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Mordechai Lukas is alone. If he said this aloud, the guest he’s entertaining might contradict him – “How can you be alone when we are speaking now?” – but the ignorance of others is not his concern. It is the truth, and that is enough.
Before, long ago, he did not know this truth. Though other children beat and mocked him, he told his tired mother he had friends. Though his bones ached from growing and his mind pushed out and away, he stayed home to study Talmud while other boys sought out the lessons of the Hevrat Hinuch Ne'arim. Though he saw his family dwindle when war brought Frenchmen to their land, he read the Haggadah for their Seder and reminded them of how G-d had carried them from Egypt. He had pride in his lineage, he told himself. He would keep the memory and traditions of those before him strong even as the world shifted around him.
Then Napoleon’s decrees came, and the world shattered instead.
The French established consistories and turned faith to suspicion. They annulled the debts the village women owed his mother, even the ones she’d left without interest. They took his friends as soldiers, refusing to listen to them explain that they’d never held a weapon. In a day, his home stood barren.
Still, he persisted. His family needed him and G-d would guide him to the solution. He would be the man he had to be to hold everyone together.
They received the lists of names four months later. The French gave them three months to force themselves to fit a name they’d never known and would never have a right to.
No. He would not.
He knew better then to tell them that. If they could take the choice of names away, then he hardly expected they’d fail to take his freedom too. He sold what he could and packed what he had left – one light case of cloth and paper – before buying passage for two to England. When all was ready, he told his mother that it was time to take flight; he would protect her and care for her in their new land.
She laid her hand on his arm and told him the name she’d chosen.
There were not two passengers on the ship to England.
He did not speak to the sailors on their voyage. Forgetting is a task best undertaken alone. He prayed, but the words were hollow. The language was gone, the words mislaid. He slept.
Before, dreams were when he felt closest to G-d. He saw the full wonder of the world that could be and how his words wove into the lines of poetry that made the sun and moon spin in their spheres. Now, his dreams were silent. There was no dark, and there was no light. No warmth or cold. No walls or open space. In his dreams, there was nothing. It was enough.
When they made land, he immediately took pains to declare and establish himself. He would not be sent back, not when he had nothing (something) waiting to welcome him. Citizenship was denied him here, but his name would be his.
When they asked him his name, he did not give the name his mother had given him, nor the name he inherited from his ancestors, nor the name he was called by his teacher when he left. He gave them the name Mordechai Lukas. That night, he prayed properly for the first time since leaving home. G-d, may I hold the strength of Mordechai against the Hamans I will face in days to come. May his name be my guide and his vindication my vengeance.
There were many, many Hamans to come. There were those who simply sneered at him and those who showed him “Christian charity” only as long as they thought he would renounce everything he was (still was, hadn’t lost). When they speak of their Lord, he simply waits until they’re done, running the knots of his fringe over and over through his fingers. If they ask, he tells them he has his own G-d and bids them good day. It doesn’t always go well.
Yes, it would be easier to bow before them, to scrape and lie and pray in secret. He knew there were Jews who did, even. But they were not his people. They had the wrong faces, the wrong language – the wrong laws, even. He wondered, sometimes, whether they even had the same G-d.
Day to day, though, he could ignore them. The skills he'd learned repairing his study materials fit well with a nearby bookseller's fondness for rare and antique books, and the work left him in peace and quiet. He could curse the miserable souls who folded his charges’ pages without any concern for who would hear or which language he used, and he took full advantage.
Each book that crossed his hands was dearer than any man could be, even when they had been left to curl or split. For a time, he would hold their lingering souls in his hands. Running his fingers along the smooth leather and rough fibrous pages, he could feel the care (or lack thereof) in every stitch and section. If he allowed himself to linger as he mixed his wood pulp, he could almost hear the whispers of the stories trapped inside. Then, when he was finished, when the life returned to their covers and the text block thrummed with promise, he released them to their new keepers.
