The Memorist

by M. J. Rose

  “Thank you for trying to help me last night,” she said.

  “You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  She shook her head. “No. Malachai, the man I was with—he was shot—they operated on him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  She nodded.

  There was so much to say and no way either of them knew where to begin.

  “We should go,” Lucian said.

  David put his hand in his pocket and as he withdrew it Lucian quickly stepped forward again, instantly suspicious and on guard. David shook his head, silently admonishing him as he pulled out a business card and offered it to Meer. “If you ever…” he started, then stopped, as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

  Meer reached out. As she took the card between her fingers she felt the raised letters that spelled out his name and contact information embossed on the smooth satiny stock. Slipping it into her pocket, she kept her hand there, as if protecting it.

  Outside, Kalfus sat waiting in the parked car. Lucian opened her door for Meer. Sliding in, she lowered her handbag to the floor, then noticed she’d put it on top of a black notebook, which she picked up to move out of the way. As she did it fell open to an unfinished pencil sketch.

  “Let me get that,” Lucian said quickly and reached for it.

  She looked up at Lucian, then back at the drawing; it was the face of a woman she’d never seen before, except in the woman’s eyes she saw herself—her very soul, looking up at her from the page.

  Chapter 107

  Indus Valley, India—2120 B.C.E.

  Ohana woke up with her father leaning over her bed, prying the bone from her grip.

  “How could you take this? It’s not bad enough that you acted like a whore with him when he was alive. But this? You stole one of his bones?” His eyes glittered like metal, his lips were curled in a snarl.

  She’d seen him angry before; he was a stern father, but this was cold fury.

  “Please, let me have him back.”

  His fingers tightened around the white bone. “No. Keeping such a thing you will bring evil down on your head—” spittle flew from his mouth “—and on my house,” he said and strode out of her bedchamber.

  Jumping up from her bed she ran after him, catching up to him in the courtyard and reaching for the bone. They struggled for a few seconds until he regained control and, brandishing the bone like a weapon, a look of revulsion in his eyes, he held it over her head.

  Ohana went from not having had any idea who had killed Devadas, to a possibility that turned her stomach. Tears of shame filled her eyes. Not for what she had done with Devadas but that by doing it she might have been responsible for his death.

  “Did you kill him?” She gasped.

  The force of her father’s hand on her cheek sent her reeling backward and she fell. Pebbles ripped her palms, and a sharp pain shot up her spine.

  Her father looked down at her, his lips narrowed in contempt. “How dare you speak to me like this? Go back into the house. Immediately.”

  It didn’t matter that she was disobeying him—she leapt up, grabbed her lover’s broken bone and raced through the garden, out into the road—and kept running. Even after he stopped trying to catch her, she kept going, running toward the only place she could think of where she could be safe.

  Chapter 108

  Vienna, Austria

  Friday, May 2nd—12:15 p.m.

  Dappled light filtered through new leaves in the run-down Jewish section of the cemetery, casting green shadows on Meer’s hands and face. Standing alone under a tall chestnut tree, she watched people arrive and gather by the gravesite. Among them she recognized the nine men who, with her father, had made up the minyan that chanted the prayer for the dead over Ruth Volker’s coffin the week before.

  Today they were here to pray over his ashes. It was against the orthodox Jewish religion to be cremated but Jeremy had stipulated it in his will and late last night, his rabbi gave his blessing and the function had been performed.

  “Before I begin today’s ceremony,” Rabbi Tischenkel said, “I want to tell you about your father’s last wishes.” He nodded at the silver jar he was holding. “He asked that only half of his ashes be buried here and for you to throw the other half into the Ganges River.” The rabbi paused, but before he could continue, Meer interrupted.

  “The Ganges?”

  “I know. I asked too. He told me that according to ancient beliefs, if your ashes are returned to the Ganges, you get to skip over a few reincarnations and save yourself some time. A shortcut, so to speak.” Tischenkel smiled sadly.

  The sun reflected off the urn and shone into Meer’s eyes.

  “Your father also wanted me to tell you to rest your heart about the flute,” Tischenkel added.

  Meer felt as if across time her father was giving his blessing over what she’d done with the precious instrument. Except…some thing didn’t make sense. “Rabbi, when was my father’s will written?”

  “About ten years ago.”

  “Did you witness it?”

  “Yes, I did. I was there.”

  “Was it amended in the last few weeks to add that message about the flute?”

  “No, it was in the original. Why?”

  “How could my father have known about the flute ten years ago? The Memorists believed Beethoven destroyed it in 1814. It wasn’t until my father found the letter in the gaming box two weeks ago that anyone imagined the flute still existed.”

  The rabbi shrugged again. “I’m afraid it’s a mystery to me.”

  “You’re certain he didn’t add that in the last few weeks?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said sympathetically. “It was in the original.”

  Meer shook her head.

  “That’s not the answer you expected?” Tischenkel asked.

  “No.”

