“Zaleski came up with that. They think we’re Russians. From the tsar’s family. Roch is actually going to Warsaw.”
“He’ll get nothing there. Everyone is poor there. Do you want some vodka?” asks Anusia. She rises and reaches for the cupboard, where she gets a bottle and two glasses. She returns and pours the golden beverage into the glasses.
“Honey liqueur.”
They savor the vodka in silence for a while. Through the window a beam of the red glow of the setting winter sun falls, and for just a moment makes the room feel truly cozy—a feminine boudoir, the soft bed, the striped armchairs standing around the little coffee table, the classic “Roman” desk topped with piles of bills and a letter started but not finished. The nib of the pen has dried out now. Then the sun disappears, and the room starts to be submerged in thickening darkness. Anusia gets up to light a candle.
“Don’t light a candle,” says Eva. “Remember you once told me how in your mother’s village there was a woman who did not fully die.”
“Yes, that’s true. My mother said she kept breathing, and she just got smaller. She was our great-grandmother. In the end she was as small as a child, or a doll. They left her in the cave.”
Eva shifts uneasily.
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” says Anusia, and pours herself a second glass. “It’s too late to find out now.”
Scraps: Of the light
Nahman is old now, hunched over and shriveled up. He sits at the little window from which not much light comes in, a chill flowing through the thick walls. The hand holding the pen is visibly shaking. In the little hourglass standing next to his inkwell the last little grains of sand are flowing down; in just a moment, he will have to turn it over. Nahman writes:
Our ancestors would always say how it is written in Pesachim 3: There are four types of money that never bring happiness: writers’ fees, translators’ fees, orphans’ benefits, and money coming from countries overseas.
I do think that the wisdom of the Talmud was really very great, for these were the primary sources of income in my life, which means it is understandable that I did not attain any great happiness. Though I did attain some fulfillment that might be called a little happiness, just ordinary human happiness, and that occurred from the moment I settled here, in Offenbach, and I understood at once that here I would die. Then I also lost suddenly my greatest weakness, my sin—impatience. For what does it mean to be impatient?
To be impatient means never really living, being always in the future, in what will happen, but which is after all not yet here. Do not impatient people resemble spirits who are never here in this place, and now, in this very moment, but rather sticking their heads out of life like those wanderers who supposedly, when they found themselves at the end of the world, just looked onward, beyond the horizon? What did they see there? What is it that an impatient person hopes to glimpse?
Yesterday I was reminded of a question from the discussion, as usual well into the night, between Yeruhim J?drzej Dembowski and myself. It is said, he said to me, that there, beyond the world, it is like behind the scenes of some sort of little street theater: a chaos of lines, old sets, costumes, and masks, all sorts of different props—the whole machinery necessary to create the illusion. That is what they say it looks like there. Ahayah aynayim, which in the old language means illusion, prestidigitation.
This is how I saw it now from my room. An illusion. A performance. As long as I could walk up and down the stairs, every morning we held lessons for the young, and with each passing year they appeared to me less distinct, until they completely merged together into a single face that changed and rippled. And in fact I could no longer find a single thing of interest in them. I would talk to them, but they wouldn’t understand me, as if the tree from our world had put out branches in completely diverging directions. But this does not worry me now.
After Jacob’s death, I entered into a period of peace. My main occupation became studying Merkavah, which my conversations with Yeruhim Dembowski also managed to cover, as we lived in the one room, which meant we got closer to each other. To him, to Yeruhim, I also confessed about Hayah Shorr—that she was the one woman I was ever able to love, and that I had loved her from that beautiful moment when I was given her for one night, back when I had come with news of Jacob to Rohatyn. But above all, of course, it was Jacob I had loved.
And now here, in Offenbach, a peaceful, sleepy place, we spent whole days doing nothing other than studying Hebrew words. We would rearrange their letters and tally up their values, so that new meanings would arise from them, and thus possibilities for new worlds. Yeruhim, when he succeeded at it, would giggle, and it would seem to me that that was exactly how God had giggled when he had created us all.
Sometimes we would be flooded with memories. Then I would ask him: “Do you remember how you were Bishop Dembowski’s favorite Jew? How he coddled you?” Because it appealed to me to travel back, in memory, because the past remained alive for me, while the present was barely breathing, and the future lay before me like a cold corpse.
We were both always waiting for our children and grandchildren. Yeruhim was to be visited in Offenbach by his sons, Jan and Joachim. He would speak of them so often, and describe them in such detail, that soon the visit itself became almost superfluous. Everyone remembered them from their childhood and youth as boys who were a little haughty, having been educated with the Theatines, and who bore themselves proudly. They grew up, became handsome. “One will come in a silver frock coat,” said Old Yeruhim, “and the other in a Polish uniform.” But they never came.