Satan in Goray - Isaac Bashevis Singer [65]
AND THE DYBBUK replied in a loud and piercing voice: How then shall I not cry and how then shall I not wail: Seeing that when. I walked among the living I polluted my soul and transgressed every transgression cited in the Torah: I hail from Lublin and there I was one of those frivolous youths that swill beer in the taverns and frolic in the whore houses: And I rebelled at every command of God and incurred His wrath: On the holy Sabbath day I did work and I did eat of the pig and of the other forbidden foods: And on Yom Kippur I made a feast for spite and drank wine and gave myself to unbridled desire and I also lay with beasts, animals and fowls: Woe is me for I said in my heart, There is neither Justice nor Judge, and I denied that the Torah is from Heaven and I despised all wise scholars and I brazenly swore at them and I set dogs on them as is the practice of pranksters: When lo suddenly I suffered a stroke and this is a sickness that no one ever rises from: And I saw clearly that my end was come: But (such is the way of the wicked) I grew not submissive and I remained haughty at the very gate of Gehenna and before my death my comrades came to me and they asked me Abraham (such was my name) dost thou repent: And I answered them in my pride, Now even now I do not believe that there is a Creator in the world and before I expired I blasphemed and thus my soul left me denying Him:
AND IT CAME TO PASS that I had but died and had not yet been lifted up and laid in the earth that three evil spirits seized me: And they tormented me cruelly and they trampled on me with their feet and they sorely afflicted me: And then I saw that indeed there is a punishment only it was already too late: And all the time I lay covered they perpetrated on me all manner of suffering that cannot be recounted: And I called on my kin that they might discover me some relief but they could not hear my voice for I was already not of this world: And tens of thousands and millions of milliards of imps followed my funeral: And they were all my children that I had created through continual defilement and fornication: And they called me Father and my shame was boundless: AND WHEN they had laid me in the grave and piled the last shovelful of earth upon me there came to me the Angel Dumah: And he rapped on my grave with his fiery rod and the grave split open at once: And he called Mah Shemecha (What is thy name) and I could not remember the verse for I had not prayed: And the angel cried Thou foul seed Thou sinner against the Lord of Israel Tarry not here and abandon this grave and fly away to the hollow of the sling: For thy place is not in the graveyard where so many righteous and proper men rest in peace: And I tried to implore him but he tore the shrouds from my body and he beat me with his fiery rod and he drove me out: AND Lo without there lay in wait for me vast armies of demons and destroyer spirits and messengers of annihilation and they were all in readiness to fling themselves at me in their wrath and to rend me to bits: And they came at me in anger and mockery and they gave chase to me and they whistled and howled and pursued me through the wilderness: I sought to flee them and to escape them but there was no hiding place and they captured me and they cast me and tossed me like a bird in the wind: One pulled me from the right hand and one from the left and they would not let me be by day or by night and they delighted in my terror: Oh were all the heavens parchment and all the seas ink would they not yet suffice to inscribe one thousandth part of my ordeal: In my anguish I passed into the leaf of a tree: But there too my sorrow was immeasurable for when the leaf shook in the wind I shivered and twisted exactly as though I were a living man: