Journey Seventeen · Assyria · 200 BC
A journey to collect a debt, with a stranger, a dog, and a fish.
This is the only book in the archive that is a road story, and it is the warmest thing in it.
Everything else here goes down into something, or up something, or out into a desert. Tobit goes east for eleven days along an ordinary trade road, with a packed lunch, a hired guide and a dog, to pick up money a relative is holding. That is the whole errand. What happens on the way is one of the strangest and most domestic stories anybody has written.
It opens badly. Your father has spent his life burying people the king has executed, which is illegal, and one night he sleeps in the courtyard because he has handled a body and cannot come inside. Sparrows on the wall above him drop into his open eyes while he is asleep and he wakes up blind. The book gives this two sentences. It does not make anything of it. He is simply blind from then on, and the house becomes poor, and he decides he is going to die and starts organizing it.
So he calls you in and tells you about the money. And because he is not sending his only son eleven days across Assyria alone, you go out to hire somebody who knows the road, and you find a young man standing in the street who says he does. He gives a false name. Your father asks him twice who his people are and he answers smoothly both times. Then the four of you leave: you, him, the dog, and whatever he actually is.
What follows is a sequence of plain physical events that turn out to have been arranged. You go down to a river to wash your feet and a fish takes hold of your foot. He tells you to land it, and then to gut it and keep three specific organs, and when you ask what they are for he tells you, and you wish you had not asked. One of them is for a bridal chamber in which seven men have already died. One of them is for your father's eyes.
And then the book does the thing nobody expects. The girl's father, while you are eating dinner, quietly goes out into the garden with a spade and digs a grave, so that he can bury you before dawn without the neighbors knowing, because he has done this seven times. His wife sends a servant girl to the door at first light to listen. That is the most frightening scene in the book and nobody raises their voice in it.
Two threads run the whole way and the text points at neither. The first is the dog, which is mentioned exactly twice in fourteen chapters: once going out and once coming back, running ahead with its tail up. It is one of only two dogs in the Bible and the only one anybody is glad to see. The second is doorways. There is a threshold in nearly every scene and somebody is always on the wrong side of it: a man shut out in his own courtyard, a girl shut in with a husband who will not last the night, a mother who goes out and sits in the road every day looking west. Your father is carried over his threshold blind and walks back out of it seeing.
Nobody is named in this retelling. That is not a stylistic tic here: the companion's identity is the hinge of the whole book, and he lies about his name when he is asked, so withholding every name is simply the right reading. You are the son. The man beside you is the man beside you, for eleven days out and eleven days back, and you find out what he is in the last ten minutes, in a yard, when you try to pay him.
Your father buries people the king has killed, which is why he is sleeping in the courtyard tonight and not in the house. Sparrows are on the wall above him. In the morning his eyes are white and the house is poor, and he starts putting his affairs in order.
He calls you in and tells you about money he left with a relative in a city eleven days east. You are to go and get it. Because nobody sends an only son across Assyria alone, you go out to hire a guide, and there is a young man in the street who says he knows the road.
The first night out of doors in your life, and then a river. You go down to wash your feet and something takes hold of one of them. Your guide tells you, quite calmly, to take it with both hands and bring it up the bank, and then to open it and keep three things out of it.
You ask what the heart and the liver and the gall are for, and he tells you, and you wish you had not. Then he mentions, as if it were a small thing, that you have a kinswoman ahead of you on this road, and that seven men have married her, and that none of them saw the morning.
You walk into her father's house and are fed and made welcome and given her. And while you are still eating, her father goes out into the garden with a spade in the dark and digs a grave, because he has done this seven times and he would rather the neighbors did not know.
They bring you into that room and shut the door, and you can hear them going away down the passage. You make a smoke in there out of a fish's heart and liver. Then the two of you say something out loud together, and then you sleep, and in the morning a servant girl is at the door.
Fourteen days of feasting, and a long way west your mother goes out and sits in the road every morning because the days have gone past when you should have come back. Your guide goes on ahead to the city with the money while you wait, and your father counts the days out loud.
You come over a rise above your own town with a small packet in your hand and the dog ahead of you with its tail up. Your mother sees you first. Your father gets up too fast, walks into the doorpost, and is led out into the yard, and then you put your hands on his face.
You try to pay the man who walked with you, and he takes you and your father aside, away from everybody, and tells you what he is and what he has been doing, and that none of it was for him. Then he is not there, and the two of you are standing in your own yard.
The Complete Journey
The whole road in one sitting — the courtyard, the hired man, the fish, the grave in the garden, the smoke, the long wait, and the yard at the end. Edited to run as one unbroken journey out and back: you are taken under once at the beginning and brought back once at the end, with the nights crossfading into one another. Best with headphones, somewhere you will not be interrupted.