Dante's Equation Part 39

The new priests a.s.sisted in the interminable service that followed-prayers of humiliation and the standard exhortations against sin, especially against the houses of ill repute, disobedience to one's superiors or the church, and the eating of one's own children. The crowd sat through it impatiently, waiting for the "good part": the bloodletting.

The arena had been set up days ahead. The devices they calledhechkih were already in place-large X-shaped structures with pyramid bases that functioned as places to mount bodies for torture and exposure and, eventually, served as roasting stakes as well. In antic.i.p.ation of the latter their bases had been painted black with a flammable pitch. Now the prisoners were led in, stripped of all but undergarments, faces miserable and petrified. They cowered like the terrified animals that they were . . . all except a group of males who looked around at the crowd defiantly.

Argeh had returned to the box. He gave My Lord a suspiciously smug look before addressing the crowd.

"The Holy Book says that we must be ever diligent in our battle against corruption! We are born corrupt, and unless we redeem ourselves through the necessary toil we die corrupt! We must ruthlessly seek out corruption and excise it from our society. If we do otherwise, the Holy Book tells us that we will sink down into the filth for all eternity!"

My Lord wanted the Jew to hear this. If he heard, he might understand where they truly were-why any lie was justified. He motioned to Tevach and instructed him to whisper a translation of the speech into Handalman's ear. Tevach seemed distracted. He had a desperate look as he gazed into his master's eyes, and My Lord was reminded of the episode this morning-something about one of the heretics. He shook his head in a strong negative to tell Tevach this was not the time, to do as he was told.

"All of the prisoners here today have violated the sanct.i.ty of Mahava!" Argeh spit onto the ground, showing his disgust. "They have disobeyed His teachers and His holy p.r.o.nouncements. Instead of striving to raise themselves up, they have fouled themselves further, and in the process they have fouled us and Fiori. . . ."

My Lord looked at Aharon, who was shaking again. His face was red with the effort of holding himself upright, even with Tevach's help. But his eyelids flickered as Tevach's words registered. My Lord turned his gaze back to the arena, satisfied.

Let him chew on Argeh's mentality for a while. Let him choke on it.

The group of prisoners My Lord had noticed earlier began wrestling with their guards. They had no hope of escape, of course, shackled as they were, but they succeeded in making a scene. The male in charge of the group raised his bound hands in a gesture of command.

"I demand to speak! I ask to be heard!"

My Lord waited for Argeh, with a motion, to order the guards to pull him back in line. Instead, Argeh hesitated, his head c.o.c.ked thoughtfully to one side.

"I am so moved to let you speak," Argeh said, and he sat down.

Stunned silence. Around the arena, the crowd was absolutely quiet. The high priest? Allow a prisoner to speak? My Lord gripped the arms of his chair, knowing that something was terribly wrong. He recalled the challenging look Argeh had given him earlier.About me-somehow, this is about me.

My Lord half stood, but he could not think of an excuse to interrupt. And then the heretic was speaking in a loud and fiery voice.

"My beloved clansmen! I die today because I dared teach a message that differs from the one we have been forced to accept for so long! I dared to ask why we punish one another? Why do we engage in spectacles of terror like this one? Why do we inflict injury on our fellows and ourselves? Can Mahava really want that of us? Our priests tell us that, yes, Mahava wants to grind us into the dirt! But I say no. I say we should ease one another's suffering, not add to it! I say we should work together to scratch our bread from the rock. I say there is room in Mahava for kindness-even for us, even for the Fiore!"

The world s.h.i.+fted beneath My Lord's feet. He was shocked to his soul. He had seen a few Fiore, like Tevach, relax the typical Fiorian temperament in private, but he had never heard one speak so radically and publicly against the norm. He looked at Argeh, marveling that the high priest would let such words be spoken aloud, and in the Festival arena! If there was one heresy Argeh pursued with special venom, it was this one. But Argeh was looking down at the heretic with a shuttered expression. Unfathomable.

"But, my fellow," Argeh said with sickly formality, "how can you believe that we are wrong in our judgment of heavenly will when we have, on our own throne, an envoy from Mahava Himself? Would you deny thatMy Lord knows the ways of our Maker?"

