A guide for the perplexed: a novel Read online

  Also by Dara Horn

  ALL OTHER NIGHTS

  THE WORLD TO COME

  IN THE IMAGE

  For Maya, Ari, Eli, and Ronen—

  who will forget what I remember,

  and who will remember what I forget

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note: The Opposite of an Archive

  1

  WHAT HAPPENS TO DAYS that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held—a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets—all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to do was open those gates.

  At least, that was how it started. In its earliest versions, the program Josie invented was little more than a variant on dozens of others. But then the software grew, unfolding before her like a prophetic dream. By the time she was twenty-four years old, Genizah was a vast platform, password-protected and accessible from anywhere, that saved not only material that its users deliberately created, but essentially everything else they did too, running recording components on devices the users already owned and then employing natural language processing and facial recognition to catalogue worlds of data according to the users’ habits—which the software learned from the users themselves. By the time she was twenty-six, Genizah didn’t merely store data, but tracked it, showing past trajectories and using them to predict the users’ future. By the time she was ­twenty-seven, she had married the company’s chief engineer, had been the subject of a nationally televised documentary, and had a baby. By the time she was thirty-three, her six-year-old daughter Tali’s every moment was recorded forever. But Tali knew nothing about it until one morning when, almost by accident, Josie showed her the archive of her life.

  “I can’t find my shoes, Mommy,” Tali had announced as she finished her breakfast. “I looked and looked, but they’re nowhere.”

  “That’s impossible,” Josie told her. Josie was throwing things into her own bag, checking messages, noting the time. In half an hour she would be at her office, meeting her sister Judith, who had been working at the company for the past seven years—ever since Josie had taken pity on her unemployed sister and parked her in the company’s public relations office. Every day Josie dreaded seeing her; every day Josie wished she could find a way not to dread it, to pretend her sister was someone different from who she was. But it was impossible. The thought of Judith made Josie unreasonable, illogical. And Tali—the girl whose resemblance to her mother ended at the roots of her long black hair—made her feel the same way. “They’re somewhere. Probably somewhere obvious. Where did you take them off yesterday?”

  “I don’t remember,” Tali said, losing interest. She was dressed, as always, entirely in orange, which she claimed was for “safety.” Now she was dipping the ends of her hair into her milk, painting the table white.

  Josie scaled the stairs and quickly glanced around Tali’s bedroom, checked her closet, dropped to the floor to check under her bed, returned downstairs to look in the kitchen, then by the TV. To Josie’s chagrin, Tali seemed to be correct. The shoes were nowhere.

  “Now I can’t go to school,” Tali proclaimed, with obvious delight.

  Josie sucked in her breath. She stepped to the kitchen counter and grabbed her tablet, entering passwords with a few quick taps. Under “local panoramic search,” she typed in “Tali,” then “shoes.” In an instant an image appeared—poor quality, she noted with disgust—of Tali’s new sneakers, mid-drop, as they descended from Tali’s feet to the floor of Josie’s car. “There they are,” Josie said, and tipped the screen toward Tali. “You must have taken them off on the way home.”

  Tali gaped, then ran to the garage. Josie smiled as she tucked the tablet into her bag and followed Tali, opening the rear car door. Josie watched as her daughter’s eyes bulged at the sight of the shoes on the car’s floor. Tali shoved her sneakers on and then climbed into the seat, still gaping. “How did you do that?” Tali asked.

  Josie took the tablet out of her bag and turned it toward her daughter. “I have everything from your life in here,” she said. It was hard to repress the pride in her voice. “That picture was pulled off the camera on my phone, from when the phone was in that holder between the seats, facing you.”

  Tali was baffled. “How did the camera know to take a picture?”

  “It happens automatically,” Josie said. “The camera is running all the time. Then the pictures get saved in a—a program I made that collects everything and sorts it.” She was surprised by how difficult this was to explain to someone who was six years old. She pointed to the screen. “Anything you ever want to remember, it’s here.”

  Tali stared at the screen, stunned. Her dark hair shone in the car’s dim interior light. “Really? Like what?”

  “Like everything,” Josie said. “Here’s what happens when I search for your shoes, for instance.” She tapped in keywords as images of doors flashed on the screen, little animated doors opening to reveal hundreds of photos and video clips. “See, these are the first shoes you ever wore, when you were about a year old.” Josie looked at the picture and felt a sudden shiver as she saw her daughter at eleven months—Josie could still remember guessing when old photos had been taken, but here the date and time appeared automatically—balancing on unsteady legs. Was that fat little baby the same person as the stringy six-year-old who was now staring at the screen? How was it possible? She recalled reading that nearly all of a person’s cells are replaced every seven years, and wondered if it were true. If it were, then this Tali was only about 15 percent of the baby Tali in the picture, if that. Josie shook away the thought and tapped out more words on the screen, silencing the breath of eternity over her shoulder. “And here’s when we bought you those shoes last week,” she said.

