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We had elderly neighbors in Amos Street, but their appearance as they walked slowly, painfully past our house was only a pale, sad, clumsy imitation of the spine-chilling reality of old, ancient Alleluyev, just as the Tel Arza woods were a miserable, amateurish sketch of the impenetrable, primeval forest. My mother's lentils were a disappointing reminder of the mushrooms and forest fruits, the blackberries and blueberries, in the stories she told me. The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words. Here is the story my mother told me about the woman and the blacksmiths, not choosing her words but laying bare before my eyes with no thought for my tender age the full extent of the faraway many-colored provinces of language, where few children's feet had trodden before, the haunt of linguistic birds of paradise:

Many years ago, in a peaceful little town in the Land of Enularia, in the region of the innermost valleys, there lived three brothers who were blacksmiths, Misha, Alyosha, and Antosha. They were all thickset, hairy, bearlike men. All the winter long they slept, and only when summer came did they forge plows, shoe horses, whet knives, sharpen blades, and hammer out metal tools. One day Misha, the eldest brother, arose and went to the region of Troshiban. He was gone for many a day, and when he returned he was not alone, but with him he brought a laughing girlish woman named Tatiana, Tanya, or Tanichka. She was a beautiful woman, no one more beautiful than she was to be found in all the width and breadth of Enularia. Misha's two younger brothers ground their teeth and kept silent all day long. If ever one of them looked at her, this Tanichka would laugh her rippling laugh until the man was forced to lower his gaze. Or if she looked at one of them, then the brother she had chosen to look at trembled and lowered his eyes. There was only a single big room in the brothers' hut, and in this room dwelt Misha and Tanichka and the furnace and the bellows and the anvil and the wild brother Alyosha and the silent brother Antosha surrounded by heavy iron hammers and axes and chisels and poles and chains and coils of metal. So it befell that one day Misha was pushed into the furnace and Alyosha took Tanichka to himself. For seven weeks the beautiful Tanichka was the bride of the wild brother Alyosha until the heavy hammer fell on him and flattened his skull, and Antosha the silent brother buried his brother and took his place. When seven weeks had passed as the two ofthem were eating a mushroom pie, Antosha suddenly turned pale and went blue in the face, and he choked and died. And from that day on, young wandering blacksmiths from all the length and breadth ofEnularia come and stay in that hut, but not one of them has dared to stay there for seven whole weeks. One might stay for a week, another for a couple of nights. And what of Tanya? Well, every blacksmith throughout the length and breadth of Enularia knew that Tanichka loved smiths who came for a week, smiths who came for a few days, smiths who stayed for a night and a day, half-naked they labored for her, farrowing, hammering, and forging, but she could never abide a smith who forgot to get up and leave. A week or two would do, but seven weeks? How could they?

Herz and Sarah Mussman, who lived in the early nineteenth century in the small village of Trope or Tripe near the town of Rovno in Ukraine, had a fine son named Ephraim. From his childhood on, so the family story ran,* this Ephraim loved playing with wheels and running water. When Ephraim Mussman was thirteen years old, twenty days after his bar mitzvah, some more guests were invited and entertained, and this time Ephraim was betrothed to a twelve-year-old girl named Haya-Duba: in those days boys were married to girls on paper to prevent their being carried off to serve in the Tsar's army and never being seen again.

My aunt Haya Shapiro (who was named after her grandmother, the child bride) told me many years ago about what happened at