The Spinoza of Market Street (11 page)

"But they say men can break rocks," said the boy.

"Old wives' tales!" countered his mother. "The power of man is only on the surface. The heights are for angels. The depths are for us. The lot of man is to creep on the skin of the earth like a louse."

"But what
are
human beings, mother? Tell me."

"What are they? They're the waste of creation, offal; where sin is brewed in a kettle, mankind is the foam. Man is the mistake of God."

"How can God the Almighty make a mistake?" asked Kuziba.

"That is a secret, my child," answered Shiddah. "For when God created the last of all the worlds, the earth, his love for our mistress, Lilith, was stronger than ever. Only for an instant his gaze wandered, and in that instant he produced man--an evil mixture of flesh, love, dung, and lust.

"Man!" Shiddah spat. "He has a white skin but inside he is red. He shouts as if he were strong, but really he is weak and shaky. Throw a stone and he breaks; use a thong and he bleeds. In heat he melts. In cold he freezes. There is a bellows in his chest which has to contract and expand constantly. In his left side is a small sac which must throb and quiver all the time. He stuffs himself with mildew of a kind which grows in mud or sand. This mildew he has to swallow constantly and after it passes through his body he must drop it out. He depends on a thousand accidents, and that's why he is so nasty and angry."

"But what do human beings do, mother?"

"Evil," Shiddah answered her son, "only evil. But that keeps them busy so that they leave us in peace. Why, some of them even deny our existence. They think life can only breed on the surface of the earth. Like all fools they consider themselves clever.

"Imagine! They study wisdom on crushed wood pulp smeared with blotches of ink. And their ideas come from a slimy matter which they carry in a bony skull on their necks. They can't even run the way animals can: their legs are too feeble. But one thing they do possess in great measure: insolence. If God the Omnipotent did not have so much patience he would have destroyed such rabble long ago."

Kuziba, who had listened intently to his mother's words, was not reassured. He stared at his mother feverishly.

"I'm afraid of them, mother. I'm afraid."

"Don't be, Kuziba. They can't come here."

"In my sleep I dream about them." Kuziba trembled.

"Don't shake so, my darling little devil." Shiddah caressed her son. "Dreams are silly. They too come from the surface where chaos rules."

II

Kuziba, who had lain for some time in a deep sleep, suddenly cried out. His mother awakened him.

"What's the matter, my son?"

"I'm frightened."

"Again?"

"I was dreaming about a man."

"What did he look like, my child?"

"So fierce. He made a noise that almost made me go deaf. And he had a light that was blinding me. I would have died from fear if you hadn't waked me."

"Be still, my son. I will chant a spell for you."

And Shiddah murmured:

Lord of the Depths

Curse the evil surface.

Lord of all Silence

Destroy the Din.

Save us great Father

From Light, from Words,

From Man his Deceit.

Save us, Lord God.

For a while it was quiet. Kuziba dozed off. Shiddah cradled her only son, swaying rhythmically above him. She thought of her husband, Hurmiz, who did not live at home. He went to the Yeshivah of Chittim and Tachtim which was thousands of yards deeper, nearer the center of the earth. There he studied the secret of silence. Because silence has many degrees. As Shiddah knew, no matter how quiet it is, it can be even quieter. Silence is like fruits which have pits within pits, seeds within seeds. There is a final silence, a last point so small that it is nothing, yet so mighty that worlds can be created from it. This last point is the essence of all essences. Everything else is external, nothing but skin, peel, surface. He who has reached the final point, the last degree of silence, knows nothing of time and space, of death and lust. There male and female are forever united; will and deed are the same. This last silence is God. But God himself keeps on penetrating deeper into Himself. He descends into his depths. His nature is like a cave without bottom. He keeps on investigating his own abyss.

Kuziba had fallen asleep. Shiddah, too, rested her head against a stone pillow. She imagined dreamily how Kuziba would grow up and become a big devil; how he would marry and become a father, and how she, Shiddah, would serve her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren. The babies would begin to call her grandma; and she would delouse their heads. She would braid the girls' hair, clean the boys' noses, take them to
Cheder
, feed them, put them to sleep. Then the grandchildren themselves would grow up and be led under black canopies to marry the sons and daughters of the most reputable and well-established demons.

Her husband, Hurmiz, would become a rabbi of the netherworld, giving out amulets, reciting incantations. He would teach imps the chapter of curses on Mount Ebal, and the curses which Balaam should have used on the Israelites; he would teach them the prophecies of the false prophets, the words of temptation which the primeval snake used in the Garden of Eden; he would teach them the cunning of the fallen angels, the confusion of tongues of those who built the tower of Babel; he would instruct them in the perversities of men at the time of the flood, in the vanities of Jeroboam and Ahab, Jezebel and Vashti. Then Hurmiz would become King of the Demons. He would be offered the throne in the Abyss of the Great Female, a thousand miles away from the surface where no one had ever heard of man and his insanity.

