Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

Pavel Brycz · 57
Which blessed day did it occur that I became what I still am today, in my
night deprived of the pleasure of sleep, while being fleetingly accompanied
by Atroposes and bats? Was it on the Day of Hate, when my mother’s belly
grew and married women with wigs smelling of garlic were hysterically
crying that Rachel, aged fourteen, has been infested with an evil dybukk?
Did it happen then, when grandpa Isaac, a hothead of mere forty at the
time, broke his daugther’s nose, cursed her, and then banished her from
home, tore his jacket, then wore sackloth and ashes from the cooled-down
hearth, and, accompanied by the gloating of the neighbours, howled from
the low window into the winding ulichka, like a yellow-pupiled werewolf
ensnared by the Rusnaks and caught in their trap?!
Rachel confided in her mother and the rabbi in tears that she hath no
knowledge of any living man, no knowledge whatsoever. She swore on the
Torah that had laid on the ambo. The rabbi’s weary eye twitched heavily
and the sweat had glazed him with an acidic bath while he, disgusted by
this virgin whore, had to hear that this lass with hair like fleece, black as
the feathers of a crow, as an educated bride hath no knowledge about how
to lie with a man, and cannot explain any differently but through her evil
charms, how the fruit of life could have been planted into her, the fruit of
life because of which each and every single one around her acts even worse
than corpses that had starved heavily ‘till death.
In tears that ran like rivers and could have melted Finnish granite with
ease, the girl confessed to playing girl games with Christians aged the same
as her, games in which nuns from the Covenant had participated too – the
rabbi’s eye fell shut to stop its perpetual movement, grandma Dora bit her
wrists so purple blood began to flow. This girl had probably thought that
honesty would melt the adults and banish the alien seed from her womb;
she described meticulously how the boisterous goy girls had ridden objects
resembling a yesod, and she followed suit. They laughed and helped each
other through when a tear fell on the grounds of pain. They had wiped
themselves down there with scented wipes, but also brought moisteners
of various kinds so the cucumbers, candles, and the statues of the melancholic
Lords and Ladies of the goy would glide more nicely.
Rabbi Hirsch jumped up and paced up and down the parlour where he
judged his people. He pranced hither and thither like a lion in a circus ring,
tugged on his long black beard, gasped and heard The Voice of Sodom and
Gomorrah that had sprung from the young lady’s tender lips that had, allegedly,
yet not been introduced to the lips of a man.
“Then, rabbi they, Katarina and Leona Zamoszovi with Julia Nowakowa
with a finger on my lips; brought me down to the basement, to the secret
chambers of Mr. Leopold, their father and uncle. He is a christened Jew
and, allegedly, a wizard. I thought they were just bragging,” Rachel said
stubbornly, while swallowing several ounces of tears. “They said that the
Emperor of Austria paid him in gold for some secret services.