Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  *

  I can’t keep up with him as he races through the city. I don’t know how he goes so fast with his crippled heel-strings. He turns around to me and laughs as we walk. I moan and wave him ahead.

  *

  We never guess how strange life is before we suffer some real sadness and confusion. I was an orphan, and then I was adopted by John, and now I have my papa back. It almost makes me believe that all things are possible. Papa says this is the most powerful belief of all.

  I put the almost there because things got real fouled up with William Arthur when I stopped having my time of the month about ten weeks ago. He hollered at me something evil and started telling me what I had to do with the baby growing inside my belly. He accused me of having “robbed his seed.”

  I let him just go his own way. Because I know what robbery is, and I never robbed anything from him.

  These days he’s barely polite to me at our school. But that’s all I want from him now. I’ve got the children in my classroom to educate, and I’ve got John and his family, and I’ve got Papa, and that’s enough for me.

  I guess I’m not willing to push and pull on myself till I’m all in a knot just to stay with a man. Even a good one. I need a whole lot of hours for myself, anyway. What happened between us is maybe not even his fault. Or mine. But I didn’t escape from River Bend and see Weaver die in his own blood so I could start taking orders again.

  After I stopped seeing William, I started liking being on my own – liking it more than ever. I suppose I’m one peculiar young lady.

  *

  Geography, too, is important. I have to remember to tell that to the children. If we were living just two hundred and fifty miles south of here, we would all be slaves. I guess one of our goals ought to be to make maps and borders less important – for everyone everywhere.

  *

  There is so much I don’t understand. But I’m only seventeen years old. Papa says many things still ought to be mysterious to me because they’re mysterious to everyone. John told me that it is a Jewish tradition for some dangerous secret teachings only to be taught to people over forty.

  What I want to understand most is how all this was waiting for me in New York and I didn’t know it. We cannot predict the future, that’s true enough, but I didn’t have even the tiniest notion of the life I’d have one day.

  Because of that I’ve come to believe we all have thousands of possibilities stored inside us, each one like a caterpillar inside a giant cocoon. Lots of folks don’t want to admit it, but the life that comes out of us is shaped more than just a little by circumstance. Not that I wouldn’t have the same wings, spots, and colors even if I was still living at River Bend. I think I’d probably be pretty much the same as I am now. But I’d be mighty diminished. For one thing, I wouldn’t be teaching, wouldn’t be giving back to the world, which now seems to me the most important thing.

  I think that that is the saddest thing about slavery: We aren’t allowed to give of ourselves to the world. I read that in the book John gave me about the hidden meaning of slavery. It was written by the Jewish conjurer in Portugal, Benjamin. And I think he’s right.

  I’m grateful to have that chance now. I am grateful to Mamma, Papa, and so many others. To Lily too. And Crow, of course – my brave, beautiful Crow. And Weaver, who died for me to be here. And John.

  In the oddest way, I am even grateful to Master Edward, Mistress Holly, and even Big Master Henry – to all the white folk at River Bend, for they helped to make me who I am.

  I will go slow, like Papa is always saying. I will take every last thing I can and then give all I have back to my children – the wee one growing inside my belly too.

  Memoria Tsamma Stewart

  New York, the Seventeenth of October, 1825

  LXI

  Midnight … I lie awake at night, alone in my bed, and know that I have done one very, very good thing in my life. Perhaps that is enough for a man.

  No, I am no hunter in the way it’s usually meant. But we found each other. Violeta told my girls to tell me that we did so by the light of the Archer, and I think she’s right.

  There is still so much I don’t understand about her. I hope that our life apart can work out as we would both wish it. When I wrote her a note about Midnight having found us, I told her a bit of what he’d said about slavery. She wrote back: A single act of cruelty can take a lifetime to undo – and sometimes not even a lifetime is enough. It’s as though we have one chance to be good and if we deviate by even half a foot, we’re lost. We’ve learned that the hard way, you and I. As a postscript, she added, Do you suppose some people even get to like the taste of stones?

  Not just Midnight, but Berekiah Zarco found me too, journeying across three centuries to help me as I fell into darkness. It might just have been a vision resulting from my delirium, but it is also true that he, as my ancestor, lives inside me. In that very real sense, he has indeed journeyed into the future, and I am his vessel.

