Part One:
Solace
* * * *
Certain wise men wrote, concerning [Nephilim] in their sacred books, that angels came down from heaven and mingled with the daughters of Cain, who bore unto them these [Nephilim]. But these wise men err in what they say. God forbid such a thing, that angels who are spirits should be found committing sin with human beings. Never, that cannot be. This cannot be true.
~3rd Century Cave of Treasures
* * * *
If you were to stand in one very particular place in the Whispering Gallery and listen very carefully for many lifetimes, you would learn just exactly how it all fits together,
my Beloved
and our place in it, all of us, Above as Below.
But who has such time?
~What mortal?
* * * *
In contrast to the majority of ancient biblical versions interpreting the word Nephilim to mean “giants,” Symmachus translates it as “the violent ones” and Aquila’s translation has been interpreted to mean either “the fallen ones” or “the ones falling upon their enemies”….. According to these texts, the fallen angels who begat the Nephilim were cast into Tartaros, “a place of total darkness;” in ancient Greek mythology, the deep abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked; according to Plato, “as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky”…
~”Symmachus Readings in the Pentateuch”. [fr. Genesis 6:6]. Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments: Papers Presented at the Rich Seminar on the Hexapla, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, [July] 25th-3rd August 1994. Salvesen, Alison (1998)
Nov. 15, 20__.
After suffering what doctors are calling “a small stroke” this morning, celebrated mezzo-soprano Helena B~ is resting comfortably and is expected to make a full recovery. Now 90, the still-electrifying star offers her heartfelt thanks for the thousands of get-well cards and flowers pouring in from friends and fans all over the world…
~OperaNewsOnline.com
* * * *
Nov. 15, 20__, evening, somewhere under Central Park
“Oh my heavens,” says Father. “Did I hear that right, Vincent? She has taken ill?”
Balanced precariously on a narrow rock ledge in the crowded listening chamber, Vincent motions for silence, straining to follow the voice of the famed conductor somewhere Above their heads.
Those assembled Below hold their breath.
“…but she is expected to make a full recovery,” he reports after a moment, inclining his head back to catch the remainder of the announcement as the party Below begins noisily to break up. “… abbreviated program… join me…. warm welcome… something Chorale… something… Bayonne…”
“I don’t imagine there was time to find a suitable replacement for a soprano of her stature,” muses Father. Conversations have already turned to matters more mundane than an ailing diva with an unpronounceable name and he must raise his voice to be heard.
“Vincent, has he said who is to perform in her stead?”
“Men’s Chorus of Bayonne Polytechnic,” says Vincent, amused at the speed with which the listening chamber suddenly begins to empty out.
“Good Lord,” says Father. “A veritable stampede.”
“Bayonne Poly rocks,” says Jacob. “Tri-state three years running. Gord Gennecki’s their baritone.”
“Be that as it may,” says Father, raising his voice over the clatter, “what a treat we have in store for us, then, at such time as she is able to return to her public. Hers is one of the extraordinary voices of our time– of all time, perhaps. To think of the singers half her age who have drifted into retirement. Astonishing.”
“What is it, Mary?” asks Vincent gently.
“I was just thinking how hard her life has been in many ways, how tragic,” answers Mary slowly, tucking her knitting into one of the bottomless pockets of her apron. “But at the same time– well, I think ‘miraculous’ is not too strong a word for it. What a remarkable spirit she must have. I cannot bear to think…”
She does not finish the thought.
“Indeed nor can I,” says Father. “So we must hope that it is simply not her time.”
From his perch Vincent studies the two of them as they stand each lost in their private thoughts. Dismounting lightly from the rock ledge, he shakes off the icy clutch of fear he always feels when any reminder of their mortality hits him while his guard is down.
Leaning close, he offers an arm to each for the walk back.
“Let us pray for her recovery then,” says Vincent. “She sounds like someone we would all be very fortunate to know.”
* * * *
We will continue to assume, for the sake of discussion, that Angels are real.
~Lightworkers.com (U.K.)
Kabbalic Angelic Hierarchy: Introduction
* * * *
November 15, 20__, New York Presbyterian University Hospital, NYC
And, in fact, it is not her time.
You have waited for millennia for me, my love, she thinks. You must wait a little longer.
The small row of black numbers on Helena’s arm has with age and scarring resolved into an unreadable purplish blot that could to the uninitiated be mistaken for a bruise. As she waits for the nurses to finish fussing with the armloads of flowers that keep arriving, she absently taps her fingers across it, pianissimo, an old habit that no longer embarrasses her, and hums the little prayer of thanks that has carried her this far, to this day.