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 in his eternal night.

 ---
Translated by Elizabeth Follet

The walls of the study where Dr. Boris Margolis sat reading his manuscript were lined with books and on the floor and sofa was a litter of newspapers, magazines, discarded envelopes. In addition, there were two wastepaper baskets crammed with papers which the doctor had forbidden anyone to discard until he had one more look at them. Books, their pages still uncut, manuscripts, his own as well as other people's, letters which remained unopened, had become a curse in the apartment. They were dust collectors; bugs were to be seen crawling on them. The smell of print, sealing wax, cigar smoke, was omnipresent in the place, an acrid and musty odor. Every day Dr. Margolis argued with his wife, Mathilda, about cleaning the room but the ash trays remained filled with cigar butts and pieces of food. Mathilda kept him on a diet and hunger was forever assaulting the doctor. He was constantly nibbling egg-cookies, halva, chocolate; he also liked a taste of brandy. He had been warned about scattering ashes, but, nevertheless, there were small gray heaps on the window sill and armchairs. The doctor had ordered that no window be opened; the wind might blow his papers away. Nothing could be discarded without his agreement and Dr. Margolis never agreed. He would peer at the paper in question from beneath his bushy eyebrows and plead, "No, I'd better keep this around just a little bit longer."

"How much longer is that?" Mathilda would ask. "Until the coming of the Messiah?"

"Indeed, how much longer?" Dr. Margolis would say with a sniff. When you are sixty-nine years old and have a weak heart, you can't postpone things forever. He had taken on so many obligations--the day was too short. Scholars kept writing to him here in Warsaw from England and America, even from Germany where that maniac Hitler had come to power. Since Dr. Margolis published criticism in an academic journal from time to time, authors sent him their books to review. He had once subscribed to several philosophical magazines and, though he had long since given up renewing his subscriptions, the issues continued to arrive along with demands for payment. Most of the scholars of his generation had died. He himself, for a while, had been as good as forgotten. But the new generation had rediscovered him, and he was now showered with letters of praise as well as all sorts of requests. Just when he had at last resigned himself to never seeing his masterpiece in print (the work had been the labor of twenty-five years), a Swiss publisher had got in touch with him. He had gone as far as to give Dr. Margolis a five hundred franc advance. But now that the publisher was waiting for the manuscript, the realization had come to Dr. Margolis that the work was full of mistakes and inaccuracies, even contradictions. He was uncertain whether his philosophy, a return to metaphysics, had any value. At sixty-nine he no longer had the need to see his name in print. If he could not bring out a consistent system, it was better to keep silent.

Now Dr. Margolis sat, small, broad-shouldered, his head bent forward, his white hair blowing about his head like foam. His goatee pointed upward and to the side of his gray moustache, singed from the cigars he had smoked down to the butt, his cheeks hung limp. Between the thick, bushy eyebrows and the pouch-like bags underlining the eyes, were the eyes themselves, dark, and despite their keen, penetrating gaze, good-natured. The retinas were covered with brown, hornlike specks; cataracts had begun to form and sooner or later the doctor would have to undergo an operation. A small beard sprouted from the doctor's nose and wisps of hair protruded from his ears. Every morning Mathilda reminded him to put on a dressing gown and slippers, but as soon as he arose, he dressed in his black suit, his spats and a stiff collar and black tie. He heeded neither his wife nor his doctors. He poured the medicines which had been prescribed down the drain, threw away the pills, smoked continually, consumed every variety of sweet and fatty foods. Now he sat reading and grimacing. He pulled at his beard, sniffed and grunted.

"Rubbish. Tripe. Just no good."

Mathilda appeared at the door, small and round as a barrel, wearing a silk kimono and open sandals which left her twisted toes exposed. Whenever Dr. Margolis looked at her, he was astonished. Was this really the woman he had fallen in love with and taken from another man thirty-two years ago? She had grown smaller and smaller and puffier and puffier; her stomach stuck out like a man's. Since she had practically no neck, her large square head just sat on her shoulders. Her nose was flat and her thick lips and jowls made him think of a bulldog. Her scalp showed through her hair. Worst of all she had begun to grow a beard, and though she had tried to cut, shave, singe off the hair, it had merely grown denser. The skin of her face was covered with roots from each of which sprouted a few prickly shoots of a nondescript color. Rouge peeled from the creases on her face like plaster. Her eyes stared with a masculine severity. Dr. Margolis remembered a saying of Schopenhauer: Woman has the appearance and mentality of a child. If she becomes intellectually mature, she develops the face of a man.