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By Root 627 0

mystery. It was the center of all Father's thoughts, of his nightly cogitations, of his frightening silences. Inscrutable and all-embracing, it stood in the background of daily events. In daytime, the generations of fabrics, full of patriarchal dignity, lay in order of precedence, segregated according to their ancestry and origins. But at night the rebellious blackness of the materials broke out and stormed about with silent tirades and hellish improvisations. In the fall the shop bustled, overflowing with the dark stock of winter merchandise, as if whole acres of forest had been uprooted and were marching through a windswept landscape. In the summer, in the dead season, the shop retreated to its dark reservations, inapproachable in its thickets of cloth. The shop assistants banged at night with their wooden yardsticks at the dull wall of bales, listening as the shop roared with pain, immured in the cave of cloth.

In the surrounding darkness my father harked back to the past, to the abyss of time. He was the last of his line, he was Atlas on whose shoulders rested the burden of an enormous legacy. By day and by night, my father thought about the meaning of it all and tried to understand its hidden intention. He often looked askance, full of expectation, at his assistants. Not himself receiving any secret signs, any enlightenment, any directives, he expected that these young and naive men, just emerging from their cocoons, might suddenly realize the meaning of his trade that stubbornly evaded him. He pestered them with persistent questioning, but they, stupid and inarticulate, avoided his looks, turned their eyes away, and mumbled some confused nonsense. In the mornings, using a walking stick for support, my father wandered like a shepherd among his blind, woolly flock, among the bleating headless rumps crowded around the drinking trough. He was still waiting, postponing the moment when he would have to move his tribe and go out into the night burdened with responsibility for that swarming, homeless Israel. . . .

The night behind the door was leaden—close, without a breeze. After a few steps it became impassable. One walked without moving forward as in a dream, and while one's feet stuck to the ground, one's thoughts continued to run forward endlessly, incessantly questioning, led astray by the dialectical byways of the night. The differential calculus of the night continued. At last, one's feet stopped moving, and one stood riveted to the spot, at the darkest, most intimate corner of the night, as in front of a privy, in dead silence, for long hours, with a feeling of blissful shame. Only thought, left to itself, slowly made an about turn, the complex anatomy of the brain unwound itself like a reel, and the abstract treatise of the summer night continued its venomous dialectic, turning logical somersaults, inventing new sophisticated questions to which there was no answer. Thus one debated with oneself through the speculative vastness of the night and entered, disembodied, into ultimate nothingness.

It was long after midnight when my father abruptly lifted his head from his pile of papers. He stood up, full of self-importance, with dilated eyes, listening intently.

"He is coming," he said with a radiant face, "open the door."

Almost before Theodore, the senior assistant, could open the glass door, which had been bolted for the night, a man had already squeezed himself in, loaded with bundles, black-haired, bearded, splendid, and smiling: the long awaited guest. Mr. Jacob, deeply moved, hurried to greet him, bowing, both his hands outstretched in greeting. They embraced. It seemed for a moment as if the black shining engine of a train had voicelessly driven up to the very door of the shop. A porter in a railwayman's hat came in carrying an enormous trunk on his back.

We never learned who this distinguished visitor really was. Theodore firmly maintained that he was Christian Seipel & Sons (Spinners and Mechanical Weavers) in person, but there was little evidence for it, and my mother did not subscribe to this theory.