My Lord gripped the arms of his chair. There it was. The knife.

"I do deny it!" the brazen Fiore yelled. "Look at him, all of you! On our throne sits a . . . a creature who claims he is from the heavens! But if he is divine, where is the proof? What good has he done the Fiore since coming here? What good does he do us now? Surely if Mahava sat among us our harvests would succeed; our bellies would not be gnawed with hunger; our women and children would not die in blood and filth."

My Lord rose shakily to his feet. Even the pain in his knees was nothing. "You dare speak to your Lord that way?" he growled, pointing his long, straight arm and pale, hairless hand at the prisoner.

"I do dare it! I say: You do not love us! You do not care for us! And you keep us chained to this evil priest! The pair of you keep us bound to misery and death in the name of Mahava!"

"Silence!"Argeh roared. The heretic had gone too far. Argeh motioned to the guards.

My Lord, panicked and sweating, watched the guards beat the Fiore to the ground with their staves. In the crowd there were those, perhaps as many as fifty scattered throughout, who stood and raised an open palm in a gesture of solidarity, hissing their disapproval. Argeh made a quick, angry motion, and the hand raisers ditched from the arena as the guards headed their way.

Argeh looked over his shoulder, his lips curled. "Your orders for the prisoner, My Lord?"

My Lord hesitated. It was not his role to hand down judgments. Argeh had never asked him before. But he knew he had no choice. The entire arena watched.

He made the sign for slaughter across his breast.

The crowd rumbled like an earthquake, though whether in approval or disapproval it was difficult to tell. Then the staffs began to pound in agreement, low, building.

"Kill the heretic!" came the cry.

My Lord quivered with relief, a tidal rush that told him he'd been more terrified than he'd known. He had escaped Argeh's treachery-for now. Thank G.o.d one could always count on Fiorian bloodl.u.s.t at least.

"No!" Aharon called out.

My Lord turned in surprise. Tevach was glaring at him from behind Aharon. The cagey rat had translated the entire thing! He motioned Tevach angrily to get away. For the first time, he felt rage at his servant-could have whipped him had he the weapon at hand.

"Yosef, no," Aharon pleaded, his eyes wet.

My Lord motioned him to desist, looked back toward the crowd, seething. Argeh was watching the three of them with infinite calculation. Worse and worse.

"The sentence?" My Lord prompted the high priest.

Argeh licked his lips in a gesture of faux submission. He turned back to the crowd. "The heretic shall be executed on the last day of Festival!"

My Lord fell back into his chair as his knees gave out. His joints screamed; his heart thudded miserably in his chest. He studied the faces in the crowd. How well known was this heretic? Could he be the source of the sentiment against him, the seed of the vandalism? He must have Decher do a full investigation as soon as possible.

The heretic and his men were led away. One by one the remaining prisoners were charged, led to thehechkih , and mounted upon them. There were still interminable hours to go, and My Lord was already exhausted. But one mercy: all eyes in the crowd would be on the bloodletting from now on.

What had possessed him to have Tevach translate for Aharon . . .in public ? What had he been thinking?

He knew: He had wanted Aharon to understand. He'd wanted the Jew's approbation, and that had made him unwise then, furious with himself now. He was walking a razor's edge on this planet, where the least breeze could be his ruin. He knew, right then, that Aharon would be that breeze. He'd brought with him too much of the past. And the past could not be reconciled with the king of Gehenna.

My Lord motioned Tevach to take the slumping Jew to the carriage.

Aharon fell into a feverish sleep the minute they put him in bed. He was depleted from the nightmarish festival, from the strain of trying to control his body. He had dreams involving b.e.s.t.i.a.l Fiore ripping him apart.

When he awoke someone was shaking him. It felt quite late, a sensation that had more to do with the reddened, puffy eyes of Tevach-whose paw was doing the shaking-than the black outside his window. Kobinski was waiting. He was dressed in a simple undyed gown that might have been his bed clothes.

Tevach helped Kobinski into a chair and left the two of them alone. The torch burned sputteringly in its holder on the table, that old familiar torch. It flickered against the old man's lined face when he removed his mask. It was a face that was deeply pained by its very structure, but the expression itself was slack, void of emotion.

