Yente
Asher Rubin goes in through the dark, muddy courtyard of Elisha’s house, where just-slaughtered geese, fattened all summer long, hang upside down. He walks through a narrow entryway and smells the fried cutlets and onions, hears someone somewhere grinding pepper in a mortar. The women are noisy in the kitchen; the cold air is pierced by the steam that comes from there, from the dishes they’re preparing. There are the smells of vinegar, nutmeg, bay leaves; there is the aroma of fresh meat, sweet and sickening. These scents make the autumn air seem even colder and more unpleasant.
The men behind the wooden partition speak aggressively, as if they were arguing; he can hear their voices and also smell candle wax and the damp that has permeated their clothing. The house is full to bursting.
Asher passes children; the little ones pay him no attention, too excited about the impending festivities. He passes through a second courtyard, which is weakly lit by a single torch. At the doorstep, he runs into a tipsy Yehuda, whom the whole family calls Leyb. As a matter of fact, Rubin’s name isn’t Rubin, either, but Asher ben Levi. Now, in the semidarkness and the throng of guests, all names seem somehow fluid, interchangeable, secondary. After all, no mortal holds on to his name for very long. Without a word, Yehuda leads him deep into the house and opens the door to a small room where some young women are working, and in a bed by the stove lies an old woman, supported by pillows, her face dried out and pale. The women greet him effusively and position themselves around the bed, curious to watch.
Yente is small and thin, like an old chicken, and her body is limp. Her chicken’s rib cage rises and falls at a rapid rate. Her half-open mouth, framed by extremely thin lips, caves inward. But her dark eyes follow the medic’s movements. After he has chased all the onlookers from the room, he lifts the covers and sees her whole body, the size of a child’s, sees her bony hands clutching strings and leather strips. They have wrapped her up to her neck in wolf hides. They believe that wolf hides restore heat and strength.
How could they have brought along this old woman with so little life left in her, Asher thinks. She looks like a shrivelled old mushroom, her brown face cruelly carved up by the candlelight, making her appear no longer human; Asher has the sense that soon she will be indistinguishable from nature—from tree bark, gnarled wood, a rough stone.
Not that there is anything surprising in her wanting to attend her relative’s wedding, since there will be cousins from Moravia and from distant Lublin here as well. Asher crouches beside the low bed and immediately smells the saltiness of human sweat and—he thinks for a moment, trying to place the scent—childhood. At Yente’s age, people start to smell like children again. He knows that there is nothing wrong with this woman—she’s simply dying. He examines her carefully and finds nothing other than old age. Her heart is beating unevenly and weakly, as if exhausted. Her skin is clear, but thin and dry, like parchment. Her eyes are glassy, sunken. Her temples are sinking, too, a sure sign of impending death. At her throat, under her slightly unbuttoned shirt, he can see some strings and knots. He touches one of the old woman’s clenched fists, and for a moment she resists, but then, as if she were ashamed, her fist blossoms open like a desert rose. In her palm lies a piece of silk cloth, completely covered in thick letters: ש״ץ.
It almost seems that Yente is smiling at him with her toothless mouth, and her deep, dark eyes reflect the candles’ burning; Asher feels as if that reflection were reaching him from very far away, from the unfathomable depths that all human beings hold within them.
“What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with her?” Elisha asks him, suddenly bursting into that cramped space.
Asher rises slowly and looks into his anxious face.
“What do you think? She’s dying. She won’t last the wedding.”
Asher Rubin makes a face that speaks for itself: Why did they bring her here in such a state?
Elisha grabs him by the elbow and takes him aside.
“You have your methods, don’t you, that we don’t know? Help us, Asher, please. The meat has already been chopped, the carrots peeled. The raisins are soaking in their bowls, the women are cleaning the carp. Did you see how many guests there are?”
“Her heart is barely beating,” Rubin says. “There’s nothing I can do. She should never have been brought on such a journey.”
He delicately frees his elbow from the grasp of Elisha Shorr and heads for the door.
