Servant of the Bones

2

I didn’t remember Jerusalem,” he said. “I wasn’t born there. My mother was carried off as a child by Nebuchadnezzar along with our whole family, and our tribe, and I was born a Hebrew in Babylon, in a rich house—full of aunts and uncles and cousins—rich merchants, scribes, sometime prophets, and occasional dancers and singers and pages at court.

“Of course,” he smiled. “Every day of my life, I wept for Jerusalem.” He smiled. “I sang the song: ‘If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.’ And at night prayers we begged the Lord to return us to our land, and at morning prayers as well.

“But what I’m trying to say is that Babylon was my whole life. At twenty, when my life came to its first—shall we say—great tragedy, I knew the songs and gods of Babylon as well as I knew my Hebrew and the Psalms of David that I copied daily, or the book of Samuel, or whatever other texts we were constantly studying as a family.

“It was a grand life. But before I describe myself further, my circumstances, so to speak, let me just talk of Babylon.

“Let me sing the song of Babylon in a strange land. I am not pleasing in the eyes of the Lord or I wouldn’t be here, so I think now I can sing the songs I want, what do you think?”

“I want to hear it,” I said gravely. “Shape it the way you would. Let the words spill. You don’t want to be careful with your language, do you? Are you talking to the Lord God now, or are you simply telling your tale?”

“Good question. I’m talking to you so that you will tell the story for me in my words. Yes. I’ll rave and cry and blaspheme when I want. I’ll let my words come in a torrent. They always did, you know. Keeping Azriel quiet was a family obsession.”

This was the first time I’d seen him really laugh, and it was a light heartfelt laugh that came up as easily as breath, nothing strangled or self-conscious in it.

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 much, 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 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 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.

“At the time, I thought it was hilarious and wonderful, and loved Marduk for this little trick. But we continued to ready the chamber, which was truly magnificent in plated gold, and the silken couch where the woman would lie to be taken by the god that night, and then we left, and one of the priests said: ‘The God smiled on you!’

“I was stiff with fear. I didn’t want to answer.

“Rich Hebrew hostages or deportees like us were treated very well, as I said, but I didn’t really talk to the priests, you know, as if they were Hebrews. They were the priests of the gods we were forbidden to worship. Besides, I didn’t trust them and there were too many of them and some were very stupid and others very sly and smart. I said simply that I had seen the smile too and thought it was sunlight.

“The priest was quaking.

“I forgot about that for years. I don’t know why I remember it now, except to say that that might have been the very moment when my fate was sealed.

“Marduk started talking to me all the time then. I’d be in the tablet house, working hard, you know, learning thoroughly every text we possessed in Sumerian so that I could copy it out, read it, even speak it, though by then nobody spoke Sumerian. Ah, I must tell you a funny thing I heard only recently here in this twentieth century world. I heard it in New York in the days after it was all over, finished with, Gregory Belkin I mean, and I was wandering around trying to make my body take the form of other men—and it kept changing back. I heard this funny thing…”

“What?” I asked at once.

“That nobody even now knows where the Sumerians came from! Not even to this day. That they came out of nowhere the Sumerians, with their language which was different from all others, and they built the first cities in our beautiful valleys. Nobody knows more about them even to this day.”

“That’s true. Did you know then?”

“No,” he said, “we knew what was written in the tablets, that Marduk had made people from clay and put life into them. That’s all we knew. But to find out two thousand years later that you have no long archaeological or historical record for the origin of the Sumerians—how their language developed and how they migrated into the valley and all of that—it’s funny to me.”

“Well, haven’t you noticed that nobody now knows where the Jews came from either?” I asked. “Or are you going to tell me that you knew for a fact in those days, when you were a Babylonian boy, that God called Abraham out of the city of Ur and that Jacob did wrestle with the angel?”

