The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Read online

  Then the horse carried her across a landscape, smooth with fallen paper, to the next town, where she changed to a fresh horse, and so forth, all the way home. The rabbi received her in an embrace, and took her to Menashe. The apothecary hadn’t been awake in days, the rabbi told her. He didn’t drink or eat. His emaciated body rattled with death whenever he breathed.

  Zayin mounted the stairs and entered his bedchamber alone. From the window, she saw that the whole town had gathered below. She turned away from them. She knelt on the floor beside Menashe’s cot, and, beneath the blankets, found his hands.

  The nails were already long and sharp like a cadaver’s subterranean claws, yet she didn’t wince, so often had she done this before, drawing men and women back into the world for an other day or year. She began chanting. She put her ear to his chest to hear her words hum within him. They didn’t. Instead there was a rumbling: Menashe, clearing his throat, coughing.

  — Enough with the singing, Zayin.

  — Hush, Papa. It’s good for you. This is how I save people.

  — First you run away from home and make me old because I can’t rely on you. Now I’m dying and you’re telling me what to do.

  — You won’t die.

  — I’m an apothecary. I know these things.

  — I’m the Messiah. Things are as I say.

  — No, daughter, you’re delusional. You’re just an ordinary girl. I’m your father, Zayin. I’d have noticed if you had the wings of an angel. I’d have seen if you’d fallen from the heavens.

  — What about my miracles?

  — Don’t you recall what I told you about my medicines? Do you remember how I said that they don’t do anything on their own, but sometimes they work wonders just because people believe in them?

  — Since the body is the best apothecary?

  — Yes, Zayin. Your miracles are like my elixirs: the tricks of a charlatan.

  — You’re certain?

  — As certain as you will be, shortly, when, in spite of your magical intervention, this sickness finally kills me. Find love, Zayin. Make a family. Life is the only miracle, and it’s brief.

  — At least may I sing to you?

  — Sing me a lullaby, child.

  As she chanted, he shut his eyes and hummed along. When she could no longer hear him, he was gone.

  In the realm of human experience, only watching your parents die is more terrible than seeing your Messiah cry. After many hours, Zayin went to the window, bathed in tears, to share what had happened, and what she now knew. My father is dead, she exclaimed. I am not the Messiah. Please go home.

  But how could they possibly believe Zayin? There was too much evidence against her blasphemous claims, evidence carried in their own bones: Were she not the Messiah, they wouldn’t be there to be forsaken by her.

  Why would she save them from the demon plague, only to abandon them? What sin had they committed to bring her to tears? What evil had they done to make her take Menashe’s life and leave them? They demanded that she at least condemn them, requested the small justice of knowing the crime for which they were punished.

  Zayin came down to them. Even in her anguish, she recognized that the only sin had been her messianic arrogance, and that the atonement must be her silence. She would simply let folks believe about her what they had to believe: Her crime would become her punishment.

  A placebo Messiah, the apothecary’s orphan wandered the land. She no longer performed miracles, nor expected them, but rather watched, breathless, as they happened, seemingly spontaneously, wherever she went. In her presence, folks found health and wealth, wisdom, even. Families ended feuds, and countries brought wars to truce. The miracles appeared more incredible than before, as if to test her, to taunt her, to torment her with the awareness she alone possessed, that she’d nothing whatsoever to do with the world in its mystery. Zayin felt like a scapegoat, except her burden wasn’t blame, but credit. She had to keep moving, to escape the wrath of acclaim.

  She traveled in silence for a year, and witnessed every possible astonishment, save for the one that might have moved her: the wonder of being embraced again by the man with eyes of dawn. Every day she doubted more the words she thought he’d whispered. She realized that he couldn’t be there for her if she was everywhere and nowhere, a placebo human: Zayin, false Messiah, had become entirely what she was not, at the expense of who she’d once been. When miracles happened in her midst, she no longer knew who was being acclaimed. She felt neither pride nor shame. She lost all delusions, could neither see nor hear. The air gave way around her.