Since Yente is the eldest person present, everyone who comes for the wedding immediately goes to pay her a visit. Guests stream into her little room at the end of the labyrinth, in the second house, which you must pass through another courtyard to reach, and which is just across the street from the cemetery. Children peer in through the cracks in the walls—high time to seal them before winter sets in. Elisha’s daughter, Hayah, sits with her a long while. Yente puts Hayah’s hands on her face, touches her eyes, her lips, and her cheeks—the children see this. She pats her head. Hayah brings her treats, gives her chicken broth to drink, adding a spoonful of goose fat, and old Yente smacks her thin, dry lips for a long time when she’s finished, although even the fat doesn’t give her enough strength to get up.
As soon as they arrive, the Moravians Solomon Zalman and his extremely young wife, Shneydel, go to visit their old cousin. It took them three weeks to get here from Brünn, through Zlín and Preschau, and then Drohobycz, but they will not go back the same way. In the mountains, some escaped serfs attacked them, and Zalman had to pay a considerable ransom—they were lucky the serfs didn’t take everything they had. They’ll go back through Kraków, before snow falls. Shneydel is already pregnant with her first child; she’s just informed her husband of it. She is often nauseated. This is not at all helped by the smell of coffee and spices that greets you when you enter the vast Shorr household, or when you go into the shop. She also doesn’t like how old Yente smells. She fears this woman, with her bizarre clothing and hair on her chin, as she would a wild animal. In Moravia, old women look a lot tidier—they wear starched bonnets and neat aprons. Shneydel is convinced that Yente is a witch. She’s afraid to sit down on the bed, although everyone keeps telling her to do so. She’s afraid the old woman will pass something on to the child in her belly, some dark, indomitable madness. She tries not to touch anything in that little room. The smell never stops making her sick. Her Podolian relatives all seem wild to her. Finally, however, they push Shneydel toward the old woman, and she perches on the very edge of the bed, ready to flee at any moment.
She does, however, like the smell of wax—she secretly sniffs every candle—and of mud mixed with horse droppings and, now she knows, of vodka. Solomon, significantly older than she is, with a solid build and a belly, a middle-aged man with a beard, proud of his lovely wife, brings her a shot of vodka every once in a while. Shneydel tastes the drink but cannot swallow it. She spits it out on the floor.
When the young wife sits down, Yente’s hand shoots out from under the wolfskins and lands on Shneydel’s belly. Shneydel isn’t showing yet, but Yente can see that a separate soul has taken up residence in her belly, a soul that is still indistinct, hard to describe because it is multiple; these free souls are everywhere, just waiting for the opportunity to grab some unclaimed bit of matter. And now they lick this little lump, which looks a bit like a tadpole, inspecting it, though there is still nothing concrete in it, just shreds, shadows. They probe it, testing. The souls consist of streaks: of images, and recollections, memories of acts, fragments of sentences, letters. Never before has Yente seen this so clearly. Truth be told, Shneydel gets uncomfortable sometimes, for she, too, can feel their presence—as if dozens of strangers’ hands were pressing on her, as if she were being touched by hundreds of fingers. She doesn’t want to confide in her husband about this—and, anyway, she wouldn’t be able to find the words.
While the men sit in one chamber, the women gather in Yente’s room, where they scarcely all fit. Every now and then one of them brings some vodka from the kitchen, wedding vodka, in semi-secret, like a smuggler, but of course this, too, is part of the fun. Crowded together and excited about the impending festivities, they forget themselves and start to clown around. But this doesn’t seem to bother the ailing Yente—she may even be pleased that she’s become the center of the merriment. Sometimes they glance at her, uneasy, feeling a bit guilty as she suddenly dozes off, then a moment later awakens with a childlike smile. Shneydel gives Hayah a significant look as Hayah straightens the wolfskins on the old woman, wraps her own scarf around Yente’s neck, and sees all the amulets she wears there—little pouches on strings, little pieces of wood with symbols written out on them, figures made of bone. Hayah doesn’t dare to touch them.
The women tell terrible stories—about ghosts, lost souls, people buried alive, ill omens.
“If you only knew how many evil spirits were lurking in a single droplet of your beloved blood, you would all at once turn over your bodies and your souls to the Creator of this world,” Tzipa, a woman who is considered learned, the wife of old Notka, says.
