Illustrations by Holly Stapleton
It was March when I received the news that Harold had died in one of his caves. I hadn’t expected him to still be doing fieldwork himself; having watched him make a nest of his laurels, I admit that I saw him as one of those shrewd birds that thieves other’s eggs. The last time we’d met was three years before, in Paris. He’d come from a conference in Lyon and was driving a rented Mini that made a caricature of the stately form he’d acquired in his late years—at any moment, the toy car looked like it would break into pieces, the doors falling off and the bottom dropping out, leaving Harold clutching the steering wheel in open air. He was wearing a woolen overcoat and a fur hat in the Russian style; I believe they call it a shapka. He claimed it had been a gift, but it was so apt that it was hard not to believe he had gone out and bought it for himself. I could imagine him walking down the street somewhere and catching sight of it in a shop window, and the uncanny feeling it must have produced in him, like seeing one’s hands on another person. Obviously he had to buy it. When I saw him in that hat, I had a feeling of déjà vu. For a minute, I couldn’t grasp what he reminded me of, until suddenly it hit me that he looked like a Holbein portrait. I saw that glossy animal skin atop his head and the spreading shoulders below, and in a flash something was revealed to me—or so I told myself—about his authorship. One always has the sense of how gloomy it is to be a Holbein, despite their regal bearing. How utterly unfortunate to live so far north, to be constantly suffering drafts, to be given such jowls, to have to go along with the Reformation. They make no bones about their misery, the Holbein people. They’re dressed in those hugely impressive clothes, and yet under the radar of the great master, they somehow manage to smuggle a secret message to us about what a difficult fate it is to be one of them. There was something of that in Harold, I thought: Here was the great ambassadorial gravity of his presence, buttressed on all sides by the bulk of his convictions, and it was all so uniform, so convincing, until, looking closely, you happened to catch a tiny flicker in his small, gray eyes, a little sign of doubt that threatened to throw the entire enormous project of being Harold into question.
It was that flicker I thought of when I got the call from his sister. While studying his beloved cave art, he had broken the safety rules, left his colleagues behind, and lost his bearings; by the time they found him in a shaft, he was dead from carbon-dioxide poisoning. He must have been wearing his spelunking overalls and hard hat, but as Clara spoke, I pictured him slumped beneath the sword of a stalactite, shapka still perched like a spirit animal atop his head. I was not lying when I told Clara, who was weeping on the other end in her Jerusalem apartment, that I loved Harold. Of course I did. Loved him and resented him too, though I left it at love and didn’t elaborate. Nor did I tell her what I believed to be true: that Harold wasn’t capable of becoming accidentally lost, and that if he had died of lostness, it was because he had decided, in no uncertain terms, to lose himself.
After I hung up, I stood, shocked, at the window, staring out through the dusk thickening over Central Park, and when a hunched, darkened form broke rank with the surrounding branches and glided forth—a giant bird with outstretched wings—I saw it as a farewell message from Harold, proof of a levity that had come to him now: a final mark of distinction in the heavens, or whatever realm he had advanced into.
Harold, née Harel, Hebrew for “mountain of God”: to the land where he was born, he now was returned, to be buried next to his parents, who had clawed their way to Israel from the threshold of the crematoria, and in defiance conceived the great geologic form of a child, permanent and holy. From the beginning, he could do no wrong. When, at 7, he threw a stone at another child’s head, causing a bloody gash, his mother defended him on the grounds that the injured child had possessed the stupidity to stick his head in the stone’s path. I first heard this canonical story at the start of the summer of our junior year, when I followed Harold back to Jerusalem and stayed with his family. My own mother had always kept a careful log of my shortcomings, written, as my analyst once said, in her own blood. I was used to an anxious love, the kind that cuts down the tree before it can grow so that it can’t be felled by another axe. But Harold was allowed to grow and grow until he became too large for his family’s apartment, too large for Jerusalem, too large even for Israel, and left for America, where, at Yale University, he continued to unfurl. As his roommate, I was amazed to discover that he didn’t know how to fry an egg or do his laundry. Only when I met his family did I come to understand that Harold was their sun king; that they revolved around him, their great hope and vindication.
