Pavel Brycz - I, City

“Moshe stared. A miracle! The saber didn’t pierce the flesh he was in the habit of nourishing, or the skin he often risked, but more often brought to Miss Rebecca, who clung to it as if she were a scented ointment.

“ ‘Haha, pierce me, brother, stab me, kill me, ha ha ha, I’m innocent,’ Moshe screamed, then danced the saber dance around Aaron, who couldn’t restrain himself and began to laugh along with him.

“Soon, the whole garrison was laughing, too.

“Even the Batushka Tsar himself was laughing.

“The horse Roman, he gave a whinny!

“ ‘Well, you amused me, soldier,’ the Tsar said to Aaron in private. ‘I forgive you the saber.’

“ ‘But tell me, since you’re so clever — would you like to become commander-in-chief of my army?

“ ‘I need skilled people. My generals have grown stupid from vodka, whores and gluttony. You with your cunning will lead my army to victory.’

“Aaron didn’t waver. Should he controvert the Tsar and tempt his patience yet again?

“No, what got him off once won’t get him off again.

“He accepted the Tsar’s offer.

“He opted for an army career.

“ ‘But tell me,’ the Tsar asked again, ‘what an odd name you have — Aaron — it’s not an Orthodox name.’

“ ‘No, it isn’t, Your Excellency,’ answered Aaron, ‘it’s Jewish.’

“ ‘A damn shame, boy, the popes christen our weapons; the highest patriarch of the Orthodox Church will bless you — you can’t be a Jew and at the same time command the Tsar’s army. Can you renounce your Judaism, change your name and be christened, my boy?’

“ ‘Yes, Your High Excellency,’ answered Aaron. ‘I have nothing left of my Judaism save the name given to me by my mother. I was not raised in the Jewish faith or with its customs; indeed, to be a Jew means nothing to me. There is nothing easier than to renounce something that is nothing — and actually less than nothing, because I’m at least conscious of nothing, but this I’ve never been conscious of. I’ll be your Ivan, Batushka, your commander-in-chief of the armed forces, your Russian, your Orthodox.’

“ ‘That’s what I call a speech, Soldier Ivan,’ the Tsar rejoiced, embracing the future convert.

“ ‘I still have some things to take care of here, Ivan,’ the Tsar informed Aaron, ‘but you’ll go to Petersburg with my safe-conduct. I will write to the Patriarch regarding your conversion and by the time I come to see you again, you’ll be a real Russian — just like my horse Roman.

“ ‘Yes, he was formerly an English thoroughbred, but today? Real Romanov. Well, aren’t I right?’

“The English thoroughbred gave a neigh.

“And so the carriage of the Batushka Tsar himself drove Aaron to Petersburg — originally a circumcised boy dragged into the army cadet school, a smart young man today, a future commander-in-chief of the army, which defeated even Napoleon.

“ ‘What’s it to me, this being a Jew?’ Aaron thought.

“ ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing at all… I don’t know the customs of my people; I don’t know what makes them suffer, what makes them laugh, what gives them consolation in their despair! I don’t know the language my mother used to sing to me in. I don’t know by whose hand my father perished. Did he have payos — was he Samson or a moneylender?

“ ‘O, such indifference.

“ ‘Where are my roots? Everything I know I learned at the cadet school of the Tsar — I’ve been invited to the heights by the Tsar and his God.

“ ‘What is Yahweh, that strict old Father, to me?

“ ‘In Mexico, it is said, in a desert grows a plant that doesn’t have roots — where to look for sustenance in the sand, anyway? And so the plant has its roots in the air. From the air, it takes everything it needs. And the wind, which races over the sand, blows this plant without roots from place to place.

“ ‘This is me! A plant in Mexico.

“ ‘So I, chased by the wind, can drive in the carriage of the Tsar from Moscow to Petersburg, and I can transform the steel saber into wood, and I can command the corps, too — me, who yearns only for peace…’

“And suddenly the carriage passed over the bridge over the Volga and the God of the Jews, the God Yahweh, saw his son jumping out of the carriage, jumping over the railing of the bridge and disappearing into the wide stream.

“ ‘Such is a Jew. He doesn’t have to know he is a Jew until someone takes from him that which is hidden. Which is what? Small but firm roots in the heart,’ ” Rabbi Glick finished, then looked right at me.

“I quivered. Ráchel Šmidtová translated. Then even she looked at me. It was a translated look. Actually, her look was more than that, gentlemen — hers was the look of a woman.

“ ‘What is hidden within?’ I asked myself with caught breath.

“She revealed it. She unlocked me. She undid my buttons one after another like Rebecca from the legend. And only when I was standing before her naked did she catch sight of that that was hidden.

“ ‘I knew immediately you were kosher,’ she told me in the morning after the night spent awake; she was gazing there, where a woman gazes at a man, ‘O, rose of Sharon…’ I looked there, too. My whole life I was ashamed. I was always different from others. My parents never told me why.

“I was ashamed before my classmates during the medical examinations, I was ashamed in the showers at the pool, I was ashamed at the army recruitment, I was ashamed while making love…

“And suddenly, the most beautiful woman since the time of Creation looks between my legs and says a miraculous sentence:

“I KNEW IMMEDIATELY YOU WERE KOSHER!!”

The astonished listeners on the Liars’ Bench exhaled, then swallowed.

“I didn’t leave her come morning. Her words were a magical shem . I lay back alongside her, and was as assiduous as the legendary Golem!

“And so, gentlemen, love holds me like the Jewish faith.”

Overwhelmed, all the men stare with respect at this man who like his Aaron swims in a river as wide as the Volga, swimming with ardor toward a great song of life, a life that will never stop being beautiful if a magnificent Jewess tells you you’re kosher. And though the men keep silent, it’s a silence that’s actually a fierce applause; every one in his own hidden self searches for the marvelous, the kosher, and no one protests at all when Franta Psoria, the King of the Liars, raises his hand and exclaims:

“Well, bartender, a beer’s all around, on me! Come let us honor our new King!”

I am a city. I’m full of people. Nothing human is strange to me. I love people. But not because they are great.

I love them because they are small.

There are a lot of them, and they’re all lonesome. Fettered, they yearn for freedom. They pray for immortality, and yet they don’t survive the touch of death, the Medusa jellyfish. They thought up money and they eternally lack it.

They explained their dreams and then they took sleeping pills.

It’s hard to survive. I, city of Most, know that — as did Pompeii, Carthage, and ancient Rome.

O, how I know it. Just one look into the mining pit behind the church. It’s hard to survive.

It’s even harder to live.

I saw a cloud in the sky yesterday.

It rode out above the city, a black conscience. This cloud had a lance. A helmet and a shield. A horse and rider was the cloud. Both of them skin and bone. I knew that some of the people down there would see them, too. People have imagination, after all.

And they will recognize that Don Quixote on his horse can ride out of anywhere, even out of the fog, clouds and gray smoke. Things are never explicit, are they? At everything sad and crazy perhaps one should gaze with imagination. Perhaps even the blackest cloud can be transformed into a knight, tilting at windmills of nothingness with the most virtuous of manners.