“You have been accepted, my dears. Here you will submit to the rule that, assiduously complied with, will bring you happiness. Here lies true salvation.”
She speaks German with a strong German accent. She dismisses the other boys, telling Joseph to stay. Then she stands and goes up to him, giving him her hand to kiss.
“You are Thomas’s nephew?”
He assents.
“Is it true that he is dead?”
Joseph lowers his head. His uncle’s death is connected with some uncomfortable, embarrassing secret that has never been explained to him by his family. Joseph has never known if it’s because Thomas for some unknown reason let himself get killed or because of something else he has not been informed of.
“You knew him, didn’t you?” asks Joseph, in order to distract her from any further questions.
“You remind me of him a little,” says this beautiful woman. “If ever you would like to speak with me, or if there is anything you need, I will be happy to receive you.”
For a moment, it seems to Joseph that the lady is regarding him with tenderness, and this emboldens him. He wants to say something, he suddenly feels love and gratitude for this sad woman who is connected by some mysterious thread with that Venus made out of red sandstone, but nothing comes to mind that he could say, and so he shyly blurts:
“Thank you for letting me come here. I will be a good student.”
The lady smiles at these words, and it seems to Joseph that her smile is flirtatious, as if she’s a young woman again.
The next day they tell the boys to go all the way upstairs, to the small rooms where the so-called elders reside.
“Have you been to see the elders?” everyone has been asking them since they arrived, so Joseph is curious about who these elders are. The whole time he feels as if he has wound up in one of those fairy tales his mother used to tell him, teeming with kings, beautiful princesses, overseas expeditions, and legless sages who guard treasures.
These ones, as it turns out, have legs. They sit at two large tables upon which numerous books are splayed, and reams of paper, and scrolls. They must be working on a project in here. The men look like Jews, like the Jewish scholars who can be seen in Prague—they have long beards, but they are dressed in the Polish fashion, in vests that were once vivid and are now somewhat worn. They wear oversleeves to protect them from ink. One of the elders stands and, barely even glancing at them, hands them a piece of paper on which is printed some odd drawing covered in interlocking rings, and he says in the same accent as the beautiful woman:
“My sons, the Shekhinah is in captivity, being kept in prison in Edom and Ishmael. Our task is to free her from her chains. This will occur when the three sefirot are united into a single Trinity; then salvation will come.” With a bony finger, he indicates the rings.
Joseph’s companion gives him a furtive, amused look; he seems to be suppressing laughter. Joseph looks around the room and sees an odd mixture: in the foreground hangs a cross, and next to it a picture of the Catholic Virgin Mary, but when you look at it closer, it turns out to be a portrait of that beautiful woman, adorned in such a way as the Virgin Mary is adorned in churches and chapels, and below her are portraits of some men, and figures with Hebrew letters, the meaning of which he has no clue. He can only make out on one of the tablets some names he vaguely remembers, without knowing their deeper sense: Keter, Chokhmah, Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth—connected with lines, they join into a single concept of Ein Sof.
The elder says:
“Two of the sefirot have already appeared in human form. Now we must await the arrival of the last one. Praise be to him who is chosen to unite with Tiferet—Beauty—for out of him the savior will arise. Pay attention, therefore, and listen to everything very carefully, so that you, too, might belong to the chosen.”
The elder says all of this as if reciting something everyone already knows, as if he had already repeated this thousands of times. He turns and leaves without a word. He is small and shriveled, and he takes tiny steps.
Out the door, both boys burst out laughing.
Immediately after returning from the elders, they are conscripted into the guard, they hand over the money they brought from home and receive funny multicolored uniforms. Now every day they will participate in drills, as well as in shooting lessons and hand-to-hand combat. Their sole obligation will be to carry out the orders of the man with the Polish mustache who runs their drills, and then show their muscles before an old man whose uniform marks him as a general and who appears at court from time to time and receives parades. The kitchen provides three big meals a day, and in the evenings, those who are not serving go to the great hall to study with the Elders. Both boys and girls participate in these lessons, and it is clear to everyone that the students care more about looking around at each other. Joseph catches only individual words from the lectures, their whole content is bizarre, and he isn’t really cut out for such things. He doesn’t understand whether what they say here is to be taken literally or as metaphor. In the lectures, quotes from the prophet Isaiah are repeated, as is the word Malkut—“Kingdom.” When Joseph is invited—no doubt through the intercession of the beautiful woman, who sometimes has him come for coffee—to join the guard of honor for the Sunday expeditions to the church in Bürgel, he starts to understand that it in fact signifies the same “Lord” whom they transport in a hermetically sealed carriage into the little town. Held up by stalwart bruisers, covered in a great hood, he enters the church with difficulty and remains there alone for some time. Then Joseph figures out that that “Lord” is in fact the same “Lord” who recently died, yet the truth is that he didn’t die. All the guards, dressed in their multicolored uniforms—Joseph feels like a circus performer in it—must then turn to face away, so that now they have before their eyes the peacefully flowing Main River and the sails of ships, fragile as dragonfly wings.
Sometimes the guards get days off. Then Joseph goes with his peers into the city, and there they join in with the exotic, bored crowd of young people who have already occupied all the parks and squares and are either flirting with whoever is around or playing instruments. They speak many different languages—you can hear the northern German dialect from Hamburg, and the southern one from the Czech and Moravian lands, and Czech, and more rarely some Eastern languages that Joseph doesn’t recognize. The most common language here is Polish, which he has learned to understand by now. Whenever the youths can’t understand a conversation, they try speaking in Yiddish or French. Romances blossom; he saw a lovely young man who, strumming a guitar, sang a song of longing under the window of his lady love.