“Get rid of that ticking!” he shouts, and has them remove to downstairs the clock that had at first so delighted him. The clock comes from somewhere in Germany and is made entirely of wood, with a little bird that leaps out on the hour with such a clatter that it is as if a canister shot has exploded nearby, as if they were still under siege in Cz?stochowa. And the little bird is ugly and rather resembles a rat. Jacob wakes up in the middle of the night and stomps around the house. He sometimes goes into Avacha’s room, but if he sees that Magda is lying there with her, he gets even more upset. Finally they give away the clock as a gift.
In the summer, Eva goes to Aunt Sheyndel’s to learn good manners and to play the fashionable piano Zalman has had brought in from Vienna. She also studies French, and as she is quite bright, she soon learns how to handle herself in conversation. With her intimates she speaks in Polish, as her father has forbidden Yiddish to all. With her cousins, however, she must speak in German; she is tutored in it at her aunt’s house, along with the younger girls. Eva is ashamed to be attending these lessons with such little children. She studies as much as she can, but even so, she fears she won’t catch up with the young Dobrushka girls. She also sometimes joins in on the sessions with the Hausrabbiner who takes care of the children’s Hebrew education, both the girls’ and the boys’. He is an old man, Solomon Gerlst, a relative of so important a person as Jonathan Eibeschütz, who was born right there in Prossnitz, where his extended family still lives. His primary focus is the two boys, Immanuel and David, who have already passed their bar mitzvahs and are now beginning to study the holy books of the true believers.
Once a month, a tailor comes, and Avacha’s aunt gradually orders her a new wardrobe: light summer dresses in muted colors, little cropped vests that show off her décolletage, hats so bedecked with ribbons and flowers that they look like dolls’ graves. At the cobbler’s, she orders shoes made out of silk, so soft that Eva is scared to go out onto the dusty streets of Brünn. In these new outfits, Eva transforms into a woman of the world, and her father squints with satisfaction as he looks at her, asking her to say something in German, anything at all. Then he smacks his lips with satisfaction.
“This is the child I asked for, this daughter, this queen.”
Eva likes to please her father—only when he likes her does she like herself. But she does not enjoy her father’s touch. She slips out of his grasp and goes off, as if busy with something, though she is always scared that he will call her back. She prefers to be in Prossnitz with her aunt and uncle. There, both she and Anusia Paw?owska do the same thing as their cousins: they learn how to be ladies.
In the Dobrushkas’ garden, fruit has already appeared on the little apple trees; the grass is lush, with paths trodden in it. It rained not long ago, and now the air is a clear, dark green, scintillating with myriad smells. The rain has etched little fissures into the main path, and drops are drying on the wooden bench Sheyndel has set up there, where she often comes to read. In the summer, Eva also sits out on this bench, trying to read the French novels that her aunt keeps under lock and key, a whole cabinet full of them.
Zalman Dobrushka often watches his daughters through the open window as he sits doing his accounts. Lately he hasn’t been going to his tobacco shop, as the stuffy summer air sparks asthma attacks. It is hard for him to breathe, so he has to be careful. He knows he won’t live too much longer, and he’s decided that he will leave his business to his eldest son, Carl. There is an ongoing battle in the Dobrushka family over baptism. Zalman and several of his elder sons are resistant to it, but Sheyndel supports their children who do decide to take such a step. Carl has recently been baptized, along with his wife and children. The tobacco business has become a Christian business. Tobacco will be a Christian good.
Of Moshe Dobrushka and the feast of the Leviathan
Twenty years ago, Moshe was at the wedding in Rohatyn, though of course he cannot know this. Yente touched him through the belly of a very young Sheyndel, disgusted by the horse shit in the courtyard. Yente, who also sometimes travels to the Dobrushkas’ garden here in Prossnitz, knows him well—yes, this is him, this once-uncertain, partial existence, a gelatinous orb of potential, a being who is and is not at the same time, for the description of which no language has yet been invented, nor theorized by any Newton. But from where she is, Yente sees both his beginning and his end. It isn’t good to know so much.
Meanwhile, in Warsaw, in the kitchen on Leszno, the bony fingers of Hayah, now Marianna Lanckorońska, are molding a figurine of him from bread. It takes a long time, because the mass crumbles and breaks, the little figure takes on strange shapes and falls apart. It will turn out completely different from all the others.
Moshe is studying law, but he is more interested in theater and literature, and Viennese wineries are without a doubt better places to learn about life, he tells his mother. He wouldn’t dare say the same to his ailing father. His mother loves him above all else and considers him a true genius. Her maternal gaze sees in him an exceptionally handsome young man. Then again, no one who has not yet passed their twenty-fifth year can be denied at least a little beauty, and so it is with Moshe—he is simultaneously slender and solidly built. When he comes from Vienna, he dispenses with his powdered wig and goes around with his head bare, his dark, wavy hair tied back. In fact he resembles his mother, with her high forehead and full lips, and just like her, he is voluble and loud. He carries himself elegantly, in the Viennese fashion: he swaggers. His tall, thin leather boots with silver-plated buckles emphasize his long, slim calves.
Eva has learned that Moshe has a fiancée in Vienna named Elke, the stepdaughter of the wealthy industrialist Joachim von Popper, an ennobled neophyte. Yes, yes, the wedding is being planned. His father would happily marry him off right now, so that Moshe could continue in peace with his brothers in what seems to the father to be best—the tobacco trade. But Moshe is just getting to know the strange and deep pocket of another world, from which money can be extracted endlessly and at will: the stock market. He knows, like his mother does, that there are more important things than the tobacco trade.
Moshe brings home friends, young people from wealthy backgrounds; then his mother opens the windows and dusts the garden furniture, and the clavichord is put out in the middle of the room so that it can be heard throughout the house and garden. His sisters put on their best dresses. These young friends, poets, philosophers, and God knows who else—Zalman calls them triflers—are open, modern people; none of them is bothered by Zalman’s beard, nor his foreign accent. They are eternally exhilarated, in a perpetual state of light elation, delighted with themselves, with their own verses, which teem with allegory and abstraction.
When his mother calls them for dinner, Moshe is standing in the middle of the living room.
“Did you hear that? Let’s go and eat the Leviathan!” he cries. The youth get up from their seats and glide across the polished floors, hurrying to take the best places at the table.