Servant of the Bones Read online

  He studied me.

  "My laugh surprises you, Jonathan?" he asked. "I believe laughter is one of the common traits of ghosts, spirits, and even powerful spirits like me. Have you been through the scholarly accounts? Ghosts are famous for laughing. Saints laugh. Angels laugh. Laughter is the sound of Heaven, I think. I believe. I don't know."

  "Maybe you feel close to Heaven when you laugh," I said.

  "Maybe so," he said. His large cherubic mouth was really beautiful. Had it been small it would have given him a baby face. But it wasn't small, and with his thick black eyebrows and the large quick eyes, he looked pretty remarkable.

  He seemed to be taking my measure again too, as if he had some capacity to read my thoughts. "My scholar," he said to me, "I've read all your books. Your students love you, don't they? But the old Hasidim are shocked by your biblical studies, I suppose."

  "They ignore me. I don't exist for the Hasidim," I said, "but for what it's worth my mother was a Hasid, and so maybe I'll have a little understanding of things that will help us."

  I knew now that I liked him, whatever he had done, liked him for himself in a way--young man of twenty, as he said, and though I was still fairly stunned from the fever, from his appearance, from his tricks, I was actually getting used to him.

  He waited a few minutes, obviously ruminating, then began to talk:

  "Babylon," he said. "Babylon! Give the name of any city which echoes as loud and as long as Babylon. Not even Rome, I tell you. And in those days there was no Rome. The center of the world was Babylon. Babylon had been built by the Gods as their gate. Babylon had been the great city of Hammurabi. The ships of Egypt, the Peoples of the Sea, the people of Dilmun, came to the docks of Babylon. I was a happy child of Babylon.

  "I've seen what stands today, in Iraq, going there myself to see the walls restored by the tyrant Saddam Hussein. I've seen the mounds of sand that dot the desert, all of this covering old cities and towns that were Assyrian, Babylonian, Judean.

  "And I've walked into the museum in Berlin to weep at the sight of what your archaeologist, Koldewey, has re-created of the mighty Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way.

  "Oh, my friend, what it was to walk on that street! What it was to look up at those walls of gleaming glazed blue brick, what it was to pass the golden dragons of Marduk.

  "But even if you walked the length and breadth of the old Processional Way, you would have only a taste of what was Babylon. All our streets were straight, many paved in limestone and red breccia. We lived as if in a place made of semiprecious stones. Think of an entire city glazed and enameled in the finest colors, think of gardens everywhere.

  "The god Marduk built Babylon with his own hands, they told us, and we believed it. Early on I fell in with Babylonian ways and you know everybody had a god, a personal god he prayed to, and beseeched for this and that, and I chose Marduk. Marduk himself was my personal god.

  "You can imagine the uproar when I walked in the house with a small pure-gold statue of Marduk, talking to it, the way the Babylonians did. But then my father just laughed. Typical of my father, my beautiful and innocent father.

  "And throwing back his head, my father sang in his beautiful voice, 'Yahweh is your God, the God of your Father, your Father's Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'

  "To which one of my somber uncles popped up at once, 'And what is that idol in his hands!'

  " 'A toy!' said my father. 'Let him play with it. Azriel, when you get sick of all this superstitious Babylonian stuff, break the statue. Or sell it. You cannot break our god, for our god is not in gold or precious metal. He has no temple. He is above such things.'

  "I nodded, went into my room, which was large and full of silken pillows and curtains, for reasons I'll get to later, and I lay down and I started just, you know, calling on Marduk to be my guardian.

  "In this day and age, Americans do it with a guardian angel. I don't know how many Babylonians took it all that seriously either, the Babylonian personal god. You know the old saying, 'If you plan ahead a god goes with you.' Well, what does that mean?"

  "The Babylonians," I said, "they were a practical people rather than superstitious, weren't they?"

  "Jonathan, they were exactly like Americans today. I have never seen a people so like the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians as the Americans of today.

  "Commerce was everything, but everybody went about consulting astrologers, talking about magic, and trying to drive out evil spirits. People had families, ate, drank, tried to achieve success in every way possible, yet carried on all the time about luck. Now Americans don't talk about demons, no, but they rattle on about 'negative thinking' and 'self-destructive ideas' and 'bad self-image.' It was a lot the same, Babylon and America, a lot the same.

  "I would say that here in America I have found the nearest thing to Babylon in the good sense that I have ever found. We were not slaves to our gods! We were not slaves to each other.

  "What was I saying? Marduk, my personal god. I prayed to him all the time. I made offerings, you know, little bits of incense when nobody was watching; I poured out a little honey and wine for him in the shrine I made for him in the deep brick wall of my bedroom. Nobody paid much attention.