He opened his lips, almost spoke, didn't. Aharon could sense that Kobinski was in a very different mood from any he'd shown before. He waited.

"I am as much a prisoner here as you, Aharon. You think I have power; I don't."

Aharon sighed inside. He felt instinctually that he should say nothing; it was that angel pressing its fingers to his lips,Shhhh . He didn't say, for example,That's what the capos said . He could see, even as Kobinski spoke those words, the guilt in his eyes.

"Argeh uses me to make the populace afraid, like an intimidating dog chained to his side."

Aharon again said nothing, though Kobinski waited for him to speak.

The ma.s.sive man put his legs out in front of him, trying to straighten his knees, grinding his teeth at the pain.

"Come sit on the bed," Aharon said. "You can stretch your legs."

"I'm fine."

"Come!" Aharon used an irresistible tone that had been his mother's specialty. It was a large bed, and though hard and scratchy from the dried-gra.s.s stuffing, it still offered welcome support in the heavy atmosphere. Aharon forced his aching muscles to rally and pushed himself to one side to make more room.

Kobinski shook his head, rubbed at his knees, but a moment later pulled himself upright. He managed to get onto the bed, his legs stretched out, his back propped against the wall. He s.h.i.+vered. Aharon tried to give him his blanket; Kobinski refused.

"The cold is not in the room." Kobinski turned his head, and for a moment Aharon saw the demons that tortured his soul. Then Kobinski turned his gaze to look up at the ceiling, as if the contact had revealed too much.

"I did . . . try. At first. When I first came. I tried to make things better for the Fiore. But . . ." He sought for words. "This place gets inside you. It beats you down. How can you change an entire culture? A way of life, a history, a people, a world? And I had come from Auschwitz, where things were not much better. After a while, you just plod forward, surviving day to day. I was broken when I came here."

He paused. Aharon, feeling that finger on his lips, said nothing. Kobinski was confessing. Aharon did not know why, but he knew enough not to interrupt.

"I couldnot openly defy their Scripture. If I had spoken against their religious views I would have been gone, like that." He wiggled his fingers in lieu of the harder task of snapping them. "I did try to improve some things-agriculture, technology. My education was not so useful. What good is calculus in a world struggling with addition and subtraction? Or chemistry in a place where there are no labs, no manufacturing, no microscopes? But I did try.

"It's this planet, Aharon. Every machine breaks-it's as simple as that. Only the most basic and hardiest devices survive. The soil is rocky and barren, unresponsive to either irrigation or fertilization. The seas are largely uninhabited. Medicine is barbaric and deadlocked in religious superst.i.tion." He paused again. "It beats you down. It just beats you down."

He raised a hand, rubbed at his trembling lips.

When it didn't seem like he would continue on his own, Aharon said gently, "Also, maybe, you'd given up before you ever came here,nu ? You already were not the man you were when you wroteThe Book of Torment ."

Kobinski didn't reply.

"Maybe that'swhy you came here. You had given up hope."

Kobinski gave a bitter laugh. "I hated; that's why I came here. Iwanted to take us both to h.e.l.l, so that night, wrestling with Wallick, I let it fill me. Hate is a form of restriction, too."

Aharon studied Kobinski's face, eyes narrowed in thought. This afternoon,he had hated. He'd hated Kobinski for his partic.i.p.ation in these atrocities, hated it that a Jew-one of the chosen and particularly one as "chosen" as Yosef Kobinski-could do such things. And how could he when he hadwritten . . . when he was the author of this incredible work Aharon was reading? It seemed a double blasphemy.

But now Aharon felt . . . compa.s.sion. He had no idea where it had come from. It was such a large compa.s.sion, he couldn't even take credit for it. It was as if someone were opening his heart and filling it up.

"What happened to the n.a.z.i? This Wallick?"

Kobinski drew in a breath. His chest rose and fell; again his lips formed words that wanted to come out but were held back at the last moment. Finally he released them. "I told the Fiore he was fromCharvah , the devil. He . . . he's dead."

"I understand," Aharon said. And he did. He remembered Yad Vashem, remembered the feeling of utter desolation and emptiness he had felt here, in this room, when all of his old ideas had been burnt to the ground.