He laughed and shrugged. “There were so many versions of that story! If you only knew. Of course people wrestled all the time with angels. That was beyond dispute. But what do you have today in the Holy Books? Its remnants! The whole story of Yahweh defeating the Leviathan is gone, gone! And I used to copy that story all the time! But I get ahead of myself. I want to describe things in some order. No, I am not surprised to hear that no one knows where the Jews came from. Because even then there were just too many stories…

“Let me tell you about my house. It was in the rich Hebrew quarter. I’ve explained what exile meant.

“We were to be citizens of quality of a city filled with people of all nations. We were booty, set free to increase and multiply and make wealth. By my time, as you can guess, Nebuchadnezzar had died, and we were ruled by Nabonidus, and he was not in the city and everybody hated him. Just hated him.

“He was thought to be mad, or obsessed. This is told in the book of Daniel though he is given the wrong name. And true, our prophets did go try to drive him crazy with their predictions about how he ought to let us go home. But I don’t think they got anywhere with him.

“Nabonidus was driven by secret ideas of his own. Nabonidus was a scholar for one thing, a digger into the mounds, and he was determined to keep Babylon in glory, yes, but he had a mad love for the god Sin. Well, Babylon was Marduk’s city. Of course there were many other temples and chapels even in Marduk’s temple, but still, for the King to fall crazy in love with another god?

“And then to go running off for ten years, ten years into the desert, leaving behind Belshazzar as the ruler, well, that made everybody hate Nabonidus even more. The whole time that Nabonidus was gone, the New Year’s Festival couldn’t happen, and this was the biggest festival in Babylon where Marduk takes the hand of the King and walks through the street with him! That couldn’t happen with no King. And the priests of Marduk, by the time I came to serious work in the temple and palace, were really despising Nabonidus. And so were many other people too.

“To tell you the truth, I never knew the whole secret of Nabonidus. If we could call him up, you know, as the Witch of Endor called up the dead prophet Samuel, disturbing his sleep, remember, so that Saul the King could talk to him…if we could call up Nabonidus he might tell us wondrous things. But that is not my mission now, to become a necromancer or a sorcerer, it’s to find the stairway to heaven, and I am done with the fog and the mist in which the lost souls linger begging for someone to call a name.

“Besides, maybe Nabonidus has gone into the light. Maybe he’s mounted the stairs. He didn’t live his life in cruelty or debauchery but devotion to a god who was not the god of his city, that’s all.

“I only saw him once, and that was during the last days of my life, and he was all caught up in the plot of course, and he seemed to me a dead man already, a King whose time had passed, and he seemed also blessed with an indifference to life. All he wanted, on that last day when we met, or that night, was that Babylon would not be sacked. That’s what everybody wanted. That’s how I lost my soul.

“But I’ll come to that awful part soon enough.

“I was talking about being alive. I didn’t give a damn about Nabonidus. We lived in the rich Hebrew quarter. It was filled with beautiful houses; we made the walls then about six feet thick, which I know sounds mad to you today, but you cannot imagine how effectively it kept our houses cool; they were sprawling affairs, with many anterooms and big dining rooms, and all these rooms surrounded a large central courtyard. My father’s house was four stories high and the wooden rooms above were full of cousins and the elderly aunts, and they often didn’t come all the way down to the yard, but merely sat in the open courtyard windows taking the breeze.

“The courtyard was Eden. It was like a small portion of the hanging gardens themselves, and the other public gardens all over the city. It was big. We had a fig tree, a willow tree, and two date palms, and flowers of all kinds, grape vines covering the arbor where we could take our evening meal, and fountains that never stopped sending their rivers of sparkling water down into the basins where the fish darted about like living jewels.

“The brickwork was glazed and beautiful, and had many figures in it, having been built by some Akkadian before us, before the Chaldeans came, and it was full of blue and red and yellow and, flowers, but there was also plenty of grass in the courtyard, and then the room off it where the ancestors were buried.

