Secondhand Sorcery

“You do know this is coincidence, right? I’m not denying that it’s an interesting coincidence, and you can call it fate if you want, but the man is Jewish. This is just the northern part of his country. He’s not trying to send you any kind of message with this.”

“I know,” Nadia said into her headset, feeling free and easy. A lively Mediterranean landscape flashed by her window as the helicopter thumped its way across Israeli airspace. No more snow or frigid mountain air, but new grass and evergreen trees, small towns nestled between great hills and rocky cliffs. Outside, the air would be cool but not cold.

The inside of the helicopter was a bit crowded, with Ruslan and Fatima squeezed in next to Nadia on one long bench and Kemal and Keisha facing them from the other side. Ruslan had the other window, but was nervously declining to look out of it; Fatima was plainly airsick, Kemal didn’t look much better, and Keisha had been fretting about something all day and trying poorly to hide it. Nadia was only at her ordinary level of pain now—which was still quite bad, but it wouldn’t have to stay that way much longer. For once she was the most cheerful member of the group.

“Why’s this guy here, anyway?” Ruslan asked. “There don’t seem to be many people to help.”

“There’s unrest in Syria and Lebanon,” Keisha said, “parts of it longstanding internal issues, parts of it due to their conflicts with Israel, and parts of it new trouble spilling over from the chaos in Turkey. He can’t defend himself like you, and both countries have sizable movements in them offering rewards for his death—all officially disavowed, but ultimately with government funding—so he stays near the border, where he can hop over to fix damage, or where injured people can slip discreetly in to see him.”

She smiled at Nadia. “That just so happens to put him near the home turf of the other famous Jewish miracle worker. I’m sure somebody has pointed out the coincidence to him before. From what Dr. Gus tells me, he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, so I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it if I were you.”

“I will be polite,” Nadia promised. “Or discreet, or whatever you want. Is that the Sea of Galilee?”

“We’re not doing an airborne pilgrimage here,” said Fatima through her teeth.

“I can look out the window, can’t I?” Nadia teased. “Am I rocking the chopper?” Confession Saturday, an actual divine liturgy—in Greek, but still!—yesterday, and now she was minutes away from being able to walk and to stop hurting and to take a shower standing up without strange women hauling her around like a bag of potatoes … she was giddy, almost delirious. She was almost afraid for the flight to end, for normal life to resume with all its risks and disappointments.

As if she could hear her thoughts, Keisha leaned forward and said, “Try and remember, he hasn’t promised to heal you, only to see you and hear what you have to say. You’re still going to have to persuade him. He takes his responsibilities very seriously. Control yourself.”

“I will.” She was dressed very conservatively, in traditional Cypriot style: a long red skirt, white blouse and black jacket with matching black hair cover. Just purchased yesterday, and immaculate. Fatima and Ruslan were got up in the same way, since it wasn’t clear if he would want to talk to them too. It wouldn’t hurt to make a good impression of the whole group.

The airport was a small one, not intended for international traffic. Their chopper touched down on an apparently random patch of bare and unmarked concrete. It belatedly occurred to Nadia that they had been flying fairly low, and she wondered if the pilot had been worried about surface-to-air missiles. Too late to bother over that now.

A man in military uniform was trundling out a wheelchair even before the rotors stopped spinning, sparing Nadia the indignity of being carried around. Fatima walked beside her as Kemal pushed. “You know, this is a really stupid amount of effort for something we could have done ourselves in less than a minute, right where we were.”

“We’re not discussing that,” Nadia said with a tight smile. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Keisha fix her sister with an evil look. Nadia wished she wouldn’t—she was more than capable of standing up for herself—but she could tolerate an overprotective adult. They’d always had the opposite problem before.

