by Dara Horn
ETERNAL
LIFE
A
NOVEL
. . .
DARA HORN
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK LONDON
For my parents,
Susan and Matthew Horn,
and their grandchildren:
Maya, Ari, Eli, Ronen, Zev, Rami, Lila, Gabriella,
Eliana, Orli, Abigail, Aliza, Yael, and Asher.
(My parents made it look easy.)
And for Brendan Schulman,
again and again and again.
ETERNAL
LIFE
CHAPTER
1
#CRAZYOLDLADY
. . .
Either everything matters, or everything is an outrageous waste of time. That’s what she would have said, if anyone had asked her. But no one asks crazy old ladies for their opinions.
If her father had described it—it was his job to write, or at least to copy, though he liked to add his own details—he might have written: These are the generations of Rachel, keeper of vows, who bargained with God and lived. If her son had written it—her first son, the wise one, the reason for everything that followed—he would have put it differently. If all the heavens were parchment, and all the seas ink, such would not suffice to record the days of Rachel, whose years are no more than an eyeblink of the Master of the World. If her twentieth son had written it—he was a panderer, a bootlicker, but that had been worth something then—he would have sprinkled it with rose petals until it reeked. O mother of thousands, she who escaped the sword; most loved, most honored, most blessed of the Lord! Or something equally trite. He was no poet, but the delusion had been harmless. Her sixty-third son, who was one of her favorites, would have written something else, in a different language this time, though still the same alphabet: If you like, dear reader, I’ll tell you a story you’ll never forget for as long as you live, about how my mother once made a promise she forever regretted. Just don’t tell anyone I told you.
This latest granddaughter had reminded her of that sixty-third son: quiet, with a simple smile that hid a voracious intellect. With that sixty-third son’s wild brothers, she had lost her temper frequently, though the sixty-third son had been silent, almost ignored. Then one day he had stood up on a chair during a meal and declaimed a rhymed alphabetical list of all the curses she had hurled at him and his brothers, and she had laughed until her insides ached. Even now she felt a lightness when she thought of the books he wrote later, which still made her laugh. She had almost told him, but hadn’t in the end. He would have thought she was joking.
But this was the longest she had stayed anywhere, and these were the oldest grandchildren she had ever dared to know. The youngest one, sitting at the table before her—the one she had kept in reserve in her mind for years, just as she always chose one, the one she thought she could trust—that one was already over thirty, with children of her own. Perhaps she would tell that granddaughter. Or not, and simply leave without a word, as she usually did. Either way, she couldn’t stay much longer.
The day’s meeting had been awkward. Just getting into the office above the store had meant crossing through a line of seven people holding signs. The signs said “Boycott Zakkai Gemstones” and “Divest from Zionist Occupiers.” It was odd, she thought. She wasn’t Israeli, at least not the way these people thought. Or rather, she was, in exactly the way these people thought. In either case, it made no sense. Her grandchildren upstairs had an explanation, though not a good one.
“They’ve got the wrong store,” one announced. “They think we’re the Bukharian guy.”
No one named the Bukharian guy. It was company policy never to name the Bukharian guy.
“If they think we’re the Bukharian guy, they’ll be pretty disappointed when all we have to divest is eighty-five cents,” another added.
“What do we do to get rid of them?”
“Give them time to get bored. They’ll leave.”
“They’ll leave faster if we give them the Bukharian guy’s address.”
“Who do you think sent them here in the first place? The Bukharian guy.”
“Crazy shit, Gram. Crazy shit.”
She rolled her eyes, a gesture she had picked up along with English, years ago, and everyone laughed. As the meeting proceeded, she looked around the table at them: her children, her grandchildren, familiar faces, repeating faces, with only one son rebelliously absent—but one wasn’t bad, considering. She had done well, she thought, in this version. “Version” was the word she used when thinking of it—nusach, the liturgical term, like a melodic variation on a theme. That’s what they were, these different versions: different tones, different moods, melancholic, joyful, anxious, calm, hectic, fast, slow. This version was one of the best, the happiest, which was why she hadn’t wanted to leave. But she couldn’t stay forever. And that one son lingered in her mind, a fifty-six-year-old disaster. Or, as she preferred to think of him, a challenge.
She ran the meeting strictly, as she had for the past few years since Mort had died. Trivial details flowed through her days. Long ago, when the details were different, she had wondered if those details that filled every minute of every day were actually concealing something, something large and still and sacred. Many days and years and people had passed before she understood that the details themselves were the still and sacred things, that there was nothing else, that the curtain of daily life itself was holy, that behind it was only a void. Yet some days she still wondered.
As she rose to leave, one son surprised her with a personal matter.
“Mom, before you go,” he said. She glanced back at the table, alarmed to see that everyone else was still seated, watching her. The thought crossed her mind that they had planned this. “The new lawyer suggested a few modifications to the will,” he said slowly. “Nothing major, but he noticed that nothing’s been signed.”