They came to pick us up at the airport, and his mother, in large plastic earrings and practical shoes dusted with ancient sediment, threw herself around his neck, craning her head back to drink him in, until he shook her off to hug his father—a long, tight embrace of a sort that I had never seen between men. “This,” he said, turning back to me at last, “is the friend I’ve been telling you all about.” Seeing me now for the first time, they embraced me too, as if I were an extension of Harold— as if what he loved, they also loved, without reservation. His father had a limp that I imagined had come from the camps, perhaps even Mengele, but he snatched up Harold’s suitcase anyway and carried it to the car. Though their apartment was small, Harold was given the best room and only duvet. I slept on a sort of thin pallet that his mother unrolled every night at the foot of his bed; lying there, I felt resentment at my own mother, who’d made me give up my bed whenever we had a guest. At their dinner table, mother, father, and sister rehearsed for me Harold’s hagiography while he sat silently, endowed with their admiration, drifting in and out of the smoke from his own cigarette.
Naturally Harold had impressed me from the start too. In the early months of our courtship, we’d strutted and preened around each other, expounded on Vico’s giants and mimetic desire, formed a cabal consisting of only us and the legendary dead. Though I was better-looking, he was more attractive to women, except when he got carried away and overspilled himself, drowning them in his endless barrage of arguments, assertions, opinions. But until I followed him home, I’d believed our differences to be largely cultural. I’d never been to Israel before, nor had I ever known any Israelis. So I took Harold to represent his kind—took his confidence to be exotic, Middle Eastern, born of a surfeit of sunlight and pioneering; his self-belief to be the survival strategy of a whole people. But when I met his family, I came to understand it as the inevitable result of being loved to the point of worship. My own parents believed that praise was unhealthy, just as they believed that bathing in cold water strengthened resilience. To his parents, Harold was a phoenix risen from the ashes; naturally he had learned to fly. But if I tried to work out how his confidence had been cultivated, bit by bit I also began to believe that it was innate, and however much I coveted it, I would never myself possess it.
Harold first took me caving that summer. His father surrendered the car and took two buses to his job at a municipal office so that Harold could drive us to the Dead Sea, where he had been exploring caves since he was a youth in the Scouts. Once we passed out of East Jerusalem, the desert opened up—I’d never seen anything like it; I was moved and terrified by so much space, and what seemed to me the raw matter of the world. Harold bore down on the blue and ancient salt-crusted sea that appeared in the distance. There, he coated himself in foul-smelling clay and floated belly-up like a corpse, drifting out toward the no-man’s-land between the shore and Jordan. Afterward we lunched on the sandwiches his mother had packed for us, and then, thickly swabbing his pita in hummus, he delivered a brilliant lecture about the scrolls discovered in the caves above us, among the oldest known manuscripts of books later included in the Hebrew Bible. There was also the nearby Cave of Horror, where the skeletons of refugees from the Bar Kokhba revolt had been found, having perished under siege by the Romans. As a teenager, Harold himself had found a Roman coin while exploring caves he’d managed to reach on his own. I still remember how his eyes gleamed as he spoke; history had always come alive for him, but his gift was to be able to animate it for those who could not see, as he could, through the narrowest of openings, the sweeping vista of the past. Two decades later, his book The Art of Prehistoric Man was that rare anomaly: praised by his fellow archaeologists and read by laymen.
It was to the caves—which we reached that day from the parking lot at the Ein Gedi Field School, after a hike and an arduous climb (back then, Harold had been lithe and, if never slender, at least athletic)—that he was most strongly drawn. In their dank depths his imagination burned most vividly. I think it was a passion connected to his boyhood, to the excitement of uncovering what had lain in secret oblivion for thousands of years. Though I want to say that something more was at work, that what he felt in those underground chambers was something spiritual.
Entering behind him that day, nourished by his mother’s lunch, I was set on feeling it too. Heady with Harold’s excitement, with a nearness to the ages such as I had never felt in Grand Rapids or New Haven, I thought that what was his might become mine as well; that I might find it through the ingress of that dark, jagged hole that led far back into time. With jaw clenched, I readied myself, ducking after him into the cave. I don’t know what I thought—that I might receive, be granted, a conversion through atavistic energies, the awakening of an anima that had long been slumbering within. But it was not to be. How could it have been? Years later, when I visited Harold in the Cave of the Trois-Frères, he showed me the stenciled prints of hands that appear in so many painted caves, and spoke of the possibility that those who made them believed in the existence of a world behind the surface of the rock, one that imbued the handprints with its power. Though he couldn’t sustain such belief himself, a sense of sanctity nevertheless came through to him across the passage of time, amplified by the echo of 30,000 or 40,000 years. There was something shamanic about him; he was, I always felt, a kind of conduit. It didn’t surprise me when, at the start of graduate school, he situated himself in the Upper Paleolithic. To me, he had—had always had—special access: Why not to the moment when humanity first discovered its own powers of creativity and chose to represent itself and the world?
