He surprised himself in formulating it so well as that. Szymanowska’s consternation hushed her now.
On the following day, she invited him to join some other guests in her living room, and she played for them, and when everyone else was leaving, she asked if he would stay behind. Then she turned to convincing him—and it took until nearly morning—not to publish his novel.
“My cousin, Jan Kanty, enjoys too high and steady a self-regard in a country still ruled by chaos and disorder. It is easy to impute . . .” She hesitated and then finished: “. . . anything to anyone, and then they’re simply finished. You know, I can’t sleep at night, I’m always afraid something terrible will happen. What use is the kind of knowledge contained in your book?”
Brinken departed, stupefied by her grace and by several bottles of excellent wine. Only in the morning did he feel angry and offended. How dare she? Of course he would publish the book in Warsaw. He already had the publisher.
Soon so much was happening that he no longer had the attention his manuscript required. He started organizing aid for the refugees coming in from the eastern realms of an insurgent Poland, and in the winter of 1834, he caught a cold and suddenly died. The manuscript, meanwhile, never published, was laid to rest in the vertiginous stores of the National Library.
The travels of New Athens
That is also where the Rohatyn copy of New Athens, from which Jacob Frank learned to read in Polish, ended up. At first it traveled all the way to Offenbach, but it was brought back to Poland, to Warsaw, by Franciszek Wo?owski, after the court was cleared out. There for a long time it remained in his library, where it was read by his granddaughters.
The copy given by the author to Bishop Dembowski, meanwhile, was almost completely burned in one of the great private libraries, on Ho?a Street, during the Warsaw Uprising. The fine work of the Lwów bookbinder, who had firmly pressed in the book’s pages, meant that for some time they were able to resist the flames. Which is why New Athens didn’t burn up altogether—at its heart, the pages stayed unscathed, relishing the rustling of the wind for a long time yet to come.
The New Athens given to Mrs. El?bieta Dru?backa stayed in the family and ended up with her granddaughter; later, the famous writer Count Aleksander Fredro, who was also El?bieta Dru?backa’s great-grandson, would dip into it sometimes. After the Second World War, that copy ended up, like most of Lvov’s books, in the collections of the Ossolineum in Wroc?aw, where it can be read to this day.
Yente
From where Yente is looking, there are no dates, and so there is nothing to mark with any celebration, nor any cause for alarm or concern. The sole traces of time are the blurry streaks that travel past her sometimes, stripped down to just a few characteristics, ungraspable, stripped of speech, but patient. These are the Dead. Yente slowly gets into the habit of counting them.
Even when people completely stop being able to feel their presence, when they can no longer be reached by any sign from them, the dead still traverse this purgatory of memory. Deprived of human attention, they do not have places of their own, nor any sort of foothold. Misers will take care of the living, yet the dead are neglected by even the most generous. Yente feels something like tenderness toward them, when they graze her like a warm breeze—her, stuck here at the limit. She permits them these relations for an instant, attending to these figures who were present during her lifetime, and now, having receded into the background upon their deaths, they are like those veterans in Cz?stochowa whom the king and the army forgot.
And so, if Yente had ever professed any religion, after all the constructions her ancestors and her contemporaries had built up in her mind, her religion now is her faith in the Dead and their unfulfilled, imperfect, miscarried, or aborted efforts at repairing the world.
At the end of this story, when her body has become pure crystal, Yente discovers a completely new ability. She ceases to be just a witness, an eye that travels through space and time—she can also flow through human bodies, women, men, and children, and time speeds up so everything happens very fast, in one instant.
It becomes clear that these bodies are like leaves in which, for a single season, for a few months, the light resides. Then they fall down dead and dry, and the darkness grinds them into dust. Yente would like to be able to see this shift fully, as they pass from one stage into the next, urged on by their souls that strive impatiently for renewed incarnation, but even for her, this much is inconceivable.
Freyna, Pesel’s sister, later Anusia Paw?owska, lived to enjoy a ripe old age in Korolówka, where she was born, and she was buried in that beautiful Jewish cemetery that slopes downhill, to the river. She never had any contact with her sister, and, busy raising twelve children, she forgot about her. Besides, her husband, as a good Jew, kept the fact of his wife’s heretic relatives a great secret.
Her great-grandchildren were also living in Korolówka at the outbreak of the Second World War. The memory of the cave in the shape of the alef and of their Old Grandmother had been preserved, especially among the women, those older ones who remembered things that would seem frivolous and fantastic as they offered no instruction on baking bread or building houses.
Freyna’s great-great-granddaughter, who was called Czarna, or Black, the eldest in her family, absolutely insisted that they not go to Barszczów to register as the Germans had ordered them to. Never trust any authority, she would say. Which is why when all the Jews of Korolówka were setting off for the city with their belongings bundled, they quietly, in the night, pulling little carts carrying their things, went into the forest.
On October 12, 1942, five families from Korolówka, thirty-eight people, the youngest of whom was a child just five months old, and the eldest of whom was seventy-nine, left their village homes and entered the cave just before dawn from the forest entrance, where the powerful underground letter alef has its uppermost, rightmost stroke.