Servant of the Bones Read Online Free PDF

That was the way with the Babylonians, you know, to bawl out the god fiercely if things didn’t go right. They would yelland scream at their personal gods: ‘Who worships you like I do! Why don’t you grant my wishes! Who else would pour out these libations for you!’ ”
    Azriel laughed again. I was considering this whole question which was not unfamiliar to me as a historian naturally. But I laughed too.
    “Times haven’t changed that much, I don’t really think,” I said. “Catholics can get very angry with their saints when the saints don’t get results. And I think once in Naples, when a local saint refused to work a yearly miracle, people stood up in the church and yelled ‘You pig of a saint!’ But how deep do these convictions go?”
    “There’s an alliance there,” Azriel answered. “You know, there are several layers to that alliance. Or shall I say, the alliance is a braid of many strands. And the truth lies in this: the gods need us! Marduk needed…” He stopped again. He looked suddenly utterly forlorn. He looked at the fire.
    “He needed you?”
    “Well, he wanted my company,” said Azriel. “I can’t say he needed me. He had all of Babylon. But these feelings, they are impossibly complex.” He looked at me. “Where are the bones of your father?” he asked.
    “Wherever the Nazis buried them in Poland,” I said, “or in the wind if they were burnt.”
    He looked heart stricken at these words.
    “You know I’m speaking of our World War II and the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jews, don’t you?”
    “Yes, yes, I know so very much about it, only to hear that your father and mother were lost to it, it hurts my heart, and it makes my question pointless. I meant only to point out to you that you probably have superstitions about your parents, that’s all, that you wouldn’t disturb their bones.”
    “I have such superstitions,” I said. “I have them about photographs of my parents. I won’t let anything happen to them, and when I do lose one of them, it’s a deep sin to me that I did it, as if I insulted my ancestor and my tribe.”
    “Ah,” said Azriel, “that’s what I was talking about. And I want to show you something. Where is my coat?”
    He got up from the hearth, found the big double-mantled coat, and took out of the inside pocket a small plastic packet. “This plastic, you know, I rather love it.”
    “Yes,” I said, watching him as he came back to the fire, sank down on the chair, and opened the packet. “I dare say all the world loves plastic, but why do you?”
    “Because it keeps things clean and pure,” he said looking up at me, and then he handed me a picture of what looked like Gregory Belkin. But it wasn’t. This man had the long beard and forelocks and the silk black hat of the Hasidim. I was puzzled.
    He didn’t explain the picture.
    “I was made to destroy,” he said, “and you remember, don’t you, the beautiful Hebrew word before so many of the old Psalms, telling us to sing it to that certain melody: ‘Do Not Destroy.’ ”
    I had to think.
    “Come on, Jonathan, you know,” he said.
    “Altashheth!” I said. “ ‘Do Not Destroy.’ ”
    He smiled and his eyes filled with tears. He put back with shaking hands the picture and he laid the plastic packet aside on the small footstool between our chairs, far enough away from the fire for it not to be hurt, and then he looked again at the flames.
    I felt the most sudden overwhelming emotion. I couldn’t talk. It wasn’t only that we had mentioned my mother and father, killed in Poland by the Nazis. It wasn’t only that he had reminded me of the mad plot of Gregory Belkin which had come perilously close to success; it wasn’t only his beauty, or that we were together, or that I was speaking with a spirit. I don’t know what it was.
    I thought of Ivan in
The Brothers Karamazov
and I thought, Is this my dream? I am dying actually, the room’s filling with snow, and I’m dying,