  Josie glanced at the picture of Tali’s feet in the shoe store, and then at Tali, anticipating her delicious awed expression again. She was surprised to see Tali grimacing, avoiding her eyes.

  “When you got mad at me,” Tali muttered.

  Josie frowned. She hadn’t remembered that, though now it occurred to her that the shopping trip had been unpleasant—that she had been distracted by a message from her office while Tali tried on the shoes, and Tali, in a bid for her attention, had knocked over a large cardboard display case, sending sneakers flying across the store. Josie returned the tablet to her bag and slid into the driver’s seat, unsettled. She started the car, glancing at Tali in the rearview mirror. Her daughter was twisting a long lock of dark hair around her finger, and Josie realized she had forgotten to brush it, much less wash out the milk. She wondered if she should apologize for her inattention in the shoe store last week, or if Tali ought to have apologized to her. Or was it better to pretend it hadn’t happened, to avoid ruminating over the past? Which would make Tali feel better? Or—the question she knew she should be asking instead—which would make Tali become better? Josie had no idea. She was about to speak, to conjure up something soothing and inevitably false, when Tali spoke again.

  “Is everything from when you were little in there too?” Tali asked.

  “No, actually,” Josie admitted, and began backing the car out of the garage, relieved to have left the scene in the shoe store behind. “I had
n’t invented it yet then.”

  “Lucky you,” Tali said.

  Josie paused, pressing the brake as the car emerged into daylight. “Lucky? Why?”

  “Because you get to remember everything the way you want, instead of how it really happened.”

  Josie laughed. “That’s how everyone remembers things anyway, with or without the pictures.”

  Tali turned to look out the window as the car backed onto the road. Josie remembered what awaited her at work: her sister Judith. She glanced again at Tali in the rearview mirror, and felt a rush of relief that Tali was still an only child. The moments Josie remembered best were usually those she preferred to forget.

  ON THAT COOL SPRING morning in 1896, the two sisters appeared before Solomon Schechter like ghosts, looking exactly as he once imagined ghosts might look: almost human, but slightly faded, with some aspect of them uncanny, carrying with them an unmistakable shadow of eternity. What was uncanny about the two women who had just stopped him on King’s Parade was that they were identical.

  “Mr. Schechter!”

  “Mr. Schechter!”

  Solomon Schechter was walking alone on King’s Parade, through a dense mist rising from the river along the backs of the colleges on the road. When he had first arrived at Cambridge from Jews’ College in London in 1894, people had backed away from him as he walked down the street, stepping aside to stare at this short strange man who, with his blue eyes, his red beard, his waistcoat covered with cigarette ash, and his accent none of them could place, seemed to wear his flapping college robes as though they were a shoddy disguise. Two years later, the merchants in the row of shops opposite the Gothic college buildings knew better than to disturb him as he walked down King’s Parade with his face in a book. This time he was immersed in a German journal article describing a new translation of Maimonides, following an argument about the incorporeality of God.

  The mist off the river was thick that morning, enveloping him as he read. As he glanced up from his journal, he thought of one of the nursery rhymes he had heard his younger daughter reciting: One misty moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather, I chanced to meet an old man, clothed all in leather. And then the one about London Bridge collapsing, and the other one about birds flying out of a pie. It was unredemptive nonsense, an insult to the adult brain. His siblings at home in Romania were grandparents already, but at forty-six years old, he was new to nursery rhymes. His wife, Matilda, thought they were important. “You don’t want them going to school without knowing what their classmates know,” she scolded him when he tried to hide his children’s Mother Goose collection. “How will they play with the other children if they don’t know the rhymes?”

  Schechter had learned verses as a child, too: The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the wind of God fluttered over the water. And Cain said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. And the brothers said to one another, “Here comes Joseph, that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we shall see what will become of his dreams.” The words were seared into his mind like a brand on the body. Forgetting them was more than impossible; it would be like forgetting his own hand. Yet when he heard his daughter singing her English nursery rhymes, something haunted him, an imperceptible loss, the way that running a fingertip across his own cheekbone made him recall pressing his fingers into his cheek, touching the forgotten hairless smoothness of his own face, as he once leaned over a book as a boy in Romania. Only rarely did it return to him, in his adult life on this fogged island far from any home: not merely the words of childhood, but their sensation—the awareness of how, for a child, words are living things, with colors and smells and textures completely independent of their meaning. For his daughter, someday, hearing those nonsense words one misty moisty morning would be all she required to remember what it was like to be young. But for Solomon Schechter, Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies, the words of childhood and adulthood were the same, and because of that his past was lost, his own private memory fallen into a pit of words from ancient days, invisible and unreachable. He breathed in the fog and thought of another verse from childhood, from the sage Ben Sirah: Wisdom came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. He returned his eyes to the journal in his hand and read the medieval philosopher’s words: I have shown you that the intellect which flows from God to us is the link that joins us to God. You have it in your power to strengthen that bond, if you choose to do so, or to weaken it gradually until it breaks.

