It was a full minute before the rustle of silence had taken possession of the hall once more. Down below, the stone floor looked like the scene of a shipwreck on a South Sea island beach. The piano had exploded in a cloud of brushwood. Only the harp and lid had survived the fall. The rest lay strewn over the marble tiles in chunks the size of a hand or a forearm. I grabbed the rake, walked downstairs, and began clearing up the mess. On the way down I saw the marks of the piano’s descent. It had hit the banister, gouged out a piece of wood, then bounced off the stairs and shattered to bits. The staircase looked as if someone had rolled down from the first floor in a tank.
Downstairs I picked up the piano lid. I leaned it against the staircase, grabbed the axe, and split the wood into strips thin enough that I could kick them to pieces. When I was finished I divided up the wood between the library and the kitchen. In the library hearth I built a fire with crumpled newspaper, the remains of a splintered crate, and the thin strips provided by the bottoms of the drawers. The wind shrieked through the chimney and tugged at the front door, which was pounding wildly in its latch. I arranged a few of the larger chunks of piano on top of the little heap of paper and splinters, and lit a match. The draught in the chimney sucked up the burgeoning fire out of the newspaper, through the brittle wood, to the larger pieces.
The hearths in the library and hunting room, green catafalques of Italian marble, were deep enough to sit in. You could build a huge fire in those hearths, and I would have done so, if I hadn’t already known that Uncle Herman had made the same mistake when he spent a winter here in the fifties. The heat had burst the frozen flue and they’d had to send for a man from one of the neighbouring villages to repair the damage.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, it was fairly comfortable. The fire in the huge stove had driven out the worst of the cold. I picked up the basket I had found in the gardener’s shed, went down to the cellar and filled it with several bottles of wine, a box of crackers, a wedge of cheese and butter, a tin of powdered milk, jars of spices, a coffee pot and filter, salt and sugar, and a handful of candles. In the library, in front of the fire, I sat and ate. I could still hear the front door rattling in its latch. High above me, where the wind played the chimney like a flute, rose a low, plaintive moan. I imagined snow whirling around the house, curling along the windows and walls and settling in banks that grew higher by the hour. I put the remains of the piano lid on the fire and watched as the flames tasted the black wood. The lacquer began to wrinkle, here and there a tiny bluish flame danced on a splinter. Then the fire shot into one of the chunks, and then another, and another. It gave off a delicious warmth. I closed the heavy curtains, put the plate of crackers and cheese that I had prepared on my lap, and poured a glass of wine, an ice-cold Nebbiolo d’Alba. The glow of the flames lit the room. Candles stood on either side of the mantelpiece, others here and there on top of a cupboard. Slowly, I began to warm up. My joints thawed, the wooden feeling in my knees disappeared.
Nina had left at around five. It was now nearly seven. I had spent about three hours in the house. I was dead tired. The cold, lugging all that wood, the chopping and splitting, had worn me out. As I sat there by the fire, my eyes grew blurred and I was overcome by a metallic feeling of exhaustion. The flames illuminated the green marble scrolls on the mantelpiece. The hearth began to look like a gateway. Beyond that gateway I saw the soot-covered wall of the chimney, the paler spots where the fire couldn’t reach and the blackened patch in which the brickwork was no more than a tar-nished bulge. The fire murmured and sighed. I heard the banging of the front door in the hall as the wind yanked it back and forth. I closed my eyes and thought about the fairy tale I had been working on for the past few months. It was as if something toppled over inside my head.
HE WHO WORKS his way past five mangy chickens, Yankel Davidovitz’s bony cow, and the massive stench of the rubbish dump behind the house of Schloime Kreisky, the hide trader, will be rewarded with a view of the sagging door of the Kotzker shul. It hangs in its cracked leather hinges like an unwashed dishrag, begging for a lick of paint, yammering for a little consideration, and maybe a nail or two. Around the door the walls of the shul struggle to hold each other up. The mortar between the bricks is brittle and crushed, the beam anchors rusty, the high windows black with soot. But even before his fingers have touched the door handle, a glob of snot dangling from the wood, even as he stands upon the threshold, trying to decide whether this wretched pile of bricks could possibly still be in use, his ears are graced by the gentle singsong and soft murmuring of the morning service, his nostrils teased by the smell of books, candied ginger, smoking oil lamps and the wax with which the rebbe’s wife polishes the tables, the chairs, in short, the entire shul.
Which brings us to the rebbe, the Reb, or simply, Menachem Mendel, the spiritual and social leader of the motley crew that constitutes Kotzker Jewry. Thirty years ago he came here from Pzysha and has been the rabbi of Kotzk ever since, thirty long years, the past ten of which he has spent in utter solitude, in the unrelent-ing, self-imposed confinement of his study. The last his followers ever heard from him, and that was seven years ago, was a furious, incomprehensible shout. Schloime Kreisky was the cause of this outburst, stinking Schloime, doomed to walk the earth amid the reek of rotting hides, hog’s piss and mouldering bark, Schloime, who had taken himself to the place of silence to ask the Reb what it meant when a slice of bread fell to the ground butter-side down, and was told in no uncertain terms that he was a ‘stinking swine’s tit’. Inquisitive as they are, those Kotzker Jews, the last-recorded words of Menachem Mendel were discussed at length, pondered, weighed, held up to the light, sucked on and chewed over until, at the end of a long night, Yankel Davidovitz slammed his palm down on the long wooden table in the middle of the study-house and roared, ‘But Schloime is a stinking swine’s tit!’ Whereupon the deeply wounded Schloime leapt to his feet and screamed at Yankel that while he might smell a bit unusual, at least he, Schloime Kreisky, hide trader of Kotzk, didn’t have daughters who disgraced the village by flirting shamelessly with every straw-haired fat-bellied Polak and that he could swear with his hand on his heart that he, Schloime Kreisky, would never milk an innocent cow dry like ‘some people around here’, to which Yankel shrugged his shoulders and said that his troubles were his own concern and that his cow, even if, God forbid, she should die, was still too good to serve as merchandise for a certain ‘hide trader’. From that day on, the silence between Schloime Kreisky and Yankel Davidovitz had been as profound as that surrounding Reb Menachem Mendel, and would have remained so, had not the Lord of the Universe in his immeasurable wisdom decreed that Schloime’s youngest son Mendel should fall in love with one of Davidovitz’s wanton daughters.
Mendel fell for Rivka like a rotting oak before the woodsman. He was young, barely eighteen and, like most lads his age, preoccupied with finding some rhyme or reason in this madly spinning world. His eyes drifted searchingly through the tops of the drooping oaks around Kotzk and sometimes, in autumn and spring, but now it was autumn, Mendel could feel his heart pounding wildly and he had to stifle the urge to sing and shout. Not that singing or shouting (in Kotzk there wasn’t much difference between the two) would be considered strange, on the contrary, but Mendel was afraid of what might fly from his lips. There was a tumult raging in his breast that he thought it might be better to suppress.
One autumn morning, Mendel arrived at the watering place along the road to Worki with his daily load of bark. He had been journey-ing since daybreak, and now that the sun was up and the sky had changed from purple to red to orange, he felt it was time for bread, water, and rest. He flung his load under an oak tree, scooped up water in the bowl of his hands, drank, sat down against the bundle of bark, and fell asleep. He began dreaming, something about the pile of hides behind the workshop. They