Satan in Goray

with her head bound and red eyes swollen with crying. Her shoulders stooped even more than usual, her hairy chin kept shaking. She seemed to be constantly muttering something, and in her confusion carried a pot with her wherever she went. The rabbi's daughter--the widow--and his elder daughter-in-law ran to the study house every few hours to supplicate God anew and to light fresh candles. Together, they rushed up the steps leading to the Torah Ark, opened the door to implore the pure Torah scrolls, and cried so piteously that the young men in the study house wept to hear them. Common folk recited psalms, women measured the graves with wicks from which they later made candles to ward off death from the rabbi. Even the rabbi's son Levi, who belonged to the Sabbatai Zevi sect, forgot the differ-ences with his father and joined the other visitors in the sick room. Only Ozer, the rabbi's eldest, was not there; he sat in the kitchen, after his fashion, filching from the pots on the fire food which, in his panicky haste, he swallowed unchewed. Every now and then Ozer would come rushing into the sick room with a sooty face, jostle his way through the crowd, to confusedly ask of all and none: "What's happening? No better?"
    What cures were not attempted! They tried soaking the bad arm in hot water, to soften it, but that only scorched it. They applied seething salt, but that made it worse. The keeper of the poorhouse, an expert at nursing the sick, insisted that the arm was only dislocated, and she tried to snap it back into its socket, but Rabbi Benish fainted with the pain. His grandchildren ran from house to house asking for advice, and returned with numerous home remedies: Honey cakes to apply to the wound, dog fat to smear on it, malodorous yellow-green salves, mustard plaster. Two experienced women with headkerchiefs high on their foreheads, sleeves rolled up, and great aprons on, stood beside the bed and poured boiling water constantly from pots into basins, so that the sick room was dense with steam; they filtered the water through sieves and lighted glowing coals, as women do on the eve of Passover when cleansing the Passover dishes. The room smelled of smoke, charred stones, and the ritual of the purification of the dead. Whenever anyone asked the sick man how things were with him, he would open a corner of his eye, look strangely at his questioner, and instantly sink back into his slumber.
    Two messengers had been sent at daybreak to a nearby village to fetch a peasant who was reputedly expert at setting dislocated arms and legs. The messengers were given money and a flask of aqua vitae, and told to drag the peasant by the ears if necessary. They should have returned by now, for the village was barely a mile away. But they were nowhere to be seen. Boys ran outdoors to be on the lookout for the messengers and the peasant. Each of them came back with another reply. Somewhere far away, on a hill, a dot came into sight, but it was uncertain whether it could be the messengers or a sleigh hauling wood. Since the disappearance of Reb Eleazar and Leib Banach, everyone lived in terror. Already the messengers' wives sat with flushed faces in the kitchen of the rabbi's wife, prepared to scream and weep. Eating thickly buttered bread, they sighed like widows. Though it was fiercely cold outdoors, knots of women stood about the market place, hunched in shawls, huddling together and as anxious as though waiting for a funeral. Their feet, thrust into men's great boots, kept up a constant dance. Their faces, prematurely aged, were pale with the frost and the new terror whose shadow was slowly deepening over the town. They all repeated the same refrain: "It's because of 'the others,' the demons."
    "They're the ones to blame."
    They gossiped that Nechele, his daughter-in-law, had bewitched Rabbi Benish. One woman had with her own eyes seen Nechele in secret confabulation with the old witch Kinnegunde. All the women knew for certain that Nechele had a magical elf lock in the chest in her room, and in order to bind her husband, Levi, she would have him drink the water in which she washed her breasts. Glucke, the trustee, swore that, unable to sleep all night, she had heard the noise of women chattering in the wind, and had concluded that the spirits were gathering together. Later, at the very moment when Rabbi Benish was injured, all the spirits had burst into laughter, mocking and clapping their hands--for they had avenged themselves