  Zayin fainted. She’d been standing in a pasture. Folks set her on a bed of straw there. The villagers didn’t know what else to do, for they’d never seen a Messiah before, much less one who was ill.

  The town had neither rabbi nor shul. The mayor sent his sons to the three nearest cities. Each returned leading a veritable country. Aldermen and holy men, tradesmen and peasants: If this was the apocalypse, who didn’t want to be in the midst of it? The crush to see Zayin on her cot was suffocating. She was barely breathing. She responded to nobody, nothing. Her eyes were open, unblinking. Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her skin, radiant white, began to blue.

  Or so some claimed. Others insisted that the change came from up above, as the afternoon sky darkened overhead—enfolding Zayin in deepest ultramarine—and the last light vanished under a fringe of fiery red.

  Zayin was swept away in the light. She cast off her body like a slip as she was carried through the night. At last she came to rest, she knew not where, only that it was not a world she had traveled before. Still she felt no fear, for she was in the grasp of something long wanting, cradling her, easing her to sleep.

  Sometime later, the dawn awoke her. She looked up—into the blue eyes of her lost peddler. He wore a mantle woven of the sun’s spectrum, in which he held her. She heard herself speak.

  — What are you doing here?

  — Don’t you know, Zayin? I’m the Messiah.

  — But you were a peddler before.

  — It was something to do. The world didn’t need me while you were alive.

  — I needed you.

  — You have me now.

  — Will you never leave me again?

  — I’ll leave you every day, to cross the sky. At night, you’ll be my bride.

  Holding her tight, he pierced her with light. Then he left, to lead in the new morning. She watched as folks awoke and looked around, each finding that the apocalypse had not happened. One by one, they then gazed up into the dawn, and smiled. It was well that a Messiah passed above, now that Zayin, their savior, had shown them how to live.

  CHET THE CHEAT

  From the day that he was born, Chet was an orphan. By no means was he the only one in his town, for birth was often fatal back then, but, even by the standards of the local poorhouse, the child was pitifully thin. That may be why, on Chet’s thirteenth birthday, the village sin-eater, a sallow old widower named Ephraim, picked the boy to be his apprentice.

  Ephraim was the region’s first sin-eating professional, a godsend, some said, for, in many rural stretches, the practice was still carried out communally: When a man or woman died, relatives would set a parting meal atop the sealed coffin, and anyone who ate a bite would consume a bit of the sin weighing down on the deceased, a portion of the wrong that the poor soul hadn’t survived to metabolize. The sin would become, by common understanding, the entire family’s digestive, and penitential, burden. Yet, no matter how fine the cooking—how rich the truffles or heavy the cream—folks seldom had much appetite for dead people’s troubles. How much simpler folks found it, how much less expensive and more efficient, to dispense with the graveside buffet, to put out some stale bread or moldy fruit, and hire a man to eat it at night while the village slept.

  Nevertheless, professional sin-eating wasn’t easy. The sin-eater had to be penitent every waking hour, and had to take care never to sin, even in his dreams. While the price for Ephrai
m’s services varied from corpse to corpse, based on his estimation of how folks lived their lives, his calculations were necessarily approximations: His rudimentary actuarial tables couldn’t account for forgotten childhood slights, say, or uncon-fessed fratricides. The sin-eater carried in his gut the speechless guilt of all society, underbelly-by-proxy, and, if he was to avoid eternal damnation, much less sustain people’s confidence in him, he had to be both more and less than human.

  Ephraim accomplished that by living the life of an ascetic, and this was the basis of Chet’s education. The old man had cleared a den in the side of a mountain several miles from the cemetery gates, where the boy came to live with him. Every little luxury that Chet had known—warm gruel, straw bed, sickly girls—was denied to him, and, had Ephraim not so carefully watched the boy, he might have been the first ward ever to run away to an orphanage.

  Ephraim drilled Chet every day, to build his stamina for consuming and carrying sin, by filling his belly with sand and pebbles and rocks, and sprinting him from mountaintop to mountaintop. When he wasn’t mute with agony, or bleeding too profusely, Chet questioned his master’s tactics.