  Thinking of him now, I wonder what it is I’d like to leave behind after my death for my descendants, just as he left his illuminated cover page for me. Perhaps I would choose the sketch of Midnight I made in Alexandria in order to find him. I think that anyone looking at it would recognize that I had done the best I could to capture the beauty of one person with my modest skills.

  The Olive Tree Sisters would say that I’d succeeded in inhabiting my sketch. Perhaps I am indeed good enough now to execute the tile panel of the field slaves. We shall see.

  When I was seven, I learned from The Fox Fables that He that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death.

  But what about good? Might it somehow be able to restore life?

  I cannot say, of course, but I’ve begun to suspect that goodness is the only miracle within reach of human hands: He that pursueth good may join together what has long been separated.

  I knew that the moment I saw Midnight standing in my doorway.

  And what of that generous old fox who wrote down his fables so that a mischievous seven-year-old lad from Porto might one day find them? Might he have meant to tell me all along: He who has been snared and hunted, when set free, may accomplish so much more….

  I do not wish to leave behind my daughters, Morri, Midnight, and Mother, but if I knew I was about to depart from this life, I would feel I had accomplished something. That is, I think, what we all need to know.

  We believe we are creatures of time, space, and a specific place, when we are nothing of the sort. Over the last nights, I have sat in the dark, facing Jerusalem, and seen that plainly. I have felt myself falling free of this body, shedding it like a phantom limb. Borders open and I am outside myself, drifting like music. I do not know where I am. I am nowhere. And I know I am no different from Midnight.

  Indeed, I am every pitch and every chord. We all are, or we could not hear them in our ears when no music is being played. Everything out there has a cognate inside. Every last atom.

  Hope has made full use of me. Not that I am finished. No, I think I’ve a further journey to make. Though I am not yet aware of its nature, I can feel the pulling on me of forces greater than myself. Of the world, if you will. Or of my daughters, who carry their mother and me inside them and who no doubt wish for me to remain with them for a while longer.

  I do not believe that there will be life everlasting to follow, nor that we shall rise on the Mount of Olives when the Messiah comes. For the secret is this:

  The Messiah is here now and we are already living on the Mount of Olives.

  That is the most important lesson I learned on my journey, while hunting Midnight.

  And so, life is written in the present tense, out of ink bequeathed to us from the past. Death too. Genesis and Exodus are taking place inside us all at this very moment. Even Christ’s Passion. And it is a good thing that they are, for we would not want to wait. Why would we?

  Eat the night!

  It was the angel Raphael who said to Tobit, “Write down all
these things that have happened to you.”

  And to give thanks, just like Tobit, that is what I have done.

  Father, you may come back to us now. We shall journey forward together and you may take hold of my hand. We shall beg forgiveness from Midnight. I know you are a good man, just as I know you committed a monstrous act. I have the letters you wrote to try to make amends, and I am aware that you regretted what you had done. I do not know what the lesson of your life and death may be, except that we may all do terrible things when the Time of the Hyena is on us.

  Perhaps evil such as you have done cannot be forgiven, not even by the one you have wronged, since it is an abomination against life itself. But if we are very lucky, then we may banish it from the present tense and consign it forever to the past. Midnight reassures me that we have. He remembers you fondly.

  If you are dead these many years, Papa, as must truly be the case, then I still say this to you, since you have always dwelt inside me:

  We have seen you from afar and we are dying of hunger.

  You are redeemed and may go now in peace.

  John Zarco Stewart

  New York, the Seventeenth of October, 1825

  About the Author

  Richard Zimler was born in Manhasset, New York. After gaining degrees in Comparative Religion from Duke University and in Journalism from Stanford University, he worked as a journalist. In 1990, he moved to Porto, Portugal, where he has taught journalism for the last twelve years, both at the College of Journalism and the University of Porto. He has published three novels since 1996: Unholy Ghosts, The Angelic Darkness, and The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon which was named 1998 Book of the Year by three British critics and was a bestseller in eleven countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Australia and Italy. Zimler has won many prizes for his writing, and has lectured on Portuguese Jewish culture all over the world. He reviews books for The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Literary Review (London) and Livros (Lisbon). When not writing, he enjoys gardening at his weekend house in the north of Portugal.

  Copyright

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  First published in hardback by Delacorte Press 2003

  This edition published by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2004

  Copyright © Richard Zimler 2003, 2004

  The right of Richard Zimler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–78033–251–2