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By Root 3172 0

’s a strange world, why make it stranger? When I was in the Tsar’s army I was less afraid of the world but once I got home again enough was enough. In other words, in those days to make me move, somebody had to push. So she pushed. But we didn’t get along so badly until another year or two went by and we still had no capital, and we had no children. Raisl was depressed and either said nothing, or wept, and never left off complaining. Our hut was divided into two small rooms. At night she stayed in bed while I sat in the kitchen. It was at this time that I began to read more. I picked up books here and there, a few I stole, and read by the lamp. Many times after I read I slept on the kitchen bench. When I was reading Spinoza I stayed up night after night. I was by now excited by ideas and I tried to collect a few of my own. It was the beginning of a different Yakov. I thought of things I had never thought of before, and then when I began to read a little history and also a pamphlet about Nicholas I, the Tsar’s father, I said to myself, “She’s right, we ought to get out of here and the sooner the better.”

But without a living where can you go? We went nowhere. By now it was coming to six years that we were married and still had no children. I said nothing but I was, in my heart, a disappointed man. Who could I look in the face? In her heart Raisl was frantic. She blamed it on her sins. Maybe on my sins. She was running again, in her big wig, to the rabbis, who had never helped her, if not in our town, then in the others. She tried magic and she tried spells. She recited verses from the Scriptures and drank potions squeezed out of parts of fish and hares. I don’t believe in this kind of business. Anyway, as one might expect, nothing happened. “Why has God cursed me?” she cried. “What God?” I said. She was a desperate woman. “Will I be just like my father, will I always have nothing? Will I have less than my father?” By this time I was worn out living in a storm. She ran this way and that, she wept, she cursed her life. I said less and read more though the books didn’t bring me a kopek unless I sold them. I thought I would take her to a big doctor in Kiev, but who would pay for it? So nothing happened. She stayed barren and I stayed poor. Every day she begged me to leave so our luck would change. “Leave,” I said, “on whose wings?” Then I said, “Like your father’s luck changed.” So she looked at me with hatred. I began to stay away from the house. When I came in at night I slept in the kitchen. The next thing I knew they were talking about her in the taverns. Then one day she was gone. I opened the door and the house was empty. At first I cursed her like somebody in the Bible curses his whorish wife. “May she keep her miscarrying womb and dry breasts.” But now I look at it like this: She had tied herself to the wrong future.

7

You wait. You wait in minutes of hope and days of hopelessness. Sometimes you just wait, there’s no greater insult. You sink into your thoughts and try to blot out the prison cell. If you’re lucky it dissolves and you spend a half hour out in the open, beyond the doors and walls and the hatred of yourself. If you’re not lucky your thoughts can poison you. If you’re lucky and get out to the shtetl you might call on a friend, or if he’s out, sit alone on a bench in front of his hut. You can smell the grass and the flowers and look at the girls, if one or two happen to be passing by along the road. You can also do a day’s work if there’s work to do. Today there’s a little carpentering job. You work up a sweat sawing wood apart and hammering it together. When it’s time to eat you open your food parcel—not bad. The thing about food is to have a little when you want it. A hard-boiled egg with a pinch of salt is delicious. Also some sour cream with a cut-up potato. If you dip bread into fresh milk and suck before swallowing, it tastes like a feast. And hot tea with lemon and a lump of sugar. In the evening you go across the wet grass to the edge of the wood. You stare at the moon in the milky sky. You