“I grew up playing among the date palms and flowers, and I loved it till the day…the day I died. I loved lying out there in the late afternoon listening to the water of the fountains, and ignoring everybody who kept telling me I ought to be in the scriptorium copying psalms or some such. I wasn’t lazy by nature. I just sort of did what I wanted to do. I got away with things. But I wasn’t bad by any stretch; in fact, I was far and away the best scholar of the family, at least as I saw it, and many times, my uncles, though they didn’t want to admit it, would bring to me three versions of a Psalm by King David and ask me which I thought was the most nearly correct, and then they’d follow my judgment.

“We had no official gathering place for prayers, of course, because we had such grandiose plans for going home and building the Temple of Solomon all over again; I mean no one was going to throw up any little street-side temple in Babylon. The temple would have to be done according to sacred dimensions, and after I was dead and cursed and had become the Servant of the Bones, the Jews did go home and build that temple. In fact, I know they did, because I saw it once…once, as if in a fog, but I saw it.

“In our Babylonian life we gathered at private homes for prayers, and also for the elders among us to read the letters we received from the rebels still hiding on Mount Zion, and also the letters coming from our prophets in Egypt. Jeremiah was imprisoned there for a long time. I don’t remember anyone ever reading one of his letters. But I remember a lot of mad writing by Ezekiel. He didn’t write it down himself. He walked about talking and predicting and then other people wrote it down.

“But so we prayed, in our homes, to our invisible and all-powerful Yahweh—reminded always that before David promised him a temple, Yahweh and the Ark of the Covenant had been housed only in a tent, and that had its meaning and its value. Lots of the Elders thought the whole temple idea was Babylonian, you know. Go back to the tent.

“On the other hand, our family had for nine generations been rich merchants, city men, living in Nineveh before Jerusalem, I think, and we had little concept of the nomad life or carrying about shrines in tents. The story of Moses didn’t make a great deal of sense to us. For instance, how could the people be so lost in the desert for forty years? But, I repeat myself, don’t I?…What am I saying…

“A tent to me was all the silk over my bed, the red-tinged light in which I lay with my hands cupped under my head talking to Marduk about the prayer meetings and listening to his jokes.

“At some of these prayer meetings we had our own prophets, whose books are lost now, who did a great deal of ranting and screaming. I was frequently pointed to, and told that I had found favor in the eyes of Yahweh, though what this meant nobody was certain.

“I guess they all knew in a way that I could see farther than others, look into souls, you know, see like a zaddik, a saint, but I was no saint, only an obstreperous young man.”

He stopped. The sharpness of memory seemed to cut him off and hold him.

“You were happy,” I said. “By nature, you were happy, truly happy.”

“Oh, yes, I knew it, and so did my friends. In fact, they often teased me about being too happy. Things never seemed all that difficult, you see. Things never seemed dark! Darkness came with death, and the worst darkness for me was right before it, and maybe…maybe even now. But darkness. Oh, to take on the world of darkness, that is like trying to chart the stars of heaven.

“What was I saying? Things were easy for me. I enjoyed them. For example, to be educated I had to work in the tablet house. I had to get a real Babylonian education. This was wise, this was for the future, this was for trade, this was to be a man of learning. And they beat the daylights out of us if we were late, or didn’t learn our lessons, but usually it was easy for me.

“I loved the old Sumerian. I loved writing out the whole stories of Gilgamesh and ‘In the Beginning’ and copying all kinds of records so that fresh tablets could be sent to other cities in Babylonia. I could practically speak Sumerian. I could now sit down and write for you my life in Sumerian—” He stopped. “No, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t because if I could have written my life, I wouldn’t have climbed up this snowy mountain to commit it to you…I can’t…I can’t.…write it in any tongue. Talking lets the pain flow…”

“That I understand perfectly, and am here to listen. The point is, you know Sumerian, and you can read it, and you can translate it.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and Akkadian, the language that had been used after, and the Persian which was creeping up on us all then, and Greek—I could read that well—and Aramaic which was taking the place of our own Hebrew in daily life, but then I wrote Hebrew too.

