation. She lowered her face behind tarnished silver hair. But, unlike those humans who’d questioned what her upset hid, her fellow demons responded to what it revealed. Sympathetic to her sympathy, they steeped her tears in chamomile, and serenaded her to sleep.

The demons coddled Yod-Beit. She was their pet. They called her Beitzel. Only Boaz was worried that she might be spoiled. In her dreams, she sometimes still murmured those empty homilies about humanity that were taught in heaven. To be so naïve in this world of evil was a danger to her, a threat to them all. Boaz gathered his brethren. The time had come to teach Yod-Beit a lesson.

They invited her on a midnight picnic. The urge to get out of the swamp, if only for an evening, overwhelmed even the embarrassment she felt to be seen in their unsightly company. She dressed in her finest lace—scant trace of white thread against pale flesh—clenching it at the waist as they slopped through the mud to firm ground.

Boaz led them to an orchard. At one end was a stretch of grass, where the demons urged Beitzel to rest while they gath-yod-ered apples. She settled down in the field, not unpleased to see them leave. Caressed by moonlight, she shut her eyes. She listened to the winds. There was no music in them, but she could hear voices, deep and melodious. Looking up, she found two tall woodsmen.

They asked her name.
Beitzel,
she said softly, and smiled.

— We’ve never met a girl called Beitzel. You’re not from around here.

— Not really, no.

— Are you alone?

— You’re with me now.

— Would you like to come with us?

She gazed at them, and imagined heaven. She nodded. They lifted her to her feet and drew her into the orchard.

Their grasp tightened in the shadows. She could no longer see their faces. They pressed her against a tree. One gripped her neck while the other tore away her lace. A knee drove her legs apart. A hand reached up her crotch, seeking something she never knew existed. She struggled to see what they wanted from her, stripped bare, but they had her upside down, and she couldn’t speak through the pain as they tore at her seamless skin.

For several moments more, Boaz watched from a treetop. Then, at his call, the demons were upon them. While Hudes wrapped Beitzel in her arms, the others felled the woodsmen. Hudes urged her not to watch what came next, but Yod-Beit was too enthralled to feel horror. As the men began to bleed, she begged to get nearer. She didn’t need more proof that people were evil, but how seductive she found it to see them ravaged on her behalf! The carnage at her feet delighted her more even than the lace that she’d lost. She dipped a finger in the slaughter and touched it to her tongue. The taste swelled through her like a first kiss.

Later that night, back in her bed, she secretly pressed the same finger between her legs. She easily found what those men had been searching for, though she’d have sworn that nothing had been there before.

Yod-Beit never missed another ambush. The world was overrun with people. There was much justice to be done.

The demons found their work made easier by Beitzel. Previously they’d needed to hide until folks accidentally strayed, whereas Yod-Beit simply had to appear angelic, and men would be tempted to their fate by their own sinister plans.