He climbed to his feet. He brushed off his pants. Ashes fell to the floor. The floor was filthy with ashes. The fire in the fireplace burned on, consuming itself, purposeless, wasted.
“Let me throw them in the fire,” I said. I reached for the skull, and picked up the gangling dead thing.
“Enough, Azriel. You do me wrong! Don’t be so quick! Don’t do it!”
I stopped. That was all it took, and I too was afraid, or the moment had passed. Five minutes after the battle, can you still slice a man in half with a sword? The wind blows. You stand there. He is lying among the dead, but not dead, and he opens his eyes, and murmurs to you thinking you’re his friend. Can you kill him?
“Oh, but if we do it then we will both know,” I said. “And I would like to know. Yes, I’m afraid, but I want to know. You know what I suspect?”
“Yes. That this time it doesn’t matter about the bones!”
“Not even,” he said, “if they are crushed to powder with a mortar and pestle.” I didn’t reply.
“The bones have completed their journey, my friend,” he said. “The bones have come down to me! This is my time, and your time. This is what is meant. If we burnt the bones, and you were still here, solid, and beautiful and strong—impertinent and sarcastic, yes, but still here as you are now, able to breathe and see and wind yourself with shrouds of velvet—would that deliver you into my hands? Would you acknowledge the destiny?”
We glared at one another. I didn’t want to take the chance. I didn’t even want to think of the whirlwind of the restless dead. The words came back to me, the words engraved on the casket. I shivered, in terror of being formless, impotent, wandering, knocking against spirits I knew were everywhere. I did nothing.
He went down on his knees, and he gathered up the casket and the lid, then rose, one knee at a time, walked over to the table, gently laid down the casket, put the burnt shriveled lid on top of it, carefully, and then he sat down on the floor, leaning against his table, legs sprawled, but looking remarkably formal still in his seamed and buttoned clothes.
He looked up. I saw his teeth flash, and bite. I think he bit down on his lip to his own blood.
He stood up and ran at me.
He came so fast, it was like a dancer leaping to catch another, and though he stumbled, he caught me with both his hands, around my neck, and I felt his thumbs press against me, and I hated it and ripped his arms away. He smacked my face hard this way and that and drove his knee into my abdomen. He knew how to fight. With all his polish and money, he knew the dancing way to fight, like the Orientals.
I backed away from these blows, barely hurt, only amazed at his grace, and how he reared back now and kicked me full in the face, sending me many paces back.
Then came his worst blow, elbow rising, hand straight, the arm swinging around to knock me backwards.
I caught his arm, and twisted it so that he went down on his knees with a snarl of rage. I pushed him flat to the carpet and held him pinned with my foot.
“You’re no match for me in that realm,” I said. I stepped back and offered him my hand.
He climbed to his feet. His eyes never moved from me. Not for one second had he really forgotten himself. I mean, even in these failed attempts he held a dignity and lust for the struggle and for winning it, too.
“All right,” he said. “You’ve proven yourself. You aren’t a man, you’re better than a man, stronger. Your soul’s as complex as my soul. You want to do right, you have some fixed and foolish notion of right.”
“Everybody has a fixed and foolish notion of right,” I answered softly. I was humbled. And I did at that moment feel doubt, doubt of anything except that I was enjoying this, and the enjoyment seemed a sin. It seemed a sin that I should breathe. But why, what had I done? I determined not to look anymore into memory. I pushed the images away, the same ones I’ve described to you, Samuel’s face, the boiling cauldron, all of it. I just said, Be done with it Azriel!
I stood in the room vowing from then on to solve this mystery there and then with no looking back.
“You’re flattered that I said you had a soul, aren’t you?” he asked. “Or is it merely that you’re relieved that I recognize such a thing? That I don’t consider you a demon like my grandfather did. That’s what he did, right? He banished you from his sight, as if you had no soul.”
I was speechless with wondering, and with longing. To have a soul, to be good, to mount the Stairs to Heaven.
He sat down on the velvet hassock, He was out of breath. I had been slow to realize this. I wasn’t out of breath at all.
I was hot all over again, with a thin sweat, but I was not soiled yet. And of course some of what I had been saying to him was bluff and lies.
I didn’t want to go into darkness or nothingness. I couldn’t even bear the thought of it. A soul, to think I might truly have a soul, a soul that could be saved…
But I wasn’t serving him! This plan, I had to know what it was; the world, how did he mean to get it when armies fought each other all over it? Did he mean the spiritual world?
There were voices in the hall. I could pick out the mother’s voice easily, but he ignored it, just as if this were nothing. He only looked at me, and marveled at me, and pondered what I had said.
He was radiant in his curiosity and in what he had allowed to happen here without fear.
“You see how it lures me,” I said. “The marble, the carpet, the breeze through the windows. Being alive, the great lure.”
“Yes, and there’s me to know and love, too, and I lure you.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “And something tells me that life has lured me in the past, lured me to serve evil men and men I can’t recall. I am lured each time by life itself and flesh itself and when there comes a moment and the door opens to Heaven, and I cannot go through. I’m not allowed to go through. My Masters may go through. Their beautiful daughters may go through. Esther may go through. But I don’t go through.”
He drew in his breath. “You’ve seen the Door to Heaven?” he asked calmly.
“As surely as you’ve seen a ghost appear to you,” I said.
“So have I,” he said. “I’ve seen the Door to Heaven. And I’ve seen Heaven here on earth. Stay with me, stay with me, and I swear to you when the door opens, I’ll take you with me. You’ll be deserving of it.”
The voices came loudly from the hall. But I looked at him, trying to answer what he said. He seemed as resolute, as without conflict, as determined and courageous as he had been before our fight.
The voices were too loud to be ignored. The woman was angry. Others talked to her as if she were a fool. It was all far away. Beyond the windows lay the black night with the lights of New York so bright that the sky itself was reddened like the dawn coming when there was no dawn. The breeze sang.
I looked down at the box. I could have wept. He had me and the world had me. At least for now, for as long as I would allow it.
He drew close to me. And I turned, letting him come close, and between us there was a tenderness and a sudden quiet. I looked into his eyes, and I saw the round black circle within his eyes, and I wondered if he saw in my eyes only blackness.
“You want the body you have now,” he said. “You want the body and the power. You were meant to have it. You were meant to be mine, but as of this moment and forever, I respect you. You’re no servant to me. You are Azriel.”
He clasped my arm. He raised his hand and clasped the side of my face. I felt his kiss, hot and sweet on my skin. I turned and locked my mouth on his for one instant, and then let him go and his face blazed with love for me. Did I feel the same heat for him?
There was a loud noise from beyond the doors.
He made a gesture to me, as if to say, be patient, and then I suppose he would have gone to the door, but it opened, and the woman appeared there, the mother with the black-and-silver hair who before had been wrapped in red silk.
She was sick, but she had groomed and clothed herself in a proper stiff way, and she marched forward. Wet and pale, and trembling, she carried a bundle, a purse, a portmanteau that was too heavy for her.
“Help me!” she cried. She said this to me! And she looked directly at me. She came up to me, turning her back on him. “You, you help me!”
She was dressed in gray wool, and the only silk on her was wrapped high around her neck, and her shoes were fancy with raised heels and beautiful straps across her arched feet, so thin, so full of blue veins beneath the
