Tales of Wonder (32 page)

Now, as a librarian in a children's department I have had my share of snake programs, and reptiles as such do not frighten me. Spiders I am not so sanguine about. But snakes are not a phobia of mine. Except for a quick intake of breath, brought on by surprise, not fear, I did not loose my grip.

The old man gave a
humph
, a grudging sound of approval, closed his eyes, and roared like a lion. I have seen movies. I have watched documentaries. I know the difference. All of Africa was in that sound.

I laughed. “All right, whoever you are, enough games,” I said. “What's going on?”

He sat up slowly, opened those clean blue eyes, and said, “Wrong question, my dear.” He had a slight accent I could not identify. “You are supposed to ask, ‘What
will
go on?'”

Angrily, I let go of his shoulder. “Obviously you need no help. I'm leaving.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” Then, incredibly, he turned over on his side. A partial stuttering snore began at once. Then a whiff of that voice came at me again. “But of course you
will
be back.”

“Of course I
will
not!” I said huffily. As an exit line it lacked both dignity and punch, but it was all I could manage as I walked off. Before I had reached the big rock, the seals had settled down around him again. I know because they were singing their lullabies over the roar of his snore—and I peeked. The smell followed me most of the way back home.

Once back in the lighthouse, a peculiar lethargy claimed me. I seemed to know something I did not want to know. A story suddenly recalled. I deliberately tried to think of everything but the old man. I stared out the great windows, a sight that always delighted me. Sky greeted me, a pallid slate of sky written on by guillemots and punctuated by gulls. A phalanx of herring gulls sailed by, followed by a pale ghostly shadow that I guessed might be an Iceland gull. Then nothing but sky. I don't believe I even blinked.

The phone shrilled.

I picked it up and could not even manage a hello until Mike's voice recalled me to time and place.

“Aunt Lyssa. Are you there? Are you all right? I tried to call before and there was no answer.”

I snapped myself into focus. “Yes, Mike. I'm fine. Tell me a story.”

There was a moment of crackling silence at the other end. Then a throat-clearing. “A story? Say, are you sure you're all right?”

“I'm sure.”

“Well, what do you mean—a story?”

I held on to the phone with both hands, as if to coax his answer. As if I had foresight, I knew his answer already. “About an old man, with seals,” I said.

Silence.

“You're the classics scholar, Mike. Tell me about Proteus.”

“Try Bulfinch.” He said it for a laugh. He had long ago taught me that Bulfinch was not to be trusted, for he had allowed no one to edit him, had made mistakes. “Why do you need to know?”

“A poem,” I said. “A reference.” No answer, but answer enough.

The phone waited a heartbeat, then spoke in Mike's voice. “One old man, with seals, coming up. One smelly old god, with seals, Aunt Lyssa. He was a shape-changer with the ability to foretell the future, only you had to hold on to him through all his changes to make him talk. Ulysses was able …”

“I remember,” I said. “I know.”

I hung up. The old man had been right. Of course I would be back. In the morning.

In the morning I gathered up pad, pencils, a sweater, and the flask of Earl Grey tea I had prepared. I stuffed them all into my old backpack. Then I started out as soon as light had bleached a line across the rocks.

Overhead a pair of laughing gulls wrote along the wind's pages with their white-bordered wings. I could almost read their messages, so clear and forceful was the scripting. Even the rocks signed to me, the water murmured advice. It was as if the world were a storyteller, a singer of old songs. The seas along the coast, usually green-black, seemed wine-dark and full of a churning energy. I did not need to hurry. I knew he would be there. Sometimes foresight has as much to do with reason as with magic.

The whale rock signaled me, and the smell lured me on. When I saw the one, and the other found my nose, I smiled. I made the last turning, and there he was—asleep and snoring.

I climbed down carefully and watched the seals scatter before me. Then I knelt by his side.

