Eternal Life Read online

  “I should have come here long ago,” Elazar said. She glanced at the gallery, at the unfurled Book of the Dead and the treasures destined for the underworld, and knew he meant something larger. He was facing her now, hopeful. “I should have followed you to New York,” he continued. “When you left with—what was your husband’s name?”

  She pretended she had to think to remember, but she didn’t. She remembered all of them. She knew he did too. “Hirshl,” she conceded. “But here they called him Harold.”

  “Yes, Hirshl. Not too bright, was he? All the teachers hated him. I remember you tutored him yourself. That was impressive, Rachel. But you’re always impressive.”

  She suppressed a smile. “You’re the only one who ever noticed,” she said.

  Elazar laughed. “I’m not the only one. But him? Of all the people to marry! He was so ashamed to be with you, a woman smarter than he was.” He switched languages again, imitating the man he remembered. “ ‘In America they appreciate real talent. You’ll see what happens when a man puts down his books and uses his brains.’ Really, Rachel! I hope at least it went well for him.”

  She grimaced. “He died two years after we arrived.” Killed himself, she remembered, when they ran out of money and the landlord was going to throw them out on the street. He had killed her too, or so he thought, leaving the gas on in their apartment while she was sleeping, pregnant. She had lost that pregnancy in a flood of tears. It never got easier. But here again was Elazar. Elazar! Everything changed, but what left her awestruck was how nothing changed.

  “When you left with him, I should have followed you,” he said, his voice lower. “You made the right choice, as usual. I was a fool.”

  “You are the opposite of a fool,” she said. She let herself look at his face. He had hidden himself well under his beard. The skin around his eyes was unwrinkled, yet his eyes seemed sunken, sagging. Then she understood that he was no longer sleeping. “Don’t tell me you stayed in Poland.”

  He looked at her. “I stayed in Poland.” Then he shrugged, and smiled. “They burned everyone, so it was easy to start over. Over and over again. You wouldn’t believe how many times.”

  She stared at him. “You’re disgusting.”

  He sat straighter, glaring at her as he defended himself. “I had a wife there, you know. Actually three.”

  “At the same time?”

  “Don’t talk that way. It was real for them.”

  “But not for you. It’s never real for you.”

  His jaw slackened. “How could it be, when I know you are wandering the world—and when I know someday you’ll come back? Rachel, please, have mercy on me.”

  She drew back, facing him. “Why should I?” she replied. “Have you ever had mercy on me?”

  “Yes, Rachel, I have. I could have come much sooner, but I found out you were married. Not to Hirshl, but to the next one—or the one after that—well, it doesn’t matter.”

  She bit her lip, feeling his eyes on her. “It matters to me.”

  “I know it does. I had mercy on you. I waited for him to die. And now here I am.”

  They sat for a moment in silence. She looked at his hands, at the black hair and dark veins on the backs of his hands, then up at his chest, then at last at his face, at his strange green eyes. Was her mother right about him? How could she believe anything he said? How could she still not know?

  “Afterward I went to Palestine, as they called it then,” he continued. He picked up where he had left off, as he always did. As they both did. It amazed her how much his voice alone affected her, the boyish quiver in his stories, the old dead words alive in his mouth. “All those terrified people, trying so hard to start new lives. It’s easy to forget how hard that is.”

  “Maybe you forget,” she said. “I don’t.”

  He smiled. “Of course I don’t either. I wish I could.” For all his flaws, he had never lied to her. At least not recently. She listened. “I spent the past forty years in Jerusalem. In the Old City, as they call it now. Lord of the World, what it’s like just to be there. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find you there. I was sure you would come. Every year, every day I was looking for you.”

  “I’ve been a few times,” she said softly.

  “ ‘A few times’? Are you serious? How? Looking out the window of a tour bus?”

  She remembered, her throat constricting. When she had taken her family for the first time in 1968, she hadn’t known how she would feel. She had seen the Western Wall and had crumpled into hysterical, gagging, wrenching sobs. To be so close, and to still be trapped! Her husband and children were embarrassed. They made up stories for the tour guide about how she had been religious as a child, while the tour guide cracked English jokes about the Wailing Wall. Later her family asked her what was wrong. She did not tell them.

