Sacrifice of Isaac

This is what Luke told me. That one winter he lost his much-feared father and found his long-lost brother. Then he lost his brother again. And found his father. This is what Luke told me. That he lost his father in the bitter rain of a Jerusalem winter and found his brother in the blossoming of a Paris spring. And when he found him, on a warm dawn of a black night, he shot at him with his brother's own gun and the bullet dropped his brother like a split bag of sand to the shadows of the street. Now Luke had killed twice. Two killings, years apart and in different countries. But as the report of the gun rolled away between the rows of houses and the neighborhood dogs began to bark, as his brother spilled to the ground and, far in the distance, sirens began to whine, Luke felt he had killed only once: a double fratricide witnessed by the same howling dogs on the same endless night. This is what Luke told me. That then, suddenly, he was sure neither whom he had found nor whom he had lost at all. We talked for an afternoon, a night, and then a morning. Afternoon, relentlessly hot on the steerage deck of the ship moving across the Aegean, above the squint of the turquoise water stretching ahead. Luke in profile against the high Grecian sky: a beaked nose over a sharp jaw; a bony, sunburned forehead; jet black hair sweeping upward from a high line, a wound healing above one pale cheek. Eating the food I bought him, hungrily; drinking the wine. Filthy, incessantly smoking thin cigars from a blue tin as he talked. And then night across a small table in the ship's deserted dining room. Outside the porthole the great harvest moon casting a wake of silver into the shifting fields of black. Then a morning hotly ripening to noon, watching anxiously as Naxos, then Amorgos draw close, then pass: great bulks sleeping in the sun, on the rippling surface of blue as the ship draws to the final call. And this is what he told me, in his low, scholar's voice, his wide mouth picking and pronouncing the German words with the practiced precision of a foreign language learned well: that looking for the brother he had murdered, he traveled south through the blooming of a European spring, from Paris, to hot Italy, and there he found the father he had lost. And that guided by a dead father, looking for a murdered son, he traveled over the Adriatic to the Ionian and on into the always strengthening sun. Always more south, always more summer, and always, always more lost. And in the end he found me. He told me he would never again mind being lost. For when you know where you are going, then you are your own guide. But when you are lost, really and truly lost, so lost that you no longer know even where you meant to go, then--and only then--is born the possibility that somebody will take you there.Gordon, Neil is the author of 'Sacrifice of Isaac' with ISBN 9780679437048 and ISBN 0679437045.