“Now she won’t die,” he says to his daughter, despair rising into his voice.
A strange expression of shock and suspicion appears on Hayah’s face, then slowly it turns into one of amusement. She laughs, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until a deep roar fills the small room and explodes through the wooden walls. Her father covers her mouth with his hands.
What the Zohar says
Yente is dying and not dying. That’s right: “Dying and not dying.” That’s how the learned Hayah explains it.
“This is exactly the way it is in the Zohar,” she says, trying to temper her irritation, since everyone is making a very big deal out of it. People from Rohatyn are starting to come up to their home and look in through their windows. “There are many phrases like this in the Zohar that seem contradictory at first glance, but when you look more carefully, it becomes clear that there are things that are impenetrable to reason and that do not work according to our systems. Doesn’t the Old Man from the Zohar begin his peroration exactly in this way?”
Hayah says this, standing in the vestibule, to several tired but trusted guests who have come here because they got a whiff of some sort of miracle. They could use a miracle right now. Among them is Israel of Korolówka, Yente’s grandson, who brought her here. Of all of them, he seems to be the most anxious and concerned.
Hayah recites: “For who are the beings who, when they rise, go down, and when they go down, climb up; and two being one, the one who is three.”
Her listeners nod as if this were exactly what they had expected, and Hayah’s words have calmed them down. Only Israel does not seem to be satisfied with this response, because he genuinely doesn’t know whether Yente is alive or not. He immediately begins with his question:
“But—”
Hayah, tying a thick wool scarf under her chin, for it has gotten cold, responds impatiently:
“People always want things to be simple. This or that. Black or white. People are idiots. Was not the world made out of countless shades of gray? You can take her home,” she concludes, speaking to Israel.
Then she quickly crosses the courtyard and vanishes into the annex where Yente lies.
In the afternoon, the medic Asher Rubin comes back and conducts a careful examination of the patient. He asks her age. Old, is the answer. At last, Rubin pronounces this to be something like a coma, and says they mustn’t for God’s sake treat her as if she were dead—rather as if she were sleeping. But they can see from his face that he does not really believe what he is saying.
“Most likely she’ll die on her own, in her sleep,” he adds, by way of consolation.
After the wedding, as the guests are heading out, the wooden wheels of their carriages carving deep ruts into the road before the Shorr home, Elisha Shorr goes up to the cart where Yente has been laid. When no one is watching, he says quietly to her:
“Don’t be angry with me.”
She doesn’t answer him, of course. Israel, Yente’s grandson, comes over. He is angry with Shorr. Shorr could have kept his grandmother and let her die here. He and Sobla have argued about this, because she didn’t want to leave Yente behind. Now he whispers to her: “Grandmother, Grandmother.” But no answer comes, and no reaction. Yente’s hands are cold; they have rubbed them in theirs, but that didn’t heat them up. Even so she breathes evenly, slowly. Asher Rubin has taken her pulse several times and cannot believe it is so slow.
Pesel’s tale of the Podhajce goat and the strange grass
Elisha gives them an additional cart lined with hay. The whole family from Korolówka now sits in the two carriages. It drizzles, and the boards with which they have covered Yente are soaked, so the men build her a makeshift roof. She really looks like a corpse now, and so on the road the people they encounter say a prayer, and the goyim bid her farewell with the sign of the cross.
When they stop in Podhajce, her great-granddaughter, Pesel, Israel’s daughter, remembers that they stopped in the same spot for a rest three weeks ago, and that her great-grandmother, still healthy and conscious at the time, told them the story of the Podhajce goat. Now Pesel, weeping intermittently, tries to tell the story the same way her great-grandmother did. The others listen to her in silence, realizing—and this draws tears to everyone’s eyes—that this was the last story Yente ever told. Did she hope to send them some sort of message through this story? To reveal some sort of mystery? At the time, the story was funny—now it seems to them odd, incomprehensible.
“Not far from here, in Podhajce, right by the castle, there lives a goat,” Pesel says in a weak voice. The women hush one another in turn. “You won’t see him now, because he doesn’t care for people and lives like a hermit. He is a highly educated goat, a wise animal that has seen many things, both good and terrible. He is three hundred years of age.”
Instinctively, everyone looks around for the goat. All they see is the dried brown grass, goose droppings, and the great clump of the ruins of the Podhajce castle. The goat must have some relevance to all of this. Pesel uses the toe of one of her leather travel shoes to pull down the hem of her skirt.
“In ruins like these, a strange grass grows, a divine grass, perhaps, since no one sows it and no one harvests it. And a grass left to its own devices also acquires a wisdom of its own. So it is only this grass the goat eats, no other. There is a certain Nazirite who took a vow not to cut his hair or touch dead bodies; he knows all about the grass. The goat has never ingested any other grass than this kind that grows in front of the castle of Podhajce, the wise grass. That is why the goat’s wisdom grew along with his horns. But they were not the ordinary horns that ordinary animals possess. These ones were soft, they would wriggle around, then twist. The wise goat concealed his horns. By day, he wore them twisted to look perfectly normal. But by night, he would go out, right over there, up to that wide level of the castle, into that once-great courtyard, now collapsed, and from there he would reach out his horns to the sky. He would stretch taller and taller, standing on his hind legs to get as close as he could, until at last, he’d hook the tips of his horns over the edge of the moon, which was young and horned just like him, and he would ask, ‘What’s up, moon? Isn’t it high time for the coming of the Messiah?’ The moon looked around among the stars then, and they paused for a moment in their journeys. ‘The Messiah has come already, in Smyrna—didn’t you know, wise goat?’ ‘I know, good moon. I just wanted to make certain.’ And so they chatted all through the night, and in the morning, when the sun came up, the goat twisted its horns back to how they were supposed to be and went on grazing on that wise grass.”
Pesel falls silent. Her mother and her aunts weep.
Father Chmielowski writes a letter to Mrs. Dru?backa, whom he holds in such high esteem, in January 1753, from Firlejów