Servant of the Bones(161)
“Sleep, Jonathan.”
When we pulled into the driveway of my house, my wife ran out to greet us. She helped me from the back of the Jeep and my two children came, the young ones who are still at home, and they helped me upstairs to the bedroom.
I was afraid he would go now, forever. But he came with us, walking through the house as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
He kissed my wife’s forehead, he kissed each of my children.
“Your husband couldn’t stay up there. Terrible storm. He got a fever.”
“But how did you find him?” my wife asked.
“I saw the light coming from his chimney. He and I have had pleasant talks together.”
“Where are you going?” I asked him. I was sitting up against a heap of pillows.
“I don’t know,” he said. He came up to the side of the bed. I was covered with two quilts, and the little house, set to my wife’s temperature, seemed intolerably warm, but I was greatly relieved to be home.
“Don’t go, Azriel,” I said.
“Jonathan, I have to. I have to wander. I want to travel and learn. I want to see things. Now that I remember everything, I am in a position to really study, to really comprehend. Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.
“Don’t worry for me. I’m going back to the sands of Iraq to the ruins of Babylon. I have the strangest feeling, that Marduk is there, lost, with no worshipers and no shrine and no temple, and that I can find him. I don’t know. It’s probably a foolish dream. But everyone I ever loved—except you—is dead.”
“What about the Hasidim?”
“I may go to them in time, I don’t know. I’ll see whether it does good or makes fear. I only want to do good now.”
“I owe you my life, and nothing in my life will ever be the same. I’ll write your story,” I told him. “You know what you are now.”
“A son of God?” he asked. He laughed. “I don’t know. I know this. That Zurvan was right, in the end there is one Creator, somewhere beyond the light I saw the truth of this, and only love and goodness matter.
“I don’t ever want to be swallowed by anger or hate again, and I won’t be, no matter how long or hard my journey. If I can just live by that one word it will be enough. Remember? Altashheth. Do Not Destroy. That alone would be enough. Altashheth.”
He leaned down and kissed me.
“When you write my story, don’t be afraid to call me the Servant of the Bones, for that is what I still am, only not the servant of the bones of one doomed boy in Babylon, or some evil magician in a candlelighted room, or a scheming high priest, or a king dreaming of glory.
“I am the Servant of the Bones that lie in the great field that Ezekiel described, the bones of all our human brothers and sisters.”
He spoke the words of Ezekiel in Hebrew, words which the wide world knows as the following from the King James edition:
The hand of the Lord was
upon me, and carried me out
in the spirit of the Lord, and set
me down in the midst of the valley
which was full of bones,