skin. She gave off a deep and rich perfume, and the smell of chemicals unknown to me, and of decay and death, very advanced, death all through her, struggling to wrap its tendrils around her heart and brain and make them go to sleep forever.
“Help me now get out of here!” She grabbed my hand, wet and warm and as seductive as he was.
“Rachel,” said Gregory, biting his tongue. “This is the medicine talking.” His voice grew hard. “Go back to your bed.”
Female attendants in white had come into the room, also gawky boys, in stiff servile little coats, but this entire assemblage stood about idle and frightened of her, nurses and lackeys, and waiting upon his every gesture.
She wrapped her arm around me. She implored me.
“You help me, please, just to get out of here, help me to the elevator, to the street.” She tried to make her words careful and persuasive, and they sounded soft, drunken, and full of misery. “Help me, and I’ll pay you, you know that! I want to leave my own house! I am not a prisoner. I don’t want to die here! Don’t I have the right to die in a place of my own choosing?”
“Take her back,” said Gregory furiously to the others. “Go on, get her out of here and don’t hurt her.”
“Mrs. Belkin,” cried one of the women. The gawky youths closed in on her like a flock that had to move as one or be scattered.
“No!” she cried out. Her voice took on youthful strength.
As the four of them set upon her, all with anxious and tentative hands, she cried out to me:
“You have to help me. I don’t care who you are. He is killing me. He’s poisoning me. He’s hastening my death by his clock! Stop him! Help me!”
The women’s murmuring, lying voices rose to drown her out.
“She’s sick,” said one woman in full and true distress. And other voices came like tiresome echoes of every word. “She’s so drugged, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Doing. Doing.”
There came a babble as the boys and Gregory spoke, and then Rachel Belkin shouted over all, and the nurse tried to make her own voice even louder.
I rushed forward and pulled one of the women loose from her, and accidentally pushed this woman to the floor. The others were all paralyzed, except for Rachel herself who reached out to me, and grabbed my very head with her right hand, as if she would make me look at her.
She was sickly and raging with fever. She was no older than Gregory—fifty-five at most. A powerful and elegant woman, in spite of it all.
Gregory cursed at her. “Damn it, Rachel. Azriel, back away.” He waved his arms at the others. “Get Mrs. Belkin back to her bed.”
“No,” I said.
I pushed two of the others away from her effortlessly and they stumbled and drew back, clinging to one another. “No,” I said. “I’ll help you.”
“Azriel,” she said. “Azriel!” She recognized the name but couldn’t place it.
“Goodbye, Gregory,” I said. “We shall see if I have to come back to you and your bones,” I said. “She wants to die under a different roof. That’s her right. I agree with her. And for Esther, I must, you see. Farewell until I come back to you.”
Gregory was aghast.
The servants were helpless.
Rachel Belkin threw her arm around me and I held her firmly in the circle of my right arm.
She seemed about to collapse and one of her ankles turned on the shiny floor. She cried out in pain. I held her. Her hair was loosed and hanging all around her, brushed, lustrous, the silver as beautiful as the black. She was thin and delicate in her years, and had the stubborn beauty of a willow tree, or torn and shining leaves left on a beach by the waves, ruined yet gleaming.
We moved swiftly towards the door together.
“You can’t do this,” said Gregory. He was purple with rage. I turned to see him sputtering and staring and making his hands into fists, all grace lost. “Stop him,” he said to the others.
“Don’t make me hurt you, Gregory,” I said. “It would be too much of a pleasure.”
He ran at me. I swung around so that I could hold her and strike him with my left hand.
And I dealt him one fine blow with my left fist that knocked him on his back, so that his head struck the hearth.
For one breathless second I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t, only dazed, but so badly hurt that all of the little cowards present ran to attend him.
This was our moment, and the woman knew it and so did I, and we left the room together.
We hurried down to the corridor. I saw the distant bronze doors but this time they had no angels, only the tree of life once more with all its limbs, which was now rent down the middle as they opened.
I felt nothing but strength coursing through me. I could have carried her in one arm, but she walked fast and straight, as if she had to do it, clutching the leather purse or bundle to her.
We went into the elevator. The doors closed. She fell against me. And I took the bundle and held her. We were alone in this chamber as it traveled down and down, through the palace.
“He is killing me,” she said. She was up close to my face. Her eyes were swimmingly beautiful. Her flesh was smooth and youthful. “He is poisoning me. I promise you, you’ll be glad you did this for me. I promise you, you will be glad.”
I looked at her, seeing the eyes of her daughter, just so big, so extraordinary, even with the thinner paler skin now around them. How could she be so strong at forty years? Obviously she’d fought her age and her disease.
“Who are you, Azriel?” she asked. “Who are you? I heard this name. I know it.” There was trust in the way she said my name. “Tell me, who are you! Quick. Talk to me.”
I held her up. She would have fallen if not for me.
“When your daughter died,” I said, “she spoke something, did they tell you?”
“Ah, Lord God. Azriel, the Servant of the Bones,” she said, bitterly, her eyes suddenly welling with tears. “That’s what she said.”
“I am he,” I said. “I’m Azriel, the one she saw as she lay dying. I cried as you cry now. I saw her and wept for her, and couldn’t help her. But I can help you.”
19
This stopped her grief, but I couldn’t tell what she made of this revelation or of me. Sick as she was, she definitely contained the full flower of the seeds of beauty in Esther.
As the doors opened again, we saw an army brought out against her—heavily uniformed men, most of them old, all apparently concerned, and most rather noisy. It was an easy matter for me to push the diffident bunch aside sharply—indeed to scatter them far and wide. But this did make them hysterical with fear. She alarmed them further with her voice.
“Get me my car now,” she said. “Do you hear? And get out of our way.” They didn’t dare to reassemble. She fired orders. “Henry, I want you out of here. George, go upstairs. My husband needs you. You, there, what are you doing—”
As they argued with one another, she marched ahead of me, towards the open doors. A man to our right picked up a gilded telephone from a marble-top table. She turned and shot him the Evil Eye and he dropped the phone. I laughed. I loved her strength. But she didn’t notice these things.
Through the glass to the street, I saw the tall gray-haired one who had driven the car earlier, the tall thin one who had mourned for Esther. But he could not see us. The car was there.
The men came flying at us with solicitous words for a new assault—“Come now, Mrs. Belkin, you’re sick”—“Rachel, this isn’t going to help you.”
I pointed out a mourner.
“Look, he’s there, the one who was with Esther,” I said. “That one, who cried for her. He’ll do what we say.”
