Everything Is Illuminated (28 page)

Augustine returned out of her house with a box marked in case in blue pencil. “Here,” she said to the hero. “She desires you to have this,”

I told him. “I can’t,” he said. “He says he cannot.” “He must.” “She says that you must.” “I did not understand why Rivka hid her wedding ring in the jar, and why she said to me, Just in case. Just in case and then what?

What?” “Just in case she was killed,” I said. “Yes, and then what? Why should the ring be any different?” “I do not know,” I said. “Ask him,” she said. “She wants to know why her friend saved her wedding ring when she thought that she would be killed.” “So there would be proof that she existed,” the hero said. “What?” “Evidence. Documentation. Testi-mony.” I told this to Augustine. “But a ring is not needed for this. People can remember without the ring. And when those people forget, or die, then no one will know about the ring.” I told this to the hero. “But the ring could be a reminder,” he said. “Every time you see it, you think of her.” I told Augustine what the hero said. “No,” she said. “I think it was in case of this. In case someone should come searching one day.” I could not perceive if she was speaking to me or to the hero. “So that we would have something to find,” I said. “No,” she said. “The ring does not exist for you. You exist for the ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring.” She excavated the pocket of her dress and removed a ring. She attempted to put it on the hero’s finger, but it did not harmonize, so she attempted to put it on his most petite finger, but it still did not harmonize. “She had small hands,” the hero said. “She had small hands,” I told Augustine. “Yes,” she said, “so small.” She again attempted to put the ring on the hero’s little finger, and she applied very rigidly, and I could perceive that this made the hero with many kinds of pain, although he did not exhibit even one of them. “It will not harmonize,” she said, and when she removed the ring I could see that the ring had made a cut around the hero’s most petite finger.

“We will go forth,” Grandfather said. “It is time to depart.” I told this to the hero. “Tell her thank you once more.” “He says thank you,” I said. “And I also thank you.” Now she was crying again. She cried when we came, and she cried when we departed, but she never cried while we were there. “May I ask a question?” I asked. “Of course,” she said. “I am Sasha, as you know, and he is Jonathan, and the bitch is Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and he, Grandfather, is Alex. Who are you?” She was silent for a moment. “Lista,” she said. And then she said, “May I ask you a question?” “Of course.” “Is the war over?” “I do not understand.” “I am,” she uttered, or began to utter, but then Grandfather performed something that I was not anticipating. He secured Augustine’s hand into his and gave her a kiss on her lips. She rotated away from us, toward the house. “I must go in and care for my baby,” she said. “It is missing me.”

Still employed by the Sloucher congregation, which had become something of an unknowing escort service for the widows and elderly, my grandfather made house calls several times a week, and was able to save up enough money to begin thinking about a family of his own, or for his family to begin thinking about a family of his own.

It’s so good to see your work ethic, his father told him one afternoon before he left for the widow Golda R’s small brick house by the Upright Synagogue. You’re not the lazy Gypsy boy we thought you were.

We are very proud of you, his mother said, but did not, as he had hoped, follow it with a kiss. It’s because of Father, he thought. If he weren’t here, she would have kissed me.

His father came close to him, patted his shoulder, said, without knowing what he was saying, Keep it up.

Golda covered all of the mirrors before she made love to him.

Leah H, twice widowed, to whom he would return three times a week (even after his marriage), asked nothing more than his seriousness when handling her aged body: that he should never laugh at her dropped breasts or balding genitalia, that he should be earnest with the varicose veins of her calves, that he should never shrink from her smell, which she knew was like rot on the vine.

Rina S, widow of the Wisp Kazwel L, the only Wisp of Ardisht able to kick the habit and descend from the rooftops of Rovno to a life on the ground — a victim, like the Dial, of the flour mill’s disk saw — bit into Safran’s dead arm while they made love, so she could be sure he wasn’t feeling anything.

Elena N, widow of the undertaker Chaim N, had seen death pass through her cellar doors a thousand times, but never could have imagined the depth of the grief that she would live with after the chicken bone went sideways and stuck. She asked him to make love to her under her bed, in a shallow subnuptial grave, to take away a bit of the pain, to make things a little easier. Safran, my grandfather, my mother’s father, whom I never met, obliged them all.

But before the portrait is painted too flatteringly, it should be mentioned that widows comprised only half of my young grandfather’s lovers. He lived a double life: lover of not only grievers, but women untouched by grief’s damp hand, those closer to their first death than their second. There were some fifty-two virgins, to whom he made love in each of the positions that he had studied from a dirty deck of cards, loaned to him by the friend whom he kept leaving at the theater: sixty-nining the one-eyed jack Tali M, with tight pigtails and folded-yarmulke eye patch; taking from behind the two of hearts Brandil W, who had only one very weak heart, which made her hobble and wear thick spectacles, and who died before the war — too early, and just early enough; spoons with the queen of diamonds Mella S, all breasts and no backside, the only daughter of the wealthiest family in Kolki (who, they say, would never use silverware more than once); mounted by the ace of spades Trema O, most diligent in the fields, whose shrieks, he was sure, would give them away. They loved him and he fucked them — ten, jack, queen, king, ace — a most straight and royal flush. And so he had two working hands: one with five fingers and one with fifty-two young girls who couldn’t, and wouldn’t, say no.

And, of course, he had a life above his waist as well. He went to school and studied with the other boys his age. He was quite good at arithmetic, and his teacher, the young Sloucher Yakem E, had suggested to my great-grandparents that they send Safran to a school for gifted children in Lutsk. But nothing could have bored my grandfather more than his studies. Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement. The school he attended was a small one — four teachers and forty students. Each day was divided between religious studies, taught by the Fair-to-Middling Rabbi and one of his Upright congregants, and secular, or useful, studies, taught by three — sometimes two, sometimes four — Slouchers.

