Rice, Anne - Servant of the Bones

VIP免费

2024-12-22 0 0 760.29KB 169 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PSALM 137

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us

mirth, saying. Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;

if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, 0 Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the

foundation thereof.

0 daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served

us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

PROEM

Murdered. Her hair was black and so were her eyes. It happened on Fifth Avenue, the murder, inside a fine

clothing store, amid hustle and bustle. Hysteria as she fell . . . perhaps.

Soundlessly I saw it on the television screen. Esther. I knew her. Yes, Esther Belkin. She'd been a student

once in my class. Esther. Rich and lovely to behold.

Her father. He was the head of that worldwide temple. New Age platitudes and T-shirts. And the Belkins had

all the money human beings could ever want or dream of, and now Esther, sweet Esther, that flower of a girl

who had always asked her questions so timidly- was dead.

On the news, "live," I think I saw her die. I was reading a book, not paying much attention. The news went

on in silence, mingling movie stars and war. It made slow garish flickers on the walls of the room. The silent

leap and flare of a television watched by no one. I read on after she died "live."

Now and then in the days that followed I thought about her. Some horrors followed her death, having to do

with her father and his electronic church. More blood shed.

I never knew her father. His followers had been detritus on street corners.

But I remembered Esther pretty well. She wanted to know everything, one of those kind, humble, ever

listening, and sweet, yes, very sweet. I remembered her. Sure. Ironic, that doe of a girl slain and then the

tragedy of her father's delusions.

Part I

I never tried to understand the whole story.

I forgot about her. I forgot that she'd been murdered. I forgot about her father. I guess I forgot that she'd ever

been alive.

There was news and news and news.

It was time to stop teaching for a while.

I went away to write my book. I went up into the mountains. I went to the snow. I hadn't so much as offered a

prayer in Esther Belkin's memory, but I am a historian and not a praying man.

In the mountains, I learnt everything. Her death came after me vivid and lush with meaning, through the

words of another.

THE BONES OF WOE

Golden are the bones of woe. Their brilliance has no place to go. It plunges inward, Spikes through snow.

Of weeping fathers whom we drink And mother's milk and final stink We can dream but cannot think. Golden

bones encrust the brink.

Golden silver copper silk.

Woe is water shocked by milk.

Heart attack, assassin, cancer.

Who would think these bones such dancers.

Golden are the bones of woe. Skeleton holds skeleton. Words of ghosts are not to know. Ignorance is what

we learn.

Stan Rice, Some Lamb

This is Azriel's tale as he told it to me, as he begged me to bear witness and to record his words. Call me

Jonathan as he did. That was the name he chose on the night he appeared in my open door and saved my

life.

Surely if he hadn't come to seek a scribe, I would have died before morning.

Let me explain that I am well known in the fields of history, archaeology, Sumerian scholarship. And

Jonathan is indeed one of the names given me at birth, but you won't find it on the jackets of my books,

which the students study because they must, or because they love the mysteries of ancient lore as much as

I do.

Azriel knew this-the scholar, the teacher I was-when he came to me.

Jonathan was a private name for me that we agreed upon together. He had plucked it from the string of

three names on the copyright pages of my books. And I had answered to it. It became my name for him

during all those hours as he told his tale-a tale I would never publish under my regular professorial name,

knowing full well, as he did, that this story would never be accepted alongside my histories.

So I am Jonathan; I am the scribe; I tell the tale as Azriel told it. It doesn't really matter to him what name I

use with you. It only mattered that one person wrote down what he had to say. The Book of Azriel was

dictated to Jonathan.

He did know who I was; he knew all my works, and had painstakingly read them before ever coming. He

knew my academic reputation, and something in my style and outlook had caught his fancy.

Perhaps he approved that I had reached the venerable age of sixty-five, and still wrote and worked night and

day like a young man, with no intentions of retiring ever from the school where I taught, though I had now

and then to get completely away from it.

So it was no haphazard choice that made him climb the steep forested mountains, in the snow, on foot,

carrying only a curled newsmagazine in his hand, his tall form protected by a thick mass of curly black hair

that grew long below his shoulders-a true protective mantle for a man's head and neck-and one of those

double-tiered and flaring winter coats that only the tall of stature and the romantic of heart can wear with

aplomb or the requisite charming indifference.