He could always tell when one of his children would return. He could see it in the way their buyer held them, in the expression of high distaste he was met with. Those books came back with shattered spines and faded inks. He could not protect them from that.
There was one book, though, that never left his possession.
It was an unusual volume in many ways. The first was that it came to him immediately after the seller obtained it, rather than once one of their regulars expressed interest. While the seller had remained tight-lipped about the book's origins, he had requested that it be entirely shorn and rebound instead of restored with its cover intact. Mordechai had not objected at the time; while it was a substantially larger project than their usual arrangement, it was hardly beyond his abilities and the additional fee would cover some... unexpected expenses he'd sustained during a recent dispute. Payment in advance meant that he could quickly move his few surviving possessions to a new lodging, so he could hardly have refused if he wanted to.
The second was the appearance of the book itself. The cover was aged but not worn; there was the impression of fingertips tracing the leather without actually leaving dips. The volume was nearly three centimeters thick, but had some of the thinnest pages he'd ever handled. Straps locked it shut with a key the size of his fingernail. The title simply read “בָּבֶל” in curved, indigo script.
Not all of the books Mordechai repaired had content meriting his attention – even beautiful books can be simple and petty. If the title had not been in Hebrew, he likely would have passed this one over as well. But it had been so long since he had seen his people’s script that he couldn’t resist gently turning the pages. They flowed through his fingers like butterfly wings as the words slipped into his mind.
The book held the text of the Bəreshit, written in columns of English, Hebrew, and German. Or it claimed to, at least. Mordechai knew the text like the back of his hand, but the words shuffled themselves across the page in a mix of English, Hebrew and German. Sentences ran into and over each other, ink feathering faintly between the letters. The English seemed to tell the stories normally, though the words were awkward and overbalanced their lines in self-satisfied poetry. The German was clipped and precise, with numbers, years, and full genealogies sprinkled like ashes over bare-bone fragments of sentences. The Hebrew...
It told the stories. It told them well. It told them wrong.
In בָּבֶל, Adam never knew Eve. They wandered the garden alone, pulling fruit from the vines and roots from the ground as the wind blew words from their mind. There was no snake, only the whisper of a breeze and crushed grass leading to the tree. When they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, the knowledge they gained was the sight of the other. An ending to their peaceful hermitage. But theirs was a jealous G-d, who had never meant them to meet. For finding another where once there was only one and G-d, they were abandoned. G-d left them, left the world he created, and never returned.
At first, Mordechai thought the heresy chilled him to the bone. Then the wind whispered to him, and he turned to find the door had opened without his consent. Snow blew in so far it touched his back, white flakes trailing back to the open air. Setting the book down, he went to close the door.
Once he reached it, though, he heard – or rather, he didn't hear – how the streets of London had fallen silent. The lamps burned and tatters of unmoored curtains blew through the street, but not a soul was in sight. It could have been that Mordechai's new neighborhood was less crowded – he certainly had fewer neighbors – but he knew that no matter how far he walked, it wouldn't change. The snow would be unmarred, freshly spilled over the cobblestones, and any flames would stay safely in their lamps.
That thought alone warmed his heart as he closed the door.
In the morning, the hum of activity had returned to the city air. Leaving בָּבֶל locked on his work table, Mordechai went straight to the bookseller and asked where the book had come from. The seller chewed on his lip as he explained that he'd bought it from a gentlewoman whose uncle had vanished without leaving instructions as to his estate. He assured Mordechai that the purchase had been legal (more times than Mordechai would have preferred), but that he intended to have it back out of his hands as soon as possible “just in case.” When Mordechai mentioned the text and its languages, the seller looked at him oddly and asked if he didn't mean English, French, and Latin. He didn't press the topic any further.
The rest of the day passed in a haze. Errands needed running, but Mordechai barely noticed anyone else as the cross-written words ran through his head. He bought far more food than he had room for immediately; better to have the extra available should he need it. He had a feeling this book wouldn't let him go until he finished the job.