  Another shrug. “Well, it’s one you’re going to have to learn to accept on faith. Along with all its ramifications.” His smile was enigmatic. “The Kabbalah says if we have not fulfilled our condition during one life, we must commence another…until we have acquired the condition that fits our reunion with God. Maybe your father lived some of this before.” He handed her the urn. “I’ll tell you when it’s appropriate and you can pour half of them in the grave.”

  Meer took it and shivered. Cold wrapped around her. Too sad, too confused and too tired to fight, she disappeared into the freezing miasma.

  Chapter 109

  Indus Valley, India—2120 B.C.E.

  Ohana had never gone to the workshop without Devadas taking her there. During the day it was where he and his brother made their instruments and at the end of the day it was her trysting place with her lover. Rasul, his brother, was the only living soul who’d known about the affair and he’d never judged or questioned them.

  Welcoming her now, he cleared a place for her to sit and then listened as she broke down and, interrupted by intermittent sobs, told him what she’d done and then showed him the bone.

  When she finished, Rasul smoothed her hair down and washed her face with cool water from the well and made her drink a thick elixir of honey and herbs. Soon she was tired and he told her to lie down on the straw mat in the corner of the workshop—the same mat where she and Devadas had lain so many times.

  When she woke five hours later, it was to an exotic sound. Ohana had spent enough time in worship to know the kasht tarang had a hollow wooden tone, that the manjira was like bells resonating and that the bins gave off reedy notes. These sad tones were different. They rode the breeze and surrounded her and helped her remember Devadas so clearly it was as if he was right there with her, beside her.

  And then the song stopped.

  Navigating the overcrowded room with its cabinets, shelves of supplies and tables covered with instruments in various stages of assemblage, Ohana found Rasul at the workbench by the brazier, bent over his work, concentrating intensely.

  He held a sharp engraving tool over the fire, waited un
til it turned red-hot and then returned to the intricate detailing he was known for and the reason men came from distant cities to purchase his wares.

  Carefully, he finished chasing a groove, laid his iron tool on the table, inspected his work and then lifted the flute to his lips. Almost as if he were kissing it, Rasul pressed his mouth to the body. A low, plaintive whistle developed into a full-toned note. The sound was pure and lucid. Like running water. Or starlight. An enlightened sound. Mesmerized, she stood immobile, then, as she listened, the note modulated. Warbled. Words came after that, soft-spoken words that had body and form and meaning, as if the very heavens were singing to her.

  She would never know how long she stood there or how many stories she saw unfold in her mind. The music of the past showed her that she and Devadas had been together before this life in many others.

  Rasul’s eyes were warm and moist as he extended his hand and offered her the instrument. “The flute is yours to keep for as long as you need its memory song…” he said. “Play it to help you remember that the two of you were together before and will be again. There’s no beginning and there’s no end. There’s only infinite passion. The infinite passion of life.”

  Ohana took the instrument and brought it up to her breast, and now, for the first time since the Asthi-Sanchayana ceremony when Devadas had been cremated, she felt him close by and was comforted.

  Chapter 110

  Vienna, Austria

  Friday, May 2nd—12:25 p.m.

  The silver jar was lighter with half her father’s ashes in his grave. Meer stepped back as the rabbi motioned to the crowd and ten men stepped forward. One of them was the stranger who’d taken her father’s place in the minyan. They gathered around the gravesite and in unison began to pray, not in German, but in Hebrew, the language of prayer for all Jews.

  The rich sound resonated through Meer’s chest cavity and her heart slowed to the prayer’s rhythm. This was the Kaddish vibrating inside of her. The prayer that had been recited millions of times over the dead for the last six thousand years, a tradition intended to give solace and succor as a soul passed from this life and prepared to enter the next. These were the teachings her father had tried to interest her in, that had mattered so much to him and that he had believed in with all of his soul. His soul. Had it shattered into those hundred pieces of light he had told her about? Were they waiting now to find another vessel?

  Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…

  The words rose up and surrounded her like a warm wind.

  V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon…

  She didn’t know the words’ actual meaning but they resonated inside her the way the memory song had when Sebastian had played it on the flute, but without the fear and panic. It was the same vibration that had engulfed her in the underground chamber when she sat with her father as he lay dying. The same vibration she’d felt when Sebastian’s son, Nicolas, had chanted his hymn—this hymn—over and over in his hospital room.

  V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon.

  As the prayer came to an end, Meer was still thinking about Nicolas: a nine-year-old savant to these words. Had he seen the gardener unearth a child’s skull that summer day? Had the souls of the two children—one alive and one dead—connected in a way that caused Nicolas to believe it was his job to mourn that long-deceased Jewish child? Was he lost in that mourning?

  The rabbi recited one last blessing.

  Meer was hearing his words and staring at the minyan, thinking about Sebastian’s useless sacrifice to help Nicolas. A father’s dedication to the point of obsession to save his son and bring him back from the land of the living dead.

  Chapter 111

  Friday, May 2nd—1:30 p.m.

  Sebastian’s ex-wife, Dr. Rebecca Kutcher, sat at her desk and frowned while she listened to Meer’s request and did her best not to stare at the nine men who stood respectfully by the window. Each member of the minyan, all in their funereal dark suits and yarmulkes, looked at the doctor with expressions that were so empathetic and kind, they disconcerted her.