By the light of the fire, he appeared at once a kind young man, with huge black eyes and thick prominent

brows, a small thick nose, and a large cherub's mouth, his hair dappled with snow, the wind blowing his coat

wildly about him as it tore through the house, sending my precious papers swirling in all directions.

Now and then this coat became too large for him. His appearance completely changed to match that of the

man on the cover of the magazine he'd brought with him.

It was that miracle I saw early on, before I knew who he was, or that I was going to live, that the fever had

broken.

Understand I am not insane or even eccentric by nature, and have never been self-destructive. I didn't go to

the mountains to die. It had seemed a fine idea to seek out the absolute solitude of my northern house,

unconnected to the world by phone, fax, television, or electricity. I had a book to complete which had taken

me some ten years, and it was in this self-imposed exile that I meant to finish it.

The house is mine, and was then, as always, well stocked, with plenty of bottled water for drinking, and oil

and kerosene for its lamps, candles by the crate, and electric batteries of every conceivable size for the

small tape recorder I use and the laptop computers on which I work, and an enormous shed of dried oak for

the fires I would need throughout my stay there.

I had the few medical necessaries a man can carry in a metal box. I had the simple food I eat and can cook

by fire: rice, hominy, cans upon cans of saltless chicken broth, and also a few barrels of apples which should

have lasted me the winter. A sack or two of yams I'd also

brought, discovering I could wrap these in foil and roast them in my coal-and-oak fire.

I liked the bright orange color of yams. And please be assured, I was not proud of this diet, or seeking to

write a magazine article on it. I'm simply tired of rich food; tired of crowded fashionable New York

restaurants and glittering party buffets, and even the often wonderful meals offered me weekly by colleagues

at their own tables. I am merely trying to explain. I wanted fuel for the body and the mind.

I brought what I needed so that I might write in peace. There was nothing that peculiar about all this.

The place was already lined in books, its old barn wood walls fully insulated and then shelved to the ceiling.

There was a duplicate here of every important text I ever consulted at home, and the few books of poetry I

read over and over for ecstasy.

My spare computers, all small and very powerful beyond any understanding I ever hope to acquire of hard

drives, bytes, megabytes of memory, or 486 chips, had been delivered earlier, along with a ludicrous supply

of diskettes on which to "back up" or copy my work.

Truth is, I worked mostly by hand, on yellow legal pads. I had cartons of pens, the very fine-point kind, with

black ink.

Everything was perfect.

And I should add here that the world I had left behind seemed just a little more mad than usual.

The news was full of a lurid murder trial on the West Coast having to do with a famous athlete accused of

slitting his wife's throat, an entertainment par excellence that had galvanized the talk shows, the news

shows, and even that vapid, naive, and childlike connection to the world that calls itself E! Entertainment.

In Oklahoma City, a Federal office building had been blown sky high-and not by alien terrorists, it was

believed, but by our own Americans, members of the militia movement they were called, who had decided in

much the same manner of the hippies of years before that our government was a dangerous enemy.

Whereas the hippies and the protesters of the Vietnam War had merely lain on railroad tracks and sung in

ranks, these new crewcut militants-filled with fantasies of impending doom-killed our own people. By the

hundreds.

Then there were the battles abroad, which had become regular cir-

cuses. Not a day went by when one was not reminded of atrocities committed among the Bosnians and the

Serbs in the Balkans-a region that had been at war for one reason or another for centuries. I had lost track

of who was Moslem, Christian, Russian ally, or friend. The city of Sarajevo had been a familiar word to

television-watching Americans for years now. In the streets of Sarajevo people died daily, including men

they called United Nations peace keepers.

In African countries, people starved as the result of civil strife and famine. It was a nightly sight as common

as a beer commercial to see on television fresh footage of starving African babies, bellies swollen, faces

covered with flies.

Jews and Arabs fought in the streets of Jerusalem. Bombs went off;

protesters were shot at by armies; and terrorists destroyed innocent people to strengthen their demands.