“I learnt my lessons. I wrote fast. I had a way of plunging the stylus into the clay that made everybody laugh but my writing was good. Really good. And I also loved to stand up and read out loud, so whenever the teacher took sick, or was called out, or suddenly needed some medicine, otherwise known as beer, I’d stand up and start reading Gilgamesh to everybody in an exaggerated voice, making them laugh.

“You know the old myth of course. And it’s important to our story, stupid and crazy as it is. Here is this king Gilgamesh and he is running wild around his city—on some tablets he is a giant, on others he is the size of a man. He behaves like a bull. He has the drums beaten all the time, which makes everybody unhappy. You’re not supposed to beat the drums except for certain reasons—to frighten spirits, to call to nuptials, you know.

“Okay, so we have Gilgamesh tearing up the city of Uruk. And what do the gods do, being the Sumerian gods, being about as smart as a bunch of water buffalo—they make an equal for Gilgamesh in a wild man called Enkido, who is covered with hair, lives in the woods, and likes to drink with beasts—oh, it is so important in this world with whom one eats and drinks and what!—anyway, here we have wild Enkido coming down to the stream to drink with the beasts, and he is rendered tame by spending seven days with a temple harlot!

“Stupid, no? The beasts wouldn’t have anything to do with him once he knew the harlot. Why? Were the beasts jealous because they didn’t get to lie with the harlot? Don’t beasts copulate with beasts? Are there no beast harlots? Why does copulating with a woman make a man less of a beast? Well, the whole story of Gilgamesh never made any sense anyway except as a bizarre code. Everything is code, is it not?”

“I think you’re right, it’s code,” I said, “but code for what? Keep telling me the story of Gilgamesh. Tell me how your version ended,” I asked. I simply couldn’t resist the question. “You know we have only fragments now, and we don’t have the old script that you had.”

“It ended the same way as your modern versions. Gilgamesh couldn’t resign himself that Enkido could die. Enkido did die, too, though I don’t remember quite why. Gilgamesh acted as if he’d never seen anybody die before, and he went to the immortal who had survived the great flood. The great flood. Your flood. Our flood. Everyone’s flood. With us it was Noah and his sons. With them it was an immortal who lived in the land of Dilmun in the sea. He was the great survivor of the flood. And off to see him, to get immortality, goes this genius Gilgamesh. And that ancient one—who would be the Hebrew Noah for our people—says what? ‘Gilgamesh, if you can stay awake for seven days and nights, you can be immortal.’

“And what happens? Gilgamesh instantly fell asleep. Instantly! He didn’t even wait a day! A night. He keeled over! Smash. Asleep. So that was the end of that plan, except that the immortal widow of the immortal man who had survived the flood took pity on him, and they told Gilgamesh that if he tied stones to his feet and sank down in the sea he could find a plant that, once eaten, gives you eternal youth. Well, I think they were trying to drown the man!

“But our version, as yours, followed Gilgamesh in this expedition. Down he went and he found the plant. Then he comes up again. He goes to sleep. His worst habit apparently, this sleeping…and a snake comes and takes the plant. Ah, what utter sadness for Gilgamesh and then comes the old advice to all:

“ ‘Enjoy your life, fill your belly with wine and food, and accept death. The Gods kept immortality for themselves, death is the lot of man.’ You know, profound philosophical revelations!”

I laughed. “I like your telling of it. When you would stand up in the tablet house, did you read it with that same fervor?”

“Oh, always!” he said. “But even then, what did we have? Bits and pieces of something ancient. Uruk had been built thousands of years before. Maybe there was such a real king. Maybe.

“If I have a point in all this right now, let me make it. Madness in kings is common. In fact, I think sanity in kings must be rare. Gilgamesh went crazy. Nabonidus was crazy. You ask me, Pharaoh was crazy in every story I ever heard about him.

