The groom is the boy Father Chmielowski called Jeremiah, whose real name is Isaac. He is sixteen years of age now, and apart from the fact that he is tall and ungainly, he does not have too many characteristics of his own just yet. His bride, Freyna, comes from Lanckoroń and is a relative of Hirsh, the rabbi of Lanckoroń, who is the husband of Hayah, daughter of Elisha Shorr. Everyone here in this low-ceilinged but extensive home is in some way family, has some connection—blood, marriage, trade, loans cosigned, carts borrowed.
Asher Rubin comes here fairly often. He is called not only for the children, but also for Hayah. She is always coming down with mystery ailments, which he can treat only by talking with her. In fact, he likes these visits to Hayah. They are perhaps the only thing he does like. And it is usually Hayah who insists on having him brought in, since no one in this home believes in any kind of medicine. They converse, and the ailment passes. Sometimes he thinks that she is like that newt that can summon up all different colors at will in order to better hide from a predator or look like something else. And so one day Hayah has a rash, the next day she can’t really breathe, the next she has a bloody nose. Everyone believes it is because of spirits, dybbukim, demons, or maybe ba’aley kabin—ba?akaben, as they’re known around here—the limping underground creatures that guard treasures. Every illness she has is significant, and every one leads to a prophecy. Then they send him away. Then he is no longer necessary.
It amuses Asher to note that among the Shorrs it’s the men who do business and the women who prophesy. Every other female in the family is a prophet. And to think that in his Berlin newspaper today he was reading that in far-off America it was demonstrated that lightning is an electrical phenomenon and that by means of a simple rod you could defend against “God’s wrath.”
But such information does not reach this far, not all the way to Rohatyn.
Now, since their wedding, Hayah has moved in with her husband, but she comes here often. They married her off to the rabbi of Lanckoroń, one of theirs, a true believer, and a friend of her father’s, significantly older than Hayah. They already have two children. Father and son-in-law are like two drops of water: bearded, gray-haired, with sunken cheeks that hold the shadow of the rooms where they station themselves most often. It’s a shadow they wear on their faces wherever they go.
When telling the future, Hayah goes into a trance, and during her trances, she plays with little figures made of bread or clay, which she sets out on a board she has painted herself. And then she prophesies. For this she needs her father, who puts his ear to her lips, so close it looks like she is licking it, and he closes his eyes and listens. Then he translates what he has heard from the language of the spirits into human language. A lot of it turns out to be true, although a lot of it also doesn’t, Asher Rubin doesn’t know how to explain it, and he doesn’t know what kind of disease it is. Because he doesn’t know, he finds it unpleasant, and he tries not to think about it much. They call this prophesizing “ibbur,” which means she is inhabited by a good and sacred spirit that gives her information that would ordinarily be unavailable to humans. Sometimes all Asher does is let her blood; he tries, when he does this, not to look her in the eye. He believes this procedure purifies her, weakens the pressure in her veins so that the blood doesn’t overwhelm her brain. The family listens to Hayah just as much as they listen to Elisha Shorr.
But now they have called Asher Rubin to see a dying old woman who came to their home as a wedding guest. She got so weak on the way they had to put her straight to bed; they are afraid she’ll die during the wedding itself. So Asher probably won’t see Hayah today.
He goes in through a dark, muddy courtyard, where just-slaughtered geese, fattened all summer long, hang upside down. He walks through a narrow entryway and smells the fried cutlets and onions, hears someone somewhere grinding pepper in a mortar. The women are noisy in the kitchen; the cold air is burst by the steam that comes out from there, from the dishes they’re preparing. There are the smells of vinegar, nutmeg, bay leaves; there is the aroma of fresh meat, sweet and sickening. These scents make the autumn air seem even colder and more unpleasant.
Men behind the wooden partition speak aggressively, as if they’re arguing; you can hear their voices and also smell the wax and damp that has permeated their clothing. The house is full to bursting.
Asher passes children; the little ones pay him no attention, too excited about the impending festivities. He passes through a second courtyard, weakly lit by a single torch; here there is a horse and cart. Someone Rubin can’t quite see is unloading this cart in the dark, carrying sacks inside the chamber. In a moment Asher catches a glimpse of his face and balks involuntarily—that’s the runaway, the boy Shorr pulled out of the snow half dead last winter, his face all frostbitten.
At the doorstep, he runs into a tipsy Yehuda, whom the whole family calls Leyb. As a matter of fact, Rubin’s name isn’t Rubin, either, but Asher ben Levi. Now, in the semidarkness and the throng of guests, all names seem somehow fluid, interchangeable, secondary. After all, no mortal holds on to his name for very long. Without a word, Yehuda leads him deep into the house and opens the door to a small room where young women are working, and in the bed by the stove lies an old woman, supported by pillows, her face dried out and pale. The women who were working greet him effusively and position themselves around the bed, curious to watch him examining Yente.
She is little and thin, like an old chicken, and her body is limp. Her chicken’s rib cage rises and falls at a rapid rate. Her half-open mouth, covered by extremely thin lips, caves inward. But her dark eyes follow the medic’s movements. After he has chased all the onlookers from the room, he lifts her covers and sees her whole figure, the size of a child’s, sees her bony hands clutching strings and little leather strips. They have wrapped her up in wolf hides up to her neck. They believe that wolf hides restore heat and strength.