“Where are the spirits?” one of the women asks in a tremulous whisper, and Tzipa picks up a stick from the dirt floor and points at its tip: “Here! Here they all are, take a good look.”
The women stare at the tip of the stick, their eyes squinting in a funny way; one of them starts to giggle, and in the light of just a few candles now they see double or triple, but they don’t see any spirits.
In the night, when everyone has gone to sleep, Elisha Shorr, writing by candlelight, scratches out the following letters on a tiny piece of paper:
Hayah stands in a white nightgown, tracing an invisible circle around herself in the air. Now she lifts the scrap of paper over her head. She stands this way for a long while. Her mouth is moving. She blows on the paper a few times, then she rolls it up very carefully and slips it inside a wooden vessel the size of a thumbnail. She stays there for a long time, in silence, her head bowed, till suddenly she licks her fingers and sticks a strap through the hole in the amulet, which she hands to her father. Elisha, candle in hand, glides through the sleeping, rustling, intermittently snoring household, through the narrow hallways, to the room where Yente lies. He pauses at the door and listens. Evidently untroubled by anything he hears there, he softly opens the door, which humbly submits to him without a sound, revealing cramped quarters faintly lit by an oil lamp. Yente’s sharp nose is pointed straight up at the ceiling, casting a defiant shadow on the wall. Elisha has to pass through it in order to lay the amulet on the dying woman’s neck. When he leans over her, her eyelids flutter, and Elisha freezes mid-motion, but it’s nothing; she’s clearly just having a dream. Her breathing is so light as to be almost imperceptible. Elisha ties the ends of the strap and slides the amulet under the old woman’s nightgown. Then he turns on his toes and vanishes as quietly as he came.
When the candlelight gets faint in the cracks in the wood, Yente opens her eyes and, with a weakening hand, feels for the amulet. She knows what’s written on it. She breaks the strap, opens the vessel and swallows the scrap of paper like a pill.
The servants keep coming into Yente’s small, cramped room with the guests’ coats and laying them at the foot of the bed. By the time the music starts, you can barely see Yente beneath the pile of garments; only when Hayah drops by is order restored, the coats moved to the floor. Hayah bends down over her elderly aunt and listens for her breathing, which is so weak it seems a butterfly would stir up more of a breeze. But her heart is beating. Hayah, slightly flushed from the vodka, presses her ear to Yente’s breast, to the cluster of amulets, strings, and straps, and she hears a delicate boom, boom, very slow, the beats as distant from each other as Yente’s long breaths.
“Babcia Yente,” Hayah calls her quietly, and she has the impression that the old woman’s half-closed eyes have trembled, and her pupils have moved, and that something like a smile has appeared on her lips. It’s a stray smile—it undulates, sometimes the corners of her mouth rise, sometimes they fall, and then Yente looks dead. Her hands are tepid, not cold, and her skin is soft and pale. Hayah fixes Yente’s hair, which has come out from under her kerchief, and she leans in to her ear: “Are you still with us?”
And again that smile comes from somewhere to the old woman’s face, lasting just a moment before vanishing. Hayah is being called from afar by the stomping of feet, so she kisses the old woman on her lukewarm cheek and runs to dance.
From Yente’s chamber, you can’t quite make out the melodies, which get stuck in the wooden walls, the winding corridors breaking them down into individual murmurs. All you can hear is the boom, boom of dance steps and, from time to time, a high-pitched squeal. Yente is curious about what’s going on out there. She is surprised to discover that she can easily slide out of her body and be suspended over it; she looks right at her own face, fallen and pale, a strange feeling, but soon she floats away, gliding along on the drafts of air, on the vibrations of sound, passing without difficulty through wooden walls and doors.
Now Yente sees everything from above, and then her gaze goes back to under her closed eyelids. That’s how it is the whole night. Soaring and descent. Back and forth over the border. It tires her, she’s never worked as hard as she is working now, not when cleaning or in the garden. And yet both the falling and the rising are pleasant. The only nasty thing is that movement, whistling and rough, which tries to push her out to somewhere far away, past the horizon, that force, external and brutal, which it would be impossible to face were her body not protected by the amulet, from the inside, irreversibly.
