Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

Like a Field Riddled by Ants

Like a Field Riddled by Ants Some people can do many things at a time without worrying , but as soon as I interrupt my work my heart feels sad, like a bookcase empty of books or a field riddled by ants. —S. Y. Agnon At first, the interruptions were of no consequence. Like the locket of air contained in a keyhole. Later, they widened, like a doorway . Gradually the number of interruptions increased like the number of days that pass in a year until I felt in myself a constant yearning I could not name. As I moved through the long days, a certain tune accompanied me—the kind sung by the women suspended in the wire cages of the great mental institutions of long-gone days, desperate cries for help disguised in elaborate rhymes. The women—their pale faces pressed between the bars, their bony knuckles pushed up from beneath the skin like miniature heads of the cabalists pushing up from beneath their prayer shawls. Whatever I did the song commanded me. It grew ragged, insistent. For what I did not claim of this world and shape in my hands—like the potter making from the dust his infinite shapes, 4 8 like the Golem who rises from a few grains—I could not know. Like a swimmer who does not swim, my legs and arms forgot how to live in the water. They became suitable for the land alone. And I dreamed of water every night. So I set about guarding my life. I built a fence around it. To the north I constructed a boundary of ice boulders. To the east, a wall of leaves. To the west, light. And to the south, water. Only the earth was allowed within. And what few birds could fly above the barriers I made for myself. And for many years I went on this way. Gradually I began to listen to others. There came one day a man to my door who insisted on his claim for my attention. Perhaps, he urged, my message is of more consequence than the words you commit yourself to with such fervor. So from then on I listened anxiously for the stranger. Who, I wondered, could fall in to my realm from the world? Oh, how I longed for any disturbance: the slightest step in the hall, a rap on the window, a branch scratching aimlessly along the roof. Why then should anticipation have caused me such grief? I dared not lift my pen to write a word, so poised was I for the possibility, for what might enter the silence. The ink dried in the inkwell. The tip of the pen hardened. The words fell back into that place where words begin to form. The dreams left my house and took up residence elsewhere . Why do you regard what could happen with such morbid anxiety? Franz wants to know. When I, he goes on, hear the sounds of footsteps approaching my room, I listen eagerly to distinguish this pair of feet from all others. To flee from the miraculous, to avoid the unexpected—that is cowardice. In that one coming toward you is contained the perfect question, laying open every secret like a finger pointing the way. You may LIKE A FIELD RIDDLED BY ANTS 4 9 travel there when you discover whose footprints have walked through the sifted ash and who has rubbed against you wearing out your clothes and who surrounds you like a ridge around a field. What, you must say, of the world will this stranger offer me. What, that I wouldn’t have access to myself. Or my way, Johann urges me. Do you hear those donkeys braying in the middle of the tune I’ve just made up? They are the church fathers demanding that I make them a work of art. I have made them their music, a work we will never forget, though they do not know enough to realize how they have grown donkey’s ears and tails. It is my own joke, he tells me. Once, the guns started—rockets firing from the north. We who have fought over how the land should be used—whether for shelters or for growing carrots, potatoes, onions—fled not to the garden that had used up most of the space above ground, but to the shelter we had dug below ground. Down the...