They had been through this before, many times. But this felt different. She paused, leaning on the table, refusing to sit down. And then she spoke.
“I’m not signing.”
One daughter drew in her breath, prepared to spit fire. “Dad would have signed. He would have signed years ago.”
“I’m sure he would have,” she answered, her tone firm, closing a door. “But I’m not him. And I’m not ready to sign yet.”
“Mom, you’re eighty-four years old. I’ll be sixty-two next week,” her oldest son said. Her oldest son, she thought, and smirked. “We all know you’re well now. Honestly, I wish I felt half as good as you do,” he added. “And none of us want to say this to you. But no one lives forever.”
The youngest granddaughter had been fiddling with her phone under the table, but now she looked up, smiling at her uncle. “Um, haven’t you noticed? Gram is the exception to that rule. She might as well sell her plot. It’s not like she’s going to use it.”
Still standing, Rachel turned to her granddaughter and grinned. “Exactly,” she announced. “I’m the head of this company, and I’ve made an executive decision not to die.” And then she walked out of the room.
What haunted her most about the children was how many times they died. Every day of raising a child brought a rush of unwanted mourning. New parents think of each day as a cascade of beginnings: the first time she smiled, the first time she rolled over, her first steps, her first words, her first day of school. But old parents like her saw only endings: the last time she crawled, the last time she spoke in a pure raw sound unsculpted into the words of others, the last time she stood before the world in braids and laughed when she shouldn’t have, not knowing. Each child died before the person did, a small rehearsal for the future.
She raised her children, a
ll of them. She raised them, nurtured them, watched them love or hate or succeed or fail, gave each of them her private excesses of possibilities, observed, sometimes from afar, what they did with them, watched her own ideas wither or grow. Then she finally watched her children die, and she was jealous.
She would tell that granddaughter, she decided as she left the building, passing by the protestors. Yet it was this granddaughter, of all of her articulate descendants, who announced online to the universe:
My grandmother just told us she can’t sign off on her will because she CAN’T DIE. #crazyoldlady
Oh child, she thought, you have no idea just how crazy I am.
CHAPTER
2
THE INVENTION
OF REGRET
. . .
She didn’t know exactly when she had first felt the sensation of regret. It was a physical sensation, a shudder that began deep in the stomach and traveled up through the throat; it was distinct from remorse, which one felt first in the throat and only later in the gut. Yet it was regret that she couldn’t handle. She did anything she could to avoid it—including the initial bargain, the one that began everything. And now this one.
Meet me in twenty minutes, the text on her phone read. You know where.
She knew, of course. No, she tapped back. Not now.
Now, the text replied.
This was the problem, always. And all this time she had never found a way out. More words appeared on the phone’s screen, unbidden: Unless you want me to come to you.
No thank you, she responded. Wait for me. I’ll come. She always did.
HE HAD FOUND HER coming out of the office one cold evening when she had been working alone. Mort was dead three years already, the business was just beginning to fail, and she was thinking about leaving. But she couldn’t leave just then, just when everyone and everything was poised at the edge of ruin; she couldn’t do that to them. She would wait another year or two or three, she’d thought—just until the business got a bit more stable, just until she could convince Rocky, her youngest son (her youngest son, ha), to stop with the stupid digital currency, “mining” digital currency, panning for digital gold. Rocky was a terror, a whirlwind of wonder and anguish that had started the day he was born and would clearly only stop with his death. She never understood her children, not ever, not even her very first son. He had been the first one to replace the real with the virtual, the one who turned two thousand years of otherworldly power into a metaphor. What it came down to was that children were stupid. She had been stupid too, of course, once. But only once.
All this clouded her mind as she emerged from the building that cold evening and bumped into him—actually bumped into his ramrod-straight body, torso to torso, so that he caught her in his arms. Cities forced intimacy on everyone, the same way they had for centuries; the ancient solution was to avoid eye contact. Flustered, she mumbled excuses and began to push by, just as she had that first time, long ago, so long ago that it was sometimes the only thing she could remember. He liked to lie in wait for her. It was how they first met.
“Excuse me, sir, pardon an old lady,” she said with a smile, talking to a stranger. She enjoyed playing the old lady card, she had noticed over the last few versions. Youth was no doubt wasted on the young, but only she knew how much of old age was wasted on those near death. The man blocking her way was young, she noted, or if not young, then at least younger than her children. It was safe to assume he was stupid.
The man rudely stepped right into her path, just as she turned around after locking the door. People were rude, she had learned that, and she’d be a fool to be any more polite than anyone else. The man was only slightly taller than she was, she saw in that half-second glance—very short for a man these days, though she remembered when men were like that. Even a tall man like her father would have been dwarfed by the giants people had recently become. The man blocking her path had olive skin like hers, a dark beard, a long dark coat over his narrow body, and an old-fashioned hat on his head. A nobody. She tried to duck out of his way.
The man stepped toward her instead of away from her. “Madam, I pardon everyone, old and young,” he announced, with an accent she couldn’t place. “I am the master of forgiveness.”
