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

by Jonathon Keats

  Certainly, folks tried to negotiate. While all could agree that life in the city was much improved by the return of death, understandably everyone wanted to enjoy the benefits. Yodal was always courteous and empathetic, generous with his condolences. He offered to return the following night when requested, but there was never any need: By morning, the man or woman would be dead.

  Occasionally there were accidents—folks frightened to death when they saw him pass under a streetlight—or complications of other kinds. A pawnbroker offered him a wealth of diamonds for a six-month furlough. A young trader proposed a partnership in his business to spare him and take his father instead. A young woman approached him at home, promising her body if only he’d murder her husband.

  Scrupulous Yodal refused all of it, patiently explaining that he didn’t decide who died, that it was reckoned by academicians on arcane charts in secret chambers. (The accidents they wrote off as accounting errors.) Yodal was just the deliveryman, and had no more say about a life span than a farmer did over the turn of seasons.

  Still, some didn’t believe him. One man attacked him, and had a stroke. One woman ran away, only to be knocked flat in the street by a horse and buggy. The only person who nearly lived to see daylight was the philosopher Meshulam, who held Yodal for hours in contemplation.

  The philosopher received Yodal in his study, where he poured some fine brandy, and posed more questions than the bricklayer had asked in a lifetime. Yodal didn’t understand any of them—though they extended from the inner realm of ethics to the outer reaches of cosmology—and he never knew whether to nod yes or no. But Meshulam scarcely noticed him. The old man had as little interest in answers as he had in bricks: Answers confined questions. So the philosopher always asked more. He might have gone on forever, were it not for the liquor. Meshulam grew drowsy. Yodal slipped away.

  The soup was cold when the bricklayer got home. His wife was in bed. Her pillow was bruised. Her eyes were shut with hurt.

  — You’re out later every night. You love your job more than you love me.

  — I tried to get away. The philosopher Meshulam had some questions.

  — If it isn’t your job that you love, then you must have a mistress. Come here. I can smell the liquor.

  Yodal obeyed her. She pulled him close. As they made love, she begged him never to leave her again.

  The following evening, Yodal told Akiva Alter that he wished to retire. He’d brought death to nearly a hundred people, sometimes half a dozen in a night, he pointed out. He’d worked hard and done his job well, but his real trade was bricklaying, and he’d heard from Hebel that business was improving. He missed his work. He missed the daylight. The wise man was understanding. A replacement might be found, the next night, even. But first the day’s chosen had to be culled. The grim-reaper-by-proxy asked for the death roll. Akiva Alter gave him only one name: Sisel.

  — That can’t be. Sisel is my wife.

  — Her time has come.

  — She’s healthy and young.

  — You’ve killed off children.

  — That was different. I live for Sisel.

  — You know how this works, Yodal. Our charts are infallible.

  — Let me see them.

  — You’re an ignorant tradesman.

  Still, Akiva Alter led the bricklayer up into the locked observatory, the tallest building in the city, where the charts were kept.

  For all his experience with plumb bob and line pins, Yodal was astonished by the complex machines stored there. He gaped at an enormous clockwork of brass gears and steel springs, the sole purpose of which, Akiva Alter showed him, was to roll up his beard. Then he showed Yodal mysterious spools of numbers that he said represented the most advanced research on the planet, calibrated to the equinoxes, verified in consultation with sun and moon. Yodal couldn’t remember any of the fancy cosmological questions posed by Meshulam with which to confound Akiva Alter, so he simply asked the academician:

  — What if the stars are wrong?

  — Look at them. They map all time. In the whole span of history, they’ve never changed their position.

  The bricklayer looked up through the observatory’s oculus, in the direction that the seated savant was pointing his jeweled finger, and watched, an instant later, a streak of light arc the distance of darkness.

  From that moment, the cosmos was different for Yodal. Nothing was fixed. As he spiraled down the staircase, he scarcely heard Akiva Alter calling after him about necromancy and divination and the infallibility of learned science. Sisel would live. That was the only certainty. Yodal would not bring death to her. He wouldn’t visit her with that. He’d never see her again, but what was his happiness measured against her life? Like the comet, he vanished into the blackness of night.

  For many years, Yod-Alef wandered the continent, working for bricklayers and stonemasons as a laborer, never staying anywhere more than a season, nor giving away his real name, lest his Sisel chance to hear it spoken, and pursue him. He claimed to have no wife, which often encouraged young widows to court him. But his solitary love for Sisel was inviolable, absolute, and girls’ well-meaning efforts to cleave it pained him like a brick ax to the heart. In her absence, Sisel occupied him through day and night. Because he could tell the truth about himself to no one, she was, as he remembered her, his sole companion.

  Yodal’s fellow laborers didn’t know what to make of him. They wondered how a man his age could have no good stories, how it was possible that nothing the least bit interesting had ever happened to him. But he didn’t drink with them, or share their whores, so, following a few sarcastic comments, they generally forgot about him, and, by the end of the season, he was able to slip away without anyone remembering that he’d been there, let alone caring where he’d gone.

  Towns are people divided by walls: Yodal could have run away every month, every week, each hour of every day, and have still found places in want of his anonymous skills. He was suited to the itinerant life. Bricks and mortar were his freedom.