The airport facilities were obviously not currently in use; the only people inside were military, a few of them in tactical gear and bearing rifles. They all looked up at their little entourage, and the man who’d brought her wheelchair out led them across the passengers’ waiting area to door marked simply “Office,” with a similarly short label in Hebrew underneath. The windows beside it were shuttered and dark. When they got there the man took control of the chair from Kemal and said his first words since their arrival: “The rest of you will stay here.” He opened the door just enough to wheel her inside, then shut it behind her, leaving her in the dark.

Two seconds passed, then there was a click, and a green-shaded banker’s lamp came on, revealing a young man in a short-sleeved button-up sky-blue shirt. His hair was dark and quite short, with sideburns coming down to the ends of his ears but his jaw clean-shaven, and he was wearing glasses and a very small black cap on top of his head. It would have been invisible in the limited light, if not for the gold trim on it. He rested his crossed arms on the desk between them as he looked her over. He was perhaps a little older than Keisha, and he would have been reasonably good-looking if he hadn’t been frowning like that.

“I usually keep a very tight schedule,” he told her. He had only a slight accent. “These are special circumstances. All the same, I’d appreciate it if we didn’t waste time. Tell me about yourself, please.”

“My name is Nadia, sir. May I have yours?”

“Why would you want it? I won’t be seeing you again after this. And I already know yours. What I want to know is who you really are, and whether I can justly treat you.”

“I don’t know where to begin. I was born in Kazakhstan—“

“Irrelevant. Please. Every moment I spend talking to you is a moment stolen from my other work. Obviously you are not a grown adult, though morally adult in the halakhic sense. Given your circumstances it would not be reasonable to hold you accountable for everything you have done to date. The future is another matter. Suppose I heal you; what are you going to do with the life I return to you?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Then you had better find out, or decide, very quickly. It’s an important question, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Only I hadn’t expected this interview to go this way. Are you trying to decide if the good I do in the future will outweigh the bad I’ve done already?”

“No. Let’s be clear: I am not responsible for what you do with your life. Nor is it lawful for me to weigh your life against others’ in a scale. To save a single life is to save the whole world. That is written—that is not up for debate. It is obviously just, in itself, to heal an innocent person. But there are complicating factors at work here, beginning with whether you would be an imminent threat to others once healed, in which case the laws governing the rodef, the pursuer, might apply.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. If you want to know what I’ve done: I killed men when I first got my familiar, so that I could escape. I might have gone too far because I didn’t know how to handle her yet. I killed men on a mission into Istanbul, trying to take it back from Russia. I killed my adopted father when he was trying to kill me. I attacked several Greek policemen … do you want the whole list? It’s very long.” And it did seem unfair to have to confess twice.

“I have it already, or most of it. Everything that is known by your American friends. I insisted on it as a condition of seeing you. Do you feel you could have prevented any of those, or done less harm?”

“I was forced to do a lot of it to save my own life. I don’t know what Israeli law says about that.”

“I am indifferent—or nearly so—to the laws of the modern state of Israel. I have disregarded them before and will do so again when my conscience and the higher law so compel me. I hope you know the saying: ‘Do not trust in princes, in the son of man.’”

“’There is no salvation in them,’” she completed.

“Very good,” he said, though he didn’t quite smile.

“I am Russian. We have a long history of very untrustworthy princes.”

“That would probably be why you keep rising up and killing them. But we digress. As present events demonstrate, nations come and go. When I first obtained my Metakken, I was ordered to use his abilities to heal only Israeli citizens, or foreign nationals who had earned the privilege through good behavior towards us, as a reward. I was a symbol of my country, not to be risked on people who sent rockets over our borders.

“I complied for a time, uneasily, but my first sight of a dead child convinced me I had done wrong. From that time on I have come and gone as seemed best, healing without prejudice. The authorities called me insubordinate. I called them insubordinate in return. They had no business telling me to disregard the decrees of the Most High. Those are the laws which concern me.”

“I think I agree. But we have different laws.”

“Allowances can be made. Continue, please.”

“What can I tell you, to convince you I am not an immoral person? Did you know I could have had my brother heal me with Kizil Khan, and refused?”