This city really was full of crazy people. Her grandchildren knew it better than she did. She glanced at the man’s face again, still trying to push past. Then she saw his eyes, green eyes in his tan-skinned face—Phoenician eyes, her mother had called them. That wild boy; do you know where he comes from? His mother worked on the docks before she came here. You think he knows who his father is? Ha! Don’t you dare believe a word he says! He looked at her and the wind rushed from her lungs.
“Elazar,” she whispered.
“Rachel.” He said her name not as her children and grandchildren did, but with its guttural intact, the name her father had given her. He said her name again and again, an incantation. “Rachel, Rachel—”
He was reaching for her, but she held her body rigid, unwilling to lean toward him. She stepped back toward the door and tried to keep her eyes on the ground. But she couldn’t help looking.
“How did you find me?” she finally asked.
He laughed. “Are you really asking me that? It’s always a matter of time.”
Cold air blew across her face. It had taken longer than usual this time, and that had made it harder, the waiting. During the waiting—years and years of waiting—she had found herself wanting him to come. To get it over with, she told herself, to leave less to endure until the next time, the next stretch of freedom. But now that he was before her, she knew she hadn’t wanted to get it over with. She had wanted him here.
“No one’s hard to find anymore,” he said. “Not even you. ‘Zakkai Gemstones.’ You hung the name right on the wall.” He laughed again. Her legs shook. “I remember how much you cared about names. We last said goodbye at Azaria’s bookshop. You named that one too.”
She pressed her hands against the brick wall behind her, and glanced past his shoulder, feeling her eyes filling with tears. Dusk had fallen, and cars blinked their headlights on as an old man hailed a cab around the corner. The world was so large, she thought. How could it contain only the two of them, as if there were no one else? She thought back again to that very first regret, turned the thought in her mind like a thumbscrew, twisting her soul. “Look at you, the big American,” he was saying. He had shifted to the language they both remembered. “You did the right thing, Rachel. Married the right man this time, it seems. He must have been kind, to let you name the business yourself. You deserved someone kind.”
She breathed in, her lips tight. He deserved nothing, she reminded herself, as she always reminded herself. Worse, there was no future in this. She already knew it. Don’t touch him, she told herself. How could she make the same mistake again and again and again? But he looked at her now with his eyebrows raised, humbled. He had come home.
“Where were you?” she asked.
He smiled. “I’m happy to tell you everything, Rachel. But not here. Come with me. There’s a place where we can talk.”
“My granddaughter is expecting me in an hour,” she mumbled.
He laughed out loud. He liked to laugh; she had noticed that about him from the beginning. “Come now, or don’t come now. If you don’t come now, I’ll wait for you until you do. Mai nafka mina?” he asked. It was a legal term, the sort of thing her very first son would say: What practical difference does it make? Inside the question was an urge to make things matter, not in the abstract but in this world, now. The question still scared her. “Waiting for you is one of my greatest pleasures, Rachel. It always has been,” Elazar said softly. “You’re the only thing worth waiting for. And I have all the time in the world.”
He put out his hand to her. To her eternal regret, she took it.
SHE WAS GRATEFUL WHEN he didn’t lead her to his apartment (did he have one? did it matter?) but to the Metropolitan Museum. She went inside w
ith him, immune now to grandiose fake classical columns and other stupidities that had galled her long ago. She was relieved when he walked her to the Egyptian galleries, sitting down with her on a bench in a quiet room surrounded by glass cases of papyri and broken idols.
“You would laugh at me, but I’ve begun to really like museums,” he said, dropping English words between the others. Languages came quickly to him; he put them on and took them off like clothes. The gallery was empty, dim and carpeted, warmed by the intimacy of his voice. “Not all of them. Actually not most of them. I just like these museums of ancient times. Real ancient times. It’s nice to be in a place you don’t remember. This must be how other people feel all the time, every time they walk into an old building or see a little piece of something from before they were born. No memories, no grief. Can you imagine? It’s like a pleasant dream.”
“I’ve often thought that,” she said, her voice softer than she expected. She looked around the room and thought of taking her children, the recent children, to these same galleries years ago. She remembered that unexpected sense of comfort in standing among these ruins, an inexpressible relief that she couldn’t explain even to herself. Naturally Elazar understood it immediately. He always noticed patterns, and their absence. He used to open up her father’s scrolls in front of her, noting oddities. Why did he write here that there were seven of every clean animal in the ark, but in the previous column he wrote that there were only two? A simple mistake like that, can’t he change it? Tell him we want a corrected copy. She would read over his shoulder, follow, argue. You want it to be perfect, but that’s not the point, she would insist, but still she brought the scrolls and questions back to her father. It’s not my job to change it, her father would mutter—though she knew he did change things sometimes, when he felt he had to. And not his either. Go tell him to learn from his own father. He’s inheriting a far more important job than mine. Her father was right about that, of course: deeply, profoundly right. Until he wasn’t. And then, sometimes, she would change the scrolls herself.