Strange—her thoughts blow over the whole region. “Wind,” says some voice in her head, which must be her own. Wind is the vision of the dead as they gaze upon the world they come from. Haven’t you ever noticed the fields of grass, she wants to say to Hayah, how the blades bow down and are parted? That has to be because there is a dead person watching. If you counted all the dead, you’d find that there are many more of them than there are of the living. Their souls have been cleansed already, as they have meandered through many lives, and now they await the Messiah, who will come to finish the task. And they look over everything. That’s why wind blows on earth. Wind is their watchful gaze.
After a moment of startled hesitation she, too, joins in with this wind that flies over the houses of Rohatyn and the impoverished little settlements, over the carts clustered together on the market square in the hope that some customer might happen by, over the three cemeteries, over the Catholic churches, the synagogue, the Orthodox church, over Rohatyn’s public house—and it dashes onward, rustling the yellowed grass on the hills, at first chaotic, in disarray, but then, as if it were learning dance steps, it speeds along the riverbeds all the way to the Dniester. There it pauses, for Yente is astonished by the mastery of the winding line of the river, its filigrees, like the outlines of the letters gimel and resh. And then it continues, over the border that has colluded with the river to divide two great countries—for Yente’s vision knows no such borders after all.
Yente finds herself in the countryside, near Brzeżany. It is the very day she was conceived. Only now can she see it.
In this strange state in which she finds herself, is Yente able to change things slightly? Influence the course of events? Can she? If she could, she would change this one day.
She sees a young woman walking through the fields with a basket in her hand and, in it, two geese. Their necks move to the rhythm of her steps, their beady eyes looking around with the trust common to domesticated animals. A mounted Cossack patrol comes galloping out of the forest, getting bigger as she watches it approach. It is too late to run away. The woman stands astonished, covers her face with the geese. The horses surround her, closing in. As if on command, the men dismount, and now everything happens very fast and wordlessly. They push her down softly onto the grass, the basket falls, the geese get out of it, but they stay close, hissing a little, quietly, threatening, warning, bearing witness to what’s going on. Two of the men hold the horses, while one of them unfastens the belt of his broad, wrinkled trousers and lies down on top of the woman. And then they trade, the next one faster than the first, as though he has to perform these few movements in haste. There is no sign of the men’s enjoying it, in fact. Their seed pours into the woman and then drips out onto the grass. The last one presses down hard on her neck, and the woman starts to resign herself to the fact that she will die, but the others hand him his reins, and the man gets back on his horse. He looks at her for a moment longer, as if wanting to remember his victim. Then they quickly ride away. It all takes just a few minutes.
The woman sits with her legs akimbo, the indignant geese looking at her, honking their disapproval. With a bit of her petticoat she wipes between her legs, then rips up some leaves and grass. She runs to the stream and raises her skirts high and sits down in the water, pushing out all the semen from inside her. The geese think this is an encouragement to them, and they scamper up to the water’s edge. But before they can quite make up their minds to get in, overcoming their usual anserine reserve, the woman stuffs both of them back in the basket and returns to the path. She slows as she comes to the village, walking slower and slower, until finally she stops, as if she had reached an invisible border.
This is Yente’s mother.
And this must be the reason that she always watched her daughter so closely; eventually, Yente grew accustomed to the looks, to the suspicious gaze cast from where her mother sat at the table working on something, or stood cutting vegetables, peeling hard-boiled eggs, scrubbing pots. Her mother watched her all the time. Like a wolf, like a dog getting ready to sink its teeth into her shin. With time, a slight grimace began to appear in connection with this watching: a light rise in the upper lip, pulling it up toward her nose—not an expression of animosity or revulsion, just barely visible, insignificant.
She remembers how her mother, as she was braiding Yente’s hair one day, found a dark mole above her ear and rejoiced in it. “Look,” she said to Yente’s father. “She has a mole in the same spot as you, but on the other side, like a reflection in the mirror.” Her father listened only absent-mindedly. He never in his life suspected a thing. Yente’s mother died with the secret clenched in her fist. She died in a kind of convulsion, in a fury. She’ll no doubt come back as a wild animal.
