34

In life and in death, Nana Bellini kept lush pots of pink and white vinca, impatiens, marigolds, ferns, and a dozen other varieties on the front porch of her house. She planted ivy and wisteria vines in an apron around the perimeter and allowed them to pull themselves up the balustrade like children at play. The flowers perfumed the air, attracting hummingbirds and bumblebees that tormented the cats napping in the shade. Like the garden behind the house, the front porch was its own little ecosystem and parable of life.

That all changed when Nana left Shemaya, leaving me alone to take care of the place. By the time Luas had come to find me after my meeting with Ott Bowles, which on earth would have been equivalent to sixty years later, everything had withered and died. Only raw piles of dirt filled the pots now, littered with fragments of dried stems and roots; the banister sagged and swayed dangerously in gusts of wind created by a thunderhead that stalked the four seasons of the valley day and night like a homicidal lover; the window panes of the house were broken, and paint peeled from the mullions and frames. The place looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for decades. There were no cats or birds, and there was no color, just a monochromatic frame. My Shemaya had turned to shades of gray.

I hadn’t seen Luas or been out of the house since the day the spirit of Otto Bowles entered my office and infected my soul. I had staggered from my office in a daze, down the long corridor, through the great hall, the vestibule, the woods, up the steps of the porch, into the house. There I stayed, behind closed doors, reliving his life again and again, horrified and fascinated. My body aged with the house over those sixty earth years; I would have been ninety-one. My hair turned gray, thin, and coarse. My face contracted into the frightened expression of an old woman, barely more than skeleton with absurd knobs of bone protruding from my chin, jaws, and forehead; and my lips disappearing into the toothless crater of a mouth without definition or color, shriveled and hardened like an earthworm baked in the sun. I slept during the day and woke in the night wet and aching all over, my bladder unable to contain fluids and my joints brittle and inflamed with arthritis. This is the way I might have looked and felt had my life not been cut short, at the age of thirty-one. Maybe Ott Bowles had done me a favor. I knew it would be Luas when I heard the knock on the door; there had been no visitors during all those years. He would be coming to say I could no longer delay the presentation: Ott Bowles was waiting in the train shed for his case to be called, and God was waiting in the Urartu Chamber to judge his soul.

Luas said nothing about the change in my appearance when I opened the door. He only smiled-that knowing grandfather’s smile of his, the way he smiled at me when I arrived in Shemaya, as if to say: Yes, my daughter, you have suffered, and it is difficult, but I would only make it worse by noticing. I offered him a seat on the porch, too embarrassed to let him in and see how run down I had allowed the house to become.

“I’d pull the switch again,” I said, in the graveled, quivering voice of an old woman, weak but defiant. “Until there was nothing left of him but ash.”

The dark anvil of the thundercloud crossed the sky. I imagined how it would feel to be pulled hot from a fire and hammered against its flank.

“Nero Claudius committed suicide,” Luas said, his face pinching into a wince while his hands groped through his pockets to find matches for his pipe. “Unlike Mr. Bowles, he cheated the world of its opportunity for justice.”

“Yes,” I said, “but did it hurt when he had you decapitated? I didn’t die right away. I can still feel the bullets tearing through my body.”

“You’ve got me there,” Luas said. “I didn’t feel a thing when the blade came down.” He struck a match, and it flared bright orange in the shadows.

“So God has a sense of humor after all,” I said. “Satan is a lawyer and carries a briefcase. What did we do to deserve all this?”

The white smoke from Luas’ pipe bubbled over the sides, too weak to rise into the wind. “I did cheer when they stoned Saint Stephen to death,” Luas said, “so I guess I had it coming. But this isn’t hell, Brek. The Urartu Chamber must be certain of our fidelity and self control. If we are impartial when presenting the souls we most despise, then the Chamber can be certain we will present all postulants with dispassion. Our motives must be pure when we enter the Chamber-we can show no favoritism or emotion. The judgment is Yahweh’s; He alone determines how Otto Bowles and Nero Claudius spend eternity.”

A blue bolt of lightning flashed across the valley, followed by a loud clap of thunder. A doe and her fawn, tiptoeing through the band of deep white snow covering the meadow, lifted their ears toward the sky, confused by the sound of thunder on such a cold day in their part of Shemaya.

Oh, take care, I wished the doe with all my heart, one mother to another. It’s not safe here. They’re after your baby, and they’re after you. Trust no one. Assume nothing. Run. Run!

“Did you know that the word justice appears more than one hundred times in the books of the Old Testament, but only four times in all of the New Testament?” Luas asked.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“The Messiah tried to do away with justice,” Luas said. “He claimed love is the only law, and when we’re wronged, we should not seek justice against our enemies but turn the other cheek instead. It came as no surprise, of course, that he died a victim of injustice, crucified by his own words.”

“That’s why Jews make the best lawyers,” I said. “That’s not a bigoted comment, by the way; it’s a matter of theology and philosophy.”

“As a Jewish lawyer myself,” Luas said, “I completely agree. In fact, I did everything I could to bring the Messiah’s supporters to justice; but then one day I found myself blinded by his ideas, I don’t know how it happened. In the darkness, I convinced myself he was right. Oh, it was quite a conversion: I started preaching this to the people and criticizing them for appealing to the law courts.”

“You misled a lot of people,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” Luas agreed. “I first realized that when I met Elymas. He was a stubborn old Jew like me, thirsty for justice. When he opposed me, I couldn’t just turn the other cheek. I blinded him just as I had been blinded-he still carries a grudge about it even though I’ve apologized a thousand times. I went back to the old law of an eye for an eye, Brek, and I can’t tell you how good it felt. But by that point, the rabbis worried that I was becoming too dangerous and had gone too far, so they convinced the Romans to imprison me as an enemy of the state, just as they did with Jesus. I wasn’t about to give up without a fight the way he did; I demanded my right to a trial as a Roman citizen. When it looked like I couldn’t get a fair trial, I appealed to Nero Claudius. He had a good reputation in those days; nobody knew he would turn out to be such a sadistic killer. You know the rest. Nero and I meet again here every day in the afterlife. And so we happily find that even mighty emperors are brought to justice. Jesus was wrong. Justice is the only law, not love, and justice exists only when the law courts and the lawyers thrive. The Urartu Chamber is the final proof of that. The Messiah was entitled to make at least one mistake.”

The storm clouds cleared, revealing four moons in the nighttime sky: a quarter moon, a half moon, a three-quarter moon and a full moon, each set against the constellations appropriate to its season, hashing the sky into astronomical gibberish. The air cooled and I wrapped one of Nana’s shawls closer around me for warmth. Bats flickered above the trees after insects, and in the distance I could hear a great horned owl and a whippoorwill, and the bark of a lonely dog-the sounds I’d heard many nights on that porch as a child.