Kobinski rubbed at his lip, his face trembling with emotion. "He raped my son, Aharon. For thirty nights, he made me watch. Then he killed him in front of me."

A deep groundswell of sympathy and pain rose up between them. Aharon muttered meaningless words, watched the old man fight for control of his emotions, watched as his face went stony again. Seeing the emotion was hard, but seeing that harshness, that disa.s.sociation, was worse. Aharon reached out his fingers and touched Kobinski's arm as if by touch he could keep the kabbalist with him.

Kobinski shook like a leaf under the touch. His face did relax a little.

Who am I?Aharon wondered.Because I, Aharon Handalman, have never been this generous in my life.

Kobinski wiped his nose. "I don't know why it should, but it's bothered me what he said-the heretic. I couldn't sleep. Because he's right, you know. I don't love the Fiore. I never did."

"The Fiore are hard to love," Aharon agreed.

"Most of them repulse me. But what repulses me more is that this place even exists.G.o.d repulses me."

Aharon bridled at such a statement, tried to find a way to turn toward something positive. "I've been readingThe Book of Torment . There's so much wisdom there, Yosef. Perhaps you, too, should look at it again."

"It's pointless, don't you see?"

"Why? You don't think there are places better than this? You don't think good exists?"

"Oh, it exists. But what does that mean to the Fiore? What did it mean for my son? No amount of good can possibly justify the evil."

Aharon sighed. His heart was heavy with the responsibility, the desire, to say the right thing. He thought of the old stories, of how the Israelites, when they conquered an enemy, would kill every living thing, women and children included, burn houses and fields and livestock, leave nothing standing. That was what G.o.d had done to Aharon-laid him waste. And Aharon understood it had been the only way that anything truly new could ever take root in his heart. He mourned for Kobinski, who had suffered a similar decimation but who had never found that new seed. His heart had remained barren all these years.

"What the heretic said today, about helping one another-is this sentiment common among the Fiore?" Aharon asked.

"Oh, no."

"And his soul: If I understand your book, when he dies he'll go back toward the middle of the ladder. Is that correct?"

Kobinski latched on to this. "Yes. So you see, death is hardly a punishment for him."

"But what if he needs more time to develop his thoughts? Or to teach others? What if he could help other Fiore, Yosef?"

Kobinski flushed, but he spoke bitterly. "That might happen. And it also might happen that if he had more time here hewould grow disillusioned in this h.e.l.lish place. Or he would gain power and become corrupt. This place has a way of twisting everything to a bad end. Don't allow yourself to be fooled by sentiment. This heretic is no messiah, no martyr. He's only a Fiore with a modic.u.m of common sense and perhaps some leaders.h.i.+p skills, nothing more."

"Nu? Maybe that's all that's required."

"Required for what?"

Aharon sighed. For a long moment he meditated on the question. His arm was strong enough now to reach up and stroke his beard-how his hand had missed that beard! "You know what I felt when he spoke?Hope. Just that someone-anyone-could speak of love and charityhere ."

Kobinski didn't answer, but Aharon could feel his will hardening. He had said the wrong thing, maybe; he was losing him. He knew the issues were not simple. It was not, G.o.d forbid he admit this, black-and-white. He changed the subject. "And what will happen toyou , Yosef? When you die?"

That, too, was the wrong thing to say. Kobinski struggled to sit upright. Aharon put a hand on his arm, but this time the older man shook it off. He shoved his legs off the bed and sat on the edge, breathing hard from the effort.

"I'm sorry," Aharon said. "I cannot imagine what you went through with your son. And who am I to make excuses for G.o.d? But that's the point. It doesn't matter whether I-or you-excuse Him or not. It seems to me that in this battle-in this battle you cannot win. You can kick and scream and flail all you want to, but you might as well rage at a storm,nu ?You cannot win. "

Kobinski got off the bed, placing his weight on his feet with great pain. "The Midrash says G.o.d weeps when He loses the heart of one of His beloved. That would have been enough for me, Aharon, to have made Him weep. But the awful thing is, I'm not even sure of that anymore."

. . . that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the n.o.ble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

-G. K. Chesterton,The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908

17.1. Forty-Sixty Calder Farris