  — Sins aren’t made of stone, you know.

  — That’s their danger. They’re much easier to swallow, Chet, and far harder to expel.

  But Chet wasn’t about to fall for that old-world-wisdom shtick. He taught himself to fake his swallow, and learned other tricks, too. He worked the geological gamut: With the cunning of a con artist, he chewed up granite and spat out garnets. With the bombast of a carnival showman, he made boulders vanish in a cloud of dust. Ephraim watched with horror his pupil’s hunger for attention, and decided that the time had come for a new lesson.

  He brought Chet to the cemetery late one night. Candles burned where meals lay in wait, table scraps slopped atop each coffin in its open crypt. There was also money, the negotiated fee, which Ephraim set aside as alms after counting it and issuing a receipt. Chet watched his master eat, the only food he’d ever seen the old man take in. Ephraim was silent, but the candle illuminating his pained face appeared to flicker, and each morsel seemed to cry in his throat. When he was done, the candle flared up, and went out.

  At the final crypt, he gave the boy a crust of bread. The bread was hard, but Chet had eaten staler loaves at the orphanage. He felt none of the trembling that appeared to afflict Ephraim as it passed his gullet. He reached for more. With a broad hand, the master held him back.

  — Sin is poison. You have no tolerance for it yet.

  — I’ll be fine. I’ve swallowed stones.

  — You must do good before you eat again.

  Ephraim made his apprentice help out the local stream, which could scarcely keep up a trickle that spring, by easing its load: For three full days, Chet hauled buckets of water to town. When he was done, Ephraim asked if he’d received gratitude from anyone.

  — Folks took the water, but they laughed at me when I said that I was carrying it for the creek.

  — Good. If you’d accepted praise, you’d have had to start over again.

  Chet nodded, appreciating the master’s point. He noted that showing off with stones and sins was not the only trick in the books, that sometimes it paid to act with discretion, leaving people to their own beliefs.

  • • •

  Old Ephraim died that summer. While he had no family, everybody in town attended his funeral. Sender the rabbi declared him holy. Then food was set atop his coffin, a candle was lit, and the people left in blessed silence.

  An apprentice no longer, Chet consumed the sins of his master. When he finished his meal, the candle didn’t flare up—so he snuffed it with his finger. Then he fell asleep, under the weight of indigestion, beside the coffin.

  Early in the morning, he was awoken by Ofer the grave digger, who wanted to know when he’d be disposing of Ephraim’s corpse.

  — Isn’t that your job, Ofer?

  — I only handle folks buried in the cemetery. Old Ephraim never bought a plot.

  — The rabbi called him holy.

  — It doesn’t mean he had money. I don’t make the rules, Chet. That’s how it is for everybody. It’s the way of the world.

  So Chet dragged his master’s putrid body—even the coffin didn’t belong to him—all the way to the rabbi’s study, where Sender was teaching his disciples scripture. When the students saw what was coming, they tried to deflect Chet at the door, to shove him back out into the street, without letting the putrid corpse soil their silk and sable, but Sender waved them away. Wrapping himself in a mink stole, he led Chet into the courtyard, his personal improvement on the Garden of Eden, all marble statuary and malachite cisterns. Against one of the urns, Chet rested his master’s body. Then he told the rabbi how Ofer had cast beloved Ephraim out of the cemetery.

  — Ephraim should have known: Credit in the world-to-come is nonnegotiable in the here-and-now.

  — He had money, rabbi. He gave it away.

  — He was holy. That can be impractical.

  — Then what should I do with his body?

  — Throw it in the forest. Leave the rest to fate.

  Chet did as he was told. When he returned the next day, only bones and vultures remained.

  So the sin-eater was fated to be carrion. Had Chet a mind for metaphor, he might have interpreted that in any number of ways, extracted meaning as the birds drew marrow from the bones. But Chet had no capacity for poetry. He was a practical young man, with a promising future in a respectable profession. Following the lead of the rabbi, he resolved not to be holy, but to be wealthy. He didn’t want, quite, to bury himself in money as bankers did. Rather he wished to own, outright, all that the here-and-now had to offer.

