Servant of the Bones (7 page)

“Ah, you are the rare thing, Jonathan Ben Isaac,” he said.

“Not really, I’m a teacher and a happy man myself. I have a wife and children who love me. I’m not very special.”

“Ah, but you are a good man who will talk to someone who is evil! That is what is rare. The Rebbe of the Hasidim, he turned his back on me!” He laughed suddenly, a deep bitter laugh. “He was too good to talk to the Servant of the Bones.”

I smiled. “We are all Jews, and there are Jews, and there are Jews.”

“Yes, and now Israelis, who would be Maccabees! And there are Hasidim.”

“And other Orthodox, and some ‘reformed,’ and so on it goes. Let’s go back to your time. You were a big and happy family.”

“Yes, true, and it was regular—I was explaining—it was regular for the rich Hebrews to work at the palace as I said, my father worked there too, and many of my cousins. We were scribes, but also merchants, merchants of jewels, silks, silver, and books. My father’s gift in trade was choosing the very finest vessels for the King’s table and for the Table of the Gods in Marduk’s temple and for Marduk himself.

“Now at the time, the temple was full of chapels, and every day a meal was set out for each deity, including Marduk, so the temple had a huge stock of gold and silver vessels for this. And my father was the one who put aside those vessels not fit.

“I went down with him to the docks all the time to meet the ships coming in from the sea, with the finest new work from Greece or Egypt, and I learned from him how to judge the carving on a goblet, and how to know the heaviest and finest mixture of gold. I learned to know a true ruby or diamond and pearls—pearls, I loved the pearls, we dealt in pearls of all kinds, we didn’t call them pearls, you know, we called them eyes of the sea.

“This is how we made our living—in the marketplace and in the temple and in the palace.

“My family had stalls all through the marketplace where they dealt in gems of all kinds, in honey, and in cloth dyed purple and blue, the finest of all silk and linen, and they sold the incense too, though they sold it to idolaters who would burn this incense for Nabu and Ishtar, and for Marduk, of course.

“But it was our living, it was our source of power, it was our way of staying together, of being strong so that one day we could go home. It was as important as the copying of the Sacred Books.”

“It’s an old tale,” I said.

“This whole trade, by the way, gave to my own house a sumptuous quality that it might not have had, had we been
camel breeders. And that you must understand because the richness around us colored my father’s values as much as mine.

“What I mean is, not only did we make money, but the house was always full of merchandise passing through. You know. Here would be a magnificent cedar statue of the goddess Ishtar just come from Dilmun, and my uncle would keep it at home for a week or two, gracing the living room, before the sale was made. The place was full of beautiful footstools, delicate furniture from Egypt, the fine black and red urns and pots of the Greeks, and just about anything portable and ornamental and lovely to behold.”

“You grew up on beauty, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Azriel said. “I did. I really did. And I grew up, for all my smart talking and carrying on and flirting with Marduk, I grew up with love. My father’s love. The love of my brothers. My sisters. The love of my uncles even. Even my deaf uncle. Even once the prophet Azarel said to me, ‘Yahweh looks at you with love.’ So did the old witch Asenath. Ah, such love.”

He had come to a natural pause. He sat there, resplendent in the red velvet, hair glossy and natural, and the pure skin of his young man’s cheeks as soft as a girl’s I suppose. I must be getting old. Because young men look to me now as beautiful as girls. Not that I desire them. It’s only that life itself is lush.

He was confused. In pain. I hesitated to press him. Then he parted his lips, only to be quiet.

W
hat was it like, roaming in the temple? The palace?” I asked. “The beautiful house, I can envision. But the palace, was the palace plated in gold? Was the temple?”

He didn’t respond.

“Give me pictures, Azriel. Take your time by means of images. The temple, will you tell me what that was like?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was a house of gems and gold. It was a world of the deep vibrant gleam of the precious, of lovely scents and the sounds of harps, and pipes playing; it was a world for the bare feet to walk on smooth tiles that were themselves cut in the shapes of flowers.” He smiled.

