Jacob, whom everyone here still calls Yankiele, has banded the children together, from the eldest to the youngest, Christian and Jewish, and this harmonious band has set out for the cemetery. From his uncle’s house toward the village, they set off down a sandy road bordered with silverweed, until they reach the inn and pass the tavern of Solomon the Jew, also known as Black Shlomo. Now they’re walking uphill, toward the Catholic church and the wooden presbytery, then farther, past the church cemetery, until they get to the last homes in the village.
From the top of the little hill, the village looks like a garden surrounded by fields of grain. Jacob has brought several boys and two little girls out of that garden and led them through the fields. They have climbed above the village, which extends beneath them like a string of beads; the sky is clear, and the nearing sunset gilds the cerulean firmament. They enter a little forest. The trees that grow here are unusual ones that none of the children have ever seen before. Suddenly everything becomes strange, different. They can no longer hear the songs from down below, and voices vanish into the softness of the leaves, so very green it almost hurts to look at them. Are these the trees from the fairy stories? one of the younger boys asks, and Jacob begins to laugh and says that here it is always spring, and the leaves never get yellow and never fall down. Here is the cavern where Abraham rests, says Jacob, miraculously brought here from the Land of Israel, brought just for him so that he might show it off. And next to Abraham lies Sara, his wife and sister. And wherever Abraham is, time does not flow, so if you go into that cave and sit there a little, and then go out again after an hour, it would likely turn out that on the earth, on the outside, a hundred years had passed.
“I was born in this cave,” he proclaims.
“That’s a lie,” one of the girls says resolutely. “Don’t you listen to him. He’s always making things up.”
Jacob gives her an ironic look. The girl takes her revenge for it:
“Pimple face,” she snaps.
Now Yente flies back into the past, where Yankiele is still little and has barely calmed down from his crying. She is trying to get him to sleep, and she looks at the other children, who are lying in a row on the bed. All of them are sleeping, except Yankiele. The little boy has to say good night to everyone around him. He whispers, neither to himself nor to her, quieter and quieter, but with intensity: “Good night, Grandma Yente, good night, Brother Isaac and Sister Hana and Cousin Tzifka, good night, Mama Rachel,” and he names all of their neighbors and remembers everyone he came into contact with that day and says good night to them as well, until Yente starts to be afraid that if he keeps going like this, he’ll never finish, because the world is so enormous, and even reflected back by such a tiny little mind, it is still endless, and Yankiele will keep talking this way until morning. And then the boy says good night to the neighborhood dogs and cats and heifers, to the goats, and finally to objects. A bowl, the ceiling, a pitcher, some buckets, pots, plates, spoons, the eiderdown, the big pillows, flowers in pots, the curtains, the nails.
Everyone in the room has already gone to sleep, the fire in the stove has dimmed, becoming just a lazy red glow, someone is snoring, and here this child is, talking and talking, softer and softer, but into his words now creep strange mistakes and slips, and there is no one left awake to correct him, so slowly this litany contorts bizarrely, becomes a magic spell, incomprehensible, spoken in an old, forgotten tongue. Finally, the child’s voice softens fully, and then he goes to sleep. Then Yente stands up carefully and looks tenderly at this strange boy, who ought not to be called Jacob, but rather Trouble, and she notices his eyelids trembling, which means he has already moved on, into a dream where he’ll embark upon new antics.
Of the terrible consequences of the amulet’s disappearance
In the morning, when everyone is sleeping off the wedding in every corner of the house, when the sawdust in the big room is so trampled that it looks like dust, Elisha Shorr enters Yente’s bedroom. He is tired; his eyes are bloodshot. He sits on the bed beside her, sways back and forth and whispers:
“It’s all over now, Yente. You can go. Don’t be angry I kept you this long. I had no alternative.”
Gently, he pulls out from under her neckline a handful of strings and leather straps, looking for one in particular, and slides them one by one through his fingers. He assumes his tired eyes have overlooked it. He does it several times—he counts the tiny teraphim, the cases, pouches, bone tablets with spells scored into them. Everyone wears them, but old women like Yente always wear the most. There must be dozens of angels hovering around Yente, guardian spirits and other beings, nameless ones. But his amulet is not there. He finds only the string it was attached to, untied, with nothing on it. The spell has vanished. But how?
Elisha Shorr sobers up, his movements growing nervous. He starts to palpate the old woman. Yente lies there like a log, not moving, with that smile slowly spreading over her face, the same smile his daughter Hayah glimpsed before. He lifts her inert body and searches under her back, under her hips, uncovers poor Yente’s skinny extremities, her big, bony feet that stick out stiff from under her skirt, he digs in the folds of her shirt, checks the insides of her palms, and finally, more and more terrified, searches in the pillows, in the sheets, the blankets and the quilts, under the bed and around the bed. How is this possible?
It’s a funny sight, this eminent, mature man rummaging around in the bedding of an ancient woman, as if mistaking her for a young one, trying clumsily to clamber in with her.
“Yente, are you going to tell me what’s happened?” he says to her in a fierce whisper, as to a child who has committed some monstrous offense, but she, of course, does not respond, only her eyelids tremble, and for a moment her eyeballs move to one side, and then the other, and her smile quivers slightly, almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t fade.
“What did you write on it?” Hayah asks her father in an urgent whisper. Sleepy, in a nightshirt with a kerchief on her head, she’s run in here at his summons. Elisha is distressed, the wrinkles on his forehead settling into soft rolling waves, their pattern drawing Hayah’s gaze. This is how her father always looks when he feels guilty.
“You know what I wrote,” he says. “I held her back.”
“Did you hang it around her neck?”
Her father nods.
“Father, you were supposed to put it in a box and lock it.”
Her father shrugs helplessly.
“You’re like a child,” says Hayah, at once tender and enraged. “How could you? You just put it right around her neck? Well, where is it?”
“It’s nowhere, it’s gone.”
“Nothing disappears just like that!”
Hayah sets about searching, but she quickly sees there is no point.
“It’s gone. I’ve looked,” he says.
“She ate it,” says Hayah. “She swallowed it.”
Shaken, her father is silent; then, helplessly, he asks:
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know,” she says. There is a pause. “Who else knows about this?” she asks.
Elisha Shorr thinks. He has taken his fur cap off his head and is rubbing his forehead. His hair is long, thin, sweaty.