“I have heard, yes. That would argue in your favor. Arguing against would be your nearly triple-digit body count. Some were at times of war when your overall cause was obviously just, others when you might have reasonably believed as much. Some might have been legitimate self-defense, as in the case of your so-called father.”

“So … will you heal me?” She’d come expecting something closer to a doctor’s visit, and didn’t like the feeling that she was on trial for her life.

“I am still not totally decided—which is why I wanted to meet you. These questions are not easy even for an adult to answer, and you have had to answer them in haste, while still quite young, and under the influence of an emissant. Helpfully, our law has precedents related to the mythical dybbuk, whose name is sometimes used to refer to emissants today—though I dislike the comparison.”

For a man who’d said he was in such a hurry, he did like to talk. Nadia could feel her pain medications starting to wear off, and only raised her eyebrows for fear that she would be rude if she talked.

He seemed to get the message anyway. “Let’s approach this from another angle,” he said, and pulled a fat stack of large, glossy color photographs from a drawer in his desk. They were from a distance, but Nadia recognized them at once, and her heart sank. “These were taken in various places in Syria, with one incursion very close to the Golan Heights.”

She looked over the colorful prints. Fire in the sky, forks of lightning, and a grainy close-up of a shiny bauble of rainbow glass, like a flying lamp. She could almost hear the obnoxious music. “I’m surprised Yuri is still alive.”

“Alive, and very active. I hope I will not offend you when I say that I would emphatically not agree to heal him. He has shed far more blood than you, and with much less justification.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “And I’m not offended. Yuri is … difficult. Very difficult. I hope I am not responsible for him, though.”

“Absolutely not. He is responsible for his own actions, assuming his emissant has left him sane. I have already healed a large number of his victims, and seen many more who were beyond my help. Metakken can heal, restore, and rebuild any number of things, but he cannot keep pace with your brother’s capacity for ruin. I can reconstruct entire devastated neighborhoods in seconds, complete with all their inhabitants who have not actually died, and while I’m getting there and getting out your brother has ravaged an area twice as large somewhere else. I hope you can understand how this vexes.”

“So, what? Are you proposing a trade? My life for my Yuri’s?”

“If I were, would you take it?”

For a long time she stared at the photographs. All three were above cities, or what had once been cities. Pretty Shum-Shum, making his beautiful sparkly lights and burning men alive. Making more Guryevs, more cities of the dead. “No,” she said. “I would not.”

The man’s expression didn’t change. “Why not?”

“I don’t deny that Yuri … deserves death. He is my brother, and I think I still love him, but if the death penalty can ever be fair, he has earned it. It wouldn’t be fair to say that my love for him, or for who he used to be, is more important than all the people he killed, and will go on to kill if he isn’t stopped. But you don’t have any right to ask me to trade like that. I’m not going to buy my life with his. Especially not after what you said, about saving one life and saving the world.”

“Very good,” the man said, in the exact same inflection he had used for her completing the psalm. Again, he didn’t quite smile. “But I will not ask you to kill him. Not necessarily. Only to stop him, as I cannot. You know that, I hope? Metakken can do nothing to destroy.”

“Yes, I have heard. So it is a deal, after all? Just promise to take him off your hands, and you will heal me?” She saw no reason she shouldn’t take it—she would have wanted to see Yuri again anyway, and of course to stop him—but it still felt disappointing somehow, to have it put this way.

“No. I do not make deals. This is a question of repentance. It is very easy for you to say you mean well, and to think you mean well. It is harder to actually mean it. Part of repentance is repairing the evil done by your sin, and to act counter to it in the future. If I heal you, I expect you to confront your brother and stop him. I do not say to kill him; if you can stop him without violence, that is acceptable. But I want you to be prepared for all necessities.”

“Even killing him?”

“If that is needful? Yes. This is not a deal. It would be more accurate to call it a test. How far are you willing to go, to atone?”

She kept looking at the photographs. “I have never been able to control my brother before; he’s older than me, and he was stubborn even before he was infected with Shum-Shum. I cannot promise anything for my siblings, or for Keisha and the others. And I also have responsibilities to the people in Turkey I agreed to defend. But, with all that said … I will confront my brother, and do what I can to stop whatever he is doing. I would have to do that anyway, now that I know what he is up to.”

“Very good,” he said for the third time, but now he smiled. “And I would have wanted you to do that anyway, but it will make my government—my so-called masters—a little more tolerant of my trips into Syria. It might be that they now regret not paying to make more emissors after me. As I understand it, they were more worried at the time that my successor would be as willful as I am, and dangerous as well.”

“I have heard that, yes,” she told him, trying to be patient.

He frowned. “But I am standing in my neighbor’s blood, aren’t I? Is that what you’re thinking? Or sitting and talking in my neighbor’s blood, which is arguably worse. That’s fair.”

Light, brilliant light, divine and all-encompassing. Light too bright to see or comprehend, light in every direction. A world, a universe, a universe of universes of light. Too much. The light retreated, retracted, so suddenly she could not see the moment of its departure, only the burst of sparks that remained. The sparks fell in the darkness, scattered and dimmed, became entombed in vessels of earth and clay, invisible. Only by peering close could she see the light within.

Mornings in the kibbutz, waking in the children’s house. Seventeen children identically dressed, living, learning, and working in unison. An entire world, equal in dress and dignity, cheerful but tedious and confined. Too small for a hot spirit.

Anger, resentment; drifting, then running, away. Drink and disillusion, nights on the streets. Begging, beatings, draft officers. Jail. The Rebbe and his words of peace from beyond the bars. Confusion, fear, unhappy acceptance. Better than the alternative.

The Yeshiva. Black clothes and long hair. Old chains, new forms. Outward structure, inward void. No place for the light to shine. Long talks with the Rebbe. A parting of ways, a disquiet heart. Only one place left to go.

The army, the barracks. Another place, another time, a cause he cannot believe in. A late night on the road, the first steps of a deserter. A phone by the roadside. A call to the Rebbe. Words in the dark, an answer revealed, the words to shape the universe. A walk back to barracks, contented.

There is no light? Make it. A thousand thousand mitzvot shine in the dark, and illuminate the empty cosmos. Light answers light, and multiplies, and all creation shines in unison. Then fades, and leaves Nadia back in the abandoned office.

A series of wooden cogs appeared in outline on the smooth wooden surface of the desk, separating and popping out one after the other and rolling down to fall to the floor. Behind the man a dusty file cabinet peeled apart, spooling out countless threads of graceful pliant steel that shone like gossamer silk. The lamp twisted and flicked apart, casting its green shade in resplendent emerald shards, its body chopped in hoops of sturdy gold like wedding rings. Both their chairs fell apart beneath them to yield their parts to the whole, and without thought or question both of them stood to see the master make himself.

Cog met cog, uniting in common purpose on the floor to make an engine of power, clanking its naked heartbeat. Rings of gold bound bones of chrome pipe, flexing and twisting as the wooden heart learned its business. The steel silk embraced them, and the body was sheathed in smooth flesh. The giant pushed himself to his feet, impossibly vast in the puny space, and looked at his new hands.

Life pulsed through him, and he was metal no more, but a living soul with a skin of warm brown oak. He flexed his fingers, and a crown of luscious leaves came tumbling down from his head, wrapping his body in twining vines heavy with fruit. Emerald eyes glinted, promising that the inner light of creation still lived inside him. But still Nadia, standing in reverent silence, could hear the clunk and tick of humble wooden gears.

Then the eyes flashed again, impossibly bright, and Metakken the Reformer was gone, and the office was exactly as it was before, except that Nadia stood healthy and whole, wishing she had more space to get the wheelchair out of her way.