Niebios Przeczysta Królowo Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie…
She is already old, her legacy assured; she does not wish to live forever but the dream is coming more frequently now, more a vision, truly, than a dream, filling out in its immediacy with implacable, thrilling momentum, its meaning nearly within her reach now.
Night, for her so long full of terrors, is now her reward; for in the dark, she can see him,
Him
so clearly now.
It is not her time, not yet.
There is something you must do first, my Beloved. Someone you must meet.
* * * *
March 1940. Soviet NKVD and Nazi Gestapo meet secretly for one week in Zakopane, Poland, a spa town at the foot of the Tatras mountains, to coordinate “pacification” of the resistance in Poland.
He who had watched and waited for so long from afar now saw the war closing window after window of possibility. His options fatally diminishing, he did it; he stepped through the veil and came to her as Henryk, a gifted composer and teacher, a Russian Jew some years older than she.
Helena, a devout Catholic, fell deeply in love with him, as he had always known she would. From the moment she saw him there was never any question. Fated, Helena called it.
* * * *
Nov. 16, 20__, early a.m., Tunnels, deep under Manhattan
Later that night, restless in the deep quiet of the sleeping community, Vincent makes his familiar rounds in hope of, if not peace, at least distraction, his first stop as always his son’s chamber. Affectionately known as The Pit, its place in tunnel legend is secure and it never fails to give Vincent pause, decorated as it is in a style Father calls “shock and awe.”
As is Jacob’s custom he is splayed out diagonally across his bed amongst his instruments and compositions, all knees and elbows at this age, looking to Vincent’s eye as if he has been dropped into his bed from a great height and simply sleeps as he landed.
Vincent turns down the oil lamps, then with the stealth of long habit picks his way around the tangled music stands in the dark. He quietly returns the violas and violins to their respective racks and closes the snaps on the cello case, sliding it off the bed. He stows it against a wall then begins to collect the sheet music scattered from one end of the bed to the other and spilling onto the floor. In the dark his keen vision notes the ink stains all over his son’s hands and clothing, as well as the bedspread. There will be hell to pay from those unlucky enough to find themselves on laundry duty tomorrow.
Vincent sighs. Jacob has inherited his dislike of graphite and his deep love of ink– its winey aroma, the satisfying traction of the pen nib gripping the grain of the paper, yielding its treasure at last to the subtlest nuances of pressure divided by angle times velocity, for page after page after page. Scanning quickly, Vincent doesn’t recognize this particular piece– “Wedding Day”– and wonders guiltily if this is something he has been told about and forgotten; Jacob’s output is prodigious. Vincent has long since given up trying to keep track.
* * * *
Throughout WWII Polish resistance in Zakopane wage a desperate cat-&-mouse battle with the Nazis for control of the pass that is their lifeline to their counterparts in Hungary. Dotted with limestone caves, the pass, at an elevation of 1,867 meters, is treacherous in the winter months.
When it was too dangerous to wait any longer they had decided to make their escape with the last group headed through the pass. But she was late. Tense and frightened, huddled together in the cave, Henryk and the others argued in whispers with Elias, the scout, who insisted they could not risk further delay.
When Helena arrived at last she carried nothing with her and when Henryk looked at her face he did not need the dingy yellow glow of the dying lamp to see everything that Helena could not: that it was already done, their fates decided, all in motion,
the Great Unfolding
“Where is your satchel?” he had asked, stalling, already knowing the answer.
“She’s getting sicker,” is all Helena said.
And she ducked out the cave mouth and was gone.
A great shudder ran through him then as past and future collided again and again in front of him, collided as they were never meant to. Henryk read the alarm in the faces of the others as she left, saw their lips moving but could hear nothing over the beating of wings. Deafening.
Just like that it was over.
Henryk handed over his sack of meager provisions for the others to divvy up; they embraced him one by one and slipped out into the night.
* * * *
Referred to in Genesis as Ishim– “angels who walk among men”–
they are very closely involved with the material world.
They walk with us,
and can even, occasionally, take on a physical body
and appear in human form.
~Wikipedia
* * * *
When she got to her mother’s house he was waiting. He stepped out, fast, catching her by the waist, his ungloved hand hard and warm over her mouth. Exhausted, half-frozen, she struggled and tried to scream, until Henryk pulled her with him into the moonlight to see his face.
He caught her as she sagged against him in a rush of guilt and grief. “I cannot ask you to forgive me,” she sobbed wildly.
“This is my choice,” he said into the rough wool of her cap against his lips. “You are my choice.”
“The others–”
“I saw them as far as Giewont,” said Henryk. “They are in God’s hands now.”
“We always have been,” said Helena.
How long we clung to one other, my Beloved
Oh my love. You could have chosen life but you chose me
At last, somehow, Henryk let her go, and reached into the canvas pouch under his coat to give her bread and two oranges.