  That took gold, which might have been hard to obtain were Chet in any ordinary trade: Coal and grain were purchased on credit slips, but death was a one-way cash transaction. Of course, if Chet spent his sin-eating fees—if he built a mansion and bought a carriage with those coins instead of giving them away as alms—he’d have to compensate with other good deeds. He’d have to carry rivers of water to work off the sins he ingested each evening at the cemetery. For weeks he vacillated, and gave his earnings away. Then one night, while picking over the sins of a burgher’s beloved wife—served up as a platter of decomposing fish—crafty Chet saw through his professional dilemma to a scheme that, he mused to himself, would have impressed even upright Ephraim.

  Chet had not been back to the orphanage in the couple of years since he began his apprenticeship, but little had changed there. The widow Yidel still woke the children several hours before dawn by pounding her clogs against a tin pan. Boys were sent to chop wood in the dark forest, miles beyond the burghers’ most outlandish property claims, while girls were sent to scavenge what scraps they could from the town waste bins, to scrape together a morning gruel. After that, the children were left to beg in the streets, not because anyone gave them money, but because Yidel knew no better way to be rid of them until they went to bed.

  Ever since Chet’s departure, the eldest ward was a girl called Naomie, whose parents, some said, were tree and wind: As an infant, she’d been found alone in the woods after a storm, and, over the decade since then, had grown up as tall and lanky as a white birch beneath a squall of black hair. Naomie was the only orphan Yidel could count on for the occasional copper. Envious, the other girls attributed this to witchcraft, and cursed her unnatural sylvan birth. Lecherous, the boys attributed it to prostitution, and cursed their own financial impotence. In truth, though, Naomie knew neither magic nor men. She was just like any orphan, a cast-off shadow of death.

  For weeks, the gruel had been so meager that children were seasoning it with their own fingernails and earwax, when Naomie found, miraculously, in a basket on the orphanage doorstep, food enough to stretch a porridge for several days. The hidden patron must have been rich to have had such copious leftovers, and to let them go when they’d still do as feed or fertilizer. Probably a foreigner; the last generous loc
al had been the sin-eater Ephraim.

  By the time the others returned from their morning rounds, Naomie had prepared a feast that made even the widow Yidel wonder what incubus the girl had seduced. But who could utter a word when all mouths were full of food?

  That night, Naomie dreamed that she’d killed a man she’d never seen before, bludgeoned him with a rock, and hauled him down to the river with a rope. The water was cold. She started to shiver. Waking in a fit of chill, she got up to see if the door was open. Through a break in the wood, she spied a man. Not the stranger she’d bludgeoned in her sleep. Someone as familiar as a brother. She watched as Chet dropped off another basket and left.

  In the morning, she retrieved it, fuller even than the day before. With some rotten eggs and a slab of moldy cheese, she fried an omelet. She boiled a soup from a batch of chicken feet and six dried-up turnips. She was chopping up some mealy apples to bake a pie, when the other orphans started to arrive, sacks and cups as empty as their hollow bellies. They glared at her, as if she were to blame, but ate what she served them, and fought over the apples before she could put pie into oven.

  Naomie’s dream that night set her inside a mansion more extravagant than any she’d ever imagined. She was there alone with the miller, who had his arms around her, despite the fact that—she felt quite certain—she wasn’t his wife. He kissed her. She recoiled onto the orphanage floor.

  Before climbing back onto her straw mattress, Naomie looked out the door. She saw the basket, and then Chet walking away, his back to her.

  He slept more soundly now that he had money. Within a few weeks of fortuitous deaths (an unscrupulous gambler, a farmer with a violent temperament), he’d collected enough to buy a small plot of land and to have a wooden cabin built on it. Most of the cabin was occupied by a great brick fireplace, where he warmed himself after his nightly rounds, and which he intended to set the scale for his future estate.