The Hypnotist

TWENTY-EIGHT

Shush, Persia, 1885

Bibi watched her husband pull his knife from his sheath. His hand shook-not with fear, she knew, but with age. The lamplight played on the edge of the blade like the devil dancing on the edge of hell, and the woman who was not a witch and had never had a premonition before in her life suddenly felt as if the very air she was breathing tasted of death.

Inching closer to her husband, she grabbed his wrist, digging into his paper-thin skin with her sharp nails. “They are just things…useless coins, pots. Who cares about them? We don’t pray to idols, and yet you are willing to risk your life to protect one?”

“They’ve belonged to my family for centuries.” He tried to pry her fingers away. “Let go of me.”

“Not until you agree not to go down into the cellar until help comes.”

“This is not your decision, woman,” he said so harshly she let go and stepped back and away from him as if he had become a stranger.

She waved her hand at the area to the right of the hearth. “Fine. Go. Protect your legacy.” Her voice was tough and weathered, but her dark eyes were glassy with tears.

“This is the one thing I have to leave our sons, and they to theirs,” Hosh said as he reached up and brushed her hair with his fingertips. He was old and sickly, spoiling from the inside out, but he smiled at her the same way he had when she was new to marriage and worried every time he’d left the house to go to the temple or to trade in the market. “Go back to bed, Bibi. No one is dying tonight. I promise you.”

Lifting the lantern off the hook on the wall, he turned and limped across the room, his elongated shadow following him. Bibi stepped on it, thinking for one crazy second that she could hold him back by keeping his shadow there with her.

Hosh walked past the warped wooden shelves where foodstuffs were stored and stopped at the edge of a small, tattered rug that had been woven with threads of deep red and royal blue but now was a memory of that glory. Faded or not, it still did the job of hiding what lay beneath it. After rolling it up, Hosh pushed it aside and exposed the trapdoor.

“Please,” Bibi whispered, reaching out again to hold him back, unable to stop herself.

Ignoring his wife, Hosh opened the door and shone his lantern on the staircase rough-hewn out of rock and dirt. Bibi shrank back. She hated everything about the cavern. Pitch-black and smelling of rotten eggs, it went so deep into the earth it was supposed to reach the sea, but no one was sure because at its farthest end was a thick wall of boulders.

She’d heard the legend about that wall four times because Hosh had told it to each of her sons on the day of his bar mitzvah, and he always began it the same way: This story has been retold by every father to every son in our family for the past three centuries.

The wall, he said, hadn’t always been there but appeared overnight after the treasures were hidden in the crypt. His ancestors claimed God himself had caused the avalanche to safeguard and protect the legacy from anyone discovering it via the outside entrance. Over time, whenever a family member became curious and started digging out the rocks, whatever they managed to move during the day caused even more stones to cave in during the night and the wall grew thicker than it had been before.

When he was thirteen and heard the story, Hosh had argued that it must be a fable. His grandfather had smiled and invited him to disprove it. The next day Hosh and his two brothers removed twenty-two rocks, and the following morning when they returned to the crypt there’d been a new cave-in and the barrier encroached two feet deeper into the cave than it had been the night before.

But Hosh’s grandfather was long gone, and the wall had finally been breached from the other side by a French archaeologist. He’d come to their front door three days ago and, in surprisingly good Farsi, requested that Hosh give him access to the crypt through the house because it would be easier to remove the antiquities that way.

Allow him entry so he could steal their treasures? Hosh had refused. The cave and its contents belonged to his family. The archaeologist was trespassing.

The Frenchman had a declaration on thick vellum from the Minister of Culture granting him the right to excavate the cave and stipulating that he could keep fifty percent of whatever he found for himself as payment. Hosh ripped up the sheets and threw the shreds in the man’s face.

“I don’t care about the partage system,” he shouted. “The cavern doesn’t belong to the government, so the government can’t give away anything in it.”

Hosh and his sons spent the following days and nights reinforcing the stone wall, but this afternoon, while they were observing the Sabbath at schul, the archaeologist and his workers had broken through once again.

Now their sons were out, rounding up men from the shtetl to fight off the looters. All Bibi wanted was for Hosh to wait until their help arrived, even if it meant that while they waited, the archaeologist and his workers carried off one or two of the treasures. What did a bowl or a bracelet matter compared to Hosh’s life? But her husband was a stubborn man.

