Hey-mem-tav-nun-hey. Hamtana: waiting.
Hayah stands in the middle of the room wearing a white nightgown, tracing an invisible circle around herself in the air. Now she lifts the little piece of paper over her head. She stands this way for a long while. Her mouth is moving. She blows on it a few times, then she rolls up the tiny piece of paper very carefully and slips it inside a wooden carrier the size of a thumbnail. She stays there for a long time, in silence, head bowed, till suddenly she licks her fingers and sticks the strap through the hole in the amulet, which she hands to her father. Elisha, candle in hand, glides through the sleeping, rustling, intermittently snoring household, through the narrow hallways, to the room where Yente lies. He pauses at the door and listens. Evidently untroubled by anything he hears there, he softly opens the door, which humbly submits to him without a sound, revealing cramped quarters faintly lit by an oil lamp. Yente’s sharp nose is pointed straight up at the ceiling, casting a defiant shadow on the wall. Elisha has to pass through it in order to lay the amulet on the dying woman’s neck. When he leans over her, her eyelids start to flutter a little, and Elisha freezes mid-motion—but it’s nothing, she’s clearly just having a dream: her breathing is so light as to be almost imperceptible. Elisha ties the ends of the strap and slides the amulet under the old woman’s nightgown. Then he turns on his toes and vanishes without a sound.
When the candlelight disappears under the door and gets faint in the cracks between the wood, Yente opens her eyes and, with a weakening hand, feels for the amulet. She knows what’s written on it. She breaks the strap, opens the carrier, and swallows the amulet like a little pill.
Yente lies in a small, cramped room, where the servants keep coming in with the guests’ coats and laying them at the foot of the bed. By the time the music starts from all the way inside the house, you can barely see Yente beneath the pile of garments; only when Hayah drops by is order restored, the coats winding up on the floor. Hayah bends down over her elderly aunt and listens for her breathing, which is barely perceptible, so weak it seems a butterfly would stir up more of a breeze by fluttering. But her heart is beating. Hayah, slightly flushed from the vodka, presses her ear to Yente’s breast, to the cluster of amulets, strings, and straps, and she hears a delicate boom, boom, very slow, the beats as distant from each other as Yente’s long breaths.
“Grandma Yente,” Hayah calls her quietly, and she has the impression that the old woman’s half-closed eyes have trembled, and her pupils have moved, and that something like a smile has appeared on her lips. It’s a stray smile—it undulates, sometimes the corners of her mouth rise, sometimes they fall, and then Yente looks dead. Her hands are tepid, not cold, and her skin is soft and pale. Hayah fixes her hair, which has come out from under her kerchief, and she leans in to her ear: “Are you still with us?”
And again that smile comes from somewhere to the old woman’s face, lasting just a moment and then vanishing. Hayah is being called from afar by the stomping of feet and the loud sounds of the music, so she kisses the old woman on her lukewarm cheek and runs to dance.
The rhythmic stomps reach Yente’s chamber—the wedding guests are dancing, although here you can’t quite hear the music, which gets stuck in the wood walls, the winding corridors breaking it down into individual murmurs. All you can hear is the boom, boom of dance steps and, from time to time, a high-pitched squeal. There was an older woman watching over Yente, but roused by the wedding, she went off. Yente is curious, too, about what’s going on out there. She is surprised to discover that she can easily slide out of her body and be suspended over it; she looks right at her own face, fallen and pale, a strange feeling, but soon she floats away, gliding along on the drafts of air, on the vibrations of sound, passing without difficulty through wooden walls and doors.
Now Yente sees everything from above, and then her gaze goes back to under her closed eyelids. That’s how it goes the whole night. Soaring and renewed descent. Back and forth over the border. It tires her, she’s never worked as hard as she is working now, not cleaning, nor in the garden. And yet both the falling and the rising are pleasant. The only nasty thing is that movement, whistling and rough, that tries to push her out to somewhere far away, past the horizons, that force, external and brutal, that it would be impossible to face were the body not protected by the amulet, from the inside, irreversibly.
Strange—her thoughts blow over the whole region. “Wind,” says some voice in her head, which must be her own. Wind is the vision of the dead as they gaze upon the world from where they are. Haven’t you ever noticed the fields of grass, she wants to say to Hayah, how the blades bow down and are parted? That has to be because there is a dead person watching. Because if you counted all the dead you’d find that there are many more of them than there are of the living. Their souls have been cleansed already over their meanderings through lots of lives, and now they await the Messiah, who will come to finish the task. And they look upon everything. That’s why wind blows on earth. Wind is their watchful gaze.
After a moment of startled hesitation she, too, joins in with this wind that flies over the houses of Rohatyn and the impoverished little settlements, over the carts clustered together on the market square in the hope that some customer might happen by, over the three cemeteries, over the Catholic churches, the synagogue, the Orthodox church, over Rohatyn’s public house—and it dashes onward, rustling the yellowed grass on the hills, at first chaotic, in disarray, but then, like it’s learning dance steps, it speeds along the riverbeds all the way to the Dniester. There it stops, for Yente is astonished by the mastery of the winding line of the river, its filigrees, like the outlines of the letters gimel and resh. And then it turns around, though not because of the border that has colluded with the river and that divides two great countries from each other. For Yente’s vision knows no such borders, after all.
4.
Pharo and Mariage