The carts are so packed that one has to get down off them to have a chance of making it over even the smallest rise. Feet raise clouds of dust, for September is hot and dry, and the grass by the road is faded from the sun. Most people go on foot, resting every few miles in the shade of the walnut trees, and then all the adults and children look around in the fallen leaves for the nuts, which are as big as their palms.
At crossroads such as this one, pilgrims coming from all different directions join together and greet one another heartily. The majority of them are poor, small tradesmen and craftsmen, the kind who support their families with their own hands, weaving, wiring, sharpening, and mending. The men, in ragged clothing, are bent double from the portable stalls they carry on their shoulders from morning to night. Dusty and tired, they exchange news and offer one another simple food. They don’t need anything other than water and a piece of bread to tide them over until the great event. When you think like that, a person doesn’t want much in order to live. He doesn’t even have to eat every day. What does he need combs, ribbons, clay pots, sharp knives for, when the world is about to be totally transformed? Everything is going to be different, although no one can say how. That’s what they are all talking about.
The carts are full of women and children. Cradles are strapped to the little wagons and hung up under a tree when they stop awhile, mothers putting down their infants in them with relief, their hands having gone numb from holding them. The bigger children, barefoot, grimy, dazed by the heat, doze in their mothers’ skirts or on little beds of hay covered with dirty linen.
In some villages other Jews go out to them and spit at their feet, and children of every origin—Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish—shout at them as they pass:
“Ne’er-do-wells! Ne’er-do-wells! Trinity! Trinity!”
In the evenings they don’t even ask for a place to sleep, they just lie down by the water, at the edge of a thicket, by some wall still warm from the day. The women hang the cradles, the diapers, light a fire, and the men set out into the village for some food, gathering along the way fallen green apples and purple plums that are swollen from the sun and lure wasps and bumblebees with their profligate sweet bodies.
Yente sees the sky opening over them in their sleep; they sleep strangely lightly. Everything is holy, as though it were special, as though it were Shabbat, as if it had all been washed and ironed. As if one had to walk very straight now and take very careful steps. Maybe the one watching them will finally wake from the numbness that lasts thousands of years? Under the divine gaze, everything becomes strange and heavy with portent. Children, for instance, find a metal cross pressed into a tree so firmly that it cannot be extracted from the bark that has grown around it. The clouds take on unusual shapes, perhaps of biblical animals—maybe those lions no one has ever seen, so that no one even knows what they looked like. Or a cloud that looks like the fish that swallowed Jonah as it floats over the horizon. And in the tiny little cloud beside it someone even spotted Jonah himself, spit out, crooked as an apple core. Sometimes they are accompanied by Noah’s blue ark. It glides across the firmament, enormous, and Noah himself bustles about in it, feeding his animals for a hundred and fifty days. And on the roof of the ark, just look, everyone, look—who is that? That is the uninvited guest, the giant Og, who, when the floodwaters were rising, latched on to the ark at the last minute.
They say: We will not die. Baptism will save us from death. But what’s it going to be like? Will people get old? Will people stay the same age for all eternity? They say everyone is going to stay thirty forever. This cheers the old and scares the young. But supposedly this is the best age, where health, wisdom, and experience are entwined harmoniously, their meanings equal. What would it be like, not to die? There would be a lot of time for everything, you’d collect a lot of groszy, build a house, and travel a little here and there, since, after all, a whole eternity cannot be spent in a single place.
Everything has lain in ruin until now, the world is made up of wants—this is lacking, that is gone. But why is it like that? Couldn’t there have been everything in excess—warmth, and food, and roofs over people’s heads, and beauty? Whom would it have hurt? Why was such a world as this created? There is nothing permanent under the sun, everything passes, and you won’t even have time to get a good look at it. But why is it like that? Could there not have been more time, and more reflection?
It is only when we become worthy of being created anew that we shall receive from the Good True God a new soul, full, whole. And man shall be as everlasting as God.
The Mayorkowiczes
Here is Srol Mayorkowicz with his wife, Beyla. Beyla is sitting in the cart with her youngest daughter, Shima, on her lap. Beyla is dozing off; her head keeps falling onto her chest. She might be sick. On her slender cheeks bloom two splotches of red, and she is coughing. Grayish locks peek out from under a drab linen kerchief that is fraying at the ends. The older girls go on foot after the cart with their father. Elia is seven years old, as thin and petite as her mother. Her dark hair is braided and tied with a rag, and her feet are bare. Beside her walks Freyna, thirteen years old, tall—she will make a beautiful woman. She has light, curly hair and black eyes, and she holds the hand of her sister Masha, who is a year younger and has a limp in one leg since she was born with crooked hips. Maybe that is why she hasn’t grown. Masha is duskier, as if from the smoke of their miserable shack in Busk, leaving home rarely, ashamed of her disability. Yet she is, people say, the wisest of all the young ladies. She doesn’t like to sleep in the same bed as her sisters and instead spreads out a dismal pallet on the floor—a sort of mattress made of hay. She covers herself with the rough horse blanket her father wove out of scraps during better days.