  “How could you not live there? Why didn’t you come? Was it because of me? Surely that wouldn’t have stopped you. Wasn’t it at least worth trying?”

  She looked down. “I was here for fifty years already then. It was impossible with the children—”

  “The children, the children, the children. The children are always your excuse for not living.”

  “The children are my only reason for living.”

  “Since you were—how old were you, sixteen?”

  “No one was counting then.”

  “Three years at the monthly women’s bath already. That’s how old. I remember you told me that, that night in the tunnel. Most girls didn’t go to the baths until they were married, but your father held some minority opinion.”

  She felt her skin growing hot.

  “You’re so beautiful, Rachel. I couldn’t wait to marry you. How could anyone wait to marry you?”

  “Fuck you,” she said in English.

  He laughed again, but she saw him shrink. She could wound him, and he knew it. “After all this time, you’re still angry,” he said softly. “You’ll never stop being angry. Anger eats people alive, you know.”

  “If only,” she said.

  “You know that if someone asks for forgiveness three times, and the offended person still refuses to forgive, the Holy One forgives instead. I’ve asked you hundreds of times, Rachel. But at least I know I’m forgiven.” Often when he spoke, she heard his father’s voice in his, echoing off a wide stone courtyard as he recited his incantations, roaring them aloud to the crowds of thousands: Forgiven! Within every person were so many other people; was there even room for a person’s own soul? “I’m forgiven, with you or without you.”

  “I’m sure that fact has helped you sleep at night,” she said. She avoided his eyes, staring at a miniature golden calf on a shelf across the room. She felt the rage rising within her. It was an old and familiar rage, fire flaming through her body. For the first time since Mort died, she felt absolutely alive.

  “I want to help you, Rachel,” he told her, and reached for her hand again. Again she let him take it. “You need me now.”

  “You’d like to think that,” she said. His hand covered hers, wrapping her fingers in light.

  “It’s actually true. You need me. You just don’t know it yet.” His eyebrows rose. “Tell me this, Rachel. How old do they think you are now?”

  Rachel hunched her shoulders in. “Eighty?” she tried. “Something like that.”

  “You’re not going to be able to keep this up much longer.”

  Rachel sighed, and said, “When I have to go, I’ll go.” She tried to sound casual, but her voice was too loud. This time, for the first time, she did not want to go.

  Elazar laughed. “You’re saying that because you think it will be like all the other times. Burn, then run to the next town or the next province or the next country, and no one will know. But that won’t work anymore. You only don’t know because you haven’t tried it yet. When was the last time you left?”

  She tried to think of it. She remembered all the people, but dates meant nothing to her. “Maybe seventy years ag
o?” she muttered.

  “Exactly,” Elazar grinned. “Seventy years ago—before you needed any identification for anything, when you could be paid for any job with money you could touch, when no one ever asked you to prove who you were. But this is the fifty-eighth century, Rachel.” He still counted time like they always had, according to scrolls.

  “Or the twenty-first.”

  “Fine. The point is, it’s not a gezerah shavah.” A valid analogy. It was what her first son used to say as he dug through the holy books, looking for ways to turn reality into a metaphor, to prove that he was right. “If you leave now,” Elazar continued, “it isn’t going to be like before. You’re going to need things that aren’t easy to get. And I know you won’t do the things you’ll need to do in order to get them. I know you, Rachel. You won’t. Only a person like your son Rocky would.”

  Rachel sucked in her breath. “How do you know Rocky?”

  Elazar smiled. “Oh yes, Rocky,” he repeated, with a perfect American “R.” Elazar was a chameleon, blending in, clutching at branches. “I can’t imagine why you named him that.”

  “His real name is Rachmiel,” she admitted, the guttural “ch” natural in her throat. Divine mercy.

  He snorted, one grunt short of a laugh. “You try everything. Even giving your children prayers for names.”

  She wouldn’t tolerate this. “What are you doing with Rocky?”

