Servant of the Bones

22

By the time I reached New York the need for sleep was weighing me down. I would have to give in to it before further explorations. But I was fiercely worried about Nathan. Before taking on a body, I prowled invisibly all through the Temple of the Mind.

Just as I expected, there was much chemical research being done there, and there were numerous restricted areas, and there were people working in the night in the strange rubbery orange plastic suits I had seen, and these suits seemed to be filled with air. These suited beings peered through their helmets as they worked with chemicals which they obviously did not mean to breathe or touch. They were loading these into what seemed very lightweight plastic cartridges. I studied everything else that was going on. In an antiseptic laboratory, my bones lay on a hard table, being studied by the evil Mastermind doctor, the thin one with the bottle-black hair. He had no hint of my invisible presence as I circled him. I could not make out his notes. I felt nothing for the Bones, except the desire to destroy them so that I could never be driven back into them again. But I might die if that happened. It was much too soon for such a risk.

Other parts of the building were obviously communication centers. There were people watching monitors, speaking on phones and working with maps. There were great electrified maps of the world on the wall, filled with pinpoints of light.

There was a great air of urgency and commotion among these night workers.

All spoke in a completely guarded way, as if they thought they were being monitored by enemies, and their statements were maddeningly vague. “We have to hurry.” “This is going to be glorious.” “This has to be loaded by four a.m.” “Everything at Point 17 is perfectly in line.”

I could not make something sensible or sophisticated out of what they said. I managed to discover from one slip of the tongue that the project they all shared was called Last Days.

Last Days.

All I saw alarmed me and repelled me. I suspected the chemicals in the canisters were filoviruses, or some other lethal agent only recently discovered through technology, and the entire Temple stank of murder.

I passed many empty floors, many sleeping dormitories filled with young Minders, and a huge chapel where Minders prayed silently like contemplative monks, on their knees with their hands pressed to their foreheads. The image over the altar was a great Brain. The Mind of God, I presume. It was a mere outline in gold. It was strangely uninspiring. It looked anatomical and bizarre.

I passed rooms where men slept alone, in dimness. In one room was a man covered up and bandaged, with a nurse in attendance. In other chambers, there were other sick people, swathed in sheeting, hooked to gleaming tubes connected to tiny computers. Many solitary rooms contained sleeping members of the church. Some were so luxurious as to rival Gregory’s rooms. They had floors of marble tile and gilded furniture; they had sumptuous bathrooms with great square tubs.

I had many unanswered questions about what I saw in the building, and could have spent much more time.

But now I had to go on to Brooklyn. I felt I could see what was happening. Surely, Nathan was in danger.

It was two a.m. Invisible I passed into the Rebbe’s house and found him sound asleep in his bed, but he woke the minute I entered the room. He knew I was there. He was at once alarmed and climbed out of the bed. I simply went very far away from the house. There was no time to search for Nathan or to look for more sympathetic members of the family.

Besides, I was growing more tired by the minute. I couldn’t dare retreat to the Bones; in fact, I had no intention of ever retreating to them again, not the way that I felt now, and I feared my weakness in sleep, that I might be called back or dissolved by Gregory or even somehow by the Rebbe.

I went back into Manhattan, found a lake in the middle of Central Park not very far at all from the huge Temple of the Mind. Indeed, I could see all its lighted windows. I took form as a man, dressed myself in the finest garb I could conceive of—red velvet suit, fine linen shirt, all manner of exotic gold embellishments—and then I drank huge amounts of water from the lake. I knelt and drank it in handfuls. I was filled with water, and felt very powerful. I lay down on the grass under a tree to rest, in the open, telling my body to hold firm and to wake if there was any natural or supernatural assault on it. I told it it must answer no one’s call but my own.

When I woke it was eight o’clock in the morning by the city’s clocks, and I was whole, intact, with my clothes, and I was rested. Just as I supposed, I had appeared far too strange for prowling mortal men to attack, and far too puzzling to be disturbed by beggars. Whatever the case, I was strong and unharmed in my velvet suit and shining black shoes.

