He began.
2
I didn't remember Jerusalem," he said. "I wasn't born there. My mother was carried off as a child by Nebuchadnezzar along with our whole family, and our tribe, and I was born a Hebrew in Babylon, in a rich house-full of aunts and uncles and cousins-rich merchants, scribes, sometime prophets, and occasional dancers and singers and pages at court.
"Of course," he smiled. "Every day of my life, I wept for Jerusalem." He smiled. "I sang the song: 'If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.' And at night prayers we begged the Lord to return us to our land, and at morning prayers as well.
"But what I'm trying to say is that Babylon was my whole life. At twenty, when my life came to its first-shall we say-great tragedy, I knew the songs and gods of Babylon as well as I knew my Hebrew and the Psalms of David that I copied daily, or the book of Samuel, or whatever other texts we were constantly studying as a family.
"It was a grand life. But before I describe myself further, my circumstances, so to speak, let me just talk of Babylon.
"Let me sing the song of Babylon in a strange land. I am not pleasing in the eyes of the Lord or I wouldn't be here, so I think now I can sing the songs I want, what do you think?"
"I want to hear it," I said gravely. "Shape it the way you would. Let the words spill. You don't want to be careful with your language, do you? Are you talking to the Lord God now, or are you simply telling your tale?"
"Good question. I'm talking to you so that you will tell the story for me in my words. Yes. I'll rave and cry and blaspheme when I want.
I'll let my words come in a torrent. They always did, you know. Keeping Azriel quiet was a family obsession."
This was the first time I'd seen him really laugh, and it was a light heartfelt laugh that came up as easily as breath, nothing strangled or self-conscious in it.
He studied me.
"My laugh surprises you, Jonathan?" he asked. "I believe laughter is one of the common traits of ghosts, spirits, and even powerful spirits like me. Have you been through the scholarly accounts? Ghosts are famous for laughing. Saints laugh. Angels laugh. Laughter is the sound of Heaven, I think. I believe. I don't know."
"Maybe you feel close to Heaven when you laugh," I said.
"Maybe so," he said. His large cherubic mouth was really beautiful. Had it been small it would have given him a baby face. But it wasn't small, and with his thick black eyebrows and the large quick eyes, he looked pretty remarkable.
He seemed to be taking my measure again too, as if he had some capacity to read my thoughts. "My scholar," he said to me, "I've read all your books. Your students love you, don't they? But the old Hasidim are shocked by your biblical studies, I suppose."
"They ignore me. I don't exist for the Hasidim," I said, "but for what it's worth my mother was a Hasid, and so maybe I'll have a little understanding of things that will help us."
I knew now that I liked him, whatever he had done, liked him for himself in a way-young man of twenty, as he said, and though I was still fairly stunned from the fever, from his appearance, from his tricks, I was actually getting used to him.
He waited a few minutes, obviously ruminating, then began to talk:
"Babylon," he said. "Babylon! Give the name of any city which echoes as loud and as long as Babylon. Not even Rome, I tell you. And in those days there was no Rome. The center of the world was Babylon. Babylon had been built by the Gods as their gate. Babylon had been the great city of Hammurabi. The ships of Egypt, the Peoples of the Sea, the people of Dilmun, came to the docks of Babylon. I was a happy child of Babylon.
"I've seen what stands today, in Iraq, going there myself to see the walls restored by the tyrant Saddam Hussein. I've seen the mounds of sand that dot the desert, all of this covering old cities and towns that were Assyrian, Babylonian, Judean.
"And I've walked into the museum in Berlin to weep at the sight of what your archaeologist, Koldewey, has re-created of the mighty Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way.
"Oh, my friend, what it was to walk on that street! What it was to look up at those walls of gleaming glazed blue brick, what it was to pass the golden dragons of Marduk.
"But even if you walked the length and breadth of the old Processional Way, you would have only a taste of what was Babylon. All our streets were straight, many paved in limestone and red breccia. We lived as if in a place made of semiprecious stones. Think of an entire city glazed and enameled in the finest colors, think of gardens everywhere.
"The god Marduk built Babylon with his own hands, they told us, and we believed it. Early on I fell in with Babylonian ways and you know everybody had a god, a personal god he prayed to, and beseeched for this and that, and I chose Marduk. Marduk himself was my personal god.
"You can imagine the uproar when I walked in the house with a small pure-gold statue of Marduk, talking to it, the way the Babylonians did. But then my father just laughed. Typical of my father, my beautiful and innocent father.
"And throwing back his head, my father sang in his beautiful voice, 'Yahweh is your God, the God of your Father, your Father's Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'
"To which one of my somber uncles popped up at once, 'And what is that idol in his hands!'
" 'A toy!' said my father. 'Let him play with it. Azriel, when you get sick of all this superstitious Babylonian stuff, break the statue. Or sell it. You cannot break our god, for our god is not in gold or precious metal. He has no temple. He is above such things.'
"I nodded, went into my room, which was large and full of silken pillows and curtains, for reasons I'll get to later, and I lay down and I started just, you know, calling on Marduk to be my guardian.
"In this day and age, Americans do it with a guardian angel. I don't know how many Babylonians took it all that seriously either, the Babylonian personal god. You know the old saying, 'If you plan ahead a god goes with you.' Well, what does that mean?"
"The Babylonians," I said, "they were a practical people rather than superstitious, weren't they?"
"Jonathan, they were exactly like Americans today. I have never seen a people so like the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians as the Americans of today.
"Commerce was everything, but everybody went about consulting astrologers, talking about magic, and trying to drive out evil spirits. People had families, ate, drank, tried to achieve success in every way possible, yet carried on all the time about luck. Now Americans don't talk about demons, no, but they rattle on about 'negative thinking' and 'self-destructive ideas' and 'bad self-image.' It was a lot the same, Babylon and America, a lot the same.