“And,” he said, “it was a hell of a lot more fun than you might think. Not all that solemn. The two buildings were huge, of course, you know Nebuchadnezzar built the palace to the full glory of the past, or so he thought, and greatly expanded the private gardens; and the temple was the great building known as Esagila, and behind the building itself stood the big ziggurat, Etemenanki, with its stairway to heaven, and then its ramps going up to the very topmost temple of my great and favorite smiling god.

“The temple and the palace were full of locked and sealed doors. Some of these seals had not been broken in a hundred years. And of course, as you probably know, we had contracts made in this way too…in that a contract would be written out on a clay tablet, dried, and then enclosed in a clay envelope with the same words on it, which was then dried, so that one could not get to the original tablet inside without breaking the
envelope. So if some corrupt individual had made a change on the outer envelope, the sealed inside tablet would tell the truth.

“There was a lot of that at court, people bringing in contracts, breaking open the envelopes, discovering some wily bastard had made a change in the contract, and the King and his advisors and wise men passing judgment. I never followed out any condemned man to see him executed. As you said, I grew up on beauty.

“In the streets of Babylon I never saw the hungry. I never saw a wretched slave. Babylon was the city people dreamed of living in; everyone was happy in Babylon and under the protection of the King.

“But to return to your question. One could roam in the temple. One could just roam. I could creep in my fine jeweled slippers into the chapels where the other gods were—Nabu and Ishtar and any god or goddess who had been brought from another city for sanctuary.

“You know, that was happening. Cyrus the Persian was on the march most definitely, taking the Greek cities along the coast one after another. And so from all over Babylonia, frightened priests were sending their gods to us for protection, to the great gateway, and we had set up these visiting deities in chapels and these chapels were full of twinkling light.

“This fear for the god, that the enemy would get him, it was very real. Marduk himself had for two hundred years been a prisoner in another city, stolen and taken there, and it had been a great day for Babylon, long before my birth, when Marduk had been recovered and had been brought home.”

“Did he ever tell you about it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I didn’t ask him. We’ll come to such things…

“As I was saying, I liked roaming about the temple. I took messages to the priests; I waited at table when Belshazzar dined, and I made friends of all the palace crowd, you might say, the eunuchs, the temple slaves, the other pages, and some of the temple prostitutes who were, of course, beautiful women.

“Now all of this work I did in the temple and the palace,
there was a Babylonian point to it. The government had a sensible policy. When rich hostages like us, rich deportees, were brought in not only to enhance the culture, young men like me were always, picked out to be trained in Babylonian ways. That was so that if or when we were sent back to our own city or some distant province we would be good Babylonians, that is, skilled members of the King’s loyal service.

“There were scores of Hebrews at court.

“Nevertheless, I had uncles who went into a fury that my father and I worked at the temple, but my father and I, we would shrug our shoulders and say, ‘We don’t worship Marduk! We don’t eat with the Babylonians. We don’t eat the food that the gods have eaten.’ And a good deal of the community felt the same way as we did.

“Let me note here, this eating of food. It’s still important for the Hebrews. No? You don’t eat with heathens. You didn’t then. And you didn’t eat anything ever that had once been put before an idol. It was a big thing.

“As good Hebrews, we broke bread only with one another, and our hands were always washed carefully with ritual prayer before we took the food, and afterwards there was not one thing in our lives that was not permeated by our desire to praise Yahweh, our Lord God of Hosts.

“But we had to survive in Babylon. We had every intention of returning rich to our homeland. We had to be strong. And that meant what it has always meant to the Hebrews. You must be powerful enough to disperse without being destroyed.”

Again came one of the inevitable pauses. He leant forward and stirred the fire, as people do when they want to think, and want to have the feeling of doing something. Stirring fires can give you that feeling, especially if you aren’t drinking anything, clutching your coffee as if that were a full-time job, the way I was doing.

“You looked then exactly as you look now, didn’t you?” I said, though this was a repeat question. It was one of those soft verbal signals: God gave you all the right gifts, young man.

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted now to be smooth-faced. I think I told you. But it doesn’t seem to be in my luck.

