B002FB6BZK EBOK (21 page)

On the day she returned the man started speaking. He stood at the grave
of Rebecca's father and suddenly words came into his mouth. At first he
stammered, then he spoke fluently. Since for many years he hadn't talked,
he couldn't tell exactly what had happened to him and after he mourned
for the fate of the nation, he started seeing his wife with the same eyes
others had seen her and he started longing for her. But he knew how to
muffle his longing to intensify the malice and terror she sought in him. She
gave him two living children and two dead ones. The two living ones were
Rebecca and Joseph de la Rayna. She got special permission to name her daughter after herself, and she named her son Joseph de la Rayna. She
wanted her son to be named after a bold sinner. Her son studied fervently
with the persecutors of the messiah, refused to think of messianism that
still filled hearts with savagery, lusted for the restrictions he imposed on
himself and changed his name to Joseph Rayna and after he touched his
mother and felt that like everybody else he also saw her as a naked woman,
he went to another city, studied with a strict and handsome rabbi who spat
whenever the name of those abominations was brought up by one of his
students and forbade Joseph to mention his grandfather Secret Charity and
his mother. Joseph married a young woman who brought a considerable
dowry and a debilitating kidney disease and served as rabbi in a small town
where he almost reluctantly inducted young men into the army of the Lord,
put sticks in their hands, and even though he knew he was committing a
grave sin, made them swear to wage heroic war and also added a formula of
miracles he had learned from his rabbi; they had to learn to be defeated
heroically, he said, but in his heart he dissented. When he was scolded for
the sticks he gave the lads, he claimed he had a dream and in it he was told
what to do, and he repented and to the day she died he didn't see his
mother who poured into his soul the savage passions he wanted so much to
suppress in himself. His wife groaned in her illness, his children were thin
and pale, and he'd go to his sister Rebecca, sit with her, hold her hand, and
fervently speak evil of his mother and his grandfather and say, Mother's
damned sorcery. His sister bore in her heart the memory of the nights
when they would adjure angels and devils and call on Satan. Since she was
also afraid of his passions, she married a man so short and anonymous she
could barely have remembered his name if he hadn't been killed a year
later by a group of bored priests when she was in the last months of her
pregnancy. She gave birth to a son and sat with her brother who had meanwhile become a widower and asked on what day did Our Rabbi Moses die?
When she found out that Moses died on the seventh of Adar, she measured
the days and the hours, went to her mother, asked her to sew her a beautiful wedding gown and her mother didn't ask a thing and sat down and
sewed her daughter a wedding gown, and on the seventh of Adar at one
o'clock in the morning, Rebecca, daughter of Rebecca Secret Charity, died
wearing the wedding gown her mother made her and that looked like a
shroud more than a gown. Rebecca Secret Charity lived many more years, her husband died as he stood at the window and saw somebody who may
have been the messiah Frank whom Rebecca's father once saw at that
window riding a horse. Even as she was dying, Rebecca looked as beautiful as in her youth. A thin channel of malice was stretched on her face.
She didn't die like other people but became transparent, and one day she
smiled to herself, lay down in bed, and died. In her death she looked like
a dead butterfly stuck with a pin on white paper. That was a winter day
and rain sprayed and her son, who stood next to her, wept, and when he
wept people saw the tears stop and stand still in the air between his eyes
and the open grave. Jews said they didn't remember such an event since
Secret Charity stopped the moon for three whole nights. The tears, said
the Jews, looked like wooden birds; both birds and fixed, not moving. From
the grave rose a tune. People thought it was the song of the choir of the
Temple. Not far from there, Secret Charity was buried standing up. On his
tombstone stood a crow, and that's how Secret Charity could have seen his
daughter's grave.

Tape / -

Joseph Rayna grew up and didn't know his forefathers. His father pondered ancient books in secret and his mother was a thin; bright-eyed woman.
Joseph was the sort of child you see sometimes at the entrance to Paradise:
beautiful children, sorrowful and cruel, who serve as minions of gods who
amuse themselves with them. His curls weren't shorn and his eyes were
green-gold like the eyes of a demon and wrapped in ovalish ellipses like the
rustle of a butterfly's wing.

When he attended heder, the children would make fun of him. He'd fix
them with his serene and arrogant look and they'd be awed. Later one of
the children said that Joseph had a green halo around his head and sometimes he'd turn himself into glass and you could see through him. But his
eyes, said the child, remained opaque with savagery and they penetrated
me and I saw dogs and wolves preying on humans on mountains I had never
seen in my life.

Afterward Joseph's father moved to the other side of the city. He read
ancient writings left by Secret Charity the father of his grandfather, who
had to be willingly ravished to bring repair, and he converted.

