The Spinoza of Market Street - Isaac Bashevis Singer [38]
Suddenly Shiddah's daydreaming was interrupted. There was a terrible thundering. Shiddah leapt to her feet. A racketing clamor filled the cave as if a thousand hammers were beating. Everything shook. Kuziba woke up with a scream.
"Mother, mother," yelled the boy. "Run, run."
"Help, demons! Help!" Shiddah shouted.
She caught up Kuziba in her arms and tried to flee. But where to? From all sides came a rumbling and cracking. Rocks were crashing down; stones were flying about. The narrow hole which led further underground to the homes of the richer demons was already clogged. A rain of dust, sparks, stone splinters struck the mother and son. Then a light, awful, glaring, a thing with no name in the netherworld, blinded them with its approach. Presently, a monstrous, spiraling machine plunged through the ledge of rock in front of them. Shiddah fell back to the opposite wall, but at that moment it too shattered into a thousand pieces. A second light appeared and another gigantic screw, twisting round and round, pushing with a strange and overwhelming power, ready to crush and grind everything with a cruelty beyond good and evil, broke into their home.
Kuziba, with a terrible sigh, fainted. He hung in Shiddah's arms as if he were dead. Shiddah saw a crevice among some stones and crawled in. She huddled there stiff with fear. What she saw was more horrible than all the horror stories she had ever heard from all the old grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The drills turned a last time and then were silent. The stones stopped falling and in the smoke and dust men appeared--tall, two-legged, dirty, stinking, with white teeth in faces black with tar, and with eyes from which glared iniquity, malice, and pride. They spoke an ugly gibberish; laughed with abandonment; danced; stretched out their paws to one another. Then they began to drink a poisonous beverage, the sheer smell of which made Shiddah faint. She wanted to rouse Kuziba, but she was afraid, if he came to, he would begin screaming, or even might die at the sight of such monsters. The only thing Shiddah could do now was pray. She prayed to Satan, to Asmodeus, to Lilith, and to all the other powers which maintain creation. Help us, she called from the cranny in which she was hiding, help us, not because of my merit but because of the merit of my scholarly husband, because of my innocent child and my worthy ancestors. Long, long, Shiddah knelt in the crack in the stones and prayed and wept. When she again opened her eyes, the ugly images had gone and the noise had subsided. What remained was garbage, a stench, and a ball of light which hung above her head like fire from Gehenna. Only now did she wake up her son.
"Kuziba, Kuziba. Wake up!" Shiddah called to her son. "We are in great danger!"
Kuziba opened his eyes.
"What is this? Oh mother. Light!"
The boy trembled and screamed. For a long while Shiddah comforted him, kissing him and caressing him. But they could not stay there any more. They had to find refuge. But where? The road down to Hurmiz was cut off. Shiddah was now a grass widow, Kuziba a fatherless child. There was only one way to go. Shiddah had heard the saying that if you cannot go down you have to go up. Mother and son began to climb to the surface. Up there, there would also be caves, marshes, graves, dark rocky crevices; there too, she had heard, there were dense forests and empty deserts. Man had not covered the whole surface with his greed. There, too, lived demons, imps, shades, hobgoblins. True, they were refugees, exiles from the netherworld. But still, exile is better than slavery.
For Shiddah knew that the last victory would be to darkness. Until then, demons who were forsaken or driven out would have to suffer patience. But a time would come when the light of the Universe would be extinguished. All the stars would be snuffed out; all voices, silenced; all surfaces, cut off. God and Satan would be one. The remembrance of man and his abominations would be nothing but a bad dream which God had spun out for a while to distract himself