Finally, seconds-long hours later, he again stood in front of בָּבֶל. Gently, reverently, he slipped a knife through the side of both covers and began to work the spine away from the stitching. It peeled away easily, as though the book was releasing itself into his care. He found himself humming zemirot he hadn’t heard in England, not even in the corners of his heart. The prayers didn’t make it to his tongue – they didn’t need to – but they resonated in the pages as he worked.
In the breaks between steps, Mordechai allowed himself to fall to the readings again. His eyes were adjusting to the chaos of text, with the letters he needed seeming to float out at him even when they were under less important lines. This Noah received no heavenly message. He heard his family and quarreling travelers, but never the voice of G-d. They called him to worship, called him to dinner, and called him to fight, but he never felt his soul join them when his body did. Instead, it listened. Listened for the cold of the night air and the silence of distant stars as they traced their own paths through the black.
When the sky grew heavy and black, he did not listen to his family's concerns or preparations. While his wife ground grain and his sons brought their flock back home, he slipped away to gather wood. While his family searched for him and wept, he built a second home for himself, board by board by board until he wondered if it would meet the sinking clouds halfway. Sealing himself in with sap and berries, he fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves.
The text lingered on him floating alone in the floodwaters, with only birds and the occasional mountaintop residents for company. As the long nights seemed to stretch longer, he whispered blessings to the solid wood and gratitude to the salt that dried by his little window. While his words didn’t reach G-d’s ears outside of the world, the sea and sky listened. Noah began to hear the faintest whispers of a voice, a little god that spoke in shivers and unsanded wood. It told him not to be afraid, because every moment he spent in the gentle silence of the ark would bring him closer to his lost G-d, to the solitude it had taken on when humans left. Noah knew that the little god was not an angel, but he also knew that its message was true. Even when the flood ebbed and the ark touched down on solid ground, he stayed inside. Every day he saw less and less of the outside, but he heard the little god’s voice grow louder. Noah died smiling, knowing that he had truly left everything behind and was ready to meet G-d alone.
Mordechai smiled too as he read it. For a moment, he was back on the ship to England, dreaming of blank experience, but knowing that there was something that understood, that cared...
Festering comfort warmed his ribs even as it twisted his gut. This was heresy. The book was heresy. He would not hold a spirit of apocrypha before G-d. Shut the pages. Work.
He left the book press bearing down on the fanning sections when he left the next morning. He walked through markets, over bridges, and in and out of crowds, until he found himself before the synagogue he'd tried to accept when he first came to London. The rabbi there was surprised to see him - he supposed that was only reasonable after their last conversation - but happy to help him work through his questions. At least, he was before Mordechai asked them. Mordechai understood, of course. Everything the man said was what he had told himself last night. He listened, trying to nail each sentiment into the folds of his brain until the channel of doubt was dammed. But he couldn’t shake the whispers of his own voice echoing through his skull, reminding him that this rabbi was not of his people. None of his people were here. They left. He left. There was only ever one passenger on the ship to England, and the waves crashed against his ears and pounded in his skull with the fury of an empty storm.
He bid the rabbi farewell. The walk home was quiet, with not one other human in sight.
He finished the new cover that night. Stamped brown leather with the title embossed and the straps neatly recolored and transplanted. The culmination of many hours of work; a quite saleable piece. Yet, when he stood up to look at it, it felt incomplete. It didn't reach out to him the way the others did. Where the others would glow, this one took the light that shone around it and turned it a feeble grey. Before he realized what he wanted (needed), the book was open, neatly parted to the story of the Tower of Babel.
In this book, much like the usual, the tower was built by many people. However, it wasn’t to prop up the sky, wage war on the heavens, or to create something worth being proud of. It was a gnarled, sickened hive that built up and around, spiraling as the workers tried desperately to build a place where they could beg G-d to end their loneliness. The city buzzed with pitiful pleas, calling out to the one who had left them so long ago. As always, that G-d could not listen.