Was I envious of Harold? Of course I was. At times, I wished I’d never met him and could have gone about things my own way. I thought highly enough of myself when I arrived at college, which was something of a feat, given what I’d been up against at home. But the more I knew of Harold, the more deeply ensconced he became in my psyche, crowding out light and widening a passage for doubt. I fell in love with the first woman who ever wanted me and I clung to her, dedicated myself to her without reserve. Agi used to say that Harold, who began to publish early, confused his pen for his penis. Only much later did I begin to see the holes in his own self-belief. Harold himself was always fascinated by the contradictions in people. In countless conversations, he circled back to that: how a person can contain within himself such violently opposing forces, and they either hold him in strange balance or tear him apart. Only much later did it occur to me that perhaps all that time, however unconsciously, he had been asking me to see what he knew others would miss in him.
On the plane to Israel for the funeral, I noted down a few scattered remarks, should Clara ask me to speak. It might have been presumptuous—in later years, Harold and I had been in touch far less—but I remained, after all, one of his oldest friends. And yet what was there to say about Harold’s passion? His appetite? His special knowledge of the Fall of Man? What did a world without Harold mean? I lifted the window shade and stared out into the blinding dark. Had it not been for Harold, I wrote, I might have become what I wanted to be. That might have gotten a laugh, but it was true enough—we had met in a class on the ancient world, and our mutual passion for the subject drew us immediately together. I’d harbored hopes of becoming a historian, though my parents expected me to go into business or law. It was Harold, a man of the sun and the Earth, who loved the materiality of things—Harold who needed to palpate history (and not only history) with his own hands. It was contagious. Why should I want to study history behind a desk, or in the musty basements of libraries, when I could be out in the field, out in the world, excavating what had been lost, forgotten, hidden? Bringing the past, quite literally, to light? That day in the caves above the Dead Sea, he had inhaled the humid earthiness, nostrils flaring, and caressed the walls with a kind of sensuousness. Later I would blame my parents for my retreat into law, where I went from success to success, and rose to become a partner in the firm. But in my heart, I considered Harold responsible. He took up the whole field of history, of prehistory; I couldn’t see how I could pursue it in his wake, I would have forever been aware of all I was lacking. I studied history for as long as I could before I had to make a definitive choice, and then, if only to get out from under his shadow, I slunk away into law. I don’t think I’d ever put it so bluntly to myself, but in the darkened hull of the airplane, trying to make sense of what Harold had been to me, I knew that’s what I believed.
I hadn’t been back to Israel since that long-ago summer. I’d never had the desire; I suppose I’d never really liked the place—the overfreighted passion, the endless exaggeration, every day a mountain out of a molehill. From Ben Gurion Airport, I took a taxi straight to the cemetery and arrived there just in time. Squinting in the sunlight, I saw the dark clot of mourners gathered among the cypresses. Two of Harold’s three wives were there, his grown children, a handful of friends and colleagues: whoever could make it so far, in such haste, to see Harold put to rest in his shroud. A larger memorial service was to be held at Oxford at a later date, in the chapel at Magdalen College, where Harold had been a fellow for 30 years, and where, on a long-ago visit, he’d shown me an enormous 16th-century copy, made by da Vinci’s studio, of The Last Supper : the ballet of hands, the feet, the elegant betrayal.
