The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman Page A

stranger, it was agreed by the townspeople, was not the mad rabbi, but a different immortal Jew.
     
    I shut the book. Had I picked it up the day before, I would have read and dismissed the story without a second thought—it was folklore, nothing at all to do with my research—but today was different. This was the same story depicted in Holly’s painting: the condemned men hanging in a swirling sky. It reminded me of Grandpa’s Manasseh too, a holy man overcome with sorrow for his people’s spiritual exile.
    The story had come to me now three times in a single day. Holly would call it synchronicity—the old Holly would have, anyway. She had spent her twelfth year presiding over a Ouija board, her fourteenth reading tarot, her sixteenth writing down every dream in an attempt to uncover her past lives. The summer before the start of her sophomore year of college she announced her intention to convert. We were drinking in the backyard, beer for me and juice for her, ants crawling over our bare legs and the low sky a deep polluted orange. She hadn’t told me about Nathan yet—I didn’t realize how serious it all was—and I laughed. “When did you start believing in God?”
    She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke her voice quavered. “Marjorie, I’ve always believed in God. Didn’t you know that?” She stared at me through her tears, with an expression of such betrayal it left me dumb, too shocked and sorry and confused to respond.
    We didn’t talk about it again. I went back to school, to ruin ghost stories with jargon about social contracts, patrilineage, and national anxiety.
    To me, the mad rabbi was just a coincidence. I wasn’t a believer.
    And yet.
     
    I RAN ALL OF THE ERRANDS I HAD BEEN IGNORING. I CHECKED my mailbox, did my laundry, downloaded several fellowship applications, so I wouldn’t have to teach next year either, however impoverished it would leave me. I moved my bed and vacuumed under it. I called my mother to tell her about my morning with Holly and Nathan, but she didn’t pick up and I didn’t leave a message. What would I say? Holly was painting a picture of doomed, white-eyed rabbis. She let me feel the baby move. Grandpa wrote a story about a magic rabbi, and I don’t know what it means, where it came from, why he would change his fairy tales into a religious story—or if he had changed religion into a fairy tale—when he had never spoken about religion at all, certainly not Judaism, except to make bigoted remarks about the families clustered around the Berukhim Yeshiva.
    I read the marbled composition book again and felt no closer to understanding its mystery. There were four titles listed at the beginning, three missing stories in I didn’t know how many notebooks. Gone. I remembered Grandpa’s friend Sam, nervously delivering the books, and Dad, driving off and letting me think he had destroyed them. Had they read this story?
    I sat on my bed for a long time, the notebook with the strange sketch inside pressed between my folded arms and my heart, studying my grandfather’s watercolor, framed beside the door. It was a seascape, a turquoise ocean with curling traces of white foam. The sky above it was washed out, ivory fading into orange at the horizon, a glowing equator thin as a pen stroke. A flock of black birds, slack check marks, hung in the top left quadrant. They seemed unmoored like the men in Holly’s painting, neither receding into the sky nor swooping down from it. I focused on the swirling currents, white and blue and purple and black twisting around one another until they took shape—a hand, a flowering vine, a dissolving eye. I blinked and the brushstrokes relaxed back into pretty nothingness, but it was too late. Grandpa’s whole exercise in painting now appeared deliberately obscure instead of pleasantly vague.
    It was early yet, only ten o’clock, but I had barely slept the night before, and I knew I needed rest so I could concentrate on my work. I