B002FB6BZK EBOK (24 page)

Rebecca went to Rachel in the next room. In the mirror, Rachel's mother
was seen putting a pin in her hair. Rachel fell into Rebecca's arms and
wept again. Rachel said: This is your son, Rebecca! Not mine, we've had a disaster! Rebecca shook her head angrily and said: This is your coffin,
Rachel, not mine. He's got fifty-two sons and daughters, said Rachel. He's
a pedigreed little god who spawns and begets all over, and Rebecca said:
You're a fool, Rachel Brin, you're a foolish and contemptible little girl. Love
your husband! What else is left for you to do? And Rachel who was offended,
said with a wicked smile taught her by recent months: See what a disaster
the emissary from the Land of Israel your Nehemiah has brought on us!

Mine?

Not yours?

Rebecca was amazed at the new strange phrase, but she cherished it in
her heart and didn't say a thing.

She mingled with the crowd. Nehemiah tried to fish out her profile.
The musicians played with fake gaiety. Rebecca saw a back hugged savagely by uncles and cousins and relatives. Violins ripping. Outside, it
started snowing. In the big room there was a sour smell of human beings,
and wine and pots of delicacies and flowers. On the wall hung a charity box
of Rabbi Meir Ba'al ha-Nes and underneath it was a flowerpot with a bush
in it. Rebecca was pushed to the wall and stood with her head next to the
box and her legs touching the bush. Now Joseph and Rachel stood close to
one another and four men held the wedding canopy over them. One of the
men was Nehemiah. When she looked at Joseph, she knew him from her
dreams, that was the black man sliced by dogs. As her lover was pledged to
Rachel, Rebecca saw the tears Rachel tried constantly to wipe away, and
then Joseph noticed Rebecca. He noticed her when the rabbi talked and
he put the ring on his bride's finger and said: Behold, you are consecrated
to me, and then for the first time in his life, Joseph Rayna fell in love with
his grandmother's mother's mother who stood and looked at him now with
a gleaming smile on her lips. Because he turned pale, Rachel held him up,
she looked here and there, and saw Rebecca. As soon as the ceremony was
over, Joseph was cut off from his bride.

Rebecca left the room a few minutes before the end of the ceremony.
She passed through various rooms, crossed the kitchen, and went outside.
Beyond the paved square stood the old house where she had sat years ago
with Rachel and talked about bewitched trees. Outside there was an intense chill and all she wore was a thin dress. She climbed the stairs of the
old house and everything was empty except for some old pieces of furni ture and objects tossed here and there. She went into the frozen sewing
room and sat at the window. She picked up a few old bags and cloths basted
coarsely, reeking of an old summer, and wrapped herself in them. She was
warmed a little, but the stone didn't melt in her chest. She put her face
against the windowpane and looked outside. Snow fell and a rooster came
out, pecked in the snow, and pranced back to his shelter. Clouds touched
the chimney of the new house and from the windows you could see the festivity through the mists coming together and parting again, when she looked
at the rooster, she recalled how she held Joseph's hand before she was born.
When the rooster came out again, Joseph was standing in the door of the
room and she didn't even turn her face to him; in advance, she knew every
movement he'd make. At that time, Rachel said: Apparently he's scared,
he'll come back soon, he's not used to getting married, veteran libertines
don't get married every day and everybody laughed and drank and she left
the room. Joseph dragged a broken chair and sat down behind her. He took
a bottle of vodka out of his pocket and started drinking. Downstairs in the
yard Rachel appeared in her bridal gown. Her eyes looked around until she
raised them and her look met Rebecca's eyes in the window. Trembling
with cold, she hugged her shivering body. For a moment, her look froze,
then a painful smile crept over her face, her hair scattered in the wind, her
gown was covered with sticky snow, and she turned back to the house.

Joseph Rayna's lips were seared, he couldn't think. All he had left in the
world was painted on the amulet around his neck and on the back turned
to him. Rachel went into the house, asked the musicians to stop a moment
and announced with a choked and giggling laugh that her bridegroom had
apparently drunk too much and with all due respect to the guests was already in bed and snoring like a slaughtered bird and please excuse him,
and the musicians started playing again and Nehemiah looked into
Rachel's eyes and was silent and pale and Rachel went up to her room,
shut the door, locked it, lay in her bed and instead of crying, she burst out
in a laughter that was quite different from the laughter that choked her
before; she laughed so wildly she had to bury her head in the blanket.

