The Perseids and Other Stories Read Free

about it. A warm house and decent food, who knows? Maybe it would help her. But taking money for my sister….” He didn’t have words to express the vileness of it. And how could it matter if Rachel was warm and well-dressed, when the price was Taglieri forcing himself between her legs every night?
    But didn’t every married woman face the same troublesome bargain?
    Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”
    “Of course.”
    “God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”
    Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.
    Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”
    “Faith.”
    “Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was
fealty
. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality
contingent
. Don’t go around killing innocent peoplethat is, unless you’re absolutely certain God wants you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.
    “Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ‘No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.”
    “What does this have to do with Rachel”
    “My point,” Ziegler said, “is that sacrifice is a complicated business. If you give Rachel to this Taglieri, are you harming her or helping her How can you be sure? And if you
don’t
give her up—if you spend the rest of your enviable youth and all of your innate kindness protecting her from her own lunacy—have you put
yourself on
the altar”
    Jacob was startled. “There must be another choice.”
    Ziegler held out two clenched fists. Two hidden pawns. He smiled. “Choose.”
    As the game progressed Ziegler said, “I have to tell you something, Jacob. You’re the best chess novice I’ve come across. Not terribly experienced and not subtle at all. But the way you
think
chess is genuinely remarkable.”
    “You play very well yourself.”
    “Thank you. I played Anderssen once, when he was a child.”
    “Adolph Anderssen, the German master? My father talked about him.” Jacob frowned. “But Anderssen was an old man half a century ago.”
    Ziegler shrugged. “Some other Anderssen, then.” The shopkeeper attempted an exchange of queens, which Jacob declined. The end was inevitable now. For once, Ziegler capitulated before the actual checkmate. He tapped his king with a thumbnail and sent it teetering against an impotent rook. Then he sat back inhis chair and wrapped his hands over his belly. “You know, Jacob, there’s another way to play this game.”
    “Another way to play chess?”
    “A revision of the rules.”
    “I don’t have time.”
    “Stay. Please. This won’t take long.”
    The coal furnace roared and the bookshop’s floorboards moaned with the heat. Jacob let himself be convinced to spend a little more time in the warmth. The game Ziegler proposed was something he called lateral chess: this involved an assumption that the chessboard was (in Ziegler’s own strange words) “topographically looped”—that is, the final squares at the left edge of the board were connected immaterially to the first squares at the right. The rook, for instance, could take a pawn on the rank even with another piece interposed, simply by coming at it from the opposite