I shook my head. Here was the world's oldest, dirtiest, smelliest man. A bum vomited up by the ocean. The centuries layered on his skin. And here was I thinking he was a god.

The I shrugged and reached out to grab his shoulder. Fire. Water. Snake. Lion. I would outwait them all.

Of course I knew the question I would
not
ask. No one my age needs to know the exact time of dying. But the other questions—the ones that deal with the days and months and years after I would surely be gone—I would ask them all. And he, being a god who cannot lie about the future, must tell me everything, everything that is going to happen in the world.

After all, I am a stubborn old woman. And a curious one. And I have always had a passion for the news.

Names

Her mother's number had been D248960. It was still imprinted on her arm, burned into the flesh, a permanent journal entry. Rachel had heard the stories, recited over and over in the deadly monotone her mother took on to tell of the camp. Usually her mother had a beautiful voice, low, musical. Men admired it. Yet not a month went by that something was not said or read or heard that reminded her, and she began reciting the names, last names, in order, in a sepulchral accent:

ABRAHMS

BERLINER

BRODSKY

DANNENBERG

FISCHER

FRANK

GLASSHEIM

GOLDBLATT

It was her one party trick, that recitation. But Rachel always knew that when the roll call was done, her mother would start the death-camp stories. Whether the audience wanted to hear them or not, she would surround them with their own guilt and besiege them with the tales:

HEGELMAN

ISAACS

KAPLAN

KOHN

Her mother had been a child in the camp; had gone through puberty there; had left with her life. Had been lucky. The roll call was of the dead ones, the unlucky ones. The children in the camp had each been imprinted with a portion of the names, a living
yahrzeit
, little speaking candles; their eyes burning, their flesh burning, wax in the hands of the adults who had told them: “You must remember. If you do not remember, we never lived. If you do not remember, we never died.” And so they remembered.

Rachel wondered if, all over the world, there were survivors, men and women who, like her mother, could recite those names:

LEVITZ

MAMOROWITZ

MORGENSTERN

NORENBERG

ORENSTEIN

REESE

Some nights she dreamed of them: hundreds of old children, wizened toddlers, marching toward her, their arms over their heads to show the glowing numbers, reciting names.

ROSENBLUM

ROSENWASSER

SOLOMON

STEIN

It was an epic poem, those names, a ballad in alphabetics. Rachel could have recited them along with her mother, but her mouth never moved. It was an incantation. Hear, O Israel, Germany, America. The names had an awful power over her, and even in her dreams she could not speak them aloud. The stories of the camps, of the choosing of victims—left line to the ovens, right to another day of deadening life—did not frighten her. She could move away from the group that listened to her mother's tales. There was no magic in the words that told of mutilations, of children's brains against the Nazi walls. She could choose to listen or not listen; such recitations did not paralyze her. But the names:

TANNENBAUM

TEITLEMAN

VANNENBERG

WASSERMAN

WECHTENSTEIN

ZEISS

Rachel knew that the names had been spoken at the moment of her birth: that her mother, legs spread, the waves of Rachel's passage rolling down her stomach, had breathed the names between spasms long before Rachel's own name had been pronounced. Rachel Rebecca Zuckerman. That final
Zeiss
had burst from her mother's lips as Rachel had slipped out, greasy with birth blood. Rachel knew she had heard the names in the womb. They had opened the uterine neck, they had lured her out and beached her as easily as a fish. How often had her mother commented that Rachel had never cried as a child. Not once. Not even at birth when the doctor had slapped her. She knew, even if her mother did not, that she had been silenced by the incantation, the
Zeiss
a stopper in her mouth.

When Rachel was a child, she had learned the names as another child would a nursery rhyme. The rhythm of the passing syllables was as water in her mouth, no more than nonsense words. But at five, beginning to understand the power of the names, she could say them no more. For the saying was not enough. It did not satisfy her mother's needs. Rachel knew that there was something more she needed to do to make her mother smile.