“One is for her, the other for you,” he said.
She kissed him
again and again
and at last, turned to go in, stumbling a little as her tabby raced between her ankles into the warm darkness of the kitchen. Henryk watched her, unblinking, knowing she would turn back once more to ask what she had promised never to ask. He waited.
“How did you get here before me?” she asked, stalling, already knowing the answer.
I flew, he said.
* * * *
Back in the village he burned their maps and their letters. He left his rucksack with his lesson plans on the doorstep of one of his violin students, returned to his freezing room alone and waited.
He did not have to wait long.
* * * *
Tunnels
Inexplicably unsettled and suddenly aware of a longing for company, Vincent seeks an old solace in the Whispering Gallery. He holds himself still, his eyes closed, allowing the lives and histories of multitudes to swirl around him, drawing him into their slipstream, this state of reverie verging, sometimes, on the hallucinatory. Fragments gathered across time and space lap up against him in waves, make sense or don’t, and are once again lost to the four winds,
And after the Four Winds? close your eyes and lift your heart, my Beloved
for there is a Fifth Wind that now comes;
and when it comes, what it brings with it carries the power of a bomb imploding in the center of his chest
deafening
and Vincent nearly staggers against it
the beating of wings
Because there is a man’s voice–
–Where is your satchel?
And a woman’s–
–She’s worse. I cannot leave her.
And suddenly, as if they have always been here, Vincent can see them, waiting
always, my love
suspended,
waiting, so long we have waited
in this unearthly light that surrounds and contains them, suddenly they are here,
We are here
he can see them, close enough, almost, to touch them
almost
The man is– he is unlike anyone Vincent has ever seen or known, Vincent can’t see him clearly,
but I am here
there isn’t time, because the woman
your face….
–where has Vincent seen her face?– the woman is saying, in a long low note of sorrow
She is my mother
She would have sewn my gown and veil
She would have strewn our marriage bed
with the petals and perfume
of God’s own roses
It takes Vincent only an instant to recognize the famous lyrics. They’re in Russian.
He sees this man and woman, but not himself within this circle of All Light;
My love, he cannot see what we see
Not yet
but soon
Vincent does not see the Source, the Hands, the Heart in which they’re held, this man and woman: his own.
Not yet
but soon
He does not see it comes from him, that he
He
is
Radiant
is
Love
is
Ours
Vincent does not see this.
Not yet
* * * *
They came for Henryk two nights later. The same day the Nazis killed him, they gassed a dozen other prominent musicians.
In a few hours in Auschwitz
an entire generation of musicians, composers, famous piano virtuosos,
the fifth column of the Jewish musical elite of Central and Eastern Europe
disappeared.
~music historian F.C. Letero
* * * *
He composed twenty operas and four symphonies before dying in the gas chambers in March of 1944, but the piece he is best known for, in the West, anyway, is of course the mournful and exquisite Niebios Przeczysta Królowo Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie (Mamma do not weep/O Queen of Heaven hear my petition) based on a prayer scrawled by a nineteen year old Polish woman named Helena Błażusiakówna on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Zakopane, Poland in 1944.
~Encyclopedia of Holocaust Music History
* * * *
Unmoored from the only physical body he had ever known, unable to intervene or petition for her fate when the Gestapo came for Helena one week later at her mother’s house and took everyone, there was nothing Henryk could do but what he had always done: silently witness, tracing and retracing the ageless patterns that had been his fate from time immemorial, patterns and purposes interrupted only by his having fallen in love.
It is not time, not yet.
You will learn just exactly how it all fits together,
and our place in it, Our Beloved,
all of us,
Above as Below
For now, Vincent will find rare peace and comfort in his slumber;
Let him dream of dreaming.
Let his soul go forth and wander as he sleeps
Dreaming us, my Beloved,
as we dream of him
And when he wakes, only fragments will remain, elusive pieces of some dream;
The Great Unfolding~
Love made him so.
End part One
* * * *
[author’s note: thank you for reading my story; I am slowly but surely working my way through writing Parts 2, 3, etc. I’m trying not to worry about how long it’s taking to “tell it all.” But besides the demands of daily life that dog us all, I’m also continuing work on two other Beauty and the Beast “story cycles” but rest assured, I can absolutely promise that they’re all connected. I have the Big Picture in my head that ties everything together– Vincent’s origins, his parents, the reason he was born, what his destiny is– including finding “others of his kind” (as per my story Magellan’s Wife: Voyager: Vincent in the Whole Wide World)– and realizing his place in the universe in both its spiritual underpinnings and its earthly lessons.
I’d better get back to work!]