The Collected Stories

They sat around the table and they were dumfounded. Leib Belkes had constructed out of matches the Holy Temple exactly as it was described in the Talmud!
    “Well, but people are envious and begrudge others their accomplishments. His wife began to complain that she needed the table for her dishes. There were firemen in Radoszyce, and they were afraid that so many matches would cause a fire and the whole town might go up in flames. There were so many threats and complaints that one day when Leib returned from his travels his temple was gone. His wife swore that the firemen came and demolished it. The firemen accused the wife.
    “After his temple had been destroyed, Leib Belkes became melancholic. He still tried to do business, but he earned less and less. He often sat at home and read Yiddish storybooks that dealt with the land of Israel. At the study house he bothered the scholars and yeshiva boys by asking them questions about the coming of the Messiah. ‘Will one huge cloud take all the Jews to the Holy Land, or will a cloud descend for each town separately?’ ‘Will the Resurrection of the Dead take place immediately, or will there be a waiting period of forty years?’ ‘Will there still be a need to plow the fields and to gather the fruit from the orchards, or will manna fall from the sky?’ People had something to scoff at.
    “Once, late in the evening, when his wife told him to close the shutters, he went outside and did not return. There was an uproar in Radoszyce. Some people believed that the demons had spirited him away. Others thought that his wife nagged him so much that he ran away to his relatives on the other side of the Vistula. But what man would run away at night without his overcoat and without a bundle? If this had happened to a rich man, they would have sent out searchers to find him. But when a poor man disappears, there is one pauper less in town. His wife—Sprintza was her name—was deserted. She earned a little from kneading dough in wealthy houses on Thursday. She also got some support from her daughters when they married.
    “Five years passed. Once on a Friday, when Sprintza was standing over the oven and cooking her Sabbath meal, the door opened, and in came a man with a gray beard, dusty and barefooted. Sprintza thought it was a beggar. Suddenly he said, ‘I was in the Holy Land. Give me some prune dessert.’
    “The town went wild. They all came running, and Leib was taken to the rabbi. The rabbi questioned him, and he learned that Leib had gone on foot to the Holy Land.”
    “On foot?” Levi Yitzchok asked.
    “Yes, on foot,” Zalman said.
    “But everyone knows that to get to the Holy Land one must travel by ship.”
    Meyer Eunuch clutched his chin where a beard should have grown and said, “Perhaps he lied?”
    “He brought letters from many rabbis, as well as a sack of holy earth that he dug himself at the Mount of Olives,” Zalman said. “When someone died he placed a handful of it under the corpse’s head. I saw it myself; it was as white as crumbled chalk.”
    “How long did the trip take him?” Levi Yitzchok asked.
    “Two years. On the way back he went by boat. The rabbi asked him, ‘How can a man do a thing like that?’ And he answered, ‘I yearned so much that I could not bear it any more. That night when I went out to close the shutters and I saw the moon running among the clouds I began to run after it. I kept running until I reached Warsaw. There, kind people showed me the road. I wandered over fields and forests, mountains and wasteland, until I arrived at the land of Israel.’ ”
    “I am astonished that the beasts did not devour him,” Levi Yitzchok half asked, half stated.
    “It is written that the Lord preserves the simple,” Meyer Eunuch said.
    For a while all three were silent. Levi Yitzchok took his blue glasses off his nose and began to wipe the lenses with his sash. He suffered from trachoma. One of his eyes was milky white, and he could not see with it at all. Levi Yitzchok owned a cane that once belonged to the preacher of Kozienice. Levi Yitzchok never parted with it even on the Sabbath. He limped, and a crutch is not forbidden. For a long while he rested his chin on this cane. Then he straightened himself and said, “Stubbornness is a power. In Krasnystaw there was a tailor by the name of Jonathan. He sewed for women, not men. As a rule, a women’s tailor is a frivolous person. When one sews a garment for a female, one has to