“And I understand this. I understand it because I have looked into the face of Cyrus the Persian and into the face of Nabonidus, and I know that kings are alone, utterly alone. I have looked into the face of Gregory Belkin, a king in his own right, and I saw this same isolation and terrible weakness; there is no mother, there is no father, there is no limit to power, and disaster is the portion of kings. I have looked into the face of other kings, but that we will pass over quickly later on, because what I did as the evil Servant of the Bones does not matter now, except that every time I killed a human life, I destroyed a universe, did I not?”

“Perhaps, or you sent the evil flame home to be cleansed in the great fire of God.”

“Ah, that is beautiful,” he said to me.

I was complimented. But did I believe this?

“So, let’s go on with my life,” he said. “I worked at the Court as soon as I left the tablet house, and then my writing and reading were of the utmost importance. I knew all languages. I saw many strange documents and old letters in Sumerian and was useful to the King’s regent, Belshazzar. No one much cared for Belshazzar, as I said. He couldn’t hold the New Year’s Festival, or the priests didn’t want him, or Marduk wouldn’t do it, who knows, but he wasn’t destined to be loved.

“Yet I can’t say this made for a bad atmosphere in the palace. It was fairly congenial and of course the correspondence was endless. Letters were pouring in from the outlying territories complaining about the Persians being on the march, or about the Egyptians being on the march, or about the stars as seen by various astrologists predicting very bad or good things for the King.

“I became acquainted in the palace with the wise men who advised the King on everything, and liked listening to them, and realized that when Marduk spoke to me, sometimes the wise men could hear it. And I also came to know that the story of the smile had never been forgotten. Marduk had smiled on Azriel.

“Well, what secrets I had.

“So look. I am walking home. I am nineteen. I have very little time left to live and I don’t know it. I said to Marduk, How could the wise men hear it when you talk to me? He said that these men, these wise men, were seers and sorcerers just as were some of our Hebrews, our prophets, our wise men, though nobody wanted much to admit it, and they had the power as I did to hear a spirit.

“He sighed and he said to me in Sumerian that I must take the utmost care. ‘These men know your powers.’

“I’d never heard Marduk sound dejected. We had long ago passed the foolish point of me asking him for favors or to play tricks on people, and now we talked more about things all the time, and he frequently said that he could see more clearly through my eyes. I didn’t know what this meant, but on this day when he seemed dejected I was worried.

“ ‘My powers!’ I said sarcastically. ‘What powers! You smiled. You are the god!’

“Silence, but I knew he was still there. I could always feel him, like heat; I heard him like breath. You know, the way a blind person knows that someone is there.

“I got to my front door and was ready to go in, and I turned around and for the first time I actually laid eyes on him. I saw Marduk. Not the gold statuette in my room. Not the big statues in the temple. But Marduk, himself.

“He was standing against the far wall, arms folded, one knee bent, just looking at me. It was Marduk. He was completely covered in gold as he was at the shrine but he was alive and his curly hair and beard seemed not made of solid gold as they were on the statue but living gold. His eyes were browner than mine, that is, paler, with more yellow in the irises. He smiled at me.

“ ‘Ah, Azriel,’ he said. ‘I knew it would happen. I knew it.’ And then he came forward and he kissed me on both cheeks. His hands were so smooth. He was my height, and I was right, there was a great resemblance between us, though his eyebrows were set just a bit higher than mine and his forehead was smoother, so he didn’t look so mischievous or ferocious by nature as I did.

“I wanted to throw my arms around him. He didn’t wait for me to say it. He said, ‘Do it, but for that moment maybe others will see me too.’

“I hugged him as my oldest friend, as the dearest to me in the world next to my father, and it was that night I made the mistake of telling my father that I talked with my god all the time. I should never have done it. I wonder now what would have happened if I had not done that.”

I interrupted. “Did anyone else see him, to the best of your knowledge?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. The doorkeeper of our house saw him and all but fainted dead away to see a man all covered in gold paint, and one of my sisters looking down from the lattice above saw him too, and an elder of the Hebrews got a glimpse of him for a moment and came flying at me later that night with his staff, claiming he had seen me with a devil or an angel, and he did not know which.