I stood across from his third and youngest wife, who’d separated from Harold a few years earlier because she wanted a family; underneath her shapeless linen dress, she appeared to be pregnant. She was an archaeologist too, a woman who normally went around dressed in Patagonia and had little tolerance for formality. But his first wife, Helen—to whom he had been married for more than 20 years, and who had maintained toward Harold an attitude of wry condescension that allowed her to indulge him—had always been glamorous. She stood now, petite and dark, in enormous sunglasses. After the rabbi said some words, their son and daughter spoke, the latter stepping forward to address the hole in the ground, as if the finally mute Harold could hear her. She hadn’t talked to Harold through her teenage years, as far as I recalled, but now she was talking to him. She was followed by one of Harold’s closest friends and colleagues, an Englishman who called him a mensch, which struck me as a goyish misunderstanding of the word, and spoke of the terrible accident. I looked around at people’s faces—did no one else suspect that Harold had been deliberate? That he would never make such a misstep? Next to the hole stood the headstones of his parents. The sudden transformation of life into archaeology—who’d understood that better than Harold? When my turn came to throw a handful of dirt, I crumpled the page of notes I’d written and threw it in with the soil. It was then, while I was looking down into the hole at the bottom of which Harold lay, that the bile rose in the back of my throat and I felt, for the first time, that I might weep.
Afterward we gathered at his sister’s apartment, a brightly colored and comfortably inhabited place that exuded a sense of the good and happy life that Clara—uncelebrated and mostly overlooked by her parents—had grown up to lead. Framed photographs of Harold were set out on a table. At the center was a large one, taken 10 or 15 years earlier, of him standing before a cave wall on which painted bison and horses seemed to be flying past in perpetual motion. His head was tilted back, and eyes cast upward, and the effect was of Harold paused at attention, listening to the sound of their hooves.
His fellow prehistorians agreed that deciphering the meaning of the paintings would only ever be speculative. But Harold had made his name with the theory that they had been produced at the moment when, after millennia of being dominated by animals, humans began to dominate them. He likened it to the Fall of Man, only the forbidden knowledge acquired was that humans were distinct from other animals. The paintings, he asserted, expressed the guilt, regret, and glory that came with the belief in that separation. Like all theories, right or wrong, it said something—or so I always thought—about its author: his will to triumph, the loneliness of his distinction.
Looking up from the photograph, I caught sight of Helen refilling the platters of food. I had the urge to lead her away so that we might speak in confidence: Surely she didn’t believe that Harold had gotten lost, and was merely pretending for the sake of Clara and the kids? For 35 years, she had been seeing through Harold. When she bobbed away after my second or third approach, I got the sense that she was avoiding me. I finally cornered her in the kitchen, and with lowered voice asked her if he’d been depressed. She gave me a long, tired look. “Everyone liked to think they’d figured Harold out,” she said. “Only Harold could admit to never figuring out himself.” Then she squeezed my arm, offered a worn smile, and turned to rejoin the others in the living room.
And yet it gnawed at me. I went out to the terrace to smoke. The hills of Jerusalem were turning a fiery gold, but I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate their beauty. For as long as I’d known him, Harold had been gnawing at me! How many things did I hold against him? Why not his death, too? It was 35 years ago that I’d found him in bed with Agi. His hairy back in the moonlight; he was consuming her. She was Hungarian, Agnetta who went by Agi—my Agi! As a child, she used to crawl between the double windows of her Budapest apartment, and there, in that narrow space of insulation, suspended between the inner and outer world, she read. I loved her for that. Her family had escaped in the back of a truck to Naples, and in its warm climate she discovered that there were no double windows, and barely even a windowsill. Instead, she spent her days standing on a chair looking out at the lines of laundry and the blue Mediterranean, and so she emigrated, as she put it, from books to the world. She had a heart-shaped face, dark eyes, an astuteness that was almost witchy; I thought I might marry her, though I was always a little afraid of her, too.
Afterward, I didn’t speak to Harold for two years—difficult years, during which I fell into a deep depression, and nearly dropped out of law school. Our friendship should have been over, but he wore me down with letters of apology, claiming to be a sex addict, and when, one day, he showed up in the lobby of my apartment in New York, I let him up. For once he appeared smaller, humbled. The fury had gone out of me after all I’d been through, which of course had stemmed from things that stretched back much further than Agi. Perhaps a part of me was even relieved to lose her, to no longer have to deserve her. And yet, I never really believed his excuses. No matter that I’d already ceded to him the whole field of history—he could be magnanimous at times, and having him in your corner was something, and yet underneath everything he couldn’t help himself, he needed to conquer at any cost. It was part of a proof being worked out, a proof about the nature of Harold. All his life he was engaged in proving something that he didn’t entirely believe about himself. Coming to see this is what allowed me to continue to be his friend. I’m not proud of it, but the truth is that I could tolerate his largeness because I found satisfaction in being able to spy the weakness at his core.
