Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

Pavel Brycz · 59
Rachel, the naive sinner, was blushing even as she was heavily pregnant,
so her Sephardic face among the dolled-up Ashkenazi, with passionate fluff
above their lips and on their cheeks, resembled a ripe peach. Any man, who
was not a saint like rabbi Hirsch, would have wanted to have her at least for
an hour, while the weakling Jakobi looked at years of such hours, the entire
life of the beauty, who may have really become a wife not worthy to be
trusted, but now her dowry had been contributed by the whole community
and the old youngster will be able to live off of it idly for years to come.
“I hope yours is made of stone, Jakobi!!!” was yelled yobbishly at him by
distinguished patriarchs with furry caps. They laughed debauchedly and
crumbed the wedding cakes into their spiky beards. “Don’t you embarrass
us, us men of flesh and blood!!!”
The rabbi’s defiant eye began to twitch again. How can it be that secrets
from the judicial chamber always spread among the community? Should
he question and interrogate the parties in an impenetrable iron cell and rip
out his wife’s honourable tongue?!
Rabbi Hirsch sighed and tried to reach Jakobi, to share with him the misery
into which he had thrust him in the interest of two children – Rachel and
her Unborn – but merry wedding guests crossed his path, and thus Jakobi
disappeared from his sight. He was barely able to spot Isaac, Rachel’s rude
father, scowling through the window, yet the apparition vanished as soon
as he had blinked from surprise.
The new husband, in his mounted shoes, answered to Mazeltov! and to all
the shameless, hazing as only he could. He drank with the musicians like
the first camel in the caravan; he drank with the rebs, who had slipped away
from their views for a bit; he drank with the toothless coquettes, to whom
the liquor appeared to have returned their pearly whites for a moment, while
also lifting their skin so it had appeared as tight as the tent of Moses.
One of them, a crone with a face spiky like a quail’s egg; who spent many
years in Siberia living with her husband, the assassin, whose dying wish
was to rid the world of the Czar, the Kurfurst of Prussia, and the Austrian
Kaiser; had told with her drunken tongue that the fact that the young
bride fell for a statue of stone had not surprised her at all, because when
she and her late husband used to lie in their shack made of planks, he
performed best during snow storms and ice-cold nights, as their breath
froze to their lips and they coughed and kissed each other with salty chops.
Then, allegedly, one time, ice had covered all of her husband’s yesod, which
stood erect the whole night through. While praying to Baal, she rode him
all the way until the roosters crowed, although her lover had already fallen
asleep like a log long before.
“Gru, gru, grunt …,” laughed the old trollops.
Translated from the Slovene by Janko Jemec