In the attic of the old house sat Rebecca Sorka. For one moment she
turned her face and looked at the handsome man sitting there. She found
a sooty old lantern, Joseph gave her matches, and she lit it. He held out the
amulet to her. She looked at it a long time and said: That's me? And he said: Yes. She touched his hand and said: You've got a wife in bed, Joseph,
and we're brother and sister. Because she knew Joseph's face so well and
he knew her face so well, there was no point talking. When they held hands,
they felt the guile of the loving couples who had toiled for generations to
permeate the two of them with that longing, destruction, and disgrace, the
profound and sublime loathing they felt for themselves. The lamplight
moved in the wind winding in the frozen room. Outside the snow went on
falling. Rebecca said: Now go to Rachel, tomorrow night I'll wait for you at
the bridge.

The next day she waited for him wrapped in a coat. The cold was intense. Rebecca told Joseph about the river. Holding hands and walking
along the path covered with blackened snow, they felt that their distress
didn't humiliate them enough. I don't want any child from you, Joseph,
said Rebecca, why did you come and kill the river for me?

Joseph returned to Rachel, who knew how to accept him with untormented betrayal. And the next day, Joseph and Rebecca went to the small
station on the outskirts of the city. Trains would slow down when they
passed our town, only one small train a day would stop at the station that
didn't even have a name. After the big curve, beyond the poplars, the trains
would speed up and fly to unimagined distances that Joseph knew and
Rebecca didn't. When Rebecca was a fourteen-year-old girl she saved the
son of the stationmaster from being trampled. She didn't mean to save
the child. The guard was a drunken lame Ukrainian called Jewish Death.
The ant has five noses, said the Ukrainian to Rebecca and Joseph who had
come to the station and gone up to the room of the bats, upstairs, and lovers he said, have only one limb. Then he sat in his chair, laughed, and drank
his brandy. Joseph and Rebecca sat upstairs and held hands. Downstairs, the
slow trains moved and the Ukrainian would bring them cookies and wine.
A few days later, Rachel came. She found the two lovers holding hands and
looking at one another. To translate the distress of the silence, she moved
toward them stunned, hunched up in the pincers of their hands holding
one another, and said: What dependence, Rebecca! That silence! And she
put her head on Rebecca's lap and stroked her own womb and looked into
Joseph's face and her cold heart was calm. Rebecca looked toward Joseph's
son in Rachel's womb and thought of the dead children she had packed in
the suitcase. Joseph looked at Rachel trying in vain to remember who she was. Rebecca pushed Rachel off her and said to Joseph: If you really love
me, give your wife what she deserves, I have to know ... Joseph said: I
want you, but she laughed in his face, felt Rachel's womb, and said: First
be a father of your son, beget him for me, too, and she left. Rachel got up
and stood facing him. She said to him: You don't have to pretend anymore,
Joseph. But to save something that died in me, at least embrace what you
left in me. They hugged and then Rebecca shouted: I've got to see love,
and they hugged again and then Joseph saw Rebecca in front of his eyes
and was with her. Rebecca stood in the next room in the window bay overlooking the tracks and the avenue of poplars and looked at them. With all
her might, she pitied Rachel's love for Joseph, but along with love a profound contempt was anchored in her that had always been embedded in
her and now found a correct spelling. She said to herself: an ancient contempt came to me from a distant grave, and then the river laughed in her.

And the city concocted rumors. The mothers of Rachel and Rebecca
locked their houses, put down the shutters, sat in Rachel's house, and
wept. Together they sent their husbands to the rabbi of the island, delegates
went out urgently to sages in other cities, and Nehemiah Schneerson leading his group of youngsters would try not to hear, not to know, to console
himself with love of the Land of Israel, and at that time the three would walk
in the forest, pick blackberries and red berries, and in an abandoned hut that
Rebecca knew from her torments in the forest, Joseph and Rebecca would
love in silence, Joseph trying to embrace Rebecca, press her to him, kiss her,
and she let him but only a little and Rachel pleads with Rebecca to give
Joseph herself and Rebecca despises Rachel and says, Why? Why?