After a while, I was called back inside. Stories were being told. His children and Clara sat on collapsible chairs, and we were to entertain them with remembrances of Harold. Helen told the story of the time they all went on safari when the kids were young, and Harold, alone in their hut, sitting on the toilet when a gang of baboons broke in, emerged from the invasion, as he’d put it, spiritually altered. No one knew exactly what had happened, but for the rest of the trip his respect for the baboons was enormous; at every appearance of the tribe, Harold went off with them to huddle, as if he suddenly shared with them a common language.
While she spoke, I thought of what to recount. The story of the time we went to London as students, and Harold stayed out one night and came back to our borrowed flat with the princess of Norway? Or how, when my daughter was born, he sent a horrendous, yellowish, sickle-shaped thing in the mail, which we discovered, after my wife threw it out, was the 30,000-year-old tooth of a cave bear, intended to act as an amulet? Or should I instead recall the part of his book—easily overlooked or forgotten—on how the high levels of carbon dioxide that cycle into underground chambers cause hallucinations, a phenomenon that likely played a role in the mythologies and rituals that took place in the painted caves? Or the lab experiments he’d cited, showing that subjects who fall into such an induced trance experience the same three stages: first seeing lines, zigzags, and abstract forms; then seeing objects; and finally feeling pulled into a vortex that induces vivid hallucinations, usually of monsters or animals, with which they feel their body and spirit merge? Didn’t anyone else feel the need to ask what, departing the human, Harold had finally become?
In the end, I told the story of the day he took me to the Cave of the Trois-Frères and how, overwhelmed, I turned to Harold, who was looking at the paintings, and, for the first and only time in my life, saw on his face a look of absolute reverence.
And yet my agitation only grew. By the time I took a taxi back to my hotel, I felt my insides churning and thought I might be sick. I rolled down the window, and the warm spring evening floated in. But I felt a depressing weight descend, a heavy sense of guilt. In the elevator I grew dizzy. A vision came to me of Harold’s carbide headlamp ablaze in the dark like the eye of Polyphemus.
In the room I gulped a bottle of water, closed the curtains, and lay down to wait for sleep. But what followed was a long and difficult night in which I tossed and turned, trying to cough up the bone in my throat. My mind roamed restlessly, driven and disturbed, until at last, down long and darkened passages, a hazy memory returned to me, dragging its heavy burden: Harold sitting in a chair by a hospital bed in which I lay.
The memory had been lumped together with all of the strange, drugged visions I’d had that week so long ago, after I’d tried feebly to take my own life. No one except my parents knew where I was, and Harold and I hadn’t spoken for a year by then. He couldn’t have known, and in any case, I would have been humiliated had he known, and so later it was buried in the jumbled set of half-waking dreams, which included one of my mother captaining an ancient ship at sea, and a dark army of hundreds, even thousands, marching forward, come to take me. But lying now in the dark room, I felt that it had happened. It had happened, hadn’t it? Somehow Harold had found out, and come to sit with me, and out of respect for my dignity had never mentioned it afterward. And some part of me had always known, and buried it out of shame. The dark army had knelt before my bed, the troops had waited to take me, and I had almost gone—what a relief it would have been to go!—but in the end I stayed. Something shifted in me, and I turned them away and came back to my life. It was Harold who had come, hadn’t he? I had never had the courage to ask him.
Later, I decided that Harold would not have understood those shades of darkness, nor the horror of true despair. Or perhaps I needed for him not to understand. Needed to see him as one chosen by life, gifted with every advantage, so that I had an excuse not to pursue the things I wanted most. His existence let me off the hook. And if, later on, when my life turned out well regardless and I began to see cracks in the picture of Harold, didn’t I see them only because it made me feel better to have chosen as I had? Then it was easy to think how difficult it must have been to be him. Harold had always been what I needed him to be, hadn’t he? He had allowed me to see him as I wanted to see him, as he’d let his parents and so many others. If I had failed to truly understand him, it was because it hadn’t been to my advantage to really try.
At one or two in the morning, I finally rose from bed, dressed, and fled the hotel, desperate for some air. I walked the empty streets without direction. A few times one of the Orthodox, dressed in dark clothes, hurried past me, coming and going from who knows where in the middle of the night, away from or toward some urgent learning, or some prayer for the living or dead. I didn’t know where I was going, but I, too, was bent forward like them, pressed with tension. After 20 minutes, I saw a taxi and flagged it down. Harold had once told me that even Neanderthals buried their dead with red flowers. But having no clue how to procure any at that hour, I demanded instead to be taken to the Dead Sea. The driver laughed, which only stoked my irritation and made me dig in my heels. When he saw that I was serious, he flicked four or five beads of a misbaha under his thumb and said the drive would take an hour and a half from Jerusalem; late as it was, he wouldn’t do it for less than 400 shekels.