In the Ukraine, remnants of a fallen Soviet Union made war on mountain folk who had never given in to any

foreign power. People died in the snow and cold for reasons that were nearly impossible to explain.

In sum there were dozens of places raging with suffering in which to fight, to die, to film, as the parliaments

of the world tried in vain to find answers without bullets. The decade was a feast of wars.

Then there was the death of Esther Belkin, followed by the scandal of the Temple of the Mind. Caches of

assault weapons had been found in the Temple's outposts from New Jersey to Libya. Explosives and

poisonous gases had been stockpiled in its hospitals. The great mentor of this popular international church-

Gregory Belkin-was insane.

Before Gregory Belkin, there had been other madmen with great dreams perhaps but smaller resources. Jim

Jones and his People's Temple committing mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana; David Koresh, who

believed himself the Christ, perishing by gun and fire in a Waco, Texas, compound.

A Japanese religious leader had just recently been accused of killing innocent people on the country's public

subways.

A church with the lovely name of the Temple Solaire had not so long ago staged a mass suicide coordinated

at three different locations in Switzerland and Canada.

A popular talk show host gave directions to his listeners as to how they might assassinate the President of

the United States.

A fatal virus had only recently broken out with stunning fury in an African country, then died away, leaving all

thinking individuals with a renewed interest in the age-old obsession: that the end of the world might be at

hand. Apparently there were more than three kinds of this virus, and numerous others equally as deadly

lurking in the rain forests of the world.

A hundred other surreal stories made up each day's news, and each day's inevitable civilized conversation.

So I ran from this, as much as anything else. I ran for the solitude, the whiteness of snow, the brutal

indifference of towering trees and tiny winter stars.

It was my own jeep which had brought me up through "the leather stocking woods," as it is sometimes still

called, in honor of James Fenimore Cooper, to barricade myself for the winter. There was a phone in the

jeep by which one could, with perseverance if possible, reach the outside world. I was for tearing it out, but

the truth is I'm not very handy and I couldn't get the thing loose without damaging my car.

So you see, I am not a fool, just a scholar. I had a plan. I was prepared for the heavy snow to come, and the

winds to whistle in the single metal chimney above the round central hearth. The smell of my books, the oak

fire, the snow itself whirling down at times in tiny specks into the flames, these things I love and need now

and then. And many a winter before this house had given me exactly what I asked of it.

The night began like any other. The fever took me completely by surprise, and I remember building up the

fire in the round pit of a fireplace very high because I did not want to have to tend it. When I drank all the

water nearest the bed, I don't know. I couldn't have been fully conscious then. I know that I went to the door,

that I myself unbolted it, and then could not get it closed; this much I do recall. I must have been trying to

reach the jeep.

Bolting the door was simply impossible. I lay for a long time in the snow itself before I crawled back inside,

and away from the mouth of the winter, or so it seemed.

I remember these things because I remember knowing then that I was very much in danger. The long

journey back to the bed, the long journey back to the warmth of the fire, utterly exhausted me. Beneath the

heap of wool blankets and quilts, I hid from the whirlwind that entered my house. And I knew that if I didn't

clear my head, if I didn't recover somehow, the winter would just come inside soon and put to sleep forever

the fire, and take me too.

Lying on my back, the quilts up to my chin, I sweated and shivered. I watched the flakes of snow fly beneath

the sloping beams of the roof. I watched the raging pyramid of logs as it blazed. I smelled the burnt pot when

the soup boiled dry. I saw the snow covering my desk.

I made a plan to rise, then fell asleep. I dreamed those fretful stupid dreams that fever makes, then woke

with a start, sat up, fell back, dreamed again. The candles were gone out, but the fire still burned, and snow

now filled the room, blanketing my desk, my chair, perhaps the bed itself. I licked snow from my lips once,

that I do recall, and it tasted good, and now and then I licked the melted snow I could gather with my hand.

My thirst was hellish. Better to dream than to feel it.

It must have been midnight when Azriel came.

Did he choose his hour with a sense of drama? Quite to the contrary. A long way off, walking through snow

and wind, he had seen the fire high on the mountain above, sparks flying from the chimney and a light that

blinkered through the open door. He had hurried towards these beacons.

