Through the canvas, dirty and torn, she watched the world they were leaving behind them folding itself up into winding lines of road, balks, trees, and horizon.
They traveled for two days, the carriage shaking mercilessly, but Old Yente bore it well. They stayed with relatives in Buczacz, and at dawn the next day they set off again. Along the way, they got swept up in a dense fog, and when that happened, all of a sudden, all of the wedding guests began to feel uncomfortable, and that was precisely when Yente started to groan like she needed the others to pay her some attention. Fog is turbid water, and all sorts of evil spirits travel in it, spirits that cloud the minds of animal and man. Wouldn’t their horse run off the road and take them all up to the steepest riverbank? And from there they would crash into the chasm. Or would they not all be overtaken by evil creatures, cruel and terrible, or would the entrance to the cave where the dwarves hide their treasures underground not yawn open in the middle of the road, those dwarves as hideous as they are rich? Perhaps so much fear had weakened Grandma.
In the afternoon, the fog subsided, and they saw, not too far ahead of them, the astonishing mass of the castle of Podhajce, uninhabited and fallen into ruin. Over it circled great flocks of crows that time and time again burst up off the half-collapsed roof. The fog retreated from their frightful cawing, which bounced off the castle walls and came back as echoes. Israel and his wife, Sobla, the eldest in the carriage besides Yente, determined to stop. They spread out by the side of the road, to rest; they took out bread and fruit and water—but Grandma wasn’t eating anymore. Of the water she drank only a few drops.
When, late at night, they finally arrived in Rohatyn, she could not stand on her own, and they had to assemble some men to carry her into the house. The assembly turned out to be unnecessary—one would have been enough. How much could Old Yente weigh? Nothing. As much as a skinny goat.
Elisha Shorr received his aunt with some uneasiness, but he gave her a nice place to sleep in her own little chamber and brought in some women to take care of her. In the afternoon, he went to see her, and they whispered together, as they always had. They’d known each other his whole life.
Elisha gave her a worried look. But Yente knew exactly what was worrying him:
“It’s not a very good time, is it?” she asked.
Elisha didn’t answer. Yente gently narrowed her eyes.
“Is there ever really a good time to die?” Elisha said, philosophically, at last.
Yente said she would wait until the crowd of guests had passed; now their exhalations steamed the windowpanes and weighed down the air. She would wait until the wedding guests went home, after the dancing and the drinking, once the sullied, trampled sawdust had been swept from the floors, once the dishes had been washed. Elisha looked at her as if concerned for her, but in reality, in his mind he was already elsewhere.
Yente has never liked Elisha Shorr. He is someone whose insides are like a home with all sorts of different rooms—part of him is one way, other parts of him are another. From the outside, it looks like one building, but on the inside you can see that it is many. You can never know what he’ll do next. And there’s something else, too—Elisha Shorr is always unhappy. There is always something he is missing, something he misses—he wants what others have, or the opposite, he has something others don’t, and he considers it useless. This makes him a bitter and dissatisfied man.
Since Yente is the eldest, everyone who comes for the wedding immediately goes to pay her a visit. Guests stream into her little room at the end of the labyrinth, in the second house, which you have to pass through the courtyard to reach, and which is just across the street from the cemetery. Children peer in to see her through the cracks in the walls—high time to seal them before winter sets in. Hayah sits with her a long while. Yente puts Hayah’s hands on her face, touches her eyes, her lips, and her cheeks—the children see this. She pats her head. Hayah brings her treats, gives her chicken broth to drink, adding a spoonful of goose fat, and Old Yente smacks her lips for a long time when she’s finished, licking her thin, dry lips, although even the fat doesn’t give her enough strength that she might get up.
As soon as they arrive, the Moravians Solomon Zalman and his extremely young wife, Sheyndel, go to visit their old cousin. It took them three weeks to get here from Brünn through Zlin and Preschau, and then Drohobycz, but they will not go back the same way. In the mountains some escaped serfs attacked them, and Zalman had to pay them a considerable ransom—they were lucky they didn’t take everything they had. Now they’ll go back through Kraków, before snow falls. Sheyndel is already pregnant with her first child, she’s just informed her husband of it. She is often nauseated. She is not at all helped by the smell of coffee and spices that greets you when you enter the vast Shorr household, and when you go into the little shop. She also doesn’t like how Old Yente smells. She fears this woman as she would a wild animal, with her bizarre dresses and hair on her chin. In Moravia old women look a lot tidier—they wear starched bonnets and neat aprons. Sheyndel is convinced that Yente is a witch. She’s afraid to sit down on the edge of the bed, although everyone keeps telling her to do so. She’s afraid the old woman will pass something on to the child in her belly, some dark madness, indomitable. She tries not to touch anything in that little room. The smell never stops making her sick. Her Podolian relatives all seem wild to her. Finally, however, they push Sheyndel toward the old woman, so she perches on the very edge of the bed, ready to flee at any time.