As he was being born, wicked sorceresses explored the perimeter of the house, but they couldn’t get inside because Yente was standing guard, along with a dog whose father was a real wolf, one of those that roamed on its own and claimed its prey out of the chicken coops. Yente’s dog’s name was Vilga. When the child of Yente’s youngest son was being born, Vilga ran around the house all day and all night, exhausting herself to the point of unconsciousness, but managing to keep the sorceresses and Lilith at bay. Later, they took the dog with them when they went to Czernowitz.
There are few who do not know that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but that since she didn’t want to be obedient to Adam, or to lie beneath him as God decreed, she fled to the Red Sea. There she turned red as though flayed. God sent three fearsome angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to drag her back by force. They accosted her in her hiding place, tormented her, and threatened to drown her. But she didn’t want to go back. Even if she had wanted to, she would no longer have been able; Adam would have been forbidden to accept her, for according to the Torah, a woman who has lain with another must not resume relations with her husband. And who was Lilith’s lover? Samael himself.
So God had to create a second, more obedient woman for Adam. This one was gentle, if rather stupid. The unfortunate creature ate the forbidden fruit, resulting in the Fall. That was how the rule of law came to be, as a punishment.
But Lilith and all beings similar to Lilith belong to a world from before the Fall, which means that human laws do not apply to them, that they’re not bound by human rules or human regulations, and that they don’t have human consciences or human hearts, and never shed human tears. For Lilith, there’s no such thing as sin. Their world is different. To human eyes, it might seem strange, as if drawn in a very fine line, since everything it contains is more luminous and lightweight, and beings belonging to that world may pass through walls and objects, and each other, back and forth—between them, there are no differences as there are between people, who are closed in on themselves as though in tin cans. Things are different there. And between man and animal there isn’t such a great gap, either—maybe only on the outside, for in their world you can converse soundlessly with animals, and they will understand you, and you them. It’s the same with angels—here they’re visible. They fly around the sky like birds, sometimes huddling on the roofs of houses where their own houses are, like storks.
Nahman wakes up, his head spinning with images. He gets up unsteadily and looks at Yente; after a brief moment of hesitation, he touches her cheek, which is barely lukewarm. Suddenly he is afraid. She has seen his thoughts. She’s watched him dream.
Yente is awakened by the creaking of the door, and she’s back inside herself. Where did she just go? In her scattered state, it seems to her she won’t be able to return to the hardwood floor of this world. So be it. It’s better here—times intermingle, overlap. How could she ever have believed in the flow of time? She had thought time flowed! Now she finds it funny. It’s obvious that time spins around like skirts whirling in a dance. Like a linden top twirled onto a table and sustained in motion there by the reverential eyes of children.
She sees those children, their faces reddened from the heat, snot running from their noses, their mouths half open. There is little Moshe, and next to him is Tzifka, who will die of whooping cough not long from now. And there is Yankiele, as little Jacob is then known, and his older brother Isaac. Yankiele can’t resist and with a sudden movement takes a jab at the top, which sways like a drunk man and falls over. His older brother wheels around in a rage and Tzifka starts to cry. At the noise, their father appears, Leyb Buchbinder, angry to be torn away from work, and he seizes Yankiele by the ear so hard he almost lifts him up into the air. Then he points his finger at him, hissing through his teeth that Jacob is about to finally get what’s coming to him, and then he locks him in the storage shed. For a moment, there is a silence, but then from behind the door Jacob begins to scream, and he screams for so long that no one can bear to listen to it or do anything else, so Leyb, red with anger, drags the child out of the shed and hits him several times in the face, until his nose starts bleeding. Only then does his father release his grasp on the boy and allow him to race out of the house.
When the child has not come back by nightfall, the search begins. First the women look for him, and then the men join in, and soon the whole family and their neighbors are walking around the village, asking if anyone has seen the little boy. They make it all the way to the hovels where the Christians live, and they ask there, too, but no one has seen the child with the bashed-up nose.
The village is called Korolówka. From above, it resembles a threepointed star. This is where little Jacob was born, right there, on the outskirts of the village, in the house where his father’s brother Yaakiev still lives today. Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder and his family are visiting now from Czernowitz, have come for the bar mitzvah of the youngest son of his brother, taking the opportunity to spend some time with the family; they hadn’t planned to stay for long—in a few days they were to return to Czernowitz, where they had moved several years before. The family home where they are staying is small—it’s hard to fit everyone in—and it sits next to the cemetery, so they assume that little Yankiele might have run there and hidden amongst the matzevot, but how will they be able to spot him? He’s such a slip of a thing, even if their search is now aided by the rising moon and the silver glow that floods the village. The boy’s mother, Rachel, gets weak from crying. She’s always known it would end up like this eventually, that if her brutal husband didn’t restrain himself from beating Jacob it would all turn out exactly like this.
“Yankiele!” cries Rachel, hysteria audible in her voice. “The child is gone, and why is that? You killed him! You killed your own son!” she shrieks to her husband. She grabs a fence picket and shakes it until she has ripped it out of the ground.
The men have run down to the river, spooking the flocks of geese grazing on the pastures; little white feathers float after them and come to rest in their hair. Others have rushed to the Orthodox cemetery, where it is known the boy goes sometimes, at the very edge of the village.
“Some demon has gotten into that child, some dybbuk, there are lots of them here, right near the cemetery. One of them must have gotten into him,” repeats his father, who is also frightened now. “I’ll show him when he comes back,” he adds immediately, to hide his fear.
“What did he do?” Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder’s brother asks a shaken Rachel.
“What did he do? What did he do?” she mocks him, gathering strength for a final burst. “What could he have done? He’s a child!”
At dawn, the whole village comes out.
“The Jews have lost a child! The Jews have lost a child!” the goyim call in both Polish and Ukrainian.