Mine was the only house on the land and he knew it. He had learnt that from the casual tactful remarks of

those who had told him officially and gently that I could not be reached in the months to come, that I had

gone into hiding.

I saw him the very moment he stood in the door. I saw the sheen of his mass of black curling hair and fire in

both his eyes. I saw the strength and swiftness with which he closed and locked the door and came directly

towards me.

I believe I said, "I'm going to die."

"No, you won't, Jonathan," he answered. He brought the bottle of water at once and lifted my head. I drank

and I drank and my fever drank, and I blessed him.

"It's only kindness, Jonathan," he said with simplicity.

I dozed as he built up the fire again, wiped away the snow, and I have a very distinct and wondrous memory

of him gathering my papers from everywhere, with great care, and kneeling by the fire to lay them out so that

they might dry and some of the writing might be saved after all.

"This is your work, your precious work," he said to me when he saw that I was watching him.

He had taken off the big double-mantled coat. He was in shirt sleeves which meant we were safe. I smelled

the soup cooking again, the bubbling chicken broth. He brought the soup to me in an earthen bowl-the sort

of rustic things I chose for this place-and he said drink the soup, and I did.

Indeed, it was by water and broth that he brought me slowly back. Never once did I have the presence of

mind to mention the few medications in the white box of first-aid supplies. He bathed my face with cold

water.

He bathed all of me slowly and patiently, turning me gently, and rolling under me the new fresh clean sheets.

"The broth," he said, "the broth, no, you must." And the water. The water he gave me perpetually.

Was there enough for him, he had asked. I had almost laughed.

"Of course, my friend, dear God, take anything you want."

And he drank the water down in greedy gulps, saying it was all he needed now, that once again the Stairway

to Heaven had disappeared and left him stranded.

"My name is Azriel," he said, sitting by the bed. "They called me die Servant of the Bones," he said, "but I

became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genii."

He unfurled the magazine for me to see. My head was clear. I sat up, propped by the divine luxury of clean

pillows. He looked as unlike a ghost as a man can look, muscular, brimming with life, the dark hair on the

backs of his hands and on his arms making him appear all the more strong and vital.

Gregory Belkin's face stared forward from the famous Time magazine frame. Gregory Belkin-Esther's father-

founder of the Temple of the Mind. The man who would have brought harm to millions.

"I killed that man," he said.

I turned to look at him, and then it was that I first saw the miracle.

He wanted me to see it. He did it for me.

He had grown smaller in size, though only slightly; his mane of tangled black curls was gone; he had the

trimmed hair of a modern businessman; even his large loose shirt was changed for the supremely

acceptable and impeccably tailored black suit, and he had become . . . before my very eyes . . . the figure of

Gregory Belkin.

"Yes," he said. "It was the way I looked on the day I made my choice, to forfeit my powers forever; to take on

real flesh and real suffering. I looked just like Gregory when I shot him."

Before I could answer, he began to change again, the head to grow larger, the features to become broader,

forehead stronger and more distinctive, the cherub mouth of his own to replace the thin line of Belkin's. His

fierce eyes grew large beneath the thick eyebrows that tended to dip as he smiled, making the smile and

immensity of the eyes seem secretive and seductive.

It was not a happy smile. It had no humor or sweetness in it.

"I thought I would look this way forever," he said, holding up the magazine for me to see. "I thought I would

die in that form." He sighed. "The Temple of the Mind lies in ruins. The people will not die. The women and

children will not fall on the road as they breathe the evil gas. But I didn't die. I am Azriel again."

I took his hand. "You're a living breathing man," I said. "I don't know how you made yourself look like

Gregory Belkin."

"No, not a man-a ghost," he said, "a ghost so strong that he can wrap himself in the form he had when he

was alive; and now he cannot make it go away. Why did God do this to me? I am not an innocent being; I

have sinned. But why can't I die?"

Suddenly a smile came over his face. He was almost a boy, the tangled curls making their dark frame for his

low cheeks and the large beautiful cherub mouth.

"Maybe God let me live to save you, Jonathan. Maybe that's all it was. He gave me my old flesh back so I

could climb this mountain and tell you all this, and you would have died had I not come here."