  "But then Marduk began to answer me. I'm not sure when Marduk first started answering me. I think I was still fairly young. I would say something idly to him, 'Look, my little brothers are running rampant and my father just laughs as though he were one of them and I have to do everything here!' and Marduk would laugh. As I said spirits laugh. Then he'd say some gentle thing like 'You know your father. He will do what you tell him, Big Brother.' His voice was soft, a man's voice. He didn't start actually speaking questions in my ear till I was nearly nine and some of these were simply little riddles and jokes and teasing about Yahweh...

  "He never got tired of teasing me about Yahweh, the god who preferred to live in a tent, and couldn't manage to lead his people out of a little bitty desert for over forty years. He made me laugh. And though I tried to be most respectful, I became more and more familiar with him, and even a little smart mouthed and ill behaved.

  " 'Why don't you go tell all this nonsense to Yahweh Himself since you are a god?' I asked him. 'Invite him to come down to your fabulous temple all full of cedars from Lebanon and gold.' And Marduk would fire off with 'What? Talk to your god? Nobody can look at the face of your god and live! What do you want to happen to me? What if he turns into a pillar of fire like he did when he brought you out of Egypt...ho, ho, ho...and smashes my temple and I end up being carried around in a tent!'

  "I didn't truly think about it till I was perhaps eleven years old. That was when I first came to know that not everybody heard from his or her personal god, and also I had learnt this: I didn't have to talk to Marduk to start him off talking to me. He could begin the conversation and sometimes at the most awkward moments. He also had bright ideas in his head. 'Let's go down into the potters' district, or let's go to the marketplace,' and we would."

  "Azriel, let me stop you," I said. "When all this happened, you spoke to the little statue of Marduk or you carried it with you?"

  "No, not at all, your personal god was always with you, you know. The idol at home, well, it received the incense, yes, I guess you could say that the god came down into it then to smell the incense. But no, Marduk was just there.

  "I did, stupidly enough, imitate the habit of other Babylonians of threatening him sometimes...you know, saying, 'Look, what kind of god are you that you can't help me find my sister's necklace! You won't get any incense out of me!' That was the way with the Babylonians, you know, to bawl out the god fiercely if things didn't go right. They would yell and scream at their personal gods: 'Who worships you like I do! Why don't you grant my wishes! Who else would pour out these libations for you!' "

  Azriel laughed again. I was considering this whole question which was not unfamiliar to me as a historian naturally. But I laughed too.

  "Times haven't changed that m
uch, I don't really think," I said. "Catholics can get very angry with their saints when the saints don't get results. And I think once in Naples, when a local saint refused to work a yearly miracle, people stood up in the church and yelled 'You pig of a saint!' But how deep do these convictions go?"

  "There's an alliance there," Azriel answered. "You know, there are several layers to that alliance. Or shall I say, the alliance is a braid of many strands. And the truth lies in this: the gods need us! Marduk needed..." He stopped again. He looked suddenly utterly forlorn. He looked at the fire.

  "He needed you?"

  "Well, he wanted my company," said Azriel. "I can't say he needed me. He had all of Babylon. But these feelings, they are impossibly complex." He looked at me. "Where are the bones of your father?" he asked.

  "Wherever the Nazis buried them in Poland," I said, "or in the wind if they were burnt."

  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 The Brothers Karamazov and I thought, Is this my dream? I am dying actually, the room's filling with snow, and I'm dying, imagining I'm talking to this beautiful young man with curling black hair, like the carvings on the stones from Mesopotamia in the British Museum, those stately kings never feline like the Pharaohs but with hair that was almost sexual on their faces, dark hair, hair as thick as the hair around their balls must have been. I don't know what was coming over me.

  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 go
vernor 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 sing night and day of dying, and of being dead, and there was nothing but village after village and field after field.

  "No, we didn't have it bad off.

  "By eleven years old, I had been to the temple itself, a page, as many a rich Hebrew boy was, and I had seen the great statue of Marduk himself, the god, in his high sanctuary atop the great ziggurat of Etemenanki. I had entered into the inner shrine with the priests, and the strangest thought had occurred to me! This big statue looked more like me than the little one I had which I had always thought bore a distinct resemblance.

  "Of course I didn't chirp this out loud. But as I looked up at mighty Marduk, the great gold Marduk, the statue in which the god lived and ruled, and should have been carried each year in the New Year's Procession, the statue smiled.

  "I was too clever to say anything to the priests. We were in the process of preparing the inner sanctuary for the woman who would come and spend the night with the god. But the priests noticed something. And they saw me look at Marduk and one of them asked, 'What did you say?' and of course I'd said nothing. But Marduk had said, 'Well, what do you think of my house, Azriel? I've been so often to yours.'

  "From that moment, the priests were on to it. Yet things might still have gone differently. I might have had a long human life. I might have had a different path. Sons, daughters. I don't know.