The Childless Man Who Begged a Son From the Graves of the Righteous

The man came to the cemetery alone, after the last mourner had gone, and lay down among the tombs of the righteous to wait. His wife had counted too many barren years to count anymore. He had tried doctors, amulets, festivals. Now he tried the dead. All night he prayed at the graves of the tzaddikim, his face against the cold stone, begging the buried righteous to carry his plea up to a heaven that had so far kept its mouth shut.

Toward dawn the ground answered.

Shapes pulled themselves out of the earth, gray and unhurried, and stood over him in the half-light. They were not the righteous. They were the demons who keep the cemeteries, the ones who do their business in the hour when the world has not yet decided whether it is night or morning. "You want a son," they said. It was not a question. "We will give you one. But we circumcise him, here, on the eighth day, in this place." A childless man at a grave does not bargain. He said yes.

The Bargain at the Graves

He went home, his wife conceived, and a boy was born. On the eighth day the demons came for the cutting, and the man let them, because a promise made at a tomb is not the kind you break. But the road home twisted and doubled and lost him, until the gray shapes rose again from the dark.

"We will lead you home," they said, "if you give the boy to us for seven years. We will raise him. We will teach him." A man lost among graves with a newborn does not argue the terms. He agreed. Seven years he waited. When he came at last to collect his son, the demons met him at the threshold of their world and asked for one year more. "So that he may learn the speech of the birds," they said, "and the tongue of the beasts." Reluctantly, a third time, the father bent.

What the demons gave the boy was a thing the world had lost. There was a morning after Eden when the mouth of every creature closed, the lion and the sparrow and the ox who had once spoken with Adam in a single tongue. From that morning on the animals only barked and chirped and roared, scattered to their kinds, the common language sealed away. The boy carried the broken seal in his ears.

The Two Birds at the Brook

At eight years old he came home a stranger to his own father. They walked together, and at a brook two birds were calling across the water, back and forth, the way birds do. The boy stopped. He laughed out loud. Then, in the same breath, he wept.

"Why do you laugh and weep?" the father demanded.

The boy answered quietly. "The birds are saying that one day I will be a king. And that you, my father, will kneel before me and wash my hands and feet before a meal."

The father heard only arrogance. Eight years of bargaining at graves, and this was the harvest, a son who said his father would one day kneel to him. Rage took him fast. He seized the boy and threw him into the river.

The River That Would Not Drown Him

The river did not drown him. The current carried him downstream and laid him on a bank, where a fuller, a man who beat cloth clean in the running water, found him and raised him as his own. The boy grew up beside the washing-stones, in another town, the prophecy traveling quietly inside him.

In the capital of that country, something had begun to torment the King. Two birds, gray with dust, came every day and threw themselves into his food. They fouled his table and would not be driven off. No one in the court could say what it meant, and a thing no one can explain becomes, to a frightened king, a thing someone must answer for. He turned on the Jews of his kingdom. "Find me a man who can read these birds within seven days," he ruled, "or you die."

The fuller heard the decree and remembered the boy he had pulled from the river, the strange child who tilted his head at sparrows. He brought him to the court.

The Souls That Came Back as Birds

The boy stood before the King and listened to the two dust-covered birds. Then he spoke. "These are the souls of two Jews," he said, "murdered by your own servants. Their wives still do not know what became of them. They throw themselves into your food because the blood will not stay buried." He named the murderers, there in the hall.

The two birds rose from the table and flew the length of the room and settled, each one, on the head of a guilty man. The court fell silent. The murderers were seized and punished, and the dead, having spoken through the only mouths left to them, were quiet at last.

The King kept the boy for his wisdom. The boy grew, and judged, and his name for justice spread through the country, and when the old King's time came the throne passed to the foundling from the river. He ruled, and people came from far places to bring him their hardest cases.

The Basin and the Pitcher

In the village he had been thrown out of, a woman still asked her husband where their son had gone. He kept saying the boy was dead. She asked to see the grave. He had none to show her. They quarreled until the only thing left was to bring it before the famous king who settled what no one else could.

The king heard them out, an old man and his wife arguing over a child eight years buried or never buried at all. Then he sent the whole court away. He kept only the two of them in the room. A servant brought a basin and a pitcher for the washing before the meal, and the old man, as the lowest guest must, bent down to pour the water over the king's hands and wash his feet.

The king looked down at the gray head bowed over the basin, the father kneeling to wash him exactly as two birds had promised at a brook a lifetime ago. "Father," he said. "I am your son."