by Michele Lang
A fallen angel had built the place, but it had a distinctly Russian flavor to it. A circular drive was crowded with small, strange-looking Soviet cars, and a cat was sleeping on the hood of one that was still idling. A delicious smell wafted out from the kitchen window, and music from an old-fashioned player piano sounded tinny and far away.
Raziel wanted to carry me, but I insisted on walking through the door. The inside of the place couldn’t look less like a Quba mountain hut … wood paneled, with guns and animal heads mounted on the wall. Now I saw the source of the piano music, an automatic piano playing a tune all by itself, its keys depressing the notes as if an invisible ghost sat at the bench set carefully before it.
“Alexander the Second used to have that piano,” somebody said in Polish. “It came all the way from Moscow to here.”
I squinted into the dark, cavernous room to find the source of that little fact. I almost died for good when I saw who it was.
My guardian angel, Viktor. Before his death, he had fought as a partisan in Kraków, and afterward, unwilling to give up the fight, he had accepted the difficult, some would say hopeless, assignment of watching over me from Heaven.
But now he stood before me, wings unfurled, still an angel but standing in the darkness, in a clump of other men. I was the only female presence for what seemed like a thousand kilometers.
“Aren’t you going to get court-martialed for coming down here with me?” I asked without saying hello.
A great roar of laughter rose all around me. I bristled at their amusement; I wasn’t trying to be funny. Raziel drew closer to me, and I saw a smile tickling his lips.
It was then I knew it was somehow all right. I hadn’t offended, and these men weren’t laughing at me or my ignorance.
“I’m sorry for being so rude,” I managed to say. Humility came hard to me—much easier to be powerful and thoughtless, the fell witch of Budapest. Now I was just Magda again, not the Magda of my girlhood with latent power to unleash someday, but the scarred Magda of my adulthood, powerless and therefore more patient. Maybe even with the beginnings of wisdom starting to sprout inside of her.
“You can’t be rude to an old Hashomer fellow like me,” Viktor replied. “It’s just the idea of serving in an army of wings. It makes me happy. Brings back the old times before the war.”
“I’m glad you are happy, Viktor. You deserve nothing but happiness and peace.”
He shrugged, and I could all but see the ubiquitous cigarette smoke wreathing around his shoulders as it had when he was alive. “I gave up peace when I said I’d watch out for you here in the below,” Viktor said. “I’m not ready for peace, not yet. And I’ll be happy when that bastard Hitler is roasting in Hell forever.”
I gulped at that. Hell is not a very Jewish place, and certainly not a place contemplated at great length by witches. But even though I didn’t know much about Hell, I figured Hitler was already living it, with Asmodel his own personal torturer, invited in and welcomed by Hitler himself.
“So let’s make you happy, Viktor,” I said. “But I don’t know how much I can do about it—”
I swallowed the rest of my words in surprise. Because Raziel was none too daintily stomping on my foot to shut me up. He clearly didn’t want me speaking of my lack of magic, not now.
So I didn’t. I knew he didn’t want me to lie; Raziel never did. But he didn’t want to make a point of my weakness, either.
I could understand that. So for once I did the prudent thing, and shut my mouth. And I did my best to imitate my lovely, lively friend Eva Farkas, the one who had no magic. I just smiled at Viktor, like I was glad to see him.
And that was easy. I had grown to love my guardian angel, Mr. Viktor Mandelstam from Kraków, Poland. And it was an honor and a pleasure to see the man again, an angel entrusted by the Almighty Himself with the power and the glory of his wings.
“Thank you for being here,” I said instead of pointing out my shorn scalp or my inner lack. “You, Viktor, and everybody. I never thought an angel could walk the earth among us, not until Raziel did it.”
“This is why we laughed, Magda,” Viktor said. “We angels do it all the time.”
The thought of it stole my breath. “Of course,” I said after a minute’s thought. “I always thought that angels were far away, out of reach.”
“No,” Raziel said, his voice gentle. He took me by the elbow and led to the big, round table set up in the corner. It was covered with a checked cotton tablecloth, and held a bowl of fresh fruit and upside-down teacups. “Don’t you remember the trolley car? You were nine.”
