Servant of the Bones

"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 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 nonintrusive 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.

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."