search for a path to God through alien gardens? Did the tragic worm that consumed Shloyme the Russian make itself at home in her soul and force her to leave the main road and set off on another? Did it force her to walk beyond the Pale and excommunicate herself?
Shloyme the Russian had a legitimate claim against his Creator. His barren wife turned away from the Almighty before he did. She became devoted to black magic, ghosts and spirits, and witches who fed her wild herbs and swindled away a fortune with promises that help would come her way if she followed their directions. And so Shorke the Russian, Shloyme’s wife, did as instructed. She strung around her neck the claws of a crow and placed the hairs of a she-panther in her bosom. At midnight she bathed in the milk of a pregnant cow and outlined her navel with the blood of a bull. Her hair unkempt, eyes painted with soot, cheeks rouged with chicory paper, Shorke approached her husband to be fertilized.
In the car all is quiet. I look out onto the winding streets of Jaffa. The sky is a pure, light blue, without a cloud to anchor the mind. The hearse carrying the corpse continues ahead. Parallels multiply; characters who have no obvious connection to one another become entangled like roots under the earth. They worm their way into the core of Zosye’s being. They help me to construct a woman from the child of long ago.
I see the woman in Felix’s attic. She is speaking to God, pleading with Him to spare her mother and her little sister. She pleads until there is nothing left to plead for. The city has been destroyed. The past is no more. Perhaps it never was? The abyss she is looking into has lost all familiar markers. No signs of yesterday, no indications of tomorrow. The forest in its innocence is in full flower. Fish multiply in the pond. Cicadas call to one another; male and female come together in the deep grasses of the meadow. Zosye knows she is pregnant. The cow in its stall is pregnant, too. Both are silent. The cow chews its cud and ruminates. Zosye picks up a stalk of straw and does the same. She thinks mostly about eating. Not about the wild strawberries with sweet cream that her mother used to serve, but about bread with salt, perhaps with a clove of garlic.
The chickens in the courtyard peck at their grain and carry on with their squabbles. They have no idea that man has confined them in a ghetto for his own gain, that cold, cynical human calculation has lodged them in a comfortable death camp. Whenever he feels like it, he’ll grab a cleaver and chop off the white head of a hen, whistling all the while. Zosye is not afraid of death. She accepts Felix’s favors like the cicadas in the grass. She doesn’t tell him about the pregnancy.
Felix has a wife and children. He keeps Zosye in his mother’s attic, holding his mother responsible for her safety. Felix’s mother is well aware of her son’s desires and knows that he means what he says. She makes sure not to let the Jewess out of the attic. She hides Zosye’s food in the bucket of oats for the cow. Felix’s mother is talkative. She prattles on at length about how the Germans have shot all the Jews, stacked the corpses like timber, doused them with kerosene and set them ablaze. She doesn’t conceal her satisfaction. She hates the Germans, but their savage treatment of the Jews is pleasing to her. “It’s high time we were rid of them,” she says.
Zosye doesn’t tell Felix about his mother’s chatter. She has long since stopped complaining, either to God or to people. She lies in the attic and listens as the front draws closer every day. The stable trembles with the heavy shelling that rolls like spring thunder. Zosye does not wait for tomorrow or hold onto today. Now that liberation is near, she wants only to sleep. In her dreams she has a past. She has a father, a mother, a clearly demarcated path, a straight line between two mountains of snow. She glides on ice skates; diamonds sparkle in the sun. Overwhelmed with bliss, she closes her eyes just for a moment — then loses her way in a fierce blizzard.
Zosye sleeps. She wants to gorge on the dream until she chokes. But when the liberator bangs on the door, she can’t find the strength to get up and open it. Instead, she lies there, listening to the cells dividing in her bloodstream. She takes her pulse and counts her heartbeats. She descends deeper and deeper into the black shafts of consciousness. Inch by inch Zosye draws back into herself. The footsteps of the liberator echo rhythmically on the road. She has no road. Her paths are overgrown with grass. She digs into the earth, under the weeds, touches the root with its suicidal poison — then gets up and climbs out of the attic. She pauses next to the cow. For a long time they stare at each other in mute understanding.
Slowly and carefully, Zosye walks down the hill between newly planted garden beds. She goes to the pond covered with green slime, closes her eyes, and throws herself in.
Zosye opens her eyes in the hospital. A bit of congealed blood trembles in a glass by the side of her bed. “A four-month-old soul,” says the nurse. “Everything inside you was rotten. It all had to be removed.”
Zosye smiles and says nothing. She asks no questions; she has no wish to know. Perhaps she thinks about her aunt, the barren Shorke? The truth is she is utterly indifferent. She lies in bed until she’s ordered to leave. Along with other wind-blown wanderers, she roams from camp to camp. But even here she’s alone. Zosye tries to go with the current. But the severed branches, leaves, and stones carried by the flow get in her way, piling their dead weight on her young shoulders. They paralyze her will, cutting her off from the stream of history and pulling her down into the abyss.
Sometimes, when Felix was tormenting her, the tears would come like a benign rain. He was the rod of punishment whose blows she endured for the sin of abandoning her mother and sister to their deaths. Each bite of bread she paid for with self-torment and selfhatred. The same feeling of guilt followed her to Israel.
At war with herself and with a reality to which she could not adjust, Zosye searched for meaning and found it in self-abasement. The deeper she sank into the swamp, the more entitled she felt to walk on God’s earth.
Zosye lay on the bottom and allowed herself to waste away. Like the Greek god Prometheus, bound to a rock, his insides gouged by an eagle, she stood with her belly exposed to the predatory birds of the world. And when the birds of prey had nothing left to peck at, she went to the sea, just as she had once gone to the pond, and threw herself in.
Enveloped in silence, I sit alone in the car. I, too, am avoiding reality. In the distance her grave is being covered. A man with a long beard and a broad-brimmed hat is reciting a prayer. I see that he’s hurrying. Soon he’ll recite the same prayer at another grave. I don’t need to hear what he’s saying. Instead I listen to the prayer that trembles inside me, a prayer that can never be repeated. It is a prayer without words, a prayer buried deep in the collective consciousness of my people. The man with the beard rushes on. Somewhere another corpse awaits him. The prayer I recite has no end. It seethes and bubbles like a chemical brew on the brink of existing. In the mixture I look for the symbol that Zosye lost. I must find it and clean off the mud, the impurity, the shame.
I know I will return, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a year from now. Using the new-found symbol, I will erect a tombstone, a blank stone without words. The passerby who stops will have to create Zosye’s image from what is not stated. He’ll stand before the stone like a master before a blank canvas. Among all the images that leap into his mind, he will need to see first of all that Zosye is the crow that pecks at my conscience.
Every time Betty looks up from her typewriter, Mrs. Zagretti’s whitewashed stoop catches her eye. She knows that the widow will open her front door at exactly 9:00 a.m. Without even looking, she can see the woman’s wintry face shrouded in its black
