The first box opened with a sigh, as if the books themselves were glad to be freed from their confinement. Stone stacked them in neat piles along the wall, his fingers blackening with dust. He opened a second and a third box and stacked the books, washing his hands of grime as he went. By the time he had emptied ten or eleven of the boxes, he finally paused, sweating, flipping through a hardcover biography of Orde Wingate, the eccentric British general credited by many with creating modern guerrilla warfare. Something akin to a shiver seized his body; not cold, but electric, as if he had stuck his finger into a light socket. He was not alone. Somebody stood just over his shoulder, reading the words before his eyes, breathing in his ear. “Who’s there?” Stone called and spun around, but there was no one in the room. The books whispered to him. It was a whisper, an actual whisper, but it came from inside Stone’s head. He did not so much read the words as the words read themselves. The Judge had underlined Wingate’s call to arms: “Today we stand on the threshold of battle. The time of preparation is over and we are moving on the enemy to prove ourselves and our methods.”
His father had been reading that book back in the spring when Stone had first arrived. The underlining was new, done with the blue Uni-ball pen Stone had given his father from his knapsack. Stone closed his eyes, and the words remained before him, illuminated, shimmering in the darkness. “I am so fucking high,” he said out loud and began to laugh before he heard four successive gunshots ring out somewhere down the block. He froze in place, waiting for the police to come, but he never heard any sirens.
Stone unboxed The History of Nations—all sixty-eight volumes, reprinted from the London edition, encapsulating the histories of all nations from Greece to Rome to Persia to France to England—his father had bought as a student at an old antiquarian bookshop on 104th Street, according to the stamp inside the cover of the books. More histories: Josephus, Churchill, Thucydides, Gibbon, a three-volume set called History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Biographies of Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds, the writings of Israel Zangwill and of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, his father’s hero, fluent in eight languages, writer and translator of Dante and Poe, a lawyer by training, a journalist, and above all the most eloquent and forceful voice in Zionism. He found Lincoln; Hitler; Stalin; Machiavelli’s Prince, the pages edged in gold leaf; Clausewitz’s On War in the original German; a signed, personalized copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. He found a first edition of Altneuland by Theodor Herzl, published in Leipzig, Germany, and then slim, elegant volumes of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol; the tales of Nachman of Bratslav; the works of Maimonides; the Harvard classics, all fifty-one volumes; Faulkner’s novels; Tolstoy; Dostoevsky; Shakespeare; the Greek tragedies—all rare or first editions in English.
IT WAS HARD to imagine just weeks before his father died, a man had knocked on the door offering to purchase the Judge’s entire estate: his books, papers, furniture, even his clothing. How did this vulture even know the Judge was dying and that his belongings might soon be available? He could have the furniture and clothing, but these books were the Judge’s children after all, more important than Stone had ever been to his father. Stone at least owed him the respect of taking proper care of his books.
It was true, there were ghouls out there looking to make an easy buck, and Stone, under different circumstances, had no objection to making a sale, but the Judge wasn’t really dying, was he? He’d be needing those books before long. He wasn’t dying, he wasn’t. The inexplicable appearance of this shady merchant of misery was enough for Stone to slam the door in the man’s face, but he deftly slid his foot across the threshold and said, “I won’t take but a moment of your time, Mr. Stone.”
This was the first time anyone had ever called him Mr. Stone, and he realized that one day, like it or not, he would be the only Mr. Stone. He opened the door and the man, seeing the living room lined entirely with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, smiled and said, “Quite a collection.” He produced a wad of cash from his pocket. “I’ll give you fifteen grand for everything. Including any personal papers or documents.” He must have been in his early thirties; he was slim and wore a nondescript blue windbreaker and a Mets cap pulled low over his eyes so they were nothing but shadows. He had the makings of a beard on his angular face and did not offer his hand. There was something familiar about him—his greasy arrogance, his presumptuousness—but Stone could not place him. He’d lived too long in the heart of Connecticut and was afraid he’d begun to think that all Jews looked similar.
“Not for sale,” Stone said.
There were no remaining documents, and the books meant everything to his father. When Stone had arrived in the spring and found the Judge’s filing cabinets emptied out, he had asked the Judge what happened, and his father had told him there were no papers, there never were any papers, and to mind his own business. But Stone had found a receipt on the kitchen table from an information management company named Iron Mountain. One afternoon, overcome with curiosity, he had phoned the company only to learn his father’s papers had all been securely shredded.
“Everything is for sale for the right price,” the man insisted, peeling off some more crisp bills. “Think what you can buy with twenty thousand dollars.” He slipped the money into Stone’s hand and it felt like freedom.
Stone considered leaving Brooklyn behind forever, starting out anew on the far side of the world. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all.
“What makes you so sure he’s dying?” Stone asked after a moment.
“Only Hashem knows for certain,” the man said. “But I am making an offer now.”
Stone heard his father stirring in his bed, clicking the morphine drip, and he suddenly felt the violent need for the man to be gone.
“You have to leave,” Stone said, pressing the bills back onto the stranger. “Get out.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“He’s not dying, he’s not dying. He’s not.”
Stone managed to push the man into the hall, but he was certain he heard through the closed door the words, “I’ll be back, Matthew.”
Stone retreated to his father’s room, furious at himself for even considering the money. What kind of son could do such a thing? His father was going to get better, he was going to survive this. But there in his sickbed, his father looked like a stranger, a pale withered husk of what he once was. His eyes were closed and Stone observed movement behind the lids, a sign of life. And then his eyes swung open, icy blue and pitiless, and he said, “You are smart, but not so smart.” After a long pause in which he never removed his eyes from Stone, he added, “Everything is in the books.”
Stone knew for certain his father was calling him through these books. The Judge was gone, but his eyes had tracked these pages, his mind had been shaped by the words written before him. Somebody was in the room with him, just over his shoulder, there but not there, whispering the words in English as they appeared on the pages, overlaid at the same time with that other strange and ancient language. He found a leather-bound copy of One Thousand and One Nights; Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; Rashi’s commentaries; a colossal book on the origins of the Spanish Inquisition; religious texts; legal texts; two books on gematria; the complete works of G. K. Chesterton; a silk-bound copy of Othello, with a tasseled bookmark that tickled Stone’s wrist.
When he finally reached the box in which he had placed the photo albums, Stone took a deep breath, expecting to be consumed by emotion. This was the life behind his own life, a blueprint to himself, which would go a long way toward explaining his future and what he might become. The albums were heavy and bursting with black-and-white pictures of his father as a child on Ocean Parkway: young Walter and poor Aunt Bunny playing on the front lawn, her broad mongoloid face shining beneath a frilled bonnet; his father lacing up a brand-new pair of PF Flyers, the corner of his tongue poking from his mouth in concentration; his father, missing his two front teeth, mugging with a baseball mitt in the stands at Ebbets Field. Stone’s father was small like he was, with a full head of hair and easy smile. He saw his father as a shirtless, happy