  “Mining currency,” Elazar said happily. “People used to do it with pans in a river, but this is so much easier. All you need are machines, money, brains and time. And when necessary, a total willingness to disregard the rules, whatever those rules are—a willingness I have myself, as you know. Rocky is a fine young man. Or a fine old man, I suppose.”

  Years of scenes flooded her mind—meetings with Rocky’s teachers, angry door-knocking from Rocky’s classmates’ mothers, painful phone calls from Rocky’s children, sobbing visits from Rocky’s ex-wives. He has so much potential. Did he tell you what he did? Make him tell you! I know he didn’t mean it. At least he’s bright, so he has that going for him. He’s a good guy, really he is. He means well. He just. He only. If only if only if only. She clenched her teeth. “Stay away from him.”

  “He’s never even seen me. We’ve only met in the imaginary world.” He used the term her father used, olam hadimyon. When her father said it, he meant this world, the physical world, as opposed to the true world: the world of the dead. Was her entire life imaginary? Elazar touched his beard, then looked back at her. His face alone comforted her. He was here, which meant she was real.

  “All I mean to say is that leaving is going to require some unpleasant work this time, and a lot more lying than before,” he said. “And working with people like your fine son. Or if not him, someone like him. I happen to know that you would never do that, not on your own. That’s why you need my help.” He paused, his presence heavy with expectation. “And Rocky needs my help as well.”

  Rachel shook her head, and pulled her hand away. “I won’t be in your debt.”

  “It’s I who owe you,” Elazar replied, his voice low. “You trusted me first. Remember?”

  He had come to it at last: the beginning and end of everything, the shameful fact upon which the world hung, suspended over a meaningless void. “No, Elazar,” she said. “You owe me because you sold my husband.”

  He leaned back, stunned. It had been a long time since she had accused him like this, so directly, to his face. She had watched her daughters in recent years and had grown bold. His lips were quivering. She had almost never seen him flustered before. She rallied inside, enjoying the triumph.

  “I never sold anyone,” he stammered. “You don’t know—”

  The fire raged within her. “Tell me they didn’t pay you,” she spat. “Because if they didn’t pay you, you’re even more repulsive than I ever imagined.”

  He tried to smile, and failed. “Everyone does things they regret, Rachel. Even you.” He knew how to make her feel dirty. “And if I had known what would happen—”

  “You knew exactly what would happen.”

  “I had other people to think about then. I had you to think about then. I had Yochanan to think about then.”

  “I never want to hear that name,” she said. “If you ever want to see me again—”

  He laughed out loud. “Don’t worry, Rachel. I’ll always see you again. I’m the one thing you can always believe in.”

  The gallery was empty. He leaned toward her, and she tried to turn away. But when he kissed her, the absolute loneliness, the bottomless homesick loneliness of years upon years of lies, the deep cold void of a loneliness no mortal can imagine, finally drained from her soul. She was alive, inhaling beauty. She kissed him back with pure relief as he embraced her breathing, beating body—her body that was still eighteen years old, and always would be.

  CHAPTER

  3

  CONSULTATIONS

  . . .

  It wasn’t exactly true that she had never told anyone. She had tried. Oh, how she had tried. In every age some new solace was on offer. In every home she’d ever lived in, she always had a little hiding place—a bathroom drawer, a wooden box, a leather pouch, a sheepskin sack. Inside it she kept the things people had given her, or that she had stolen from people who claimed to have special knowledge: carved bones, vials of poison, molten gold, spells and curses written out in various languages, parchments and papers blessed by holy men. The problem was that the cures were all predicated on belief in the cures. And she and Elazar were beyond believing.

