As he is returning late in the evening down the streets of Vienna, still filled with motion and noise, he is reminded of when he used to walk through Rohatyn to get to Hayah Shorr, who would throw herself across the floor, prophesying, tensing her body, covered in sweat.
Compared with Vienna, Rohatyn is a dream under the eiderdown in a dark, smoky chamber. None of Asher’s patients now resides in a common chamber, none wears shmatte on her head, and none dresses in a Polish kubrak. No one here suffers from a Polish plait. The houses are tall, powerful, with thick stone walls; they smell of lime, and the fresh wood from which the stairs are constructed. Most of these new houses are connected to street sewers. Gas lamps burn on the streets, which are broad and airy. Through the clean glass windows you can see the sky and the strands of smoke that rise up from the chimneys.
And yet today Asher saw, in that sick girl, Hayah Shorr from Rohatyn. That woman who was young then, and must be sixty years old by now, if she is still alive. Perhaps Mrs. Rudnitzky would be relieved by prophecy, by the agile navigation of the darkness of her reason, of its shadows and fogs. Perhaps that is also a good place to live. Maybe that is what he should advise her husband: “Mr. Rudnitzky, your wife ought to start to prophesy, for that will help her.”
Of figurines made out of bread
Hayah Marianna is dozing now. She has let her head fall to her chest, her hands have dropped down limp, and in a moment her account book will slide right out of her lap. Hayah keeps the bills at her son’s. This means spending all day in the office behind his shop, sitting and tallying columns of figures. The shop sells all kinds of fabrics. Her son is named Lanckoroński, like all of her sons and daughters, and Hayah herself, now a widow. Her son and Goliński imported the textiles, but Goliński became a wholesaler and lost a great deal of money, while Lanckoroński kept to retail and has done all right. The shop is on Nowe Miasto, very lovely and well kept. Warsaw’s townswomen come here for their materials—the prices are reasonable, and you can get discounts, too. There are a number of simple percales, as well as the still cheaper cotton imported from the East that has been such a hit lately. Servant girls and cooks sew themselves dresses out of it. The wealthier townswomen buy better materials, throwing in ribbons, feathers, bands, hooks, and buttons. In addition to all that, Lanckoroński imports hats from England, this being his latest line; he wants to open a small shop with just English hats on Krakowskie Przedmie?cie. He’s also thinking about starting to produce them himself, since no one in Poland is making decent felt hats. Why not? God only knows.
Hayah snoozes in the little back office. She has grown fat and doesn’t like to exert herself now; her legs ache, her joints have thickened, painful and constantly cracking. Because of this new corpulence, Hayah’s face has filled out—it’s hard to glean her old features in it. In fact, that old Hayah has vanished now, dissolved. This new Marianna is sort of sleepy, as if she were always in a fortune-telling trance. And yet, whenever anyone comes to her seeking advice, she’ll still unfold her board; when she unfolds it on the table and digs out from a small wooden box the appropriate figures, her eyelids start to tremble and her gaze drifts up until her pupils finally disappear. In this way, Hayah sees. The figures set out on the flat surface create all sorts of different arrangements, some pleasant, others ugly, some that set your teeth on edge. Hayah-Marianna is able to lay out in her board every “farther” and every “closer,” both in time and in space, knows how to show, based on a figure’s position, attraction or its opposite, repulsion. She also sees clearly conflict and accord.
The figurines have really multiplied since Rohatyn times—there are so many of them these days, and the latest are also the smallest, made just from bread now, never out of clay. In a single glance, Hayah can comprehend the meaning of a constellation, see where it is headed, what it will develop into.
Certain patterns develop out of this, patterns that connect with one another via bridges or gangways, there are also dikes and dams between them, and wedges and nails, joints, bands that squeeze together situations with similarly shaped outlines, like the staves on a barrel. There are also the sequences that look like ants’ paths, old botanical routes, and it isn’t known who’s walked down them or why they went that way instead of another. There are loops and vortices and dangerous spirals, and their slow movement draws Hayah’s gaze down, into the depths that accompany every thing.
From that little office where she stations herself, Hayah—leaning over her board that makes some of her son’s customers think that this strange woman has reverted to childhood and is playing with her grandchildren’s games—sometimes glimpses Yente; she can feel her presence, inquisitive but calm. She recognizes her, she knows it is Yente; evidently she has not quite died, which does not surprise her. She is, however, surprised by the presence of someone else entirely, of a completely different nature. This is someone tenderly observing them, her and the office, and all the brothers and sisters scattered all across the earth, and the people on the streets. This someone is attentive to details. Right now, for instance, this someone is observing the figurines and board. Hayah guesses what this someone wants, so she treats the presence like an ever so slightly annoying friend. She raises her closed eyes and tries to look this someone in the face, but she doesn’t know if this is possible or not.
The rejected proposal of Franciszek Wo?owski the younger