Before she falls asleep, Sobla remembers the stories about the cave—how Jacob, back when he was little Yankiele, took such a liking to that place. And how he went missing there when he was a child.
She was a child then, too, and she knew Jacob well, and she was always afraid of him, because he was so rough-and-tumble. They used to play war: some of the children would be Turks, while the others would be Moskals. One time Jacob, as a Moskal or as a Turk, Sobla can’t remember, went berserk, fighting with such fury that he couldn’t stop, beating another boy within an inch of his life with his wooden sword. Sobla remembers that his father later beat him bloody for it, too.
Now, with her eyes closed, she sees the entrance to the cave—she has never been inside. That place scares her. There is something strange about it: the trees are greener there, and the silence is so frightening, and the ground beneath the birch trees is completely covered in bear’s garlic. The bear’s garlic is harvested and given to people when they get sick. It always helps. No one knows how big the cave is, but they say it extends for miles underground and is shaped like an enormous alef; they say there is a whole city under there. In it live hobgoblins and the limping ba?akaben who keep their treasures there . . .
Suddenly Sobla stands, the blanket falling from her shoulders to the ground. She says:
“The cave!”
Of Asher Rubin’s adventures with light, and his grandfather’s with a wolf
News of the earthquake in Lisbon reached Lwów last year. News, in general, takes a while to spread. What Asher discovered in a pamphlet illustrated with engravings is horrific. He looks at it over and over, dozens of times, so shaken he cannot look away. What he sees are scenes that might as well be from the Final Judgment. He can’t really think about anything else.
The pamphlet tells of piles of corpses, and Asher tries to imagine how many a hundred thousand could be—it’s more than the population of Lwów, so you would have to add in the surrounding villages and towns, and summon everyone, Christians and Jews, Ruthenians and Armenians, women and men, the elderly, animals, innocent cows, the dogs around the hovels. How many is a hundred thousand?
Later, however, when he has calmed down a bit, he thinks that after all this is nothing so extraordinary. Maybe no one counted up the victims of Khmelnytsky—those villages, those towns, those nobles’ heads cut off and rolling around the grounds of their estates, Jewish women with their stomachs split open. Somewhere he heard that they had hanged a Polish nobleman, a Jew, and a dog together. Nonetheless Asher had never seen engravings such as these, with scenes that defy the human imagination captured in pictures etched meticulously onto metal plates. This particular image takes root in his brain: he sees the depths of the sea storming the city. It looks like a war between the elements: the earth defending itself against water with fire, but the element of water is more powerful; wherever the waves strike, they extinguish all life, destroying and erasing everything. The ships look like duck feathers on a pond, and people are all but invisible in this Armageddon, what is happening is not happening on a human scale. With one exception—in a boat in the foreground stands a man, no doubt a noble, for he is wearing lovely clothes, holding up his hands, folded in prayer, to the heavens.
Asher gazes with malicious satisfaction at the desperation of this man, noting the absence of the heavens in the picture. A sky reduced to a thin strip over the battlefield. After all, how could heavens be shown here?
Asher has lived for four years in Lwów, practicing medicine, healing eyes. He works with one particular lens grinder to provide glasses to those who cannot see. He learned some of it in Italy, but it is really here that he has been developing his skills and knowledge. He brought along a book that has made a great impression upon him. One passage in particular could be said to be the real foundation of his studies, a guiding principle of sorts: “And I saw,” writes its author, one Newton, an Englishman, “that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image, did suffer a Refraction considerably greater than the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, than that Light consists of Rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect to a difference in their incidence, were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.”
Asher’s father was a Kabbalist whose primary area of interest was light, although he was also the leaseholder of two tiny villages on the estates of Prince Radziwi?? in Lithuania. Thus the leases fell to Asher’s mother, whose operations were orderly and strict. The village where they lived and kept an inn lay on the Neman River. In addition to several farmsteads, there was also a watermill and a small port with a depot for the ships that sailed in the direction of the Prussian K?nigsberg. This lease was quite lucrative, and, since his mother had a real gift for administering it, and a strong sense of responsibility, the family earned a good deal of money thanks to hazakah, the traditional Jewish system—far more than they would have under arenda, the traditional Slavic system.
Asher’s father was rich in comparison with all the impoverished Jews around them, and thanks to this (as well as help from the kahal) he was in due course able to send his gifted son abroad for his education. He himself lived modestly, however, not trusting innovations, never favoring excess. For him the best-case scenario was that nothing would ever change. Asher remembers how rough his father’s hands used to get when he had to do some work around the estate. His skin would crack, and if any dirt made its way inside those cracks, it would give rise to a festering wound. His mother would smear goose fat over those places, and afterward he couldn’t touch his books. Asher’s father and Asher’s uncle were like Jacob and Esau, until finally the uncle moved out to Podolia, where Asher later sought him out, and where he eventually settled down.
Both Poles and Ruthenians lived in the area, and the inn kept by Asher’s mother was beloved by all. Their house was very welcoming, and whenever any Jew would come up the road, rich or poor, Asher’s mother would greet him with a glass of vodka. The table was always set, and there was always enough food.
A certain Orthodox priest used to come to his mother’s inn, a slothful man who could barely read or write, but a drinker of the most dedicated sort. He came within a hair’s breadth of bringing about the death of Asher’s father, and if he had, the fate of the family might have taken a completely different direction.