The Collected Stories

a Gentile. After a while we both developed a revulsion toward the whole thing.”
    “You are both ascetics,” I said.
    “Eh? I don’t know. I indulge in passionate affairs in my daydreams. I’ve read Freud, Jung, Stekel, but I’m convinced that they cannot help me. I’m amazed at my frankness with you. I’ve never written to an author before. I generally don’t write letters. It’s even hard for me to write to my father. Suddenly I write you and phone you. It’s as if one of your dybbuks had entered me. Now that you seem to have opened, so to say, a sealed source within me, I’ll tell you something else. Since I’ve started reading you, you’ve become the lover in my fantasies—you have driven off all the others.”
    Elizabeth took another sip of tea. She smiled and added, “Don’t get scared. This isn’t the purpose of my visit.”
    I felt a dryness in my throat and had to strain to make my voice emerge clearly. “Tell me about your fantasies.”
    “Oh, I spend time with you. We take trips together. You take me along to Poland and we visit all the villages you describe. Strange, but in my imagination your voice is the same as your voice is now and I can’t conceive how this can be. Even your accent is as I imagined it. This is something really irrational.”
    “Every love is irrational,” I said, embarrassed by my own assumption.
    Elizabeth bowed her head and gave this some thought.
    “At times I go to sleep with these fantasies and they are transformed into dreams. I see towns full of movement. I hear Yiddish spoken, and although I don’t know the language, I understand everything in the dream. If I didn’t know that these places have been destroyed, I would go there to see if everything matches my dreams.”
    “Nothing matches any more.”
    “My mother always spoke to me of her father, the rabbi. She came to America with her mother—my grandmother—when she was eight. My grandfather was married for the second time when he was seventy-five to a girl of eighteen, and my mother was the result of this marriage. Six years later, my grandfather died. He left many exegeses. The whole family perished under the Nazis, and all his manuscripts were burned. My grandmother brought along a small Hebrew book he had published and I have it in my purse in the foyer. Would you like to see it?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Let me wash the dishes. You wait here. I’ll get Grandfather’s book and you can look it over in the time I do them.”
    I remained at the table and Elizabeth brought me a slim book entitled
The Outcry of Mordechai.
On the title page the author listed his genealogy, and as I studied it I saw that my visitor and I were actually related by a connection many centuries back. We were both descended from Rabbi Moses Isserles and also from the author of
The Revealer of Profundities.
The book by the Klendev rabbi was a pamphlet against the Radzyn rabbi, Reb Gershon Henoch, who believed that he had found in the Mediterranean Sea the murex whose secretion was used in ancient Israel to dye the ritual fringes blue, although it was traditionally accepted that the murex had been concealed after the destruction of the Temple and would be found again only when the Messiah came. Reb Gershon Henoch hadn’t reckoned on the storm of protest from the other rabbis, and he directed his followers to wear the blue fringes. This aroused great controversy in the rabbinical world. Elizabeth’s grandfather called Reb Gershon Henoch “betrayer of Israel, apostate, messenger of Satan, Lilith, Asmodeus, and their evil host.” He warned that the sin of wearing these sham fringes could bring dire punishment from heaven. The pages of
The Outcry of Mordechai
had grown yellow and so dry that pieces flicked off the margins when I leafed through them.
    Elizabeth washed the plates and our glasses in the sink with a sponge. “What’s written there?” she asked me.
    It wasn’t easy to explain to Elizabeth de Sollar the dispute between the Radzyn rabbi and the other rabbis and Talmudic scholars of his generation, but I somehow found the words. Her eyes sparkled as she listened. “Fascinating!”
    The telephone rang and I left Elizabeth to answer it. It was Oliver Leslie de Sollar again. I told him that I would fetch his wife, but he said, “Wait. May I have a few words with you?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    Oliver Leslie began to cough and clear his throat. “My daughter, Bibi, nearly died from her attack today. We