Servant of the Bones

Strewn about us were couches and chairs of peach and gold velvet, tables with lustrous tops, more vases of magnificent lilies and great golden daisies, or so they seemed to me, and beneath all was a sprawling square carpet, reaching almost from the windows over the park to the edge of the circle in the rear.

The carpet was sewn in magnificent detail with the tree of life, full of the birds of Heaven, and the fruit of Heaven, and figures walking beneath the tree limbs, figures in Asian dress.

So it was always; the world changed; the world became more complex; the world increased in invention and sometimes in ugliness, yet the forms of my time were always embedded in the surfaces around me. Every object in the room was connected in some way to the oldest aesthetic principles ever known to me.

I imagined suddenly that the lost tribes of Israel lived in the carpet, those sold when Nebuchadnezzar came down upon the northern kingdom, but that had been before Jerusalem had been taken. Images of battle, of fire.

Azriel, master thyself.

"Tell me," I said, disguising my delight in all this, my weakness and hunger for it. "What is the Temple of the Mind that its High Priest lives in this splendor? These are private rooms. Are you the thief and the charlatan, as your grandfather said?"

He didn't answer me, but he was most delighted. He walked about me, watching me, waiting eagerly for me to speak again.

"There lies a newspaper from the streets opened where you left it," I said. "Ah, there is Esther's face. Esther smiles for the historians. For the public. And beside the paper, what is this pitcher? Bitter coffee. Your taste is on the cup. I smell it. This is all private, your place of recollection. Yours is a rich God, Mind or no Mind." I took the time to smile. "And you a rich priest."

"I'm not a priest," he said.

Two men appeared suddenly, gawky youths in white stiff shirts and dark trousers. They entered out of the wall of doors, and Gregory was flustered.

He made some quick gestures to them that they must go away.

The mirrored doors closed again.

We were alone. I felt my breath and my eyes moving in my skull, and I felt such desire for all things material and sensuous that I could have wept. If I had been alone I would have wept.

I regarded him suspiciously. The night, both real and in reflection, pulsed with twinkling lights. Indeed lights were as plentiful and vital in this time as water had been perhaps in earlier times. Even in this room the lamps were powerful, sculpted pieces of bronze work with heavily adorned glass shades the color of parchment. Light, light, light.

His excitement was palpable to me. He could scarce hold his tongue. He wanted to inundate me with questions, drink all the knowledge he could from me. I stood obdurate, as if I were really human and had every right as any man to be quiet and myself.

Air moved in the room, full of the smell of trees and horses and of the fumes rising from the engines; the engines filled the night with discord. If he were to shut the window, it would go away, this noise, but then so would the fragrance of green grass.

Finally he could contain himself no longer.

"Who called you?" he said. He was not unpleasant. Indeed, he seemed now to slip into a childlike candor but with too much ease for it not to be a style. "Who brought you out of the bones?" he asked. "Tell me, you have to. I am the Master now."

"Don't take such a foolish tack," I answered. "It will be nothing for me to kill you. It would be too simple." I felt no weakening in myself as I resisted him.

What if the world was my Master now? What if each and every human were my master? I saw a blazing fire suddenly, a fire not of the world, but of the gods.

The bones which I still held all this time were heavy in my arms.

Did they want me to see them? I looked down at the old battered casket. It had soiled my garments. I didn't care.

"May I set down the bones?" I asked. "Here, on your table, beside your newspaper and your pitcher of bitter coffee and your dead daughter's face, so pretty to look at, with no veil?"

He nodded, lips parted, straining to keep quiet, to think, and yet too exultant really to do either in any organized way.

I laid down the casket. I felt a ripple of sensation pass through me, just from the proximity of the bones, and the thought suddenly that they were mine own, and I was dead and a ghost, and that I was walking the earth again.

My god, don't let me be taken before I understand this! He approached. I didn't wait for him. I boldly took off the frail cover of the casket, just as he had before. I laid down the cover on the big table, crushing the newspaper a little, and I stared at the bones.

They were as golden and brilliant as they had been the day I died. But when had that been?

"The day I died!" I whispered. "Am I to find out everything now?) Is that part of the plan?" /

I thought again of Esther's mother, the woman in red silk. I could sense her presence under this roof. She had most definitely seen me and I tried to imagine how I looked to her. I wanted her to come in here, or to find some way to go to her.

"What are you saying?" He questioned me eagerly. "The day you died, when was it? Tell me. Who made you a ghost? What plan do you speak of?"

"I don't know those answers," I said. "I wouldn't bother with you if I did. The Rebbe told you more than I knew when he translated those inscriptions."

"Not bother with me!" he said. "Not bother with me! Don't you see that if there is a plan, a plan even greater than that which I have designed, you are part of it?"

It gave me pleasure to see his mounting excitement. It was invigorating, beyond doubt. His fine eyebrows rose a little, and I saw that the charm of his eyes was not merely their depth, but their length. I was a person of rounded features; the lines of his face came to beautiful trajectories and points.

"When did you first come? How could Esther have seen you?" "If I was sent to save her I failed. But why did you call her the lamb? Why did you use those words? Who are these enemies you speak of?"

"You'll learn soon enough. We're all surrounded by enemies. All we have to do to rouse them is show a little power, resist the interjecting plans which they have laid with all the solemnity of a god, plans which are only the routine, the ritual, the tradition, the law, the normal, the regular, the sane . . . You know what I mean, you understand me."

I did understand him.

"Well, I have gone against them and they would come against me, only I'm too powerful for them, and I have dreams that dwarf their petty evil!"

"My, but you speak with a silken tongue," I said, "and you give so much in your words. Why to me?"