They take up clubs and sticks and pitchforks, and they set out as if mobilizing against some werewolf army, against the underground kobold kidnappers, against the cemetery’s devils. Someone has the idea of going into the forest, outside the village—that’s where Priest’s Hill is, he could have run there.
By noon, a small search party is standing at the entrance to a cavern. Narrow and terrifying, it is shaped like a woman’s private parts; going inside is akin to climbing back into the womb. No one wants to go.
“He wouldn’t have gone in there, either,” they try to tell themselves. Finally a boy with washed-out eyes—they call him Bere?—screws up his courage; two others follow him. At first you can hear their voices from inside, but then there is quiet, as if they’ve been swallowed up by the earth. After a quarter of an hour, Bere? reemerges with the child in his arms. Little Jacob’s eyes are open wide in terror, and his relentless sobs have given him hiccups.
The whole village keeps talking about this event for several days, and a group of adolescents united by a common goal begins an exploration of Jacob’s cave, shrouding it in the great secrecy to which children that age are prone.
Hayah walks into the room where Yente is lying. She leans over her, checking carefully whether her eyelids are trembling, whether some vein on her sunken temples might be pulsing to the rhythm of her very weak heart. She takes the old woman’s little head in her hands.
“Yente?” she asks quietly. “You alive?”
But what is Yente supposed to say to that? Is that even the right question? Hayah ought instead to ask: Do you see, do you feel? How does it work, you moving rapidly as thought across the rippling ruffles of time? Hayah should know how to ask. Yente, who doesn’t have the strength to give any answer at all, goes back to where she was a moment ago, or maybe not exactly there, because now it’s a little later on, but that doesn’t really matter.
Yehuda Leyb Buchbinder, Yente’s son, little Jacob’s father, is impulsive, unpredictable. He always feels like he’s being persecuted by someone for his heresies. He doesn’t like people. Isn’t it possible to live, think, and do what you like, but in such a way that no one finds out? Yente wonders. For that is what they have been taught: we will quietly lead a double life, following in the footsteps of the Messiah. We just have to master absolute silence, looking away, living in secret. Is that so hard, Yehuda? Not to give away your feelings, not to betray your thoughts? The inhabitants of this world, abyss-dwellers, understand nothing anyway, the great truth is as far away from them as Africa might feel. They are subject to laws we must reject.
Buchbinder is simply a contrarian, always in disagreement with everyone. And his son takes after him, he’s exactly the same way, which is of course the reason they don’t get along. Yente’s gaze travels up under the damp bellies of the clouds and easily finds her son, asleep with his head resting on top of a big book. His oil lamp is burning out. His black beard has covered the writing on the page, shadows have carved little nests into his thin, sunken cheeks, and his eyelids tremble. Yehuda sleeps.
Yente’s vision hesitates. Should she go inside his dream? Why does she see everything at once, all times swirled together, and on top of that, people’s thoughts? Yente can see thoughts. She orbits her son’s head; along the wooden table ants are marching, one after the other, in perfect single file. When Yehuda wakes up, he will wipe them off the table’s surface in a single motion, not even realizing.
Of Yente’s onward wanderings through time
Yente remembers how a few years later Yehuda came to visit her in Korolówka on his way to Kamieniec. He was traveling with Jacob, who was fourteen years old at the time. The father was hoping to teach his son a little bit about his business so that he could start to get involved.
Jacob is thin, ungainly, a black mustache just starting to sprout under his nose. His face is covered with red pimples. Some of them have white, pus-filled tips, and his skin is ugly, reddened, shiny; Jacob is very ashamed of all this. He’s grown out his hair, and he wears it in such a way that it falls over his face. This annoys his father, who often grabs that “mop,” as he calls it, and throws it back over his son’s shoulders. They’re the same height now, and from behind they could be brothers. Brothers always in an argument. Whenever the younger one tries to talk back, the older one smacks him over the head.
In the village, only four homes remain with the true faith. In the evenings, they close the door, close the curtains over the windows, light the candles. The younger members of these families take part only in the readings of the Zohar and the singing of the psalms. After that, an adult takes them to another cottage. It is better that their impressionable eyes don’t witness and that their ears don’t hear what happens when the candles start to be put out.
Now even during the day the grown-ups sit behind closed shutters, waiting for news of the Messiah, who will have to show up at some point, after all. But that news from the world arrives with a delay, belated, for here someone has already dreamed of the Messiah—that he’ll be coming from the west, the fields and forests, villages and towns curling up behind him like patterns on a carpet. What remains of the world is a tight roll, a scroll covered with tiny symbols that are not quite legible. In the new world, there will be a different alphabet, different symbols, other rules. Maybe it will go bottom to top, instead of top to bottom. Maybe people will move from old age into youth, and not the other way around. Maybe people will arise out of the earth and eventually vanish into the bellies of their mothers.
The coming Messiah is a suffering, aching Messiah, trodden down by the evil of the world and the misery of people. He might even resemble Jesus, whose mangled body hangs in Korolówka from crosses placed at almost every crossroads. The conventional Jews look away from this hideous figure, but the true believers look upon it. For was not Sabbatai Tzvi, too, a suffering savior? Was he not locked away in prison, and was he not tormented and oppressed?
While the parents whisper amongst themselves, the heat ignites in the children’s minds all sorts of ideas for games. Then Jacob appears, neither an adult nor a child. His father has just chased him out of the house. His father’s face was flushed, his gaze absent; no doubt he had been crying over the Zohar, something that has been happening more and more.