Servant of the Bones (3 page)

I told him to put out a few more. And to light the kerosene lamp on my desk. He did these things with no trouble. A match was no mystery to him, or a cigarette lighter. He raised the wick of the lamp. He put two more of the candles on the stone-top table by the bed.

The room, with its wooden windows bolted shut as tight as its door, was softly, evenly visible. The wind howled in the chimney. Again came the volley of flakes dissolving in the heat. The storm had slackened but the snow still fell. The winter surrounded us.

And no one will come, no one will disturb us, no one will distract us. I stared at him in keen interest. I was happy. Uncommonly happy.

I taught him how to make cowboy coffee by merely throwing the grinds into the pot, and I drank plenty of it, loving the smell of it.

Though he wanted to do it, I mixed up the grits for a good meal, showing him again how it came in little packets, and all
one had to do was boil the water on the fire, and then stir the grits to a thick delicious porridge.

He watched me eat it. He said he wanted nothing.

“Why don’t you taste it?” I said. I begged.

“Because my body won’t take it,” he said. “It’s not human, I told you.”

He stood up and walked slowly to the door. I thought he might open it on the storm and I hunkered my shoulders, ready for the blast. I would not even consider asking him to keep it shut. After all he had done, if he wanted to see the snow, I wouldn’t deny him anything.

But he lifted his arms. And without the door being opened, there came a blast of wind and his figure paled, seemed to swirl for a moment, its colors and textures mingled in a vortex and then vanished.

Spellbound, I rose from my place by the fire. I held the bowl to my chest in a desperate childlike gesture.

The wind died away. He was nowhere to be seen, and then, when the wind came again, it was hot: a blast as if from a furnace.

Azriel stood opposite the fire, looking at me. Same white shirt, same black pants. The same dark black hair of his chest thick beneath his open collar.

“Will I never be
nefesh?”
he asked. “That is, body and soul together.”

I knew the Hebrew word.

I sat him down. He said he could drink water. He said that all ghosts and spirits could drink water, and they drank up the scents of sacrifice and that was why all the ancient talk of libations and of incense, of burnt offerings and of smoke rising from the altars. He drank the water, and it seemed to relax him again.

He sat back in one of my many cracked and broken leather chairs, oblivious to its worn crevices and rips. He put his feet up on the stone hearth, and I saw his shoes were still wet.

I finished my meal, cleared it away, and came back with the picture of Esther. At this round hearth, six people could have sat in a circle. We were near to one another, near enough, him
with his back to the desk and beyond it the door, and I with my back to the warmer, smaller, darker corner of the room in my favorite chair, of broken springs and round fat arms, stained from careless wine and coffee.

I looked at her. She was half a page, in this the recurrent story of her death which had been retold only because of Gregory’s downfall.

“He killed her, didn’t he?” I said. “It was the first assassination.”

“Yes,” Azriel answered. I marveled that his eyebrows could be so thick, beautiful and brooding, and yet his mouth so gentle as he smiled. There was no double to die in her place. He killed his own stepdaughter.

“That’s when I came, you see,” he went on. ‘That’s when I came out of the darkness as if called by the master sorcerer, only there was none. I appeared fully formed and hurrying down the New York street, only to witness her death, her cruel death, and to kill those who killed her.”

“The three men? The men who stabbed Esther Belkin?”

He didn’t answer. I remembered. The men had been stabbed with their own ice picks only a block and a half away from the crime. So thick was the crowd on Fifth Avenue that day that no one even connected the deaths of three street toughs with the slaughter of the beautiful girl inside the fashionable store of Henri Bendel. Only the next day had the ice picks told the story of blood, her blood on three, their blood on the one chosen by someone to do away with them.

“I suppose I thought it was part of his plot, then,” I said. “She was killed by terrorists, he said, and he had disposed of those henchmen so that he might make the he bigger and bigger.”

“No, those henchmen were to
get away
, so that he could make the lie of the terrorists bigger and bigger. But I came there, and I killed them.” He looked at me. “She saw me through the window before she died, the window of the ambulance that came to take her away, and she said my name: ‘Azriel.’ ”

“Then she called you.”