Joseph's mother, busy with her embarrassing love for her son, followed
her husband. Joseph was baptized and given a name nobody remembered
anymore. Like his grandfather's father, her husband sat in a cellar and
made kiddush secretly to keep the commandments of God in secret.
Once when Joseph fell asleep in the park a group of young girls passed by
him. They were shaken at the sight of him, stopped and looked at him.
He woke up but didn't open his eyes and they couldn't resist the temptation and touched him, they shrieked and fled in panic. He opened his
eyes slowly and looked serenely at their panicky running. Some man who
stood there and caught them red-handed scolded them, one of the girls
who feared the rage of her father, a district officer, said: He tried to play
with us, and so a policeman appeared at Joseph's house and took him to
prison. In prison Joseph was beaten and the police called him filthy Jew,
and asked why did you do that, and he said quietly: I'm not a Jew and I'm
not filthy and I didn't do a thing. The police were scared when he talked
because he laughed as he spoke while they beat him harshly. His demon's
eyes were shrouded in a harsh and indulgent dusk and they were forced to
put him in solitary confinement. The girl who told her father the officer
the story had a nightmare that night, repented, went to church and confessed, and the priest told her forget everything and say eighteen Ave
Marias but she went to her father and told him. Her father, who was a
person who had a conscience but also a position in the city, went to the
prison and released Joseph. Outside, he slapped Joseph's face and said: I
don't know who's lying and who's not, but you get the benefit of the doubt.
Joseph looked at the hand that had hit him and said to the district officer:
Some day you'll find that hand outside your body and whether there is a
God or not, your punishment is already prepared and is found in the air, I
see it and it will strike you. The man was stunned, and by the time he finished thinking confused thoughts that ran around in his brain, Joseph left.
About a year later his hand was lopped off and then he was afflicted with
a serious illness and when he searched for Joseph, he was no longer to be
found. Then Joseph started writing his poems.

To get around himself like his grandfather Secret Charity, he wrote the
poems in Hebrew, which he remembered from his days in heder. He would
illustrate his poems with stylized drawings and his mother would hang them on cords around her bed. His father joined a group of monks who wanted
to prepare the Holy Inquisition in the Ukraine and Poland. In those monkish
rituals, Joseph's father was tortured with richly imaginative instruments of
torture the monks tried to copy from old books brought from Spain two
hundred years earlier. He sensed that by that humiliation he woke hidden
forces from their slumber. Then the father disappeared and in a letter that
came to Joseph's mother two years later the father wrote: Ever since I read
Karl Marx, my world has changed. I abandoned the flayers who sell opium
to the masses. The future is latent in the class war that will come and in
which the working man will defeat the parasites, in the new world there
will no longer be the exploiters and the exploited, no Christians, no Jews,
no Muslims, but only workers and those who stand in the way of the revolution have to be burned. Yours always. Joseph's mother went on praying to
the old gods, but her passion for her son made her feel very guilty and the
fact that she didn't yearn for her husband sharpened those feelings and so,
to justify her life, she joined a group calling themselves messianic Christians.

One night, Joseph's father appeared in workers' clothing, wearing a cap,
and didn't ask to see his son at all. Joseph heard him come in and was filled
with yearnings for his father. He put on his favorite clothes and all night
long he sat on his bed and waited. He murmured Father! Father! But his
father didn't answer. He was too proud to get up and go into his mother's
room, he tried to cry but he couldn't. At dawn, he heard his father silently
leave the house without telling him good-bye. Joseph buried his face in a
bowl, poured cold water on himself, and stayed like that a long time, hardly
breathing, and then he sneaked off, changed clothes, and went to his mother.
He sat at the table, hit the tablecloth, and said: That man is no longer my
father.

Joseph's mother told him that his father was confused, called her
"Mezuzah," prayed in an embarrassing way, slept on the rug, didn't approach
her, said he didn't remember if he had ever had a son, and looked lost and
desperate in his new faith. Joseph said: There is no salvation, all those salvations have different names but all of them are nonsense, this life is what
we have, not what doesn't exist. She wanted so much to hug her son but her
hands didn't obey her. Afterward, she started bringing home her friends, the
drunk old messiahs. They cultivated forbidden love with clamorous and wild
lust and the children told Joseph, Your mother's a whore!

Joseph's poems became more and more glorious and the sight of his
mother in the arms of old drunks eager to bring the messiah, stirred a strong
impulse in him to honor the world with poems devoid of all connection with
reality that would describe a nonexistent world. The house began to fill up
with birdcages and every night one of the old boyfriends slaughtered one
bird.