  One morning, he got into a conversation with another laborer about towns where they’d worked. The man called himself Motke, and, while he was young enough to be Yodal’s son, they’d many similarities. In the first place, Motke was unusually handy for a common laborer, adept with line pins and plumb bob, so proficient with square and bevel that the master’s apprentice had several times begrudgingly taken instruction from him. In the second place, he was exceedingly discreet, which alternately gave the impression that he had nothing to say and that he was in possession of unspeakable secrets. And in the third place, he was built thick and strong like Yodal, which was why both had been hired for the hard work of lifting bricks three stories to set a spire atop the town hall.

  As they spoke, Yodal recognized the dialect peculiar to his native city, the patois of an isolated place with many terms for immediate proximity and few for long distance. Motke was the first person he’d met from his region since leaving, the first man who might know if his Sisel was well. Yet naturally he couldn’t say her name. Instead, he simply asked about the city. Motke looked him over with care. At last he bent near and said:

  — You’re from there, too?

  — I had a job in the city a long time ago.

  — Which master did you work for?

  — A fellow called . . . Hebel.

  — Hebel was my father.

  — He wasn’t married when I was there. Who’s your mother?

  — Her name is Sisel. Do you know her?

  — I suppose that I don’t.

  The master called Yodal to fetch more lime for mortar. Motke watched him sling the wooden hod across his shoulder and head toward the quarry.

  Several days later, the hod was seen in pieces at the bottom of a cliff. A search for Yodal’s body followed. Not even his bones could be found.

  The widow Sisel was living in a tiny hovel built of rough granite in the hills above the city. Brick and mortar had brought her nothing but despair: the loss
of one husband after another, and then her only son. She was still marriageable—her beauty had aged with the firm resolve of fine marble—but what good had men ever been? When the matchmakers came, she slammed the door on them. Nor did she go out much anymore. Her childhood friendships hadn’t survived her marriage to Yodal, and Hebel’s companions had been rough-hewn masons who wanted only to lay her.

  And, in any case, so many people had died. Ancient Akiva Alter had been the first after Yodal’s departure, found the following morning in his observatory, expired over the celestial tables, one jeweled finger pointed stiffly toward an empty sky. Within weeks, the other eleven academicians were deceased. Nobody thought to replace them, nor to appoint a new grim-reaper-by-proxy. Folks reckoned that death had finally recalled the way to their distant city, and repaid Yodal’s makeshift undertaking by making him angel’s apprentice. Only Sisel was dissatisfied with that explanation for her husband’s sudden disappearance. She believed that he’d bartered death for life with another girl, younger and prettier than she. She confided this in Hebel, who naturally encouraged such faithless suspicions. He courted her openly. Nobody was surprised to see that, within a year, they were married and a son was born.

  As a husband, Hebel showed neither competency nor diligence. His work kept him away from home all day long, and at night his many mistresses occupied him. He tolerated Motke on the job—the boy was free labor after all, capable of mixing mortar and tying down scaffold—but Sisel he ignored when he wasn’t teaching the kid a lesson by banging her like a board.

  Shortly after Motke’s twelfth birthday, Hebel was crushed under a mislaid pile of bricks. That effectively ended the boy’s apprenticeship. He went to find work in other cities. Five years lapsed, and then five more. Sisel waited for him, a little sadder and poorer each season, expectant at every knock that he’d come back—only to be faced with another meddlesome matchmaker.

  The knocking stopped for a time, and then returned in the third month of her eleventh year alone. She unhitched the latch.

  Yod-Alef stood in front of her. Sisel dropped to her knees, instantly repenting everything she’d ever said and done: He burned with such fury that she imagined he actually had been taken in by the angel of death, and, apprenticeship served, became damnation itself. Then she saw that Yodal had aged, which, as she knew, supernatural creatures don’t do, at least in human ways. She stood up. She held out her hand.

  He didn’t move. He tried to speak, but his heat was too great. The words simmered over in sobs, and Sisel had to pull him across the doorstep by clasping his wrist. She sat him down. She stroked his hair as she had years before.

  He bristled. He stared at her.

  — How could you do this to me, Sisel? How could you marry Hebel? How could you have a son?

  — You abandoned me. You ran off with another girl.

  — Is that what Hebel told you?

  — Isn’t it true?

  Of course it wasn’t, though poor Yodal, who’d scarcely spoken in two decades, had a very hard time persuading her: Even after he’d told her every detail about his life, from Akiva Alter and the comet to Motke and the broken hod, she refused for hours to believe that Hebel had had so many mistresses while Yodal had had none. But even jealous Sisel could hold on to her delusion for only so long. Yodal’s love for her had made him leave her, and what had she gone and done?

  — No, no, Yodal. I hated you for what you did, but I married Hebel for your sake.

  — You might as well have slit my throat.

  — I was pregnant when you left me. I couldn’t raise Motke alone. He was all I had left of you. Yodal, Motke is your son.

  — Does he know?

  — I told him when Hebel died. That’s why he went away. For the past eleven years and three months, he’s been searching for you.

  Both parents wanted him back then, but who could say where he’d gone in the week since Yodal abandoned him to avenge Sisel’s infidelity by fulfilling Akiva Alter’s prophecy? His warrant had no expiration date. He’d come to implement it, and now he couldn’t rescind it. He couldn’t leave Sisel, even for a moment, without taking her life away. He couldn’t run off to fetch Motke, and even for them to travel together was too risky: A misstep could separate the lovers, young again to each other, for an eternity.

  So they stayed. Yodal hitched the latch on her door. Sisel brought him to bed. In their embrace, they encompassed their world.

  Half a century passed. Motke traveled to every country, other continents even, searching for his father. In all those years, only one man had moved him to believe that Yod-Alef could be found. But then that man had dropped his hod from a cliff and vanished. And now that he was too old to labor, Motke was walking home.

  In his native city, he no longer knew anybody. New buildings, more imposing, had replaced old ones. None of his brick-work remained. He asked old folks what had happened to his mother. Only one man recognized Sisel’s name, and said—he had to smile—that she lived with her husband in a stone hovel from which they hadn’t emerged in decades. He pointed to the hill. He described the trail.

  Motke was a sensible man. He didn’t believe the codger any more than he’d trusted those fables, popular when he was a child, about the grim reaper losing his way to the city. Motke was sensible, but he also needed a place to stay. He followed the trail. He climbed the hill. He knocked at the door of the stone hovel.

  For a while, nobody answered. Then he heard a single pair of feet shuffle across the floor. The latch rattled and fell. The door opened. Motke looked into the blind eyes of the oldest creature he’d ever seen.

  At first he guessed it was a woman. Next he figured it was a man. Then he perceived, from the serene expression, that it was both his mother and his father, so many years together, so close to each other, that they had cleaved into one being.

  YOD-BEIT THE REBEL

  Ousted from the heavens for crimes against paradise, angels burn bright as they fall through the night. Folks call them shooting stars, and even wish on them, but no one believes the euphemism: Wish what they will, folks can only hope that those shamed angels incinerate in the descent, for a seraph that endures the plummet will bedevil humanity forever.

  One morning after a terrible celestial downpour, a crippled little girl shambled from town to town, begging for a place to rest. She was as pale as fright and as slight as chance. Evidently she’d been a victim of the nocturnal mayhem—bloody and broken as if ravaged by demons—and if anyone asked what had happened, she bowed her head, shrouding her face behind hair of tarnished silver, and started sobbing.

  She didn’t answer when folks inquired who her parents were or where she’d come from. In each village, the story was the same: Questions hardened into suspicions, and, when the girl couldn’t even say her name, sharpened into accusations. These were dangerous times, the villagers informed her, peering through her veil of hair into blue eyes washed pale with tears. How could they be sure that she wasn’t herself a beast? She opened her mouth. They pointed at her teeth, small and serrated. She was the devil, they decreed, and if heaven didn’t want her, they sure as hell didn’t either. Too stunned to protest, she was chased out of each village, pelted with dirt and cursed as a monster, the cause of man’s anguish on earth.

  She’d begun to wonder whether what folks told her was true, when she wandered into a village quite unlike the others. The town had no walls, but was built on a swamp. Nor were there buildings of brick and stone as she’d seen elsewhere, merely dirt huts. Sunk to her knees in muck, she knocked on the first door she reached. Silence. She looked around. Not a soul to be seen, though it was past noon. She pushed the door open. Into the darkness, she plunged.

  The muck was much thicker inside, a soft bed beneath her aching body. She curled up. She slept. She dreamed that she was home again. All was immaculate, a land unsoiled: a life of gilt and polished marble. The air was fragrance on a breeze of music. She tried to inhale—and could not breathe. All at once awake, she found
herself under a crush of rancid flesh.

  With her lungs’ last draft, she screamed. Pressing closer, her captors urged her to hush. They asked, with a trace of offense, Yod-Beit, don’t you recognize us?

  She opened her eyes wide. She had not heard her name in many days. The last time, Yod-Beit had been uttered as a curse. If she’d lamented never to hear it again, this was worse.

  — Are you demons?

  — We don’t say that here. I’m your cousin Boaz. These are your cousins Hudes and Pinchas.

  Try as she might, Yod-Beit could not see the family resemblance. Of course every seraph had heard rumors about what happened to outcast angels, the monstrosities they became in the shadow of heaven, but even death was more fathomable to Yod-Beit than so terrible a fate. She ran trembling fingers across her face.

  — Do I look like you now?

  — Only a few broken bones, some bruises. It’s miraculous.

  — But my skin isn’t . . . My nose and ears haven’t . . .

  — It makes no difference, Yod-Beit. You’re one of us.

  For several months, they nursed Yod-Beit to health. Pin-chas dressed her wounds. Hudes fed her soups. And Boaz talked to her through the blackest hours of night.

  He told her about the cruelties of humans. In heaven, she’d been taught, like all young seraphim, that humans were good yet easily misled, and, while her education had been abbreviated by her fall, Yod-Beit tenaciously held on to this wisdom, her only celestial souvenir, and repeated it often. Boaz was patient with her—she’d never had to reason before—but persistent.