Yente was the eleventh-born. Her father named her Yente, which means “she who spreads the news,” and “she who teaches others.” Her mother didn’t have the strength to take care of her—she was fragile of both mind and body. Yente was dealt with by the other women who were always bustling around the house—cousins, an aunt, and, for some time, her grandmother. She remembered her mother sliding off her cap in the evenings—then Yente would see from up close her mother’s wretched hair, cut short and sloppily, growing over her unhealthy, flaking skin.
Yente had six older brothers who went to yeshiva and, at home, quoted passages from the Scriptures under their breath while she hung around the table at which they sat, too young to be assigned real women’s work. She also had four older sisters, one of whom was already married; significant efforts were being made to match up another.
Her father, detecting her interest and zeal, showed her the letters of the alphabet, thinking they would be like little pictures for her, like jewels and stars: lovely aleph, like the reflection of a cat’s paw; shin, like a boat with a mast made out of bark floating on the water. But Yente, who knew how or when, learned the letters in a different way—in such a way as to soon be able to make words of them. Her mother slapped her hands for this with an unexpected ferocity, as if Yente were reaching for too much. Her mother didn’t know how to read. She would listen happily, however, as Yente’s father, on rare occasions, or, more often, their old relation Abramek the Cripple told the women and children stories from the books in Yiddish. Abramek always did this in a plaintive voice, as if the written words were by nature akin to a lament. He would start at dusk, by the dim light of the candles, and so, along with reading, there would appear in the house in the evenings the unbearable sadness of the village Kabbalists, of whom there were many in those days. People developed a taste for this sorrow in the same way that some grow fond of vodka. They would all be overcome by such melancholy that someone would begin to cry and keen. Then they would want to touch with their hands everything of which Abramek had told, and they would reach out for something tangible—but there was nothing there. That lack was terrible. There began true despair. All around them, darkness, cold, and damp. In the summer, dust, dry grass, and stones. Where was all that, that world, that life? Where was paradise, and how could we get there?
To little Yente it seemed that every such evening of stories grew dense, dark, impenetrable, especially when Abramek the Cripple would say, “And it is known that the space of the world is filled with ghosts and evil spirits, born of human sin. These float in that space, as is written clearly in the Zohar. We have to guard against them attaching to us on the way to the synagogue, and this is why we must know what is written in the Zohar, namely that the damage-doer lies in wait for you on the left side, for the mezuzah may be placed only on the right side, and on the mezuzah is written God’s name, Shaddai, which will defeat the damage-doer. This explains the mezuzah’s inscription: ‘And Shaddai will be on your doorframe.’ ”
They nodded in agreement. This we know. The left side. Yente knew this. “The air is full of eyes,” her mother would whisper, jerking her around like a rag doll every time she got her dressed. “They are watching you. Just put out a question before you, and the spirits will instantly answer. You just have to be able to ask. And to find those answers you receive: in the milk that has spilled into the shape of the letter samech, in the imprint of a horse’s hoof in the shape of the letter shin. Gather, gather these signs, and soon you will read a whole sentence. What is the art of reading from books written by man when the whole world is a book written by God, even the clay path that leads up to the river? Look at it. The goose feathers, too, the dried rings of the wood of the fence boards, the cracks in the clay of the houses’ walls—that is exactly like the letter shin. You know how to read, so read, Yente.”
She feared her mother, and how. A thin, small woman, who was perpetually muttering something, always with spite. “Shrew,” that was what everyone in the village called her. Her moods changed so frequently that Yente never knew whether her mother, setting her down on her lap, would kiss her and hug her or squeeze her shoulders painfully and shake her. So she preferred to just keep out of her way. She would watch her mother’s skinny hands putting the last of her dowry back in the chest—she had come from wealthy Silesian Jews, but scarcely any of that wealth remained. Yente heard her parents moaning in bed, and she knew that this was her father chasing the dybbuk out of her mother, something he kept secret from the rest of the family. Her mother would at first try faintly to escape him, but then she would take a deep breath, like someone submerging herself in cold water, in the icy water of the mikvah, where she could hide from evil.