But the little god could. The little god heard them tell each other their plans for that day, saw them reach out to meet hands or arms or lips, and the little god grew angry. Still, the people had not learned. A jealous G-d could never share the faith he was owed, not even with his own creations. The little god cursed the workers to wander endlessly in a place where they had no words to speak, hands to touch, or eyes to see. They were alone, but this was not the garden. They would never forget what they had and lost, and they would never again hear the blessed silence of G-d.
The words settled, after that. They split into easily defined columns with normal English and German translations. The Hebrew, though, still told the tale of the little god, which called out less and less as the people forgot it and what it meant to be alone. By the end of the text, it barely spoke at all.
Mordechai did not speak either as he lifted the book from the table. Clutching it to his chest in the bitter cold, he set out. He walked with purpose and direction, though he did not yet know where. The little god would guide him through the empty streets. He would be delivered.
A lifetime and an instant later, he came upon a sizable house tucked between two unmarked streets, fences rising high into the air above its gardens. A mezuzah hung from the right gatepost, slanted out and away from the door. Mordechai ran his hand over the case, cold marble just as hostile as he'd expected and yet more comforting than a thick blanket and a fire. He felt rather than saw the gates opening and slipped through between them before they closed, sealing him into this ark of a home. Eyes flitting over each feature of the architecture, Mordechai jumped when his ears picked up the door opening instead. A young woman stared out at him, curious but not unwelcoming. He searched for something, anything to say, but only three words would come. “I am alone.”
The woman smiled and gestured him in. They were married three months later.
Mordechai Lukas took well to family life, if quietly. He taught each of his children Hebrew and Torah, of course, but he told stories of their little, lonely god as well. His eldest could recite both texts by heart almost before Mordechai learned the latter. Pride welled up in him at the thought, though he never forgot that they, too, were alone.
He no longer bound books for his old seller. The man had not understood when Mordechai claimed בָּבֶל as the birthright of the Lukas family. Regrettably, like the builders of Babel, he could not hear the silence of their absent G-d. When his wife returned the amount she'd first sold it for, the seller still broke his contract and tried to take it from them. Even when they introduced him to the meditative peace of the lonely god's prayer, he never understood. His bones were buried ten feet below the poplar tree where last they'd found him. It didn't seem respectful to leave them for the children to find.
The bookshop had flourished under Mordechai's care, though it took time for their regulars to stop asking after the seller's health. While he was no longer able to restore each book they took in on his own, Mordechai made sure none of the books left in anything less than top condition - and if some reappeared on his shelf after their owner eloped or broke their lease without explanation or forwarding address, then no one asked too many questions about it. It kept the shop comfortably at the level of owed rather than owing, which meant that Mordechai could sometimes be convinced to extend a small amount of credit to his regulars or someone they vouched for. For the most part, they were model debtors. For the most part. But one...
Bring it before the courts.
...sera nul de plein droit, sans que porteurs ou cessionnaires puissent s'en prévaloir, et nos tribunaux autoriser aucune action ou poursuite...
You shall pay me. In kind.
It was not holy, what he did. The oathbreaker does not reside in the realm of prayer. But he is unrepentant. Some men cannot be made to understand their wealth and freedom without being robbed of it. They cannot hear over their pride and pomp to realize that, like everything, it fades into the roar of a crowd. Such men will never understand his god, nor his far away G-d. But if they cannot learn to love...
They can live in fear.
In his study, now, he watches the considering, unblinking stare his guest gives him and thinks of the faraway look in his debtor's eyes when he last went to visit. Both seem to see the space he should occupy - one can see nothing else, after all - but this guest sees him just as clearly. There is a sparking tension in the air between them, and Mordechai finds himself certain that the guest can see both his presence and absence at once. Setting down his tea, he lets his fingertips find the book on the table beside him, tracing the whorls of leather and letters. “I am alone,” Mordechai says, an answer to halt the questions he's sure he'll be asked.
Instead, Jonah Magnus just nods, sipping at his tea. “So, I hear, is Barnabas Bennett.”
Mordechai smiles.