I had survived the hours of sleep in material form, outside the bones, and this was another triumph.

I danced for joy on the grass for a few minutes, then brushed off the clothes, dissolved with the requisite enchantments, and re-formed, velvet clad, bearded, and free of bits of grass and dirt in the living room of the Rebbe’s house. I did not want the beard, but the beard and mustache came as they had before. And maybe they’d even been there when I woke. In fact, I’m sure they had. They had been there all along. They wanted to be there. Very well.

The house was modern, cramped, made of many smallish rooms.

It struck me as most remarkable how conventional this house was. It was filled with rather ordinary furniture, none of it ugly or beautiful. Comfortable and well lighted. Immediately people waiting in the parlor stared at me and began to whisper. A man approached, and in Yiddish I said I had to see Nathan immediately.

I realized I didn’t know Nathan’s real last name. Or even if they called him Nathan here. Obviously his last name wasn’t Belkin. Belkin was a made-up name of Gregory. I said in Yiddish that it was a matter of life and death that I see Nathan.

The Rebbe flung open the doors of his study. He was in a fury. Two elderly women stood with him, and two young men, all of these people Hasidim, the women wigged to cover their natural hair, the young men with locks and silk suits. There was no one about who was not Hasidim.

The Rebbe’s face was trembling with outrage. He began to try to exorcise me from the house, and I stood firm and put up my hand.

“I have to speak to Nathan,” I said in Yiddish. “Nathan could be in danger. Gregory is a dangerous man. I have to speak to Nathan. I won’t leave here until I find him. Perhaps his is a compassionate and fearless heart and he will hear me. Whatever the case, I will speak to him in love. Perhaps Nathan walks with God, and if I save him, so shall I.”

Everyone fell silent. Then the men bid the women to go, which they did, and they called several old men from the parlor, and they pointed for me to go into the Rebbe’s study.

I was now among an assemblage of elders.

One of these men took a piece of white chalk and drew a circle on the carpet and told me to stand in it.

I said:

“No. I am here to love, to avert harm, I am here having loved two people who are now dead. I learned love from them. I will not be the Servant of the Bones. I will do no evil. I will not be driven any longer by anger, hatred, or bitterness. And I will not be confined by you and your magic to that circle. I am too strong for that circle. It means nothing to me. The love of Nathan is what calls me now.”

The Rebbe sank down at his desk, a rather large formal one compared to his desk in the basement, where I had first seen him. He seemed in despair.

“Rachel Belkin is dead,” I told him in Yiddish. “She took her own life.”

“The news says you took her life!” said the Rebbe in Yiddish. The other men murmured, nodding.

A very very old man, balding and thin with a head like a skull covered in black silk, came forward and looked into my eyes. “We don’t watch television; we don’t do it. But the news spread fast. That you killed her and you killed her daughter.”

“That is a he,” I said. “Esther Belkin met Nathan, Gregory’s brother, in the diamond district. She bought a necklace from him. I believe Gregory Belkin had her murdered because she knew of his family and in particular of his twin brother. Nathan is in danger.”

They all stood motionless. I couldn’t predict what was going to happen. I knew I made a strange sight in the dark red velvet with so much gold ornament on the cuffs and with my dark hair and long beard, but so did they make a strange sight, all of them bearded and wearing hats, either small-or large-brimmed, and in long black silk suits all their own style.

They gradually formed a circle around me.

They began to hurl questions at me. At first I didn’t realize what this was. Then it became clear that it was a test. The first question was, Could I quote from this or that book of the Torah. They used letters and names I understood completely. I answered all their questions, throwing out the quotations first in Hebrew and then in Greek, and then sometimes, to really startle them, in older Aramaic.

“Name the prophets,” they said.

I did, including Enoch, who had been a prophet in my time in Babylon, whom they didn’t know. They were shocked at this.