  “Mr. Schechter!”

  “Mr. Schechter!”

  “Good morning,” he stammered as the two women approached him. They were older and taller than he was, their twinned heads of bunned gray-blond hair towering above him. He slipped the journal awkwardly under his arm.

  Now he recognized the spectral twins. They were Mrs. Agnes Lewis and Mrs. Margaret Gibson, Scottish lady adventurers, world-famous of late for their discovery in the monastery at Mount Sinai of the oldest manuscript of the Gospels. It was the only known version of the Christian Bible written in Syriac, the language Jesus spoke—the Lewis Codex, it was now called, after Agnes Lewis published her translation of it. All of Cambridge lauded the twins, despite the fact that they didn’t have so much as a ladies’ seminary diploma between them. They had just gone off to Egypt again, hunting for more Bibles. Matilda knew them both well, confided in them, relished their company on Saturday afternoons. Schechter knew them too.

  Yet after two years in Cambridge he still could not tell them apart.

  “Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Gibson,” he said vaguely, careful to look at both of them as he said each name. “Welcome back!”

  “We’re so glad we’ve found you, Mr. Schechter,” one of the twins exclaimed. “Professor Taylor told us we ought to see you immediately.”

  “Without delay,” said the other. “We were just our way to the Faculty, but—”

  “But imagine, here you are, on King’s Parade, as if you knew we were looking for you! It’s all too astonishing.”

  One twin turned to the other. “Margaret, bumping into Mr. Schechter on King’s Parade is hardly astonishing. He’s probably on his way from the library to visit Professor Taylor at St. John’s.”

  Schechter began to nod, but the sisters were looking at each other as though he had disappeared.

  “But Agnes, it is a bit coincidental, isn’t it?” the other twin replied. “That it would be precisely now?”

  “Margaret, you’ve spent too much time with those fatalistic monks. They’ve affected your brain.”

  “I spent precisely as much time with those fatalistic monks as you did, Agnes.”

  “But I did not allow them to affect my brain.” The twin turned back to him. “Don’t indulge her, Mr. Schechter. It is hardly astonishing to meet you here, particularly compared with what we have to show you.”

  “Professor Taylor advised that we ought to speak to you at once, about some manuscripts we purchased in Cairo.”

  “No one seems able to identify them.”

  “He thought perhaps you could help.”

  Their voices, too, were identical. They spoke in a kind of Greek chorus, echoing each other’s thoughts. The doubled voices made Schechter anxious. Since his parents died, it had become painful for him even to open letters from his sister and brothers at home. But now a door in his mind opened, and he saw himself from the outside, long ago: Shneur Zalman, the boy he once was, and his identical twin brother Srulik, whom everyone once mistook for him. Two redheaded boys, standing next to each other with their heads nearly touching, perched over the same lectern, studying from the same book—Shneur Zalman arguing on behalf of God, and Srulik prosecuting against him. It always happened when he encountered other identical twins: the uncanny jolt of recognition, the reminder that he was living only half a life. Fourteen years earlier, Srulik h
ad moved to Palestine, where he now called himself Yisrael ben Yitzhak. Shneur Zalman had moved to England, where he called himself Solomon Schechter. As Schechter stood before the twins, he felt an unexpected pang of longing. It had been years since he had even seen a photograph of Srulik. Did they still look alike? Or had his brother shaved his beard, tanned his skin, aged his mind—his body and soul so altered that the two brothers were no longer identical at all?

  “We bought the manuscripts from one of the Hebrew merchants there, in the souk,” one of the twins continued.

  “Near the Hotel d’Angleterre. We used to stay at Shepheard’s, but only tourists go there now.”

  “The salesman actually followed us into the hotel. He claimed to have hundreds of manuscripts like the ones we bought.”

  “Literally hundreds, if we wanted to purchase more.”

  “There was a limit to what we were willing to purchase with our own funds.”

  “We didn’t want to invest in something whose value we could not ascertain. But now it’s clear that they are authentic. We—”

  One of them reached into a fold of her long black cloak and withdrew a scrap of leathery parchment, slightly smaller than her hand. Its color was a very dark brown, a sheath of hide, but the black ink on it was eminently legible. Schechter bent slightly to see it, bowing his head. The letters were Hebrew.

  “You can see they aren’t forged. The orthography looks to be twelfth-century or so.”

  “Or thirteenth, perhaps. If you look here, you’ll see that this is a copy of Dalalat al-Ha’irin—Guide for the Perplexed.”

  “The first Hebrew translation from the Arabic, at any rate. Moreh Nevukhim. This is just the introductory bit.”

  Schechter leaned closer as one of the twins held the parchment up in the fogged morning light. His journal slipped from under his arm and tumbled into the gutter. He didn’t pick it up. His eyes were fixed on the tiny paper, on the handwritten scrawl of Hebrew letters. He edged closer. In the name of God, Lord of the Universe, he read, to R. Joseph, may God protect him, son of R. Judah, may his rest be in Paradise …