the abyss, I look at him with terror, expecting to discover something that disturbs my sense of how things are.
As I ride along in the car, my eye follows the carriage carrying Zosye’s martyred bones. I seem to hear the letters “s” and “z” dangerously sharp in her Polish name. Zosye, Zoshke, the bookkeeper’s pampered daughter, is riding her bicycle, her windblown hair as blond as the furniture in her father’s parlor. When Zosye laughs, the rows of trees lining the road respond with an emphatic “yes!”
Many girls in our small town spoke Polish, but Zosye’s Polish had deep roots. Absorbed with the milk of her gentile wet nurse, it was a mark of her dual identity.
I leaf through the pages fluttering in my mind. The black crows retreat into the background. The open path ahead leads to the town where I grew up. I follow the town princess to the shadowy corners of the world, and to the sea, to the blue shores of the Mediterranean into which she threw herself. I don’t see her the way she looks now. Sealed in the coffin, she is safe from curious eyes. She is no longer for sale, neither to earn money nor out of despair. Against her will she arrived in this world, and against her will she has departed.
Three other people are sharing the car with me. They, too, are shuffling through pages — pages marked with judgments. “She was a streetwalker who lived with an Arab.” They exchange information they have observed with their own eyes. I am trying to see the invisible. I don’t trust the eye that relies on facts. Half-truths can mislead, divert the guilt from murderer to murdered. The corpse is silent, and the murderer, protected by the privileged status accorded him as a citizen, a father, and perhaps by now a grandfather, sips his beer in peace and grows fatter by the day.
“Why didn’t she adapt to the new way of life? Why didn’t she become a productive member of society like other immigrants?”
I don’t answer these questions. The truth is concealed beneath bloody bandages; the painful wound may not be touched. It is clear that a single standard does not fit all. I believe no suicide is an accident. Every hour, every moment, the suicide holds the blade over her throat. Zosye committed her first suicide — her initial, spiritual suicide — in Felix’s attic. The physical one came gradually, step by step.
I meander along the victim’s own paths. I know who murdered her. In exchange for a piece of bread and a slice of ham, he sated himself on her blooming, sun-ripened white body. Perhaps she committed suicide even earlier. Perhaps her life ended on the wild autumn night when Felix arrived like a prince on a white horse, bearing a loaf of bread and a peasant skirt, blouse, and kerchief. Zosye donned the clothes and kissed her mother’s wet face, black as that autumn night. . . . She kissed the dog that lay by the door without understanding that the house he was guarding had become a prison. She kissed her father’s body, which had lain abandoned in the marketplace after he was shot. She kissed the piano and the garden that surrounded the house. Everything, everything she gathered up inside her, hiding it like a ransom in the cellars of her being.
Behind Felix’s barn, downhill from the path, stood a pond bordered by linden trees. Beneath its slimy green surface, fish were spawning. On sunny days Zosye could see them swimming in the water. She could see the black rings on the green-mirrored surface. Through the narrow crevices in the attic, these rings became the only outlet for her famished gaze. Looking down, she would imagine the ring she’d create when she threw herself into the water. Buried deep in the hay, she had time to mourn her own death and to attend her own funeral.
Now, on the way to her funeral, I want to tell her that I see with her eyes, feel with her senses. I picture perspiring beds. I caress bodies with her fingers. I do it in the spirit of the girl I once knew, searching for a sign of today in the buried world of yesterday. In that light, or more aptly put, in those shadows, I seek to glimpse the why and the wherefore. In my mind I lower myself into the abyss, following the overgrown footpath to long-ago.
Sometimes in those days, after I’d brought my father his coffee in the butcher shop, I would stop at Zosye’s exquisite garden on my way home. Standing on tiptoe, I’d peer over the fence and marvel at the golden lilies that grew around her house. I would bemoan all that could have been but never was. If my grandfather hadn’t been so stubborn, if he’d yielded to the demands of Zosye’s father’s parents and provided them with the dowry they asked for, then I, not she, would have been the bookkeeper’s daughter, playing the piano and preparing to travel all the way to Lemberg for my studies. But my pious grandfather was loath to go against his deeply-held ethical beliefs by making a promise he knew he could not keep, and so the bookkeeper and my mother had parted forever. He married a rich man’s daughter, and my mother married a butcher boy.
I used to stand at the fence and imagine how it would have been, if only. . . .
Today, as a tourist from Paris, I accompany the bookkeeper’s daughter to her eternal rest and remember how gladly I would have relinquished all my worldly ambitions to study in Lemberg.
Through the skylight of my Parisian garret I used to look up at the tiny rectangle of heaven that fortune had allotted me and conjure up Zosye’s lush, slumbering garden. How I cursed the fate that had stranded me in Paris on my way to Israel!
Zosye did not want to go to Israel, nor did she need to. For her, the vine was abloom with all the brilliant hues of the bejeweled peacock that resides in the dreams of every young woman.
How could she have known, as she played the piano, that the civilization of those magical notes was even then writing her people’s death sentence? How could she have known that form and harmony were but the seductive song of the Lorelei, the façade behind which the cannibal sharpened his crooked teeth? Protected and sheltered like the golden lilies in her father’s garden, Zosye could not see those teeth. With the natural power that is the birthright of every living thing, she glowed in the light of the sun. Endowed with all the attributes she needed to thrive and grow, Zosye was primed to scatter her own seeds across God’s willing earth.
The pages I turn are blank, as unreadable as the image in a shattered mirror. It occurs to me that the earth to which Zosye is now returning holds the remains of another prostitute, the biblical Tamar, who sat down at the crossroads where fortunes were decided and seduced men with her charms. I search for a spark of Tamar’s desire in the image of Zosye that is anchored deep in my memory. I search for the lust of a whore in her dimples and her rosy, Polish-speaking lips that surely didn’t even know the meaning of the word “prostitute.” I look into her eyes, the reflection of her soul. Her character, unripe, uprooted, is borne by the wind to the four corners of the world. I search for the legacy of modesty passed down through the generations. I search for the set path of her father, and before me another form rises up: her Uncle Shloyme, the Russian. I don’t force this figure to take shape — I let it grow on its own. I relive the terror that his death caused me, which penetrated my dreams long after I’d left my town behind. His imposing figure rises out of the mist: gray eyes, bushy black eyebrows, broad shoulders, erect and proud. From his mouth I heard for the first time that “all is vanity.” When Shloyme spoke, every word burned, a reflection of the grief and rage that gradually devoured him. At the time I imagined he looked the way Job did when he sat down in dust and ashes, despising himself. “What is the difference between man and beast,” Shloyme asked, “if even a rabbi will paw at his wife’s tits?”
These particular words, expressed at our home one Sabbath afternoon, provoked a radical shift in my thinking. I too began to ask questions that led me off the beaten path. When Shloyme the Russian lay on his death bed, he wanted only one thing: that God should grant him sufficient strength to get out of bed, set the house on fire, and be burned with all his worldly possessions on God’s eternal sacrificial altar. And, in fact, this is what he did. People said that years earlier he had been banished from the Jewish community for reading the heretic Spinoza and for walking too far outside the town limits on the Sabbath, in violation of Jewish law.
Did