“Babylon?”

“I can’t remember!” I said. “I have to stop Gregory Belkin from hurting his brother, Nathan. I’m convinced he killed Esther because she met Nathan and knew of Nathan, and there are other suspicious things.”

Now they began to question me on the Talmud: What were the Mitzvot? I told them there were 613, and they were laws or rules in general concerned with attitude, what one does, good behavior, and what one says.

The questions went on and on. They had to do with ritual and cleanliness, and what is forbidden, and with the heretic rabbis, and with the Kabbalah. I answered everything rapidly, lapsing into Aramaic over and over, then coming back to Yiddish. When I quoted from the Septuagint, I used the Greek.

I referred sometimes to the Babylonian Talmud and sometimes to the old Jerusalem Talmud. I answered all questions about sacred numbers, and the points of discussion became finer and finer. It seemed each man was trying to outdo the other with the delicacy of his question.

Finally I became impatient.

“Do you realize while we carry on like this, as if we were in the yeshiva, that Nathan may be in danger? What is Nathan’s name among you? Help me save Nathan, in the name of God.”

“Nathan is gone,” said the Rebbe. “He is far far away, where Gregory cannot find him. He is safe in the Lord’s city.”

“How do you know he’s safe?”

“The day after the death of Esther he left here for Israel. Gregory cannot find him there. Gregory could never track him down.”

“The day after…you mean then the day before you first saw me?”

“Yes, if you aren’t a dybbuk, what are you?”

“I don’t know. What I want to be is an angel and that is what I intend to be. And God will judge whether I have done His Will, What made Nathan go to Israel?”

The old men looked at the Rebbe, obviously confused. The Rebbe said that he wasn’t sure why Nathan wanted to take the trip just then, but it seemed in his grief for Esther, Nathan was eager to go and said something about doing his yearly work early in Israel. His work had to do with copies of the Torah which he would bring back. Routine.

“Can you reach him?” I said.

“Why should we tell you more?” said the Rebbe. “He’s safe from Gregory.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Now that you are all here, I want you to answer. Did any of you call upon the Servant of the Bones? Did Nathan?”

They all shook their heads and looked at the Rebbe.

“Nathan would never do such an unholy thing.”

“Am I unholy?” I lifted my hands. “Come,” I said, “I invite you. Try to exorcise me, try in the name of the Lord God of Hosts. I’ll stand here firm in my love for Nathan and for Esther and Rachel Belkin. I want to avert harm. I will stand firm. Go on, give me your abracadabra Kabbalah magic!”

This roused them all to whispering and murmuring, and the Rebbe, who was still furious, did begin a loud chant to exorcise me, and then all the men joined in and I watched them, feeling nothing, not letting any anger come to the fore, only feeling love for them, and thinking with love of my Master Samuel, and how I had hated him for something perhaps that was only human. I couldn’t remember it. I remembered Babylon. I remembered the prophet Enoch, but each time sadness or hate or bitterness came to me I pushed it away and thought of love, love profane, love sacred, love of the good…

I still could not recall Zurvan distinctly, only the feeling, but I quoted him now out loud as best I could. Each time it seemed I used new words but it was the same quote: “The purpose of life is to love and to increase our knowledge of the intricacies of creation. Kindness is the way of God.”

They kept up the exorcism, and I searched my mind, closing my eyes, and sought for the proper words, calling to the world to yield to me the proper words that would quiet them, just the way that it yielded to me the clothing I wore, or the skin that appeared human.

Then I saw the words. I saw the room. I didn’t know where it was then. Now I realize that it was the scriptorium in my father’s house. All I knew was that it was familiar and I began to sing the words, as I had sung them long ago, with the harp on my knee. As I had written them over and over.

I sang them now in the ancient tongue in which I learned them, loudly and with rhythm, rocking as I sang:

I will love thee, O Lord, my strength.