"Perhaps, Azriel," I said.

"You rest now," he said. "Your forehead is cool. I'll wait, and I'll watch, and if you see me, now and then, turn

into that man again, it

is only that I'm trying to measure each time the difficulty of it. It was never so very hard for me to change my

shape-for the sorcerer who called me up from the bones. It was never so hard for me to throw an illusion to

trick my master's enemies or those he would rob or cheat.

"But it's hard now to be anything but the young man I was when it started. When I bought their lies. When I

became a ghost and not the martyr they promised. Lie still now, Jonathan, sleep. Your eyes are clear and

your cheeks have color."

"Give me more of the broth," I said.

He did.

"Azriel, I would be dead without you."

"Yes, that much is true, isn't it? But I had my foot on the Ladder to Heaven, I was on it this time, I tell you,

when I made this choice, and I thought when it was all over, the Temple destroyed, the Stairway might come

down for me again. The Hasidim are pure and innocent. They are good. But battles they must leave to

monsters like me."

"Lord, God," I said. Gregory Belkin. A lunatic plan. I remember fragments . . . "And there was that beautiful

girl," I said.

He put down the cup of broth, and wiped my face and my hands.

"Her name was Esther."

"Yes."

He opened the curled and damp magazine for me. It was now badly creased as it was drying out in the

warm room. I saw the famous photograph of Esther Belkin, on Fifth Avenue. I saw her lying on the stretcher

just before they had put her into the ambulance, and just before she had died.

Only this time I focused on a figure in this photograph which I had noticed before, yes, in television

broadcasts, and in the larger cover photographs of this very scene. But I hadn't until now paid any real

attention to the figure. I saw a young man by Esther's stretcher, with his hands raised to his head, as though

crying out in grief for her, a young man blurry and indistinct as all the other crowd figures in the famous

photograph, except for his heavy beautifully shaped eyebrows and his mane of thick black curly hair.

"That's you," I said. "Azriel, that's you there in the photograph."

He was distracted. He didn't reply. He put his finger on the figure of Esther. "She died there, Esther, his

daughter."

•I "i :s

.'i

I explained that I had known her. The Temple was new then, and controversial rather than solid and

immense and indefatigable. She had been a good student, serious and modest and alert.

He looked at me for a long time. "She was a sweet, kind girl, wasn't she?"

"Yes, very much so. Very unlike her stepfather."

He pointed to his own shape in the picture.

"Yes, the ghost, the Servant of the Bones," he said. "I was visible then in my grief. I will never know who

called me. Maybe it was only her death, the dark horrible beauty of it. I'll never know. But you see now, you

feel now, I have the solid shape of that form which was nothing before but vapor. God has wrapped me in

my old flesh; he makes it harder and harder for me to vanish and return; to take to the air and to nothingness

and to reassemble. What is to become of me, Jonathan? As I grow stronger and stronger in this seeming

human form, I fear I can't die. I will never."

"Azriel, you must tell me everything."

"Everything? Oh, I want to, Jonathan. I want to."

Within an hour, I was able to walk about the house without dizziness. He'd found my thick robe for me, and

my leather slippers. Within a few more hours I was hungry.

It must have been morning when I fell asleep. And then waking in the later afternoon, I was myself,

clearheaded, sharp, and the house was not only safely warmed by the fire, but he had put a few candles

around, the thick kind, so that the corners had a dusty soft nonintru-sive light.

"Is it all right?" he asked me gently.

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 nefeshf" 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.

JL* ^ X-s

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 lie 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 Ha-sidim

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 be-seeched 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 Babylo-nians 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 Wth 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 fall 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?"

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PSALM137BytheriversofBabylon,therewesatdown,yea,wewept,whenwerememberedZion.Wehangedourharpsuponthewillowsinthemidstthereof.Fortheretheythatcarriedusawaycaptiverequiredofusasong;andtheythatwastedusrequiredofusmirth,saying.SingusoneofthesongsofZion.HowshallwesingtheLord'ssonginastrangeland?IfIforgett...

展开>> 收起<<

Rice, Anne - Servant of the Bones.pdf

共169页,预览34页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Rice, Anne - Servant of the Bones

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: