He glanced at the tapes. I made the gesture that we were all ears, all of us, the tapes and me.
"Cyrus kept his word," he said, with a shrug. "To everyone. He kept his word to my father's family, to the Hebrews of Babylon. Those Hebrews that wanted to, and not all did, by the way, but those that wanted to, went back to Zion and rebuilt the temple and the Persians were never cruel to Palestine. Trouble came only centuries later with the Romans, as we've said. And you know too that many, many Jews stayed in Babylon and they studied there and wrote the Talmud there, and Babylon was a place of great learning until some horrible day in later centuries when it was burnt and then destroyed. But that came much later. I wanted to tell you first of the two masters who taught me everything that would be of use."
I nodded. He let a silence fall and I didn't disturb it.
I looked into the fire, and for a moment I felt a dizziness, as if the pace of life, my heart, my breath, the world itself, had gradually slowed. The fire was made of wood I hadn't brought here. The fire was full of cedar as well as oak and other wood. It was perfumed and crackling, and for a moment I thought again that perhaps I was dead, that this was some kind of mental stage. I could smell incense, and a feeling of ineffable happiness came over me. I knew I was sick. I had a pain in my chest and my throat, but these things were of no importance at all. I merely felt happy. What if I am dead, I thought.
"You're alive," he said in a soft, even voice. "May the Lord God Bless you and Keep you."
He was watching me. He said nothing.
"What is it, Azriel?" I asked.
"Only that I like you," he said. "Forgive me. I knew your books, I loved them, but I didn't know . . . that I would like you. I foresee now what my existence is going to be ... I see something of what God has planned, but never mind on that. We talk of the past, not God and the future ..."
Part II
10
AESTHETIC THEORY
Contrive a poem out of ears. Tell it so that its petals unchocolate like a brain in a jar.
Wax walnut, melting with thought.
Make it a poem almost lewdly knowledgable and make its knowledge ooze, syrup from the punched trunk.
Make it snake up to the molecule whorey and put its mouth atomic against the mouth of its core. Pull on its stem to expose its foetus. Make it have children with sleek ginger jaws, make the dogs moan when it passes, let it out of its jar, make it lie with our corpse, our chaos. Make it hungry, evil, enemy of Death. Put it on paper. Read it. Make surgery its sigh, and of such sting the scorpions call it Jehovah & Who. Make it now before you crap out. Contrive it, sperm it, stroke it, . make it efficient, make it fit, make it more poem than Poem can survive.
Stan Rice, Some Lamb 1975
Now, I begin the story of my two masters and what they taught me. And I assure you that this will be the briefest part of my tale. I am eager to get on to the present. But I want this known and written down by you, if you will be so kind. So ...
"Zurvan announced himself to me dramatically. As I told you, I had gone into the bones. I was in darkness and sleep. There was an awareness in me, and there always is, but I can't express it in words, this awareness. Perhaps I am like a tablet in my sleep upon which history is being written. But that image is too clumsy and concrete.
"I slept, I knew neither fear nor pain. I certainly didn't feel. trapped. I didn't know what I was or where. Then Zurvan called me:
" 'Azriel, Servant of the Bones, come to me, invisible, your tzelem only, fly with all your might.' I felt I had been sucked up into the sky. I flew towards the voice that called me and as before, I saw the air full of spirits, spirits in all directions, and spirits through which I moved with great determination, trying not to hurt them, yet deeply dismayed by their cries and the look of desperation in their faces.
"Some of these spirits even grabbed onto me and tried to stop me. But I had my command, and I threw them off with wondrous strength, which made me laugh and laugh.
"When I saw the city of Miletus below me, it was midday; the air was clearing of spirits as I neared the earth, or at least I was now moving at a different rate of speed and they weren't visible to me. Miletus Isy on its peninsula, the first Ionic or Greek colonial city that I had ever beheld.
It was beautiful and spacious, containing wondrous open areas and colonnades and all the perfection of Greek art even at that early age. The agora, the palaestra, the temples, the amphitheater ... it seemed all of it to be like a hand open to catch the summer breeze.
"And on three sides of it was the deep sea, filled with Greek and Phoenician and Egyptian merchant ships, and the harbor swarming with traders and with long lines of slaves in chains.
"The lower I dropped, the more I saw the beauty of it, which of course was not entirely unfamiliar to me in Babylon, but to see a city with so much splendid marble, to see it white and shining and not barricaded against the desert winds, that was the spectacle. It was a city where people went outdoors to talk and walk and gather and do the business of the day, and the heat was not unendurable, and the desert sands did not come.
"Into the house of Zurvan I came immediately and found him sitting at his desk with a letter in his hand.
"He was Persian, maybe I should say Median, black-haired, though with plenty of gray on his head and in his beard, though not too old, and with large blue eyes that looked up at me at once, perceiving my invisible shape perfectly, and then he said,
" 'Ah, make yourself flesh; you know how to do it. Do it now!'
"This was exactly the tack to take, I guess, because I took great pride in calling for a body. And I didn't really know any words then other than what had been on the tablet. But I had the body made and well made within seconds, and he sat back laughing with delight, his knee up, looking at me. I suppose I looked as I do now.
"I remember being too astonished by this lovely Greek house with its courtyard and doors open everywhere, and paintings on the wall of slender, big-eyed Greek persons in sinewy flowing garments that made me think of Egypt, but were definitely Ionic, unto themselves.
"He put his foot down on the floor, turned his folded arms, and then stood up. He was dressed in the looser, more naked Greek manner of clothing without fitted sleeves as we always wore, and he wore sandals. He studied me fearlessly as my father might have studied a piece of the silversmith's craft. " 'Where are you fingernails, spirit?' he asked. 'Where is the hair on your face? Where are your eyelashes! Be quick! Hereafter you need only say "Bring to me all those details which I require at this oiouien1" and nothing more. Fix an image and you've finished your work. That's it. That's it.' "He clapped his hands. " 'Now you are plenty complete enough for what you have to do.