At thirteen, on her birthday, she began menstruating, and her mother watched her get dressed. “So plump. So
zaftik.”
It was an observation, less personal than a weather report. But she knew it meant that her mother had finally seen her as more than an extension, more than a child still red and white from its passage into the light.

It seemed that, all at once, she knew what to do. Her mother's duty had been the Word. Rachel's was to be the Word Made Flesh.

She stopped eating.

The first month, fifteen pounds poured off her. Melted. Ran as easily as candle wax. She thought only of food. Bouillon. Lettuce. Carrots. Eggs. Her own private poem. What she missed most was chewing. In the camp they chewed on gristle and wood. It was one of her mother's best tales.

The second month her cheekbones emerged, sharp reminders of the skull. She watched the mirror and prayed.
Barukh atah adonai elohenu melekh ha-olam
. She would not say the words for bread or wine. Too many calories. Too many pounds. She cut a star out of yellow posterboard and held it to her breast. The face in the mirror smiled back. She rushed to the bathroom and vomited away another few pounds. When she flushed the toilet, the sound was a hiss, as if gas were escaping into the room.

The third month she discovered laxatives, and the names on the containers became an addition to her litany: Metamucil, Agoral, Senokot. She could feel the chair impress itself on her bones. Bone on wood. If it hurt to sit, she would lie down.

She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling, spread above her like a sanitized sky. A voice pronounced her name. “Rachel, Rachel Zuckerman. Answer me.”

But no words came out. She raised her right hand, a signal; she was weaker than she thought. Her mother's face, smiling, appeared. The room was full of cries. There was a chill in the air, damp, crowded. The smell of decay was sweet and beckoning. She closed her eyes and the familiar chant began, and Rachel added her voice to the rest. It grew stronger near the end:

ABRAHMS

BERLINER

BRODSKY

DANNENBERG

FISCHER

FRANK

GLASSHEIM

GOLDBLATT

HEGELMAN

ISAACS

KAPLAN

KOHN

LEVITZ

MAMOROWITZ

MORGENSTERN

NORENBERG

ORENSTEIN

REESE

ROSENBLUM

ROSENWASSER

SOLOMON

STEIN

TANNENBAUM

TEITLEMAN

VANNENBERG

WASSERMAN

WECHTENSTEIN

ZEISS

ZUCKERMAN

They said the final name together and then, with a little sputter, like a
yahrzeit
candle at the end, she went out.

Sister Light, Sister Dark

The Myth:

Then Great Alta plaited the left side of her hair, the golden side, and let it fall into the sinkhole of night. And there she drew up the queen of shadows and set her upon the earth. Next she plaited the right side of her hair, the dark side, and with it she caught the queen of light. And she set her next to the black queen.

“And you two shall be sisters,” quoth great Alta. “You shall be as images in a glass, the one reflecting the other. As I have bound you with my hair, it shall be so.”

Then she twined her living braids around and about them, and they were as one.

The Legend

It was in Altenland, in a village called Alta's Crossing, that this story was found. It was told to Jonna Bardling by an old cooking woman known only as Mother Comfort.

“My great-aunt—that would be my mother's mother's sister—fought in the army as blanket companion to the last of the great mountain warrior women, the one that was called Sister Light. She was almost six foot tall, my great-aunt said, with long white braids she wore tied up on top her head. Her crown, like. She kept an extra dirk there. And she could fight like a dust demon, all grit and whirling. 'Twas known that no one could best her in battle, for she carried a great pack on her back and in it was Sister Dark, a shadow who looked just like her but twice as big. Whenever Sister Light was losing—and that weren't often, mind—she would reach into her pack and set this shadow fighter free. It was faster than eyes could see and quiet as grass growing. But Sister Light used that shadow thing only when she was desperate. Because it ate away at her insides as it fought. Fed on her, you might say. My great-aunt never saw it, mind you. No one did. But everyone knew of it.