A big man, he overwhelmed his seat. I got into the back seat. Dead Sea where? Ein Gedi? I waved my hand in a gesture of More or less. He pulled away from the curb and did a U-turn, driving southeast toward Highway 1. From time to time, he glanced at me in the rearview mirror with the alert and assessing eyes of a man who had once been trained in military tactics. We left the city behind, and the headlights illuminated the barren, sand-colored hills. His phone rang and he shouted at what must have been a family member, a brother or grown son, at the volume of love as an argument without end. An hour passed before the dark, still sea appeared in the distance. I want to go to the Ein Gedi Field School, I told him, leaning forward between the seats. Where? he shouted back, as if I’d ordered him to the moon or across the sea to Jordan. I waved my phone at him, having pulled the school up on the map, and without slowing his speed he grabbed the phone and held it up, swerving into the oncoming lane as he attempted to decode its meaning. Unable to make out the English, he handed it back and made me repeat the name until finally he found it on his own phone. Ahhh, he exclaimed, Beit Sefer Sade Ein Gedi!
I paid him. Here you’re staying? he asked, gesturing in the direction of the hostel, though he might have meant the desert itself. I nodded. In the dark, I recognized nothing. The place looked abandoned; a lone dog barked in the distance. Forty years had passed since that summer of my visit. The cliffs loomed up terribly out of the blackness. The driver counted the bills while I got out, then gave me a last interrogating look through the half-lowered window; if he had been trained to kill, perhaps he also had been trained to save, though presumably he was less practiced at that. He spun the car back toward the road, headlights momentarily sweeping the vast, striated geology, an expression of all time. The lowest place on Earth! Harold had exclaimed when the fetid, turquoise sea had at last come into view.
That day, he’d been fixed on what he’d wanted to show me. The sun beat down savagely, but he mopped the sweat from his face with a crumpled bandanna and otherwise took no notice. I followed as he made his way nimbly, goatlike, over the rocks. He was talking, he was always talking. Words flooded from him as if from a spring fed by an ancient aquifer: a 12,000-year-old grave had been found in a cave in the Galilee, a woman’s body covered with two martens, the foreleg of a wild boar, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the pelvis of a leopard, the shells of some 50 tortoises, a human foot placed lovingly—lovingly?—between the two of her own. God knows what else he said. Lost psalms, the Book of Lamentations. We reached the mouth of the cave and I followed him inside, where it immediately became dim and cool.
Onward he went into darkness, removing a headlamp from his pack to light the way. Our footsteps began to echo, and I lost all measure of the space around us, guided only by Harold and the beam of his lamp. I thought of Agi, her beautiful naked back arched over a book as she read, and missed her terribly. I imagined skulls in crevices, brown with age, the jawbones come away. The pottery shards of a last meal. A wave of nausea seized me. Nothing spoke to me; I lacked reception and had no taste for cave life. But Harold forged ahead. A wall loomed up and he studied it for footholds, then instructed me to follow him. The climb was harder than it looked, but at last I scrambled after him to the top, gasping for breath in the thin air.
He was standing before a huge stalactite, pointing a flashlight at what seemed to be some sort of primitive writing, black chicken scratch on stone. It had been found by the guide at the Field School who’d first discovered the cave. Written in Hebrew script older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was, Harold told me, a sort of curse. I didn’t ask him what kind. I felt sick, filled with a terrible gloom. Deep in his rapture, Harold didn’t notice my mounting anxiety, my breath coming more heavily. There was only air enough for one of us; let Harold decipher the menacing letters. I was desperate to get back out into the sunlight, where, unoppressed, I might go on with life, less and less touched by history. But even then, I couldn’t leave him, couldn’t retreat to choose my own way.
Now, turning alone in the dark, I had no clue which way to go. A howl of rage filled the back of my throat. I would never know what he had finally discovered—there on the other side, among the endless buried.
This short story appears in the August 2025 print edition.
The post Lamentations appeared first on The Atlantic.