“No, she was no sorceress; she didn’t know the words. She didn’t have the Bones. I was the Servant of the Bones.” He fell back in the chair. Quiet, looking at the fire, his eyes fierce and thick with dark curling eyelashes, the bones of his forehead strong as the line of his jaw.

After a long time he cast on me the most bright and innocent boyish smile. “You’re well now, Jonathan. You’re cured of your fever.” He laughed.

“Yes,” I said. I lay back enjoying the dry warmth of the room, the smell of burning oak. I drank the coffee until I tasted the grounds in my teeth, then I put the cup on the circular stone hearth. “Will you let me record what you tell me?” I asked.

The light shone bright in his face again. With a boy’s enthusiasm, he leant forward in the chair, his massive hands on his knees. “Would you do it? Would you write down what I tell you?”

“I have a machine,” I said, “that will remember every word for us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” he said. He smiled contentedly and put his head back. “You mustn’t think me an addlebrained spirit, Jonathan. The Servant of the Bones was never that.

“I was made a strong spirit, I was made what the Chaldeans would have called a genii. When brought forth, I knew all that I should know—of the times, of the language, of the ways of the world near and far—all I need to know to serve my Master.”

I begged him to wait. “Let me turn on our little recorder,” I said.

It felt good to stand up, for my head not to swim, for my chest not to ache, and for most of the blur of the fever to have been banished.

I put down two small machines, as all of us do who have lost a tale through one. I checked their batteries and that the stones were not too warm for them, and I put the tape cassettes inside and then I said, “Tell me.” I pressed the buttons so that both little ears would be on full alert. “And let me say first,” I said, speaking for microphones now, “that you seem a young
man to me, no more than twenty. You’ve a hairy chest and hair on your arms, and it’s dark and healthy, and your skin is an olive tone, and the hair of your head is lustrous and I would think the envy of women.”

‘They like to touch it,” he said with a sweet and kindly smile.

“And I trust you,” I said for my record. “I trust you. You saved my life, and I trust you. And I don’t know why I should. I myself have seen you change into another man. Later I will think I dreamt it. I’ve seen you vanish and come back. Later I won’t believe it. I want this recorded too, by the scribe. Jonathan. Now we can begin your story, Azriel.

“Forget this room, forget this time. Go to the beginning for me, will you? Tell me what a ghost knows, how a ghost begins, what a ghost remembers of the living but no…” I stopped, letting the cassettes turn. “I’ve made my worst mistake already.”

“And what is that, Jonathan?” he asked.

“You have a tale you want to tell and you should tell it.”

He nodded. “Kindly teacher,” he said, “let’s draw a little closer. Let’s bring our chairs near. Let’s bring our little machines closer so that we can talk softly. But I don’t mind beginning as you wish. I want to begin that way. I want for it all to be known, at least, to both of us.”

We made the adjustments as he asked, the arms of our chairs touching. I made a movement to clasp his hand and he didn’t draw back; his handshake was firm and warm. And when he smiled again, the little dip of his brows made him look almost playful. But it was only the way his face was made—brows that curve down in the middle to make a frown, and then curve gently up and out from the nose. They give a face a look of peering from a secret vantage point, and they make its smile all the more radiant.

He took a drink of the water, a long deep drink.

“Does the fire feel good to you, too?” I asked.

He nodded. “But it looks ever so much better.”

Then he looked at me. “There will be times when I’ll forget
myself. I’ll speak to you in Aramaic, or in Hebrew. Sometimes in Persian. I may speak Greek or Latin. You bring me back to English, bring me back to your tongue quickly.”

“I will,” I said, “but never have I so deeply regretted my own lack of education in languages. The Hebrew I would understand, the Latin too, the Persian never.”

“Don’t regret,” he said. “Perhaps you spent that time looking at the stars or the fall of the snow, or making love. My language should be that of a ghost—the language of you and your people. A genii speaks the language of the Master he must serve and of those among whom he must move to do his Master’s bidding. I am Master here. I know that now. I have chosen your language for us. That is sufficient.”

We were ready. If this house had ever been warmer and sweeter, if I had ever enjoyed the company of someone else more than I did then, I didn’t recall it. I wanted only to be with him and talk to him, and I had a small, painful feeling in my heart, that when he finished his tale, when somehow or other this closeness between us had come to an end, nothing would ever be the same for me.

Nothing was ever the same afterwards.

He began.

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.