  Her most recent attempt was the most pathetic. Her granddaughter Hannah—the name was all wrong, of course, pronounced nothing like her mother’s name, although her son had supposedly named the girl for her “great-grandmother”—had first told her about the psychiatrist. Hannah was Rocky’s daughter, which was punishment enough for a lifetime. In her twenties, she had been a little quivering thing, a brilliant woman so silent that her silence frightened Rachel, because Rachel heard in that silence the girl she herself once was, the girl who didn’t know how to say yes or no, the girl for whom regret was waiting. Rachel was right. Hannah fell headlong into a marriage to the worst kind of man: handsome, manipulative, desperate—like her father, but without the brains. Rachel couldn’t bear to watch. It was as if she were forced to observe herself again, seeing herself from the outside making all the same mistakes and powerless to change them. But within a year Hannah extricated herself, and did so as a completely different woman from the one she had been: a proud, brave woman, resilient, outspoken, independent. Rachel watched all this and felt as if she stood at the parting of the sea, stunned by the impossible. One day, years later, when Hannah had already married again and was pregnant with her second child, Rachel dared to ask her how she had done it. She barely expected an answer. But Hannah answered immediately: “Dr. Moskowitz.”

  “Dr. Moskowitz?”

  “My psychiatrist. She’s amazing.”

  Rachel had heard such blather from husbands and children before, with only the slightest changes in details: My doctor. He told me to buy a juicer, and it changed my life. The lady at the settlement house. Just meet her, and you’ll become a different person—she’ll teach you English in three weeks! My rebbe. When he teaches, I feel as though I were seared by holy fire. The rav, the greatest of our generation. The divine law comes alive through him, you can feel it. The priest. The first time you bring a sacrifice, you’ll understand—your soul makes contact with the Most High, and you’ll never be the same. Trust me. People she otherwise respected said such things regularly. Was she really such an exception to human rules?

  “What did she do?” Rachel asked. “Give you pills?”

  “She could have, but she said I didn’t need them.”

  “So you just . . . talked to her?”

  “She does a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and old-

  fashioned analysis.”

  Old-fashioned might work for me, Rache
l thought. “What’s cognitive—what’s that?”

  “It’s about recognizing and redirecting negative thoughts. Breaking old negative behavior patterns, patterns that are very destructive.”

  Breaking old negative behavior patterns could work for me too, Rachel thought. “But how does she do that?”

  Hannah laughed. “She’s like your brain’s cleaning lady. You dump all the garbage in your head, and she takes it out to the curb. I swear, in six months I became a new person.”

  Rachel needed to become a new person, and not in her usual way. And when she found out that Dr. Moskowitz didn’t mind being paid in cash, she gave herself a new name and made an appointment.

  Dr. Moskowitz was a small thin woman in her forties, with short black hair and a long narrow face that reminded Rachel of one of her daughters—her fifty-second daughter, the one she had left behind in Poland, abandoning her at about Dr. Moskowitz’s age. That daughter had died over a century ago. But might Dr. Moskowitz be one of her great-great-grandchildren? It sometimes seemed to Rachel that her descendants surrounded her, that by now she had populated the world. Except that so many of them had died. Again and again and again.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Rachel,” Dr. Moskowitz said, and shook her hand firmly before they both sat down. Rachel said a silent thank-you to her long-dead parents for giving her a name that survived so many years. She couldn’t remember what surname she had given herself this time, but hopefully it wouldn’t matter. “What brings you here today?”

  Rachel paused, arranging herself in the seat as she remembered the line she had rehearsed in the waiting room. “I think I’m depressed,” she said carefully. In every setting, one had to speak the right language. “I’m repeating old negative behavior patterns, and I feel it’s very destructive.”

  Dr. Moskowitz’s eyes locked on Rachel’s. Rachel looked at this small woman who so resembled that fifty-second daughter and saw her face open, an expression of actual compassion. Rachel knew she shouldn’t buy it. This woman was being paid to be kind. But that fifty-second daughter had been so loving, so overflowing with debilitating empathy, that Rachel couldn’t help imagining being in her presence. Mama, I found this blind kitten behind the bathhouse and I just had to take him home. I’ll take care of him myself, don’t worry. Mama, Rivka’s mother died last night. She’s supposed to go to her uncle and aunt in Lublin, but she’s never even met them. Can she come live with us, just for a while? Yes, Mama, Ronya and her kids are staying with me, for as long as they need to. Her husband broke her arm! How could I say no? She had died in her forties, that daughter. But what could one expect of a saint?