Despite her pleas, he put his knife between his teeth, grabbed hold of a lantern and descended into the earth via a ladder that his ancestors had used before him. The rungs creaked with his weight. Once he’d disappeared from her sight, Bibi counted to ten, gathered her skirts, tucked them into her waistband and followed him into the darkness.

Hugging the sharp, rocky walls, hiding in the heavy shadows, Bibi watched Hosh confront the archaeologist. He wasn’t alone. She counted ten young Persians. Filthy from climbing through the rubble and shining with sweat, each was armed with a knife that glittered in the low light. The weapons were redundant. Every one of them was strong enough to take Hosh with his bare hands. Why couldn’t her husband see that? Why was he willing to risk so much for these things?

“You’re on my property.” Hosh shook his fist. It was a futile, childish gesture, and Bibi’s heart broke for him. “Leave or you will be arrested for looting. My sons are on their way with help. They’re bringing the whole ghetto with them. If you don’t go, you’ll get hurt.”

The archaeologist held out another sheaf of official-looking documents that looked similar to the one Hosh had ripped up earlier that week. “These give me the right to excavate here.”

Hosh knocked them out of the intruder’s hand, and they landed in a crazy mosaic pattern on the dirt floor.

“It’s you who is the thief,” the Frenchman said, each word spoken with righteous indignation. “You who are hiding ancient treasures here that belong to Persia, to history and to mankind.”

Hosh laughed bitterly. “Is that what you are going to do with them? Give them to mankind? Or are you going to sell them to collectors in Europe and America? Don’t think I’m a fool because I’m old. We all know what happens to the antiquities that are dug up in our land.”

Bibi’s mouth was dry, and her heart was like a small animal running fast, trying to escape the cage of her chest. None of this would be happening-her husband would not be in danger and her sons would not be rounding up their neighbors-if Hosh had listened to her and sold these things a long time ago. What good were pots, jugs, jewelry and graven images doing anyone sitting underground?

She was sure the wooden man with wings on either side of his forehead, holding poppies in one hand and a drinking horn in the other, was an evil thing. But her husband had argued that whatever the religion of the men who’d created the treasures, they were important in the same way that the Torah in the synagogue was important-not just for the words they read from it every Shabbat but for the past that the scroll carried into present and would one day carry into the future.

“Get out of my way, old man!” the archaeologist shouted. He was out of patience.

Hosh didn’t move. Not a single muscle in his hand or his neck twitched. Not even his eyes blinked.

“For the last time, get out of my way.”

Hosh pulled his knife from its sheath.

“Is your life so worthless to you that you would throw it away on these objects?” the archaeologist asked less aggressively, as if he were talking to a child now.

When Hosh didn’t reply, Bibi guessed he was trying to stall, hoping his sons would arrive soon with help. But the archaeologist was impatient. He gestured to two of his workers, who stepped forward with the assuredness of the very young and very strong. Bibi thought she heard laughter as they approached her husband. She knew that unless help arrived right away, he was doomed.

Hosh continued to hold his ground.

“Get out of our way,” the younger of the two Persians said and pushed Hosh back toward the wall. Falling, he landed on his side and winced. Bibi had to hold herself back. Was he hurt? She hoped that he was. Then he’d stay there out of their way. A small injury could keep him safe.

Hosh got back on his feet, shaky at first but then, rebounding, he lashed out with his knife, surprising his assailant and nicking him on the arm. The man looked down, saw the trickle of blood, and without any hesitation, shoved his knife into Hosh’s ribs.

Bibi didn’t see the expression on her husband’s face change, but she heard him express a small, surprised Oh. She’d never heard such a weak sound come from his lips or seen him so defeated. Forgetting the danger she’d be in, thinking only that Hosh was hurt and needed her, she ran out from the shadows and toward him.

No. She wailed as she saw the blood oozing out of him. No. His face was slack. There was no flicker of life left in his eyes. No. A long, drawn-out note of disbelief. No!

When their sons arrived with the men from the ghetto, all the treasures were gone. The crypt was empty except for the tableau of two bodies: Hosh on his back in the dust and dirt with his frail wife on top of him, her blood mixing with his in a red-black stain beneath them.