One night, Rebecca's father came into her room and hit her; she slipped
away from him and escaped. Rabbis wrote excommunication decrees and
Rebecca returned to her hut. Rachel sat outside and Joseph was inside and
made a fire of pieces of wood he had previously gathered. Rebecca let him
undress her and stood before him naked. The fire enhanced the beauty of
her body. She shut her eyes and let him stroke her. She didn't want to see
the sight of her body in his eyes. I won't allow any love to confound the
high price I set on the beauty I feel, she said. Shutting her eyes she could
have been destroyed by gods Joseph said were in another location, and returned to the grave of her disappointments that were always her life itself.
I'm part of the night, witches burned in fire, sleep, dreams, the pallbearers of Rebecca Secret Charity, she said, and Joseph was willing to die just to be
borne by her, but he was afraid of the lofty words buzzing in his temples.
Rebecca knew there wasn't even one corpse who would be ready for love like
Joseph. Suddenly she abandoned her body, a wild joy she didn't know except
from dreams came to her, Joseph's hands came, his body came close to her,
blood started flowing when he came close to her, seasonal blood, she said,
seasonal blood, Joseph, and he didn't see a thing, a forbidden woman, said
Rebecca. And suddenly a tremor went through Joseph, Rebecca laughed in
his face, he saw the laugh, hit her, and she dropped down, laughing, Rachel
looked on hypnotized, and the blood still flowed and Rachel thought to herself: Who do I love, Joseph or Rebecca, and she knew that the hatred she felt
for them was a kind of irreparable love. So she didn't know who she wanted
to kill, and she hugged her son in her womb and called him to herself Secret
Glory and Rebecca dreams, despicable in her own eyes, hugged in Joseph's
arms, looked into his eyes and he is in her and her blood flows, and she
gives birth to dead sons, all of them in her suitcase, and he still doesn't see
the blood, and then Rebecca gets up and Joseph is still writhing on the
ground, and she says: You're a fool, Joseph, you're the most beautiful man
I ever met in my life, you kill you in me, and she started getting dressed.
When she was dressed, Rachel came in and Joseph looked at her with the
pain of his tormented body. Rebecca looked at Joseph and Rachel and they
looked so distant, so threatening in their soft words.

In that longing, she was afraid she'd be a mirror there and see herself.
In her eyes, they were so full of a future she didn't want to be in. Such a
love mustn't be fostered because it's against all possibility of real disgust,
she said and left. Joseph ran after her, pleaded, but Rebecca strode quickly
and without turning around. From the windows of the city, frightened faces
peeped out and contemptuous looks were hung on her and on Joseph running after her. Rebecca's mother put her head in the oven and Rachel's
mother took her out of the oven, poured water on her, called the doctor,
and Rebecca's father sat cross-legged and started praying, even though he
hadn't prayed for years, and Rebecca walked to Nehemiah's house, and
Nehemiah Schneerson's mother was knitting a shawl and looked outside and
saw Rebecca knocking on the gate of the house. Nehemiah had dressed
ahead of time, as if he were waiting for some sign. A few days before, when
he saw Joseph walking around like a blind man, he wanted to mourn and then he went to the forest and vowed revenge against Judea for preventing him from avenging the cursed Exile, and said: In blood and fire Judea
fell, in blood and fire Judea will rise, and now, dressed in warrior clothes
he stood in the door he opened to Rebecca.

From his mother, Nehemiah inherited the intelligence of the quiet defeated people who fabricate small consolations. Rebecca said: If you want
you can marry me, Nehemiah, I'll be your wife all the days of my life, and
only yours, but if you don't want to, tell me now.

Later on, she told Nehemiah what had happened to her in the three
days since Rachel's wedding. He was silent, sipped the tea his mother
served, and his eyes filled with unshed tears. He didn't say a thing. Then
they drank wine and the two of them were gripped by some spasm that
united them so profoundly they had to embrace. And Rebecca felt peace
for the first time in her life. For a moment she loved Joseph with an impossible love and hated him with an impossible hate, and that was the last
time she thought about Joseph with that passion and disgust that had filled
her from the moment she saw him at Rachel's wedding, and until her
grandson Boaz was born she no longer yearned even one minute for the
handsome man who was her brother, her cousin, and her only lover. When
she felt peace, Nehemiah stopped being afraid of her. She drank wine and
began talking gaily, she said: Does my educated lord know why God lays
tefillin? Nehemiah looked out the window. In the window Joseph appeared.
She said: Because it is written, The Lord hath sworn by his right hand. Does
my young lord know that King David, like Joseph Rayna standing there outside, sang a song in his mother's belly? It is written that he sucked from the
breasts of his mother and looked at her breasts. Don't blush, lad. And then
he started singing. And it's written, Bless the Lord 0 my soul and forget not
all his benefits, said Rabbi: that's because he made teats instead of intelligence. Not I, Nehemiah, the rabbis said: That's so he won't look at her groin.
Don't blush! Nehemiah, who had almost not listened to her, said: You'll love
me Rebecca, and she said: Maybe, maybe. I told you about David because of
my violated honor, we'll go to America and start a new life. And Nehemiah
said: No, to the Land of Israel, and she thought: We'll go there and from
there we'll go to America. She didn't like to argue with him.