I gasped with the sudden recollection of it. It was my first summer in Budapest. I was taking ballet classes across town, inside the Ring Road, and had only managed to convince my mother to let me go alone after many sulky tantrums and proclamations of my maturity. I think my poor mother finally gave in to teach me a lesson.
And a lesson I got, though maybe not the one she wanted me to learn. My mother had drummed in my head, “Look both ways, look both ways,” and I had.
But I only looked for carts and automobiles. The trolley ran on a separate track, and the electric trolleys were so quiet I wasn’t used to hearing them yet. I had just put the tip of my foot on the trolley track when I felt two hands pull me back roughly.
I stepped back just as the trolley whizzed past, not five centimeters from the tip of my nose. The wail of the trolley horn went off an instant after that, too late for the trolley or for me.
The hands had saved me from ending up under the trolley. I whirled around, but nobody was standing behind me. Just faraway people only now pressing into the intersection, after the trolley was already gone.
“That was you,” I said to Raziel, out of breath now, the way I had been when it had happened.
“Yes, I pulled you back, and I wasn’t gentle about it. You are not a woolgatherer, but you weren’t paying enough attention that afternoon. Budapest itself distracted you.”
I stopped to consider that afternoon so long ago in my favorite city, that little incident now forever changed by a moment’s revelation. “I thought you could not intervene in human affairs. I thought such things could get you fallen.”
“Human will is sacred,” Viktor said, his voice soft and reflective, for once. “We cannot intervene in the process of choosing. But something like this…” He trailed off and looked to Raziel to finish the thought.
“My student of angelic creed is correct,” Raziel said. “You weren’t choosing to end your life. I cannot stop you from jumping off a bridge, only try as hard as I can to recall you to life with birdsong, the sunrise, anything I can reach out for that might reach you, too. But you weren’t choosing anything that day; you were only a girl who didn’t pay enough attention.”
“But plenty of children, quite innocent, die in accidents. All the time! No human choice involved there, either. So how does that happen?”
All of the angels, fallen and active, looked uneasily at one another. “What?” I insisted. “Don’t tell me those innocents don’t have angels watching over them. Don’t tell me their angels care any bit less.”
“Not all angels are created the same,” Uzziel said. I hadn’t realized he was here until I heard his voice. “We are given the law, but the law has many interpretations. Some of us are strict, some stretch the law until it tears.”
My poor, addled, operated-on mind. I could not fathom a world so haphazardly constructed. But then I considered this place where I stood, how brutal, gorgeous, and terrifying it was, and the caprice of God’s creation began to make some sense.
“So the Fall, and the Garden,” I said under my breath. “You are telling me the angels themselves have quarreled since the beginning of things.”
Their silence only confirmed the obvious.
“So, what is this now? I thought this was a human war we fight.”
Raziel shrugged. “I think you are making too big a deal of the differences between the angels and the childre
n of men.”
I goggled then. Now, I readily admit that about many things I am a fool. But it was just dawning upon me how thoroughly I had missed the nature of the battle we fought. How deeply the dispute ran. It did not run back to Weimar Germany or to the Great War or even the war of 1870. No.
This fight was as much between Raziel and Asmodel as it was between Hitler and Stalin. More. Hitler and Stalin were mere gnats, as I had once observed to Asmodel. Raziel, Asmodel, Uzziel—they had battled one another, over deep and bloody ground, for centuries.
I stole a glance at Viktor. He had been an ordinary mortal, no adept with magic, no werewolf or vampire or hob or fairy, and yet here he was, wings tucked behind him but winged nevertheless. I took a sharp intake of breath.
“I keep thinking the angels and the people, the vampires and the werewolves…” My voice trailed off as the sewn-up incision on the top of my head began to throb.
“From the other side, things look very different,” Viktor began. “It is understandable to me how you look at things. Look, I was a socialist, I didn’t care what happened after my death. The fight for my people was all that mattered.
