He looked heart stricken at these words.
“You know I’m speaking of our World War II and the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jews, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I know so very much about it, only to hear that your father and mother were lost to it, it hurts my heart, and it makes my question pointless. I meant only to point out to you that you probably have superstitions about your parents, that’s all, that you wouldn’t disturb their bones.”
“I have such superstitions,” I said. “I have them about photographs of my parents. I won’t let anything happen to them, and when I do lose one of them, it’s a deep sin to me that I did it, as if I insulted my ancestor and my tribe.”
“Ah,” said Azriel, “that’s what I was talking about. And I want to show you something. Where is my coat?”
He got up from the hearth, found the big double-mantled coat, and took out of the inside pocket a small plastic packet. “This plastic, you know, I rather love it.”
“Yes,” I said, watching him as he came back to the fire, sank down on the chair, and opened the packet. “I dare say all the world loves plastic, but why do you?”
“Because it keeps things clean and pure,” he said looking up at me, and then he handed me a picture of what looked like Gregory Belkin. But it wasn’t. This man had the long beard and forelocks and the silk black hat of the Hasidim. I was puzzled.
He didn’t explain the picture.
“I was made to destroy,” he said, “and you remember, don’t you, the beautiful Hebrew word before so many of the old Psalms, telling us to sing it to that certain melody: ‘Do Not Destroy.’ ”
I had to think.
“Come on, Jonathan, you know,” he said.
“Altashheth!” I said. “ ‘Do Not Destroy.’ ”
He smiled and his eyes filled with tears. He put back with shaking hands the picture and he laid the plastic packet aside on the small footstool between our chairs, far enough away from the fire for it not to be hurt, and then he looked again at the flames.
I felt the most sudden overwhelming emotion. I couldn’t talk. It wasn’t only that we had mentioned my mother and father, killed in Poland by the Nazis. It wasn’t only that he had reminded me of the mad plot of Gregory Belkin which had come perilously close to success; it wasn’t only his beauty, or that we were together, or that I was speaking with a spirit. I don’t know what it was.
I thought of Ivan in
I looked at him. He turned slowly, and just for one moment I knew fear. It was the first time. It was the way he moved his head. He turned towards me, obviously listening to my thoughts, or reading my emotion, or touching my heart, or however one would say it, and then I realized he had done a trick for me.
He was dressed differently. He wore a soft tunic of red velvet, tied loosely at the waist and loose red velvet pants and slippers.
“You’re not dreaming, Jonathan Ben Isaac, I’m here.”
The fire gave off an incredible burst of sparks. It gave off sparks as if things had been tossed on it.
I realized that something else about him had changed. He had now his heavy smooth mustache and his beard curling exactly as the beards of kings and soldiers in those old tablets, and I saw why God had given him the large cherubic mouth because it was a mouth you could see in spite of all that hair, a mouth that talked to you, a mouth developed by nature at a time when mouths had to compete with hair.
He started. He reached up. He touched the hair and then he scowled. “I didn’t mean to do that part. I think I shall give up on it. The hair wants to come back.”
“The Lord God wants you to have it?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know!”
“How did you make the clothes change? How do you make yourself disappear?”
“There’s little to it. Science will one day be able to control it. Today, science knows all about atoms and neutrinos. All I did was throw off all the tiny particles smaller than atoms which I had drawn to myself, through a magnetic strength you might say, to make my old clothes. They weren’t real clothes. They just were clothes made by a ghost. And then to banish them, I said, as the sorcerer would say, ‘Return until I call to you again.’ And then I called up new clothes. I said in my heart with the sorcerer’s conviction:
“ ‘From the living and the dead, from the raw earth and from that which is forged and refined, woven, and treasured, come to me, tinier than grains of sand, and without sound, unnoticed, hurting no one, at your greatest speed, penetrating whatever barriers surround me that you must and clothe me in red velvet, soft garments the color of rubies. See these clothes in my mind, come.’ ”
He sighed. “And it was done.”
He sat quiet for a moment. I was so mesmerized by this new red attire, and by the way it seemed to change him somewhat, give him a sort of regal air, that I didn’t speak. I pushed another big log into the pyramid of the fire, and threw some more coal on it from the scuttle, all of this without leaving the sanctuary of my rotting and crunched old chair.
Then and only then did I look at him. And at that same moment, when his eyes were utterly remote, I realized he was singing in a very low voice, a voice so low I had to strain to disentangle it from the soft devouring rush of the fire.
He was singing in Hebrew but it wasn’t the Hebrew I knew. But I knew enough of it to know what it was: It was the Psalm “By the Rivers of Babylon.” When he finished, I was awestruck and even more shaken than before.
I wondered if it was snowing in Poland. I wondered if my parents had been buried or cremated. I wondered if he could call together the ashes of my parents, but it seemed a horrible, blasphemous thought.
“That was my point, that we have things about which we are superstitious,” he said. “When I blunderingly asked about your parents, I meant to say, you believe certain things but you don’t believe them. You live in a double frame of mind.”
I reflected.
He looked at me deliberately, eyebrows curving down, though his cherubic mouth smiled. It was a respectful, sincere expression. “And I can’t bring them back to life. I can’t do that!” he said.
He looked back at the flames.
“The parents of Gregory Belkin perished in the Holocaust in Europe,” he said. “And Gregory became a madman. And his brother a holy man, a saint, zaddik. And you became a scholar, and a teacher, with a gentle gift for making students understand.”
“You honor me,” I said softly. There were a thousand little questions buzzing around me like bees. I wasn’t going to cheapen things.
“Go on, Azriel, please,” I said. “Tell me what you want to tell me. Tell me what you want me to know.”
“Ah, well, as I indicated we were the rich exiles. You know the story. Nebuchadnezzar came down on Jerusalem and slew the soldiers and littered the streets with bodies, and left behind a Babylonian governor to rule over the peasants who would tend our estates and vineyards and send the produce home to his Court. Customary.
“But rich men, tradesmen, scribes like the men of my family? We weren’t slain. He didn’t come sharpening his sword on our necks. We were deported to Babylon with everything that we could carry, I might add, wagons of our fine furniture which he allowed us to have, although he had thoroughly looted our temple, and we were given fine houses in which to live so that we might set up shop and serve the markets of Babylon and serve the temple and the Court.
“This happened a thousand times over in those centuries. Even the cruel Assyrians would do the same thing. They’d put to the sword the soldiers and then drag off the man who knew how to write three languages, and the boy who could carve perfectly in ivory, and so it was with us. The Babylonians, they weren’t as bad as other enemies might have been. Imagine being dragged back to Egypt. Imagine. Egypt, where people live just to die, and