“I came as myself this time, and I don’t know even to this moment who called me. Why now? Why has my body come back around me? Why? I don’t know.

“In the past when I was called forth by sorcerers, they made me look the way they wanted, and that could be quite horrible. Seldom if ever did they wait, or take a deep breath, to see what I might look like on my own. I would be summoned in a specific form: ‘Azriel, Servant of the Golden Bones which I hold in my hand, come forth in a blaze of fire and consume my enemies. Make of them cinders.’ That sort of chant.

“Whatever the case, in answer to your question I looked exactly the same when I died as I do now except for one salient characteristic which had been added to me before my murder, which I will recount later. I am as I died.”

“Your father, why was it a mistake to tell him about Marduk? Why? What did all that mean? What did he do to you, Azriel?”

He shook his head. “This is the hardest part for me to tell you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, but I have never told anyone, you know. I never told any master. Does God never forget? Will God deny me forever the Stairway to Heaven?”

“Azriel, let me caution you, simply as an older human being, though my soul may be newborn. Don’t be so sure of Heaven. Don’t be any more sure of the face of our god than Marduk was sure.”

“This means you believe in one and not the other?”

“This means I want to blunt your pain in the telling of what happened. I want to blunt your sense of fatality, and that you are destined for something terrible because of what others have done.”

“Wise of you,” he said. “And generous in spirit. I am a fool still in so many ways.”

“I see. I understand. Let’s go back to Babylon, shall we? Can you explain the plot? What did your father have to do with it in the end?”

“Oh, my father and I, what friends we were! He didn’t have a better friend than me, and my best friend was Marduk.

“I was the leader on our drinking jaunts, and it was he…it was only he who could have ever made me do what I did…the thing which made me the Servant of the Bones.

“Strange how it all comes together.” He fell to murmuring. He was distracted. “They choose ingredients and they blend them, because the potion won’t work unless you have everything. The priests alone, they could never have gotten him to do it. Cyrus the Persian? I trusted him as much as any tyrant. And old Nabonidus, what was his advice? He was only there out of some sort of kindness on the part of Cyrus, and cleverness. Everything with the Persian empire was cleverness. Perhaps it’s so with all empires.”

“Take your time,” I said. “Catch your breath.”

“Yes…let me give you pictures of my family. My mother died when I was young. She was very sick, and she cried that she wouldn’t live to see Yahweh lift His Face to us again and take us back to Zion. Her people had all been scribes. She herself was a scribe and at one time, I heard, had been something of a prophetess, but this had ceased when she had sons.

“My father missed her unbearably until the last day I ever knew him. He had two Gentile women and so did I; in fact, we shared the same two women most of the time, but this was not for having children or marriage, this was just for fun.

“And at home in the family my father was a hard worker at writing down the psalms and trying to get exact the words we remembered from Jeremiah over which we all argued night and day. My father seldom if ever led the prayers. But he had a beautiful voice, and I can still remember him singing the Lord’s praises.

“When we worked in the temple, it was secret between him and me that we thought all idolaters were completely crazy, and why not work for them and humor them?

“As I was explaining, we set the meal out for the god Marduk himself from time to time with the priests. I had many, many friends among the priests, and you know, it was like any group of priests; some believed it all, and some
believed nothing. But we drew the veils around the god’s table, and then afterwards we took away the food, which of course the god Marduk in his own way had actually savored and fed upon—through fragrance and through the moisture that he could feel—and we helped set up that meal for the members of the royal family, the royal hostages, and the priests and the eunuchs who would eat the god’s food, or eat at the King’s table.

“But again, as good Hebrews we didn’t eat that food ourselves. No, we would never have done that.

“We kept to the laws of Moses in every way that we could. And days ago, when I found myself pitched down into New York, and I began my journey to find the killers of Esther Belkin, when I happened upon the grandfather of Gregory Belkin, the Rebbe in Brooklyn, I saw that many of those Jews, strict as they were, had made a living in the big city of New York in
handel
as we would call it, just as we did in Babylon.