One moonlit night, for six straight hours Joseph's mother watched a
slaughtered bird whose blood froze on the floor of the cage. The cage was
gilded and the dead bird's mouth was sunk in a tiny saucer of water. When
an old boyfriend came and started taking off his coat, she shifted her eyes
from the cage and looked like a woman who had gone mad. The man was
startled and threw his coat on the floor. Because he started cursing her, she
spat on the coat, when he attacked her his foot hit the gold cage and the
water spilled, he tried to steady himself, he touched the head of the bird,
stumbled with a kind of swoop because he tried to keep from falling, his
head split open and he died on the spot. Joseph came in and saw the chameleon of blood gushing from the old man's mouth. He went back to his
room, took off his clothes, and fell asleep. In the morning, he didn't look
at his mother. She hadn't budged all night. When she held out her hand to
touch him, he started shrieking like a bird. She was very beautiful and pale
then, at her feet lay the old man's body. His face was shriveled, his skin
was yellowish, and his tongue was coiled outside. His wide-open eyes were
gaping in an expression of extinguished amazement. His mother stood up,
went to her room, and returned wearing a beautiful dress. Her face was
serene but a spark of apostasy flashed in it. She giggled and Joseph saw her
madness and thought: a demon entered her, even though he knew that
demons don't enter human beings but live in them from birth. She said:
Joseph my love, my old father is lying dead, I promised him to marry you
off. She drank a little wine, looked at the old man, and said: I'm queen of
the Hasmoneans. After they went down to the cellar she asked her son to
lie down on his father's sanctification table where he'd perform his mysterious Sabbath rituals. She carefully placed four lit candles at the four corners of the table, looked at Joseph, held her hand out to him, and said: I'm
the queen and I marry my lover. Joseph, whose wrath burned for his father,
grasped his mother's hand and felt a mighty current of heat passing from
her hand to his body. For a moment, the dress looked like a bridal gown and Joseph thought: maybe the moment of my death has come, when she
asked, he broke the glass of his father's kiddush wine.

Joseph took the body of the old man wrapped in rags down to the courtyard, put it in a wheelbarrow, and took the corpse to the river. The municipal clerks came and asked him to help burn the cats because the plague
was spreading to all parts of the city and the cats, they said, ate the mice
the Jews burned in their houses to ward off the epidemic. After the cats
were burned, he went down to the cellar and read the writings his father
had left, read the "Words of the Days of the Lord" and felt vague but not
intangible yearnings for the messiah Frank. He thought about the venom
infiltrating his blood, about his mother, about the sorrow of his beauty,
about his life, about his father, and thus he found out about Secret Charity and Rebecca Secret Charity. He went to the cemetery and searched for
the tombstones. He found the graves of Rebecca and her father close together. He sat for hours and looked at the tombstone on the grave of
Rebecca Secret Charity. He heard a tune coming from the grave and without moving he followed the tune and without moving his body he encountered daydreams that led him to realms where he had never been and on
the tombstone, Rebecca's face began to be marked. At first the picture of
her face was rough but it became clear. He burned a few branches in a
pit, turned them into charcoal, and went over Rebecca's features with
the charcoal, she looked a lot like him and didn't look like him at all. A
painter of amulets came and copied Rebecca's face on paper and then went
to his workshop and made Joseph an amulet of the face of Rebecca Secret
Charity. And then came a letter from Russia with a curl of his father's hair.
His father's will was addressed to his mother. Joseph wasn't mentioned in it.
The letter said that Joseph's father plotted against some aged colonel and
was sentenced to death. Not to be accused of devotion to a despicable
religion, he hadn't said the Shema Israel and refused to accept forgiveness
from a priest. When he was hanged, a writer wrote in the letter, he muttered words in Hebrew. He died as a revolutionary, said the letter, even
though he was a troublemaking Jew all his life. Joseph went to the rabbi of
the city and asked permission to be a Jew again. The rabbi blessed him and
Joseph said: In fact, never was I anything, not a Christian, not a Jew, but
the rabbi questioned him and received him back in the bosom of Judaism.
Joseph's mother went on embroidering new royal gowns for herself that were just as beautiful and splendid as the arrogant words of her son. Joseph
was sometimes her son, sometimes her husband, and sometimes an old
adulterer who came to have sex with her. She tried to return to the Land
of Israel and in her madness she began to recall her childhood there more
vividly. She described Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea to Joseph,
and only years later, when he toured the Land of Israel, did he see how
precise her description was and how correct were the details she painted
and had never seen, and then she began to die and Joseph lay her in bed
dressed in a royal gown, brought her hot tea and cookies, lay down next to
her a whole night and hugged his trembling, weeping mother, who wanted
to return to her homeland, and when she died, there was on her face a
smile of bliss that Joseph had never seen there before. And then he wept.
For the first time in his life, the handsome lad wept. He found a picture
of his father, hung it on the wall, found a whip his father had kept in the
cellar against the enemy who would come in the war between Gog and
Magog and flogged his father's face until the picture was shredded. Joseph
put on a splendid suit, shiny black boots, the black broad-brimmed hat of
a Spanish grandee, picked up a short stick, and after arranging his mother's
grave, he set out on the road.