Pesel’s eyes are filled with nervous tears, which the priest takes for the heightened emotions of an ordinary bride, and he smiles at her as he would at a child. If it were proper, he would pat her on the head.
Tables have been set around the apartment, from which the rest of the furniture has been removed. The food is already waiting for them. The guests, tired after the long mass in the cold church, would like to warm themselves. As they eat, Pawe? Paw?owski pours vodka into their glasses—to reinvigorate them and to relax them, since the whole company is having to deal with something foreign and unpleasant and new. And yet they all know that from now on, this is how it’s going to be. It’s as if they were seated around a great void that they were consuming with spoons, as if what was covered in white tablecloths were pure nothingness, and they were celebrating its pale chill. This strange feeling lasts through the first two courses and glasses of vodka. Then the curtains in the windows are drawn, the tables are pushed up against the wall, and Franciszek Wo?owski and the father of the bride perform a second wedding, the familiar kind, a wedding that is theirs. Hands seek out hands, nerves calm down once they are standing in a circle, holding on to one another, as up to the ceiling of the apartment rises a prayer in a language that Pesel and her young husband can no longer understand, said in a whisper, mysterious and eternal.
PeselMarianna bows her head like the others, and her thoughts fly far afield, to Yente, who stayed back in the Korolówka cave. She can’t stop thinking of it. Did they do the right thing, bearing that tiny body down into the depths of those passageways, as though against the flow of time, to its stone-black beginning? What else could they have done? Before leaving, she brought Yente nuts and flowers. She covered her up in a cape she had embroidered—it was supposed to be for the wedding, but then Pesel thought that since Yente was to stay behind, she would by means of this cape nonetheless be able to be present on Pesel’s special day. The cape is made of pink damask, decorated with white silk and white tassels. Marianna embroidered a bird on it, a stork with a snake in its beak, standing on one leg, like the ones that fly into Korolówka’s riverside meadows and step pompously across the tall grass. She kissed her great-grandmother on the cheek and found her cheek cool and fresh as usual. She said in parting, “The Lord will cover you up with His feathers, Yente, and under His wings you will be safe, as it says in Psalm 91.” Pesel is quite certain that Yente would like the stork with the snake in his beak. His big, powerful wings, his red legs, his down, his dignified step.
Now, as this second wedding takes place, the doubly named PeselMarianna also thinks about her singly named sister Freyna, whom she has always loved the most of all her siblings and who remained in Korolówka with her husband and children. She vows to herself that she will visit Freyna again come spring, and that she will do so every year; she swears on her own grave.
Yente, who sees this from underneath the stork’s wing, from above, as usual, knows that this is a vow that her great-granddaughter will be unable to keep.
Of Yente’s measurement of graves
Yente’s gaze also hovers over Cz?stochowa, the little village nestled into the hillside over which the Madonna reigns. But Yente can see only the roofs—here the even roofs of the Jasna Góra monastery have just been covered with brand-new tiles, while down below the rotten roofs of the huts and houses have wooden shingles over them.
It is a September sky—cool and distant, the sun slowly growing orange, and the Jewish women of Cz?stochowa have arranged to meet up on the road to the Jewish cemetery, they’re headed there now, the older ones wearing thick skirts conferring in a whisper, waiting up for each other as they go.
On the terrible days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, kneytlakh legn takes place—the measuring of graves. The women measure out the cemeteries with a string, then wind the string back up around a bobbin, for later use as candlewicks; some of the women will also use it to tell fortunes. Each of them murmurs a prayer under her breath, and they look like witches in their wide, ruffled skirts, which catch on blackberry thorns and rustle among the dry yellow leaves.
Once, Yente herself measured the graves, believing it to be the duty of every woman to measure how much room was left for the dead, or whether there was any room at all, before any new living people were born. It is a kind of bookkeeping that women take care of—women are always better, in any case, at keeping the accounts.
But what reason do they have for measuring the graves and cemeteries? After all, the dead are not contained in their graves—Yente has learned this only now, however, after plunging thousands of wicks into wax. Graves are in fact altogether pointless, since the dead ignore them and roam—the dead are everywhere. Yente sees them all the time, as if through glass, for however much she might like to join their ranks, she can’t. Where is this? It’s hard to say. They behold the world as if from behind a windowpane, inspecting it and always coveting something inside it. Yente tries to figure out what the faces they make mean, likewise their gestures, and in the end, she gets it: The dead would like to be talked about; they are hungry, and that is their food. What they want from us is our attention.
And Yente notices something else—that that attention is inequitably distributed. Some people are spoken about a great deal, with myriad words pronounced about them. Of others, people utter not a single word, nary a syllable, ever. Those dead will flicker out after a while, moving away from the glass, disappearing somewhere into the back. There are a great many of that latter group, millions of them, completely forgotten. No one even knows they lived on earth. There is no trace of them, which is why they are freed faster, and depart. And maybe that’s a good thing. Yente would depart, as well, if only she could. If only she weren’t still bound by that powerful word she swallowed. The little piece of paper is gone, and there’s no trace left of the string. It’s all dissolved, and the tiniest particles of light have been absorbed into matter. All that remains is the word like a rock that reckless Elisha Shorr employed to tether Yente.