“But who are ‘my people’?” Viktor continued. “I thought the magicals were the enemy. The angels, remote or perhaps mythical. But I was wrong, Lazarus. Terribly, tragically, wrong.
“You are made a certain way,” Viktor continued. “All of us are made a certain way. But we are all the same—in that we are made.”
I rubbed at my eyes, drowsy with headache. “So you’re saying it’s all the choices we make, our wills, that matter? Whether we have wings or fangs isn’t important?”
Viktor, damn his wings, didn’t answer me—angels have an annoying tendency to just smile and nod instead of telling us ignorant humans how the world really works. But his smile said volumes. His smile said, “What does it matter, Magdalena? Just choose. You are going to die after all, sooner or later but for good, one day. How you decide to live before that is up to you.”
“But aren’t you breaking your angelic vows by coming here?” I asked. “Didn’t Raziel break his vows by coming back to Earth after Asmodel destroyed him?”
I spoke to Viktor, but my words were meant for my husband. He had assured me a thousand times he had decided to come for his own sake, not mine. That love demanded such a sacrifice, and that he gladly made it, took it as a joy and a badge of honor to lose his wings to stand with me and Gisele and the rest of us blindly fighting for our lives here in the world.
So it was Raziel who replied to me. “My love, the battle is not between the angels and the Fallen Ones. When I said I walked Asmodel’s path I wasn’t kidding. But we keep choosing, even after the first choice is made. We took on free will, the gift given to the children of Eve. We keep choosing. And it is the small choices that make the biggest impact in the end.
“It was my choice, to pull you out of the path of the trolley, that led to me standing here. I fell to earth that day, not the day I asked to return and was granted that gift.”
I sat down, my head hurting like the blazes. I shrugged off the heavy mink coat, though the dacha was freezing. “I am too stupid now to follow you, my dear. I’ve been stupid ever since I said good-bye to Gisele. Not the day she was killed, either. The day I left her behind in Keleti Station and left Budapest to hunt the Book. Ever since I made that choice, I’ve been confused and wrong and full of bad decisions.”
Viktor laughed and I could smell cigarette smoke, though I did not see a burning ember in his hand. “Welcome to the world, Magdalena Lazarus. The tragedy of humanity is not that we make so many terrible choices. It’s that we don’t ever learn, or even realize when the choice is made.”
So Viktor still saw it as “we.” Even his wings did not separate him from our mad race of fools.
“We’re all confused and wandering,” Uzziel said. “It is not the province of mortal man alone. All creatures who choose must do so in ignorance.”
“We don’t know what will happen as a result,” Raziel cut in. “So. I choose to use the gem to stop Asmodel at last. Will that turn me into a creature like him? I hope not, but I don’t know.”
He stared levelly at me, that serene, steady expression of his, so beloved and infuriating, and I just loved him, Raziel, loved him in that moment like I never had before. Because I had never understood how much he was like me, not until that moment. Like me, but so much more patient, and stronger, and less tossed by fury and grief.
“I won’t let you get like him,” I said. “Stupid mortal that I am, I believe there’s a chance you won’t. Because unlike Asmodel, you think and weigh, and you agree to be wrong when you are wrong. You can bear the consequences of your choice. He won’t.”
“So who is the biggest rebel, then?” Raziel said, a laugh hidden in his words. “Asmodel retains the angelic trait of distance from living reality. I have given all that celestial knowing away. If you’re stupid, my love, I’m stupider. You have grown up in the world of mortals. I am just starting to understand why it is so deucedly difficult to make any choice at all, much less the correct one.”
“This is a very interesting philosophical discussion,” I said. My voice slurred, my head hurt so much. “But let’s say what we really mean. You mean to take your gem, the Heaven Sapphire, and use it to destroy the elemental creature of air, Asmodel.”
I had no power to craft spells any longer, none at all, but the air seemed to vibrate around my words nevertheless, as if I had spoken a secret invocation. “How can you possibly do it, my dear? Without working magic? I thought I was the only one to work the magic of the gem … or so you told me.”
