A man of an olden race standing in a stone trance. He smells the food which his ancestors cooked in the millenary past: the chicken, the liver paste, the stuffed fish, the herrings, the eiderdown ducks. He has lived with them and they have lived in him. Feathers float through the air, the feathers of winged creatures caged in crates—as it was in Ur, in Babylon, in Egypt and Palestine. The same shiny silks, blacks turning green with age: the silks of other times, of other cities, other ghettos, other pogroms. Now and then a coffee grinder or a samovar, a little wooden casket for spices, for the myrrh and aloes of the East. Little strips of carpet—from the souks and bazaars, from the emporiums of the Levant; bits of astrakhan, laces, shawls, nubies, and petticoats of flaming, flouncing flamingo. Some bring their birds, their little pets—warm, tender things pulsing with tremulous beat, learning no new language, no new melodies, but pining away, droopy, listless, languishing in their super-heated cages suspended above the fire-escapes. The iron balconies are festooned with meat and bedding, with plants and pets—a crawling still life in which even the rust is rapturously eaten away. With the cool of the evening the young are exposed like egg-plants; they lie back under the stars, lulled to dream by the obscene jabberwocky of the American street. Below, in wooden casks, are the pickles floating in brine. Without the pickle, the pretzel, the Turkish sweets, the ghetto would be without savour. Bread of every variety, with seeds and without. White, black, brown, even gray bread—of all weights, all consistencies….
The ghetto! A marble table top with a basket of bread. A bottle of seltzer water, preferably blue. A soup with egg drops. And two men talking. Talking, talking, talking, with burning cigarettes hanging from their blenched lips. Nearby a cellar with music: strange instruments, strange costumes, strange airs. The birds begin to warble, the air becomes over-heated, the bread piles up, the seltzer bottles smoke and sweat. Words are dragged like ermine through the spittled sawdust; growling, guttural dogs paw the air. Spangled women choked with tiaras doze heavily in their richly upholstered caskets of flesh. The magnetic fury of lust concentrates in dark, mahogany eyes.
In another cellar an old man sits in his overcoat on a pile of wood, counting his coal. He sits in the dark, as he did in Cracow, stroking his beard. His life is all coal and wood, little voyages from darkness to daylight. In his ears is still the ring of hoofs on cobbled streets, the sound of shrieks and screams, the clatter of sabres, the splash of bullets against a blank wall. In the cinema, in the synagogue, in the coffee house, wherever one sits, two kinds of music playing—one bitter, one sweet. One sits in the middle of a river called Nostalgia. A river filled with little souvenirs gathered from the wreckage of the world. Souvenirs of the homeless, of birds of refuge building again and again with sticks and twigs. Everywhere broken nests, egg shells, fledgelings with twisted necks and dead eyes staring into space. Nostalgic river dreams under tin copings, under rusty sheds, under capsized boats. A world of mutilated hopes, of strangled aspirations, of bulletproof starvation. A world where even the warm breath of life has to be smuggled in, where gems big as pigeons’ hearts are traded for a yard of space, an ounce of freedom. All is compounded into a familiar liver paste which is swallowed on a tasteless wafer. In one gulp there is swallowed down five thousand years of bitterness, five thousand years of ashes, five thousand years of broken twigs, smashed egg-shells, strangled fledgelings….
In the deep sub-cellar of the human heart the dolorous twang of the iron harp rings out.
Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.
20
For seven days and nights I was alone. I began to think that she had left me. Twice she telephoned, hut she sounded far away, lost, swallowed up by grief. I remembered Mr. Eisenstein’s words. I wondered, wondered if she had been reclaimed.
Then one day, towards closing time, she stepped out of the elevator and stood before me. She was all in black except for a mauve turban which gave her an exotic cast. A transformation had taken place. The eyes had grown still softer, the skin more translucent. Her figure had become seductively suave, her carriage more majestic. She had the poise of a somnambulist.
For a moment I could scarcely believe my eyes. There was something hypnotic about her. She radiated power, magnetism, enchantment. She was like one of those Italian women of the Renaissance who gaze at you steadily with enigmatic smile from a canvas which recedes into infinity. In those few strides which she took before throwing herself into my arms I felt a gulf, such as I had never known could exist between two people, closing up. It was as though the earth had opened up between us, as if, by a supreme and magical effort of will, she had leaped the void and rejoined me. The ground on which she stood a moment ago fell away, slipped into a past altogether unknown to me, just as the shelf of a continent slips into the sea. Nothing so clear and tangible as this formulated itself in my mind then; it was only afterwards, because I rehearsed this moment time and again later, that I understood the nature of our reunion.
Her whole body felt strangely different, as I pressed her close. It was the body of a creature who had been reborn. It was an entirely new body that she surrendered, new because it contained some element which hitherto had been missing. It was, strange as it may seem to say so, as if she had returned with her soul—and not her private, individual soul, but the soul of her race. She seemed to be offering it to me, like a talisman.
Words came to our lips with difficulty. We simply gurgled and stared at one another. Then I saw her glance roving over the place, taking everything in with a remorseless eye, and finally resting on my desk and on me.
«What are you doing here?» she seemed to say. And then, as it softened, as she gathered me up in the folds of the tribe—«What have they done to you?» Yes, I felt the power and the pride of her people. I have not chosen you, it said, to sit among the lowly. I am taking you out of this world. I am going to enthrone you.
And this was Mona, the Mona who had come to me from the center of the dance floor and offered herself, as she had offered herself to hundreds and perhaps thousands of others before me. Such a strange, wondrous flower is the human being! You hold it in your hand and while you sleep it grows, it becomes transformed, it exhales a narcotic fragrance.
In a few seconds I had become worshipful. It was almost unbearable to look at her steadily. To think that she would follow me home, accept the life I had to offer her, seemed unbelievable. I had asked for a woman and I had been given a queen.
What happened at dinner is a complete blank. We must have eaten in a restaurant, we must have talked, we must have made plans. I remember nothing of all this. I remember her face, her new soulful look, the brilliance and magnetism of the eyes, the translucent tone of the flesh.
I remember that we walked for a time through deserted streets. And perhaps, listening only to the sound of her voice, perhaps then she told me everything, all that I had ever longed to know about her. I remember not a word of it. Nothing had any importance or meaning except the future. I