“That’s when my father, my beloved, sweet, good-hearted father said, ‘It was Marduk, Babylon’s god, whom you saw.’ And maybe that is why…that is why, we are here now. My father never meant to hurt me. Never. He never meant to do a cruel thing to anyone in his life! He never meant it! He was…he was my little brother.

“Let me explain. I have figured it out. I was the eldest son, born when my father was young, because the deportation from Jerusalem had been hard on our people and they married quickly to have sons.

“But my father was the baby of his family, the little Benjamin beloved by everyone, and somehow or other in our family I fell into being his elder brother, and treating him as such. As eldest son I bossed him about a bit. Or rather, we became…we became as friends.

“My father worked hard. But we were close. We drank together. We went to the taverns together. We shared women together. And I told him, drunk that night, how Marduk had talked to me for years, and how now I had seen him, and my personal god was the great god of Babylon himself.

“So foolish to have done it! What good could have come of it! At first he laughed, then he worried, then he became engrossed. Oh, I never should have done it. And Marduk knew this. He was in the tavern but so far from me that he had no visibility, he was vaporous and golden like light, and only I could see him, and he shook his head ‘no,’ and turned his back when I told my father. But you know, I loved my father, and I was so happy! And I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know how I had put my arms around the god!

“Stupid!

“Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.

“The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn’t think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?

“But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right home to work all evening on the Holy Scriptures, with my sisters and my cousins and uncles in the scriptoria of our houses, which were big rooms.

“As I told you, I was never very quiet, and I would sing the psalms out loud as I wrote them, and this irritated my deaf uncle more than anyone. I don’t know why. He was deaf! And besides, I have a good voice.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why should a deaf uncle get so upset? But he knew I was singing the psalms not as I just sang that one for you, but as one would sing, with cymbals, dancing, you know, with a little bit of added dash, shall we say, and he wasn’t so happy about it.

“He said that we were to write when we were to write and to sing the Lord’s songs at the appropriate time. I shrugged and gave in but I was one for cutting up all the time. But I’m giving the wrong impression. I wasn’t really bad…”

“I know what kind of man you are, and were then…”

“Yes, I think by now you do, and maybe if you thought me bad you would have thrown me out in the snow.”

He looked at me. His eyes weren’t ferocious. The brows were low and thick, but the eyes were plenty big enough beneath them to give him a pretty look. And, it seemed to me that he was warmer and more relaxed now than earlier, and I felt drawn to him and wanting to hear everything he said.

But I wondered: Could I throw him out in the snow?

“I’ve taken many lives,” he said, plucking the thought right from me, “but I would not hurt you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, you know that. I wouldn’t hurt such a man as you. I killed assassins. At least when I came to myself that was my code of honor. That is my code now.

“In my early days as the Servant of the Bones, as the bitter, angry ghost for the powerful sorcerer, I killed the innocent because it was my Master’s will and I thought I had to do it, I thought that the man who had called me up could control me, and I did his bidding, until the moment came when I suddenly realized that I did not have to be a slave forever, that maybe though my soul had been taken from my spirit, and my spirit and soul from my flesh, that perhaps I could still be pleasing to God. That somehow all could come and be united once more in one figure! Ah!”

He shook his head.

“But Azriel, maybe it’s happened!”

“Oh, Lord God, Jonathan, don’t give me consolation. I cannot bear it. Just hear me out. Make sure your tapes record my words. Remember me. Remember what I say…”

His confidence broke suddenly. He looked at the fire again.

“My family, my father,” he said. “My father! How it hurt him what he finally did, and how he looked at me. Do you know what he said about hurting me? He said, ‘Azriel, who of all my sons loves me as you do? No one else could ever forgive me for this but you!’ And he meant it. He meant it, my father, my little brother, looking at me full of tears and sincerity and absolute conviction!