“You had the magic to withstand the gem without being seduced to use it. That is all I ever said, mind. But now the choice is we use it now, or Churchill tries to use it—he’s not stupid, and Knox knows about the gem’s properties. Or Stalin uses it.”
“God forbid,” Uzziel said, under his breath but loud enough for me to hear.
“And I don’t think anyone else stands a chance of using it without becoming corrupted by it. Asmodel was corrupted, years ago, just by the prospect of using it. Why do you think I threw it into the ocean in the time of Noah? Asmodel.”
“So you’re going to work the magic of the gem. Why do you need an army at all then?”
“I will call the spirits the way you did at Wolf’s Lair. Because I can’t destroy a million souls at once in a battle. Nor would I want to, if I even could. Not with the gem. It works one soul at a time. And is much more dangerous, for that. For the wrong soul, corrupted, can do a great deal of damage. As we have seen in these terrible times.”
I thought of Ziyad, looked among the men of fire who had gathered in this place. But Ziyad was gone.
“Was Ziyad corrupted?” I asked. “Is that why he is missing?”
The men looked at one another, and even Viktor avoided my gaze. “He isn’t corrupted,” Raziel said. “Magduska, he made a great sacrifice, in the name of the good.”
Nobody was going to solve the mystery of Ziyad’s disappearance for me, and I was too worn out to press the question. I thought of my own mother, who had entangled her own soul to fight my battles. And I sighed, when I thought of the trouble I had caused as well as the good, in this world and in the beyond.
“What will it cost the afterworld, to fight this battle as you say?”
Viktor laughed aloud at this. “Those bastards at the Institute may have carved you up like Frankenstein’s monster, but maybe they also injected you with wisdom. You now think of the whole world, not just the bits you know. Brava, Miss Lazarus.”
I smiled at that. Even my own angel still used my maiden name. But the days of my maiden name were done.
“I’ve kept my true name a secret, to protect Raziel from magic worked by the hand against me,” I said. “But to hell with secrets. I am defenseless, after the hospital. The truth can only protect me now.”
I looked at Raziel, who only nodded. I had nothing more to hide, not fr
om my own angel certainly, and not from the people here, once winged or not, who now fought on the same side as me.
“Raziel HaMelech. Once angel, malach, now my husband. The king of the rebel angels, my sister called him. My name is now Magdalena King, Lazarus no more.”
I sighed and rested my head on my forearms, on the tablecloth. “Okay, I give up, and I’ll do what you say. But I can’t do a thing now. You all have a bite and we’ll go. But I couldn’t eat now if you held a gun to my head to make me.”
27
Churchill himself was installed at a grand dacha in Krasnaya Polyana, near the Black Sea, and once the plans had been laid by the brothers of Raziel, Knox returned from Moscow and flew with me and Raziel to meet the great man.
I feared to see him again. He was the last person I knew to see my mouse alive, and I was afraid he knew a different girl than I grieved over now. Gisele had tried to warn me that she was changed or, more precisely, that my fond mental picture of her no longer was very accurate.
Even more, I feared to show him my own diminished self. My pride, still formidable, had taken a terrible blow in the wake of the surgery I had survived. But even worse than embarrassment, I feared Churchill’s pity.
I needn’t have wasted my worries on him. I fussed and fretted for a whole three days, while I waited for the now itchy-as-hell incision on my head to heal, found some decent clothes and a clever assortment of hats that hid my chopped-off hair and the nasty-looking scars from view.
We three flew together in a Tupolev ANT-14, a tourist plane that could hold three dozen people. This time I was well bundled in furs and a cunning little black hat trimmed in ermine. No more freezing on planes for me.
Knox barely said hello, only grew still and squinted at me, as if he could look into my soul and see what was now missing. I nodded my greetings, too choked up to speak. Funny how I now associated the big, mustachioed American with Gisele, since he had taken her away from me forever. Just as Gisele had once foreseen.
Raziel stroked my gloved hands as the plane rumbled down the runway and into the sky. “All of this will soon be over, for better or for worse,” he said, his voice all but drowned out by the drone of the twin propellers beating the air outside our window.