The Lord is my rock, and my fortress and my

deliverer; my God, my strength,

in whom I will trust, my buckler

and the horn of my salvation and my high tower.

The sorrows of death compassed me,

and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid

The sorrows of hell compassed me about:

the snares of death prevented me

In my distress I called upon the Lord,

And cried unto my God; he heard my voice…

This silenced them. They stood staring in wonder, not afraid and not full of hate. Even the Rebbe’s soul was stilled and had lost its hate.

I spoke in Aramaic: “I forgive those who made of me a demon, whoever they were, and to whatever purpose. Learning to love from Esther and Rachel, I come in love and to love Nathan and to love God. To love is to know love, and that is to love God. Amen.”

The old man looked suspicious suddenly, but it was not of me. He looked at the telephone on his desk. Then he glanced at me.

The very old one said, in Hebrew, “So he was a demon who would be an angel? Is such a thing possible?” The Rebbe didn’t answer.

Then suddenly the Rebbe picked up the phone and punched in a long series of numbers, too long for me to follow or remember, and then he began to talk in Yiddish.

He asked if Nathan was there. Had Nathan arrived safely? He assumed that someone would have called, had Nathan not arrived, but he wanted to speak to his grandson.

Then shock came over his face. The room was silent. All the men looked at him and seemed to know what he was thinking.

The Rebbe spoke into the phone in Yiddish:

“He didn’t tell you that he was coming? You have not heard from him, one single word?”

The old men were distressed. So was I.

“He’s not there,” I said. “He’s not there!”

The old man went over all the details with those at the other end of the line. They knew nothing about Nathan coming to Israel. Last they heard, Nathan would come at his regular time later in the year. All was in readiness for Nathan’s regular visit. They had received no calls from Nathan about an early visit.

The Rebbe put down the phone. “Don’t tell Sarah!” he said with his hand raised. All the others nodded. He then told the youngest of the men to go for Sarah. “I’ll speak with Sarah.”

Sarah came into the room, a modest and humble woman, very beautiful, her natural hair covered by an ugly brown wig. She had narrow almond-shaped eyes, and a lovely soft mouth. She emanated kindness and when she glanced at me shyly she made no judgment.

She looked at the Rebbe.

“Your husband has called you since he left?”

She said no.

“You went with him and Jacob and Joseph to the plane?”

She said no.

Silence.

She looked at me and then looked down.

“Please, forgive me,” I said, “but did Nathan tell you he was going to Israel?”

She said yes, and that a car had come for him, from a rich friend in the city to take him, and he had said he would be back very soon.

“Did he tell you who this friend was?” I asked. “Please tell me, Sarah, please.”

She seemed utterly reassured and something inside her was suddenly unlocked. I saw in her eyes the same gentleness that I had seen in the girl on the street in the southern city, and in Esther herself, and in Rachel. The pure gentleness of women, which is wholly different from the pure gentleness of men.

Maybe this is what happens when you love, really love, I thought. People love you in return! I felt so free of hatred and anger suddenly that I shivered, but I implored her with my eyes to speak.

She looked shaken and then she glanced at the Rebbe, and bowed her head and blushed. She was about to cry.

“He had with him her diamond necklace,” she said, “the necklace of his brother’s daughter, Esther Belkin. He was taking it to his brother.”

She began to cry.

“When he had heard of the necklace being stolen,” she said, “when he heard this tale, he knew it wasn’t true. He had the necklace. Esther Belkin had given it to him for mending.” She swallowed her tears and continued. “Rebbe, he didn’t want anyone to be angry. He called his brother to tell him. He said his brother was crying. The car came to take him to his brother so that he might restore the necklace to him which had been Esther’s, and then his brother wanted Nathan to come with him to Israel that they stand together at the Wailing Wall. Nathan promised me that when he had comforted his brother, he would return. Perhaps, he said, he could bring his brother back home.”

“Ah, of course,” I said.

