The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman Page B

turned off the lights, climbed into bed, and stared at the streetlight glow clinging to the ceiling. I stared at the door, outlined in black, the hall beyond quiet, empty. I stared at Grandpa’s notebook, a sliver of darkness on my desk.
    At midnight I turned on the light and opened the book again. As the story went on, his handwriting grew smaller, tighter, darker. There was an urgency in the script, or maybe something else—anger or fear. I thought again of my grandfather at the end of his life. A disordered, angry twin of the man who painted oceans and told tales of a kind magician who never failed. I took a legal pad, determined to expel the words cycloning in my mind and cage them behind a set of ruled lines. The White Rebbe. The Sabbath Light. The Angel of Losses. The River of Stones. The Penitent. The Wanderer.
    I copied the sketch from the inside cover of Grandpa’s notebook, its many arms, its meticulous angles, and then I copied it again, seeing this time the subtle swelling and tapering of the lines, the elegance of it, and then copied it again, and copied it a fourth time, because it was really so simple, deceptively simple, fundamental, pure.
    It was one o’clock. I called a friend from my old writing group.
    “Insomnia,” I said. “Again.”
    “Just your luck,” he said. “I’m leaving Brooklyn now. We can meet downtown.”
    An hour later I arrived at Warsaw, a Polish dive serving cheap well drinks and pierogies under a canopy of Christmas lights. The tables were filled, chairs crowding the aisle, but I didn’t recognize any of the customers. I took a seat at the bar. The blond bartender was intent on the elderly man beside me. He wore a brown plaid hat, round on top with a stiff bill shading his eyes, a fringe of white curls at the brim. He leaned over his mug of tea, shouting a joke to her in what must have been Polish. She laughed, and he leaned back a bit, content.
    I ordered vodka, put the anemic lime on a napkin, and swallowed half of the drink. I was itchy and nervous with fatigue. Next would come the headaches, then the flashes in my peripheral vision, like an alarm heralding collapse. I finished my drink.
    “Careful, careful,” the old man said. He had a slight accent. “We must remember our sorrows, not drown them.”
    “What did you say?” I asked. He was familiar: the wide mouth, the silver stubble, the bright blue eyes, watery and set deep in his flesh. His voice too—the tenor, the authority.
    He removed something from his pocket. A silver thread fell from between his pinched thumb and forefinger. “Here,” he said, and I leaned in to see the pendant tracing watery rings on the bar. It was blue and just the size of a chickpea, but it possessed a disproportionate depth, layers of tinted glass, the surface textured with an opalescent fingerprint.
    “For you,” he said, and held it out to me.
    “Oh, no thank you,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
    “Don’t worry, not to keep,” he said. “To hold for a while.”
    I knew him. He had tried to comfort me after Grandpa’s funeral, appearing by my side as I stood alone beside the coffin, suspended above the plot. I was the last mourner, and I knew that once I walked away, the workers waiting under the trees would lower him into the pit, the dirt wet and obscene. Grandpa would be gone forever, and the delicate forces containing my grief would weaken and I would spill across the earth. “Eli had a good life,” the old man had said. “Far better than he could have expected.”
    I had been angry at this but unable to protest. I realized how little I knew about Grandpa’s life before us.
    “Are you a friend from Brooklyn?” I had asked. The senior center had chartered a van. Sam had been too ill to come, and I didn’t think Grandpa had counted any of the other men as true friends; they were just neighbors who didn’t want their own funerals to be unattended.
    “From before,” he answered. “I did him a favor once, when he was