Every schoolboy learned the history of Trachimbrod from a book originally written by the Venerable Rabbi — AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN’T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST? — and revised regularly by a committee of Uprighters and Slouchers. The Book of Antecedents began as a record of major events: battles and treaties, famines, seismic occur-rences, the beginnings and ends of political regimes. But it wasn’t long before lesser events were included and described at great length — festivals, important marriages and deaths, records of construction in the shtetl (there was no destruction then) — and the rather small book had to be replaced with a three-volume set. Soon, upon the demand of the read-ership — which was everyone, Uprighter and Sloucher alike — The Book of Antecedents included a biennial census, with every name of every citizen and a brief chronicle of his or her life (women were included after the synagogue split), summaries of even less notable events, and commen-taries on what the Venerable Rabbi had called LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF LIFE, which included definitions, parables, various rules and regulations for righteous living, and cute, if meaningless, sayings. The later editions, now taking up an entire shelf, became yet more detailed, as citizens con-tributed family records, portraits, important documents, and personal journals, until any schoolboy could easily find out what his grandfather ate for breakfast on a given Thursday fifty years before, or what his great-aunt did when the rain fell without lull for five months. The Book of Antecedents, once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing . . . We are writing . . . We are writing . . .

Even the most delinquent students read The Book of Antecedents without skipping a word, for they knew that they too would one day inhabit its pages, that if they could only get hold of a future edition, they would be able to read of their mistakes (and perhaps avoid them), and the mistakes of their children (and ensure that they would never happen), and the outcome of future wars (and prepare for the death of loved ones).

And I’m sure that my grandfather was no exception. He, too, must have skipped from volume to volume, page to page, searching . . .

Yankel D’s Shameful Bead

The result of certain shameful activities, the disgraced usurer Yankel D’s trial took place in the year 1741 before the High Upright Court.

Said usurer, after being found guilty of having committed said shameful deeds in question, was obligated by shtetl proclamation to wear the incriminating abacus bead on a white string around his neck. Let the record show that he wore it even when no one was looking, even to sleep.

Trachimday, 1796

A fly of particular pestiferousness stung on its tuches the horse that pulled the Rovno Trachimday float, causing the touchy mare to buck and toss its fieldworker effigy into the Brod. The parade of floats was delayed for some thirty minutes while strong men recovered the soggy effigy. The culpable fly was caught in the net of an unidenti-fied schoolboy. The boy raised his hand to smash it, knowing that an example must be made, but as his fist began its descent, the fly twitched its wing without flight. The boy, the sensitive boy, was overcome by the fragility of life and released the fly. The fly, also overcome, died of gratefulness. An example was made.

Unhealthy Babies

( See God)

When the Rain Fell Without Lull for Five Months

This worst of all rain spells occurred in the last two months of 1914

and first three of 1915. Cups left on sills quickly overflowed. Flowers bloomed and then drowned. Holes were cut into the ceilings above bathtubs . . . It should be noted that the rain without lull coincided with the period of Russian occupation,* and that no matter how much water came down, there were those who still claimed to be thirsty. ( See Gittle K, Yakov L.)

*Upon hearing that it was a Jew who invented the love poem, the unrequited magistrate Rufkin S, may his name be lost between cushions, rained all fire and broken glass upon our simple shtetl. (It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.)

The Flour Mill

It so happened that in the eleventh year of a long-past century, the Chosen People (us) were sent forth from Egypt under the guidance of our then wise leader, Moses. There was no time for bread to rise in the haste of escape, and the Lord our God, may His name inspire buoyant thoughts, who, in seeking perfection with his every creation, would not want an imperfect bread, said unto his people (us, not them): MAKE NOT ANY BREAD THAT WILL BE AT ALL CRUNCHY, BLAND, BAD TASTING, OR THE CAUSE OF HOPELESS CONSTIPATION. But the Chosen People were very hungry, and we took our chances with some good yeast. What baked on our backs was less than perfect, indeed bland, crunchy, bad tasting, and the cause of many a good poop withheld, and God, may His name be always on our unchapped lips, was made very angry. It is because of this sin of our ancestors that one member of our shtetl has been killed in the flour mill every year since its founding in 1713. (For a list of those who have perished in the mill, see Appendix G: Untimely Deaths.)

The Existence of Gentiles

( See God)

The Entirety of the World as We Do and Don’t

Know It

( See God)

Jews Have Six Senses

Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing . . . memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks — when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain —

that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.

When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?

The Problem of Evil: Why Unconditionally Bad

Things Happen to Unconditionally Good People

They never do.

The Time of Dyed Hands

Occurring shortly after the mistaken suicides, the time of dyed hands began when the baker of rolls Herzog J observed that those rolls that were not watched with a cautious eye would sometimes disappear. He repeated this observation numerous times, placing his rolls about his bakery, even marking their placement with a coal pencil, and each time he would turn quickly away and steal a glance back, only the markings would remain.

All this stealing, he said.

At that point in our history, the Eminent Rabbi Fagel F ( see also Appendix B: Listing of Upright Rabbis) was chief executor of legal regulation. So as to conduct a fair investigation, he saw to it that everyone in the shtetl was treated like a suspect, guilty until proven otherwise. WE WILL DYE THE HANDS OF EACH CITIZEN WITH A DIFFERENT COLOR, he said, AND WILL THIS WAY DISCOVER WHO HAS BEEN PUTTING THEIRS BEHIND HERZOG’S COUNTER.