The Worm in Every Heart

“ . . . gas burns upwards.”

And THERE’s a comforting image.

But: “Come here,” he tells her, veering off towards something new half-hid in shadow between two broken slabs of wall the blast must have knocked loose, much like his brains. “Look at this, would you?”

She feels her hand twitch before she can stop it, yearning to make a fist again, then thinks better of the idea; feels her whole arm spasm at the sting like a half-body wrench, a lopsided crucifixion. “Rabbi, we don’t have the time—”

“Nu? Nothing but, surely, ‘till the fire burns itself out.” He crooks a finger, tempting. “Come on, Kotzeleh, indulge me. I want to show off my shul learning one last time, while I still have the chance.” As she hesitates: “God would appreciate the gesture, I’m sure.”

Kotzeleh breathes out through her nose, a single, calming huff. Finally—

“Your God wants a lot, Lev.”

“But he’s your God too, pretty girl. Isn’t he?”

Well . . .

. . . remains to be proven, that.

Ikons and mosiacs stained by time, crawling with water-reflected light. And here between, out of this crack where the walls shivered apart, comes something extruding from the shallow, bricked-up cell hidden behind: A . . . box? A coffin?

Man-sized and lightly featured, rust-bleeding iron chased in bands of tarnished brass; the hinges have popped under heat, pressure, water-warping maybe, and its emptied shell gapes like a lesioned mouth, the whole inside of the thing embossed with crosses. As Kotzeleh peers closer, however, she finally realizes what she’s looking at—it’s one of those containers the Catholics routinely lock bits and pieces of their holiest holies inside, the better to prepare them for ritual display. Dust from the road to Egypt and splinters of the True Cross, broken femurs and nail-pierced palms; that severed tongue they keep in the Vatican’s treasure-trove, black and slimy, wedged deep inside a skull made from glass and gold . . .

(relics)

. . . yes, that’s the word. Which makes this a reliquary, though Kotzeleh can’t ever remember having heard of—let alone having seen, in the so-called flesh—a reliquary big enough to hold somebody’s whole body inside it.

On the wall above, meanwhile, just one flaking section of the nearest fresco: A monster’s foreshortened face gaping down on coffin-box and supplicant/tourists alike, snouted, with teeth like tusks.

“What is that, anyway?” Kotzeleh demands. “A monkey? Some kind of . . . ”

“A saint,” Lev replies, still studying their find. Then adds, at her look: “Pretty girl—they’ve got their stories, same as us; it’s rude not to listen at all, even when you know you’ll have to kill them later on. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Christopher, the Christ-bearer?”

Kotzeleh shrugs, a suppressed shiver. “Not like that.”

The ikon stares, yellow eyes popping, as Lev traces a blackened trail of silver lettering around the reliquary’s rim. Explaining, absently, while he does—

“It’s the oldest form of the tale, you see: From back in the first millennium, when the Church was still organizing itself, agreeing on what was ‘true’ and what ‘wasn’t’. They don’t debate things the way we do, after all—it’s just one way or another, and anybody who takes the middle ground can stand there and burn. So.

“Used to be, before people drew accurate maps, Christians—and some Jews, too—believed a race of dog-faced people lived in darkest Africa. Big teeth, panting tongues . . . ” He prods the painted rock with a gentle nail, to illustrate. “Cannibals, too, though that might not apply, since they couldn’t possibly have thought ordinary men belonged to the same speci

es as themselves—”

To which Kotzeleh nods, thinking: And doesn’t THAT sound familiar?

(Never trust people who’d nail their own Messiah to a cross . . . oh, but wait, I forgot. That was us, wasn’t it? Supposedly.)

That supposition alone being good enough, apparently, for everyone else involved to shift the blame squarely onto the shoulders of the Jews.

And now here they are, Lev and Chavah and she herself, squatting to soak their wounds in the shit of centuries because that same long-ago judgement has finally let loose a dragon on Europe, crushing and pruning and scorching all Warsaw alike—not just the ghetto, oh no, much as it may have begun there—to the bare earth with its hot, poisonous breath.

They call us vermin, she thinks. But it’s Christianity that’s the true curse. All their talk of love and forgiveness—such garbage, in the end. Have you ever seen them leave a single thing upright and intact behind them, once they’ve decided it needed a laying on of hands?

“St. Christopher the Cynophelus, who carried the Christ-child over water,” Lev says, musingly. “Because the idea was that God’s redemption could be given to anyone, if they only had enough faith. Even monsters.”

SUCH garbage.

Behind Kotzeleh, Chavah has starting crying again; choking, anyway, which sounds pretty much the same. Her burnt head leaves marks where she leans it against the wall. While Kotzeleh fists her hurt hand hard, yet once more, at the scrape and bleed of Chavah’s voice in her ears, forcing herself past an infectiously tempting rush of sympathy by putting her attention squarely elsewhere. Asking—