In the Shtetl

IN THE SHTETL / Maurya Simon Was it astonishment or fear or both that guided men into the iron bars of despair one night, and kept them locked up tight and holding hands under their long sleeves? To comfort them the rabbi said: Even before the world existed, the Torah existed, having been written with black fire on white fire; it lay on the lap of God. But the men could hear the horses' hooves like cumulative thunder getting nearer. And the boastful thud of cannonballs recalled their fathers' warnings: Among our pages full of smoke and blood, you must cling to the edge of the story. It seemed that all around them now the world waltzed in a flaming skirt, and that the exiled souls of the dead surrounded them with moans. A conference of crows on the farthest horizon, the phantom of a dome in Bucharest, deadened water in a silver bowl: all signs, impurities. Let the house be filled from the ground to the roof in prayers, what good was piety? Evil weakened the strong; the left foot and right foot wore the same stocking. Who could prepare for the Days of Awe, the Day of Atonement in this fever of silence? Then one who had never spoken arose. And when he began to sing, his voice dark and robust as a Guarneri's, the men saw his small soul flare beneath his body's lantern, like light 292 · The Missouri Review beneath parchment. Listen! Listen! Within his song the thunder subsides, the moon wings into the windowframe, they whispered. At last his music lulled the world, so in that calm they heard, not from the Kingdom of Mysteries, but from the kitchen, the voice of the rabbi's daughter calling, calling them in to dinner. Maurya Simon THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 293 ...