Yente, who is never far, watches Hayah.
Who is Hayah? And are there two Hayahs? When she goes through the kitchen in the morning carrying a little bowl of onion, when she wipes the sweat from her brow with her hand, furrowing her forehead, where a vertical wrinkle appears—then she is a matriarch, an eldest daughter who has taken on the obligations of a mother. As she goes she stomps her boots, and you can hear her throughout the whole house, and then she is the daytime Hayah, sunny and bright. During prayers she becomes a zogerke, a reciter who helps women who can’t read, or can’t read well, to orient themselves during the service, to figure out which prayer to say when. She can be overbearing. The menace of her furrowed brow tamps down all disobedience. Everyone, even her father, fears her quick steps, her shouting when she disciplines the children, when she fights with the man with the cart who brought two sacks of flour from the mill with holes in them, or her rage when she throws plates, to the despair of the servants. How did it come about that Hayah was granted so much license?
It is said in the Zohar that all females on earth dwell within the mystery of the Shekhinah.
This is the only possible way to understand Hayah’s becoming this gloomy woman with disheveled hair, sloppy clothing, an absent gaze. Her face ages in the blink of an eye, as wrinkles break over her face, as she furrows her brow and tightens her lips. It is dusk already, and the house has fallen into splotches of light cast by the lamps and candles. Hayah’s face loses its features, those angry eyes are covered now by heavy lids, and her face swells and droops and becomes ugly, like the face of a sick old woman. Hayah is barefoot, and her steps are heavy as she makes her way through the hall to the room where they await her. She touches the walls with her fingers as though she were really the Virgin without Eyes. The assembled have filled the room with incense, burning sage and Turkish herbs; the air gets thick, and Hayah starts to speak. Whoever has seen this happen once will forever feel strange about seeing her again by day, shredding the cabbage.
Why did Shorr give his beloved daughter the name Hayah? And how did he know that this baby, born early in the morning in a stuffy room where water was steaming in huge pots on the stove, in an attempt to heat the house in the cold January winter, would become his beloved daughter, the most brilliant of children? Was it because she was conceived first, of his best seed, at the pinnacle of his strength? When their bodies were smooth, elastic and clean, unstained, and their minds were full of good faith, not yet broken by anything? And yet the girl had been born lifeless, not breathing, and the silence that followed the drama of labor was like that of the grave. He had been afraid the tiny thing would die. He was terrified of the death he had no doubt was already encircling their home. Only after the midwife had availed herself of some whispered spells did the child start to cough and then cry. And so the first word that had come to Elisha’s mind in connection with this child was hai—“to live.” Hayim is life, but not vegetable life, not mere physical life, but rather the kind that permits prayer, thought, and feeling.
“VaYitzer haShem Elohim et haAdam Afar min haAdama, vaYipah beApav Nishmat Hayim, baYehi haAdam leNefesh Hayah,” Elisha recited as he saw the child. Then God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat hayim), making man a living being (nefesh hayah).
And then Shorr felt like God.
The shapes of the new letters
The leather in which the book is bound is new and of good quality—smooth, and fragrant. Jacob takes pleasure in touching its spine, and he realizes that it is rare to see a new book, as if it were only the older ones that could be trusted and consulted. He has such a book, with which he’s never parted—everyone should have one like that. But his is a manuscript, a much-read copy of And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, which he always has in his luggage. It is a little haggard now, if a stack of pages sewn together can be described like an old man. The title page has been damaged in several places, the paper yellowed from the sun when he left it out on a windowsill. What negligence! His father always hit him on the hands for such slips and negligence.
This new volume is a thick book. The bookbinder has pressed the pages in tight, so that when it’s opened, they crack like bones stretched too violently, resisting. Jacob opens it at random and holds it forcefully so that the strange book does not shut in his face while his eyes wander along the string of letters from right to left, but then he recollects that here you have to go in reverse, from left to right, and his eyes struggle to perform this circus trick. Before long—although he does not understand a word—he is finding pleasure in this movement from left to right, as though against the current, in spite of the world. He thinks perhaps this other direction of movement is the fundamental thing, that this is what he ought to study and to practice: this gesture initiated by the left hand but completed by the right; a revolution in which the right arm retreats before the left, and day begins with sunrise, with light, in order to submerge itself at last in darkness.
He examines the shapes of the letters and worries he will not be able to remember them. There is one that looks a little bit like tzadi, and another that seems close to samech, and here is one that is kind of like qof, but not exactly—it’s close, but not quite, and maybe the meanings, too, are close but not quite, edging just near enough to those he knows to let him make out a blurry world.
“This is their collected Geschichte,” Shorr says to Jacob in his rumpled shirt. “Something like our ‘Jacob’s Eye,’ with a little bit about everything, about animals, places, it has different stories, some about spirits. It was written by a priest from right here in Rohatyn, can you believe that?”
Now Jacob takes a closer look at the book.