random hairs, dark, fine, at the edges of his hair.
“What do you see?” he asked.
I sat down, near to the tape recorder. “Everything is a little bit darker and more detailed,” I said.
He nodded. “I can no longer summon the shape of Gregory Belkin at will. As for the semblance of anyone else, I cannot hold it very long. I am not a scientist enough to understand it. Someday it will be understood. It will have to do with particles and vibration. It will have to do with things mundane.”
I was in a fury of curiosity.
“Have you tried to take any other form, the form of someone you like perhaps a little more than Gregory Belkin?”
He shook his head. “I can make myself ugly if I want to frighten you, but I don’t want to be ugly. I don’t want to frighten anyone. Hate has abandoned me, and it’s taken some power with it, I imagine. I can work tricks. Watch this.”
He put his hands up round his neck, and slowly drew them down the embroidered front of his coat, revealing as he did a necklace of engraved gold disks, like ancient coins. The entire house rattled. The fire flared for an instant, and then became smaller.
He picked up the necklace, to demonstrate the solidity and the weight of it, and then he let it drop.
“You have a fear of animals?” he asked me. “A distaste for wearing their skins? I see no skins here, warm skins, like bearskins.”
“No fear at all,” I said. “No distaste.”
The temperature of the room rose dramatically, and once again the fire exploded as if someone had fanned it, and I felt myself surrounded by a large dark bearskin blanket, lined in silk. I put my hand up and felt the fur. It was deep and luxurious and made me think of Russian woods, and men in Russian novels who are always dressed in fur. I thought of Jews who used to wear fur hats in Russia, and maybe still do.
I sat up, adjusting the blanket more comfortably around me.
“That’s quite wonderful,” I said. I was trembling. So many thoughts were racing in me that I couldn’t think what to say first.
He gave a deep sigh and rather dramatically collapsed in his chair.
“This has exhausted you,” I said. “The changes, the tricks.”
“Yes, somewhat. But I’m not exhausted for talking, Jonathan. It’s that I can only do so much and no more… but then…who knows? What is God doing to me?
“I just thought that this time, after this ordeal was completed, you know, that the stairway would come…or there would be deep sleep. I thought…so many things.
“And wanted a finish.”
He paused. “I’ve learnt something,” he said. “I’ve learnt in these last two days that to tell a story is not what I thought.”
“Explain to me.”
“I thought to talk about the boiling cauldron would send the pain out of me. It didn’t. Unable to hate, to muster anger, I feel despair.”
He paused.
“I want you to tell me the whole story. You do believe in it. That’s why you came, to tell it all.”
“Well, let’s say that I will finish, because…someone should know. Someone should record. And out of courtesy for you because you are gracious and you listen and I think you want to know.”
“I do. But I must tell you how difficult it was to imagine such cruelty, to imagine that your own father gave you up to it. And to imagine a death so contrived. Do you still forgive your father?”
“Not at the moment,” he said. “That’s what I was talking about, that telling it did not produce forgiveness. It drew me close to him, to tell it, to see him.”
“He wasn’t as strong as you, on that he was right.”
A silence fell between us. I thought of Rachel Belkin, the murder of Rachel Belkin, but I said nothing.
“Did you like walking in the snow?” I asked.
He turned to me in surprise and smiled. It was very bright, and kind.
“Yes, I did, but you haven’t eaten your supper which I warmed for you. No, sit there, I’ll get it, and one of your silver spoons.”
He was as good as his word. I ate a bowl of the stew, as he watched with his arms folded.
I put aside the empty plate and at once he took it and then the spoon. I heard the sound of water running as he washed them. He brought back to me a small clean bowl of water and a towel, as someone might have done in another country. I didn’t need it. But I dipped my fingers, and I used the cloth to wipe my mouth clean, which felt rather comforting, and he took these things away.
It was now that he saw the little boat television set with its built-in handle and tiny screen. I’d probably left it too near the fire. I felt a surge of embarrassment, as though I had spied upon his world while he was gone, as if to verify things he said.
He looked at the thing for a long moment and then away.
“It works? It talked to you?” he asked without enthusiasm.
“News from some local town, network I think, coming through the local channel. The Belkin Temples have been raided, people arrested, the public is being reassured.”
He waited a long time before he answered. Then he said,
“Yes, well, there are some others, perhaps, that they haven’t found yet, but the people in them are dead. When you come upon these men with their gun belts, and their vow to kill themselves along with the entire population of a country, it’s best just to…kill them on the spot.”
“They showed your face,” I said, “smooth shaven.”
He laughed. “Which means they’ll never find me under all this hair.”
“Especially not if you cut the long part but that would be rather a shame.”
“I don’t need to,” he said. “I can still do the most important thing of all.”
“Which is what?”
“Disappear.”
“Ah! I’m glad to hear it. Do you know they are looking for you? They said something about the murder of Rachel Belkin. I hardly know the name.”
He seemed neither surprised nor insulted nor upset in any way.
“She was Esther’s mother. She didn’t want to die in Gregory’s house. But I’ll tell you the strange part. When he looked at her dead body, I think he was grief-stricken. I think he actually loved her. We forget that such men can love.”
“Do you want to tell me…whether or not you killed her? Or is that something I shouldn’t ask?”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said simply. “They know that. They were there. That was early. Why would they bother to look for me anymore?”
“It’s all to do with conspiracy, and banks, and plots, and the long tentacles of the Temple. You’re a man of mystery.”
“Ah, yes. And as I said, I am one who can, if necessary, disappear.”
“Go to the bones?” I asked.
“Ah, the bones, the golden bones.”
“You ready to tell me?”
“I’m thinking how to do it. There’s a little more that I should tell before I come to the moment of Esther Belkin’s death. There were masters I did love. I should explain a little more.”
“You won’t tell me about all of them?”
“Too many,” he said, “and some are not worth remembering, and some I can’t remember at all. There are two I want to describe to you. The first and the last master whom I ever obeyed. I stopped obedience to any master. I slew when called—not only the man who had called me or the woman, but everyone who had witnessed the calling. I did that for years and years. And then the bones were encased with warnings in Hebrew and German and Polish and no one took the risk to call the Servant of the Bones.
“But I want to tell you about the two—the first and the last masters I obeyed. The others which I do recall we can dismiss with a few words.”
