The Memorist

Chapter 110

Vienna, Austria

Friday, May 2^nd-12:25 p.m.

The silver jar was lighter with half her father’s ashes in his grave. Meer stepped back as the rabbi motioned to the crowd and ten men stepped forward. One of them was the stranger who’d taken her father’s place in the minyan. They gathered around the gravesite and in unison began to pray, not in German, but in Hebrew, the language of prayer for all Jews.

The rich sound resonated through Meer’s chest cavity and her heart slowed to the prayer’s rhythm. This was the Kaddish vibrating inside of her. The prayer that had been recited millions of times over the dead for the last six thousand years, a tradition intended to give solace and succor as a soul passed from this life and prepared to enter the next. These were the teachings her father had tried to interest her in, that had mattered so much to him and that he had believed in with all of his soul. His soul. Had it shattered into those hundred pieces of light he had told her about? Were they waiting now to find another vessel?

Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…

The words rose up and surrounded her like a warm wind.

V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon…

She didn’t know the words’ actual meaning but they resonated inside her the way the memory song had when Sebastian had played it on the flute, but without the fear and panic. It was the same vibration that had engulfed her in the underground chamber when she sat with her father as he lay dying. The same vibration she’d felt when Sebastian’s son, Nicolas, had chanted his hymn-this hymn-over and over in his hospital room.

V’yam’likh mal’khutei b’chayeikhon uv’yomeikhon.

As the prayer came to an end, Meer was still thinking about Nicolas: a nine-year-old savant to these words. Had he seen the gardener unearth a child’s skull that summer day? Had the souls of the two children-one alive and one dead-connected in a way that caused Nicolas to believe it was his job to mourn that long-deceased Jewish child? Was he lost in that mourning?

The rabbi recited one last blessing.

Meer was hearing his words and staring at the minyan, thinking about Sebastian’s useless sacrifice to help Nicolas. A father’s dedication to the point of obsession to save his son and bring him back from the land of the living dead.