“Malchiah, I’m weeping,” I whispered. “I don’t want to leave them.”
A long ribbon of laughter softly broke the darkness that surrounded me, and every syllable of it was picked up as if it were the kernel of a melody, full and entire, and destined now to mingle with another.
“Malchiah,” I whispered.
And I felt his arms around me. I felt him cradling me as he lifted me. The music was made up of space as well as time and it seemed each note was a mouth from which another mouth sprang and then another and another.
He was cradling me as he carried me upward.
“Will I always love them so much? Will I always hate to leave them? Is that part of it, part of what I have to suffer?”
But the word “suffer” was the wrong word because it had all been too grand, too splendid, too golden. And I could hear his lips against my ear reminding me of that, and saying in the softest tones,
“You’ve done well, and now you know there are others waiting for you.”
“This is the school of love,” I said, “and every lesson is deeper, richer, finer.”
I saw a vision of love; I saw that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips.
But no answer came except the anthems of Heaven.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I WOKE UP, OUT OF A nightmare. Shmarya stood there in the darkness, his back to the pale light from the window. Nighttime streets below.
“You’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours,” he said. We were in my room in the Mission Inn, and I lay on top of the rumpled comforter, my clothes twisted and moist, my body full of aching muscles. The room was cold.
The nightmare clung to me—full of all the telltale signs of dreams, the incoherent shifts, the distorted faces, the absurd and incomplete backdrops. It was utterly unlike the clarity of Angel Time.
I tried to hear again the angels singing, but there were only faint echoes, and a fragment of the nightmare rose, to blot them out.
Ankanoc had been arguing with me about the suicide of Lodovico. “According to your system,” he had said over and over, “this poor soul goes into a blazing Hell. But there is no such place. His soul will reincarnate and he will have to learn what he failed to learn the first time.” I’d seen the blazing Hell. I’d heard the screams of the damned. Ankanoc kept laughing. “You think I’m a devil? Why would I want to live in such a place?” Such a mocking smile, and then a wooden expression. “You think you’ve been visited by angels of the Lord? Why would you be in such torment over so many things? If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light? No, you know nothing of Heavenly Spirits. But don’t let that frighten you. Welcome to the Human Race.”
I sat up, bowed my head and prayed. “Lord, deliver me from this.” I was dizzy and terribly thirsty. The sense of having failed, of having let Lodovico slip away into death, was as strong with me as it had been in Rome. And I was angry, angry that Ankanoc had come into my world, into my dreams, into my thoughts.
If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?
“It’s finished now,” said Shmarya. He had a quiet easy voice, resonant, but youthful, and he was dressed as I was dressed, in a blue cotton shirt and khaki pants.
He helped me off the bed. I went to the window and looked at my watch. It was 2:00 a.m. The streetlamps below gave the only illumination.
Memories of my time in Rome were crowding in, pervading the fragments of nightmare. “Let this dream go away, please!” I whispered.
To my surprise I felt Shmarya’s hand on my shoulder. We were eye to eye. I failed Lodovico. That one got away.
“Stop struggling,” he said. His expression was innocent, probing, his eyebrows knitting for an instant as he made his point. “This man’s soul is not in your hands.”
“The Maker has to know all things,” I said. My voice broke. I could hear Ankanoc laughing, but this was memory. Shmarya was here. “And the Maker is the only one who can judge.”
He nodded.
“Where’s The Boss?” I asked. I meant Malchiah.
“He’ll come soon enough,” said Shmarya. “You need to take care of yourself now.”
“Why do I have the feeling that you don’t like him?”
“I love him,” he said simply. “You know this. But he and I don’t always agree. After all, I’m your guardian angel. My assignment is simple. You are my charge.”
“And Malchiah?”
“Again, you know the answer to your own question. He’s a Seraph. He’s sent to answer the prayers of many. He knows things I can’t know. He does things I’m not sent to do.”
“But I thought you all know everything,” I said. It sounded immediately stupid.
He shook his head.
“Then you can’t tell me, can you, whether or not Lodovico went to Hell?” I insisted.
He shook his head.
I nodded. I pulled the blinds over the window. And I turned on the lamp by the bed.
It was powerfully comforting to see him so fully realized in the light. He looked as solid as anything else in the room. I wanted to touch him but I didn’t, and then I remembered that he had just touched me.
I couldn’t read anything into his blue eyes, or the relaxed way in which he studied me. He gave a little lift to his eyebrows, and then he said in a whisper, “Trust the Maker. What you think or what I think does not put a man in Hell.”
“You know why I’m angry?”
He nodded.
I went on, “Because before I saw that man take his own life, I didn’t believe in Hell. I didn’t believe in the Devil or demons, and when I came to God, it was not out of fear of Hell.”
He nodded.
“And now there is Ankanoc, and there is Hell.”
He pondered this and then he shrugged.
“You’ve heard the voices of evil in the past,” he said. “You’ve always known what evil is. You never lied to yourself.”
“I have but I thought the voices came from within me. I thought all the evil I’d ever witnessed came from within individuals, that devils and Hell were old constructs. I felt myself become evil when I first took a human life. I felt myself grow ever more evil as I killed others. I can live with an evil that was inside myself, perhaps because I was able to repent. But now there’s Ankanoc, a dybbuk, and I don’t want to believe in such things.”