“I’m sorry. I jump ahead. I’ll die soon enough. It won’t take too many more pages, I don’t think.” He shuddered all over. And again the tears stood in his eyes. “Forgive me, and recall again that for those thousands of years, I didn’t remember these things. I was the bitter ghost without memory. And now it has all come back to me and I pour it out to you. I pour it out to you in tears.”

“Continue. Give me your tears, your trust, and your hurt. I won’t fail you.”

“Ah, you are the rare thing, Jonathan Ben Isaac,” he said.

“Not really, I’m a teacher and a happy man myself. I have a wife and children who love me. I’m not very special.”

“Ah, but you are a good man who will talk to someone who is evil! That is what is rare. The Rebbe of the Hasidim, he turned his back on me!” He laughed suddenly, a deep bitter laugh. “He was too good to talk to the Servant of the Bones.”

I smiled. “We are all Jews, and there are Jews, and there are Jews.”

“Yes, and now Israelis, who would be Maccabees! And there are Hasidim.”

“And other Orthodox, and some ‘reformed,’ and so on it goes. Let’s go back to your time. You were a big and happy family.”

“Yes, true, and it was regular—I was explaining—it was regular for the rich Hebrews to work at the palace as I said, my father worked there too, and many of my cousins. We were scribes, but also merchants, merchants of jewels, silks, silver, and books. My father’s gift in trade was choosing the very finest vessels for the King’s table and for the Table of the Gods in Marduk’s temple and for Marduk himself.

“Now at the time, the temple was full of chapels, and every day a meal was set out for each deity, including Marduk, so the temple had a huge stock of gold and silver vessels for this. And my father was the one who put aside those vessels not fit.

“I went down with him to the docks all the time to meet the ships coming in from the sea, with the finest new work from Greece or Egypt, and I learned from him how to judge the carving on a goblet, and how to know the heaviest and finest mixture of gold. I learned to know a true ruby or diamond and pearls—pearls, I loved the pearls, we dealt in pearls of all kinds, we didn’t call them pearls, you know, we called them eyes of the sea.

“This is how we made our living—in the marketplace and in the temple and in the palace.

“My family had stalls all through the marketplace where they dealt in gems of all kinds, in honey, and in cloth dyed purple and blue, the finest of all silk and linen, and they sold the incense too, though they sold it to idolaters who would burn this incense for Nabu and Ishtar, and for Marduk, of course.

“But it was our living, it was our source of power, it was our way of staying together, of being strong so that one day we could go home. It was as important as the copying of the Sacred Books.”

“It’s an old tale,” I said.

“This whole trade, by the way, gave to my own house a sumptuous quality that it might not have had, had we been camel breeders. And that you must understand because the richness around us colored my father’s values as much as mine.

“What I mean is, not only did we make money, but the house was always full of merchandise passing through. You know. Here would be a magnificent cedar statue of the goddess Ishtar just come from Dilmun, and my uncle would keep it at home for a week or two, gracing the living room, before the sale was made. The place was full of beautiful footstools, delicate furniture from Egypt, the fine black and red urns and pots of the Greeks, and just about anything portable and ornamental and lovely to behold.”

“You grew up on beauty, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Azriel said. “I did. I really did. And I grew up, for all my smart talking and carrying on and flirting with Marduk, I grew up with love. My father’s love. The love of my brothers. My sisters. The love of my uncles even. Even my deaf uncle. Even once the prophet Azarel said to me, ‘Yahweh looks at you with love.’ So did the old witch Asenath. Ah, such love.”

He had come to a natural pause. He sat there, resplendent in the red velvet, hair glossy and natural, and the pure skin of his young man’s cheeks as soft as a girl’s I suppose. I must be getting old. Because young men look to me now as beautiful as girls. Not that I desire them. It’s only that life itself is lush.

He was confused. In pain. I hesitated to press him. Then he parted his lips, only to be quiet.