“Quiet,” said the Rebbe. “Sarah, don’t be sorry or sad. Don’t worry. I’m not angry that he went with his brother. He went in love, with good intentions.”

“He did, Rebbe,” she said. “He did.”

“Leave this to us.”

“I’m so sorry, Rebbe. But he loved his brother and was so stricken with grief for the girl. He said the girl would one day have come to us and would have wanted to be one of us. He was sure of it. He had seen it in her eyes.”

“I see, Sarah. Don’t think any more about it. Go out now.”

She turned her head, still crying, glanced back at me once, and then left the room.

I felt so sorry for her, so very sorry! She knew something was wrong, but she had no idea what was wrong, how bad it was. She was loving by nature. Maybe Nathan was too. Very likely so, as Rachel and Esther had said he was.

“It’s just as I thought,” I said.

The old man waited on me in silence.

“Gregory used the necklace to lure Nathan to him. Gregory published that stupid story of the stolen necklace so that Nathan would call him, and he could persuade Nathan to meet with him and stay with him. Nathan prepared you for his prolonged absence. Gregory put him up to this. I will do everything in my power to see that Nathan is returned unharmed. I can’t stay with you now. Will you give me your blessing, all of you? I won’t linger begging for it, but if you want to give it, I will receive it with love in the name of the Lord. My name is Azriel.”

They cried out, throwing up their hands and backing away. It was the fear of knowing the name of a spirit, though I hadn’t expected such alarm at this point. I put my hands to my temples and thought again, “Yield to me the words! Yield to me the words. I know my name is not evil.”

Then I declared, “I was named Azriel by my father when I was circumcised in our own house of prayer at Babylon. We were the last tribes taken hostage out of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The name was good enough for God and for the Tribe and for my father! Nabonidus was King and we practiced our faith in peace under his rule. We sang the Lord’s Song in that strange land every day.”

A great flush of energy passed through me, but again the memory lacked substance, color. I knew only that what I said was true, and that if I could solve this blasted mystery, this horror, then perhaps in time I could recall other things, just as I had recalled this, and all my past would come to me. Not in hatred, but in love. I was now fascinated by love. No doubt of it.

They fell to murmuring, it is his Hebrew name, it is his human name, it is his own name blessed by God, and some arguing that to know my name only gave them power over me and others whispered that I was an angel.

Then with a nod from the Rebbe, they all gave me their blessings. I felt nothing, but at least I didn’t dislike them anymore; I loved them and saw them for what they were and feared all the more for Nathan.

“But what is Gregory doing?” the Rebbe whispered, more to himself than to me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted again. “But Nathan is an identical twin, is he not? And your grandson Gregory would be the Messiah, would he not? He would change the whole world.”

The old man was perplexed and horrified.

I asked, “If I need you, for Nathan’s sake, for the sake of the love of all God’s creatures, will you come?”

“Yes,” said the Rebbe.

I was about to walk out of the room. But I decided for obvious reasons that it was best to vanish. I did so slowly so as to amaze them, growing transparent, rising, extending my arms, then vanishing altogether. I don’t think they saw the tiny bits of moisture all through the air. They probably only felt the coolness and then the heat when a spirit vanishes.

I left them staring solemnly at the place where I’d stood. I wanted desperately to comfort Sarah, whom I saw crying at the kitchen table, but there was no way, no time.

I went up higher and higher.

“Gregory!” I said, and I set my destination to that place where the Master of the Bones might be—his Temple. To search, as a spirit, for Nathan was impossible. I had never laid eyes on him, caught his scent, seen or touched him or his garments. He might have been sleeping in one of those rooms in the Temple which I roamed, invisibly, the night before. But I had not lingered on faces. There had been hundreds of faces.

Go to Gregory. The danger to Nathan was with his brother, and that was where I had to be now. I had one comforting thought. Whatever was in store for Nathan had probably not transpired yet.

On the other hand, the people in the Temple had been working full speed on the project called the Last Days.