Once, in a time of great poverty, Yente watched in secret as her mother ate the rations intended for everyone—her back hunched, her face lanky, her eyes empty. They were so black that you couldn’t see her pupils in them.
When Yente was seven years old, her mother died in childbirth, along with the child who didn’t have the strength to make its way out from inside her. To Yente’s mind, it had obviously been a dybbuk, which her mother had eaten when she stole the provisions intended for everyone, and which her father had not managed to banish during those nocturnal struggles. That dybbuk had set up shop in her mother’s stomach and had not wanted to leave. Death—that was the punishment.
In the morning, when everyone is sleeping off the wedding in every corner of the house, when the sawdust in the big room is so trampled that it looks like dust, Elisha Shorr enters Yente’s bedroom. He is tired; his eyes are bloodshot. He sits on the bed beside her, sways back and forth, and whispers, “It’s all over now, Yente. You can go. Don’t be angry I kept you this long. I had no alternative.”
Gently, he pulls out from under her neckline a handful of strings and leather straps, looking for one in particular, and slides them one by one through his fingers. He assumes his tired eyes have overlooked it. He does it several times—he counts the tiny teraphim, the cases, pouches, bone tablets with spells scored into them. Everyone wears them, but old women like Yente always wear the most. There must be dozens of angels hovering around Yente, guardian spirits and other beings, nameless ones. But his amulet is not there. He finds only the string it was attached to, untied, with nothing on it. The spell has vanished. But how?
Elisha Shorr sobers up, his movements growing nervous. He starts to palpate the old woman. Yente lies there like a log, not moving, with that smile slowly spreading over her face, the same smile his daughter, Hayah, glimpsed earlier. He lifts her inert body and searches under her back, under her hips, uncovers poor Yente’s skinny extremities, her big, bony feet, which stick out stiffly from under her skirt. He digs in the folds of her shirt, checks her palms, and finally, more and more terrified, searches in the pillows, in the sheets, the blankets, and the quilts, under the bed and around the bed. How is this possible?
It’s a funny sight, this eminent, mature man rummaging around in the bedding of an ancient woman, as though he had mistaken her for a young one and were trying clumsily to clamber in with her.
“Yente, are you going to tell me what’s happened?” he says to her in a fierce whisper, as if to a child who has committed some monstrous offense, but she, of course, does not respond, only her eyelids tremble, and her eyeballs move to one side for a moment, and then to the other, and her smile quivers slightly, almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t fade.
“What did you write on it?” Hayah asks her father. Sleepy, in a nightshirt with a kerchief on her head, she has run in here at his summons. Elisha is distressed, the wrinkles on his forehead settling into soft rolling waves that draw Hayah’s gaze. This is how her father always looks when he feels guilty.
“You know what I wrote,” he says. “I held her back.”
“Did you hang it around her neck?”
Her father nods.
“Father, you were supposed to put it in a box and lock it.” Her father shrugs helplessly.
“You’re like a child,” Hayah says, at once tender and enraged. “How could you? You just put it right around her neck? Well, where is it?”
“It’s nowhere, it’s gone.”
“Nothing disappears just like that!”
Hayah sets about searching, but she quickly sees there is no point. “It’s gone. I’ve looked,” he says.
“She ate it,” Hayah says. “She swallowed it.”
Shaken, her father is silent; then, helplessly, he says, despair rising into his voice, “Now she won’t die.”
A strange expression of shock and suspicion appears on Hayah’s face. Then, slowly, it turns into one of amusement. She laughs, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until a deep roar fills the small room and explodes through the wooden walls. Her father covers her mouth with his hands.
Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in Yente’s esophagus near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shape. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter—even if this is the cause of many misfortunes.
Someday Yente will understand that bodies are like leaves in which, for a single season, for a few months, the light resides. Then they fall down dead and dry, and the darkness grinds them into dust, even as the souls within them strive impatiently for renewed incarnation.
For now, lying covered up to her neck in wolfskins, Yente simply smiles, knowing that she has deceived them all.♦
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