  “No,” Rebecca said when Meer finished. “Everything I’ve done has been to protect Nicolas from his father’s obsessions. Why would I agree to allow you to take strangers into my son’s room?”

  “I know that what I’m suggesting sounds strange to you. It does even to me,” Meer said, trying to think of a way to win over this brittle woman.

  Out the window, in the distance, the sun sparkled on the lake, its surface as smooth as a mirror.

  “What do you believe in, Rebecca?”

  “Science,” she answered with no hesitation.

  “What about in the gap between where science stops and mystery begins?”

  “What has this to do with my son?”

  “Have you read any studies on binaural beats?”

  Rebecca shook her head impatiently, and Meer knew her chance of winning this woman over was slight.

  “There are prayers and mystic rituals going back thousands of years that effect change and help heal both spiritually and physically. They’re often words with meanings but they’re also sounds that have vibrations. And in the last fifty years there have been studies done that show different kinds of vibrations can affect consciousness.” Meer was losing Rebecca, she could see it in the other woman’s eyes. “I didn’t believe it either but I’ve experienced it…and it helped me. I was there, Rebecca. Where Nicolas is. All I’m asking is that you allow these men to go into your son’s room and chant with him.”

  The boy didn’t look up when the men walked into his room. Nicolas sat drawing, a box of crayons at his elbow. The reds, yellows, bright blues and greens were all still in the container, their points sharp and intact. The ones he used, the grays and the browns, the blacks and the dull taupes, were scattered across on the tabletop, sad, worn-down stubs.

  He was drawing yet another version of the boy in the dark passageway that was identical to the drawings Meer had seen the last time she’d been there. She’d traversed passageways like this one and had finally come out on the other side. Now she wanted to help Nicolas to come out the other side, too. For his sake. His sake alone. Even though Meer understood what had driven Sebastian, she knew she’d probably never be able to forgive him, but neither could she punish the boy for his father’s failures. Failures in both the present and in the faraway past.

  Under his breath, the boy’s singsong words were barely audible but Meer’s father’s friends recognized what they were hearing. There was no signal, no instant when the decision was made. One moment there was just a thin childish whisper and then a single adult male voice joined in and then another joined in and another until nine voices combined with Nicolas’s and the minyan of ten was formed and together they all chanted.

  Meer bowed her head, not sure she should watch. Now, not at the concert hall when all hell broke loose; not in Beethoven’s house when she realized where the flute was hidden; not at the graveyard when she buried her father’s ashes; but now, she felt for the first time in her life that she was in the presence of something sacred as the vibrations from the chanting resonated in the hospital room. Was this the sound of myriad pieces of broken, fragmented souls joining together at last?

  Meer thought about the love her father had described to her: love that we pass on, that keeps us alive, that makes us weak and fallible when it is taken away and that gives us strength and peace when we realize it can’t ever really be taken away but exists always, just transformed.

  When Meer had stood at her own father’s grave and heard this prayer circling around her, she’d thought of Nicolas and wondered if somehow in his past he’d been a father or grandfather or brother who’d been unable to complete the mourning process for a child. Who’d failed at gathering a minyan and making sure the proper prayers were said. A father or a grandfather or a brother who must have died or been killed, with this unfinished business of grief still on his mind.

  B
eside her, Rebecca sighed and Meer looked over to see tears and an expression of wonder on the woman’s face. The room was silent. The minyan had stopped their chanting. The Kaddish had been said. Nicolas was as quiet now as the others. He sat at his desk, staring down at his drawing, not frantically chanting or moving side to side or sketching. He was absolutely still.

  Rebecca went to him, got down on her knees by his side. “Nicolas?” she whispered.

  The little boy turned and looked at his mother. There was confusion but also something vitally alive in eyes that had been dead before. He was no longer a child disconnected from himself or the world. Yes, he was pale and looked fragile and would certainly need help but he could see what was in front of him for the first time in a long time and what he saw was his mother reaching out for him and as she gently held him, his hands moved to grip her arms.

  Over her son’s head, Rebecca looked up at Meer.

  “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t understand the depth of my thanks.”

  Meer wondered what Nicolas would remember. What he’d be able to explain about the last six months of his life when he was older, when he was her age, when someone asked him what had happened to him. Would he remember the sensation of today’s vibrations in his body, in his blood, in his bones?

  Her father would have loved to see what she’d just seen. He’d explain it using theories about the resilience of the human spirit and the human soul, and connect them to his ideas about binaural beats and what Pythagoras believed about reincarnation and mathematics, numbers, sounds and circular time.

  With his irrepressible optimism her father would use all this as proof of what he’d always wanted her to understand about her own past and her future.

  You see how simple it is? All you have to do—she could hear him say—is open yourself up to the cosmos as it lays itself before you. See it in all its mysterious dimensions. Without prejudice. Without assumption. There’s music waiting for you to write, sweetheart. All you ever needed was the key to open yourself to it. And that key is the wonder of the world. All the songs you could never remember but couldn’t forget? You can find them now.