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“Enough!!” she roared, and bared her sharp green reefs at me. “Enough of your meddling and torturing me like this!” And I screamed: “The truth now! Everything ‘he’ left you! The scorching smell! One irrevocable utterance in his own language, or at least the minutes preceding that brilliant utterance I will never understand. I want the big secret from you now and I won’t take anything else!”

And she wails and spits, and pretends to oust me, and tries to scare me with the shadows of sharks she uses her pleated skin to project around me, or rudely breaks wind through the Strait of Gibraltar, but I have nothing left to lose, so I smack her with my hands and feet. “The book,” I scream through raging billows. “His final conclusion, the marrow of our existence!” And she sobs and bangs her head against the rocks that crack like eggshells, and combs her body till it hurts with the skeletons of sunken ships, and sticks a long, watery finger down her throat and vomits a shoal of dead fish all over me and fragments of half-digested dinghies, and suddenly she gathers her water crinolines and lifts a thousand petticoats to expose the bareness of lost continents and arid wastelands to the staggered eye of the sun, and for a moment we are all floating in dry air—fishes, shrimps, nets, the wrecks of sailing ships and submarines, shells and pirate swords and bottled messages from survivors who died long ago on desert islands, and a moment later the water bursts through with a mighty groan, covers the sunken continents, stirring the dust of earliest memories, raising a huge green folio before my eyes, that floats solitary in the depths, shimmering with a thousand tiny bubbles in the margins, a troubling, monkish folio, dampening the spirits of the fast-recoiling fish, and I don’t know what I’m doing here, floating over it, laughing and crying, and straining my eyes to read the title spelled in thick green seaweed: The Messiah.

At Easter time, the end of March or the beginning of April, Shloma, son of Tobias, was released from the prison where he had spent the winter after the skirmishes and imbecilities of summer and autumn. In the year when the things which shall be told herein took place, young Bruno peered out of the window of his house just as Shloma left the barbershop and stood on the threshold of Trinity Square. Bruno beckoned his old friend to come over (“There’s nobody home, Shloma!”) to view his drawings of the Age of Genius, that void in time at the heart of boredom and habit. In those few, remarkable days, little Bruno, with the help of his paintbrush, successfully broke out of the heavy metal bars imprisoning us, into a torrent of light, a ravishing first bloom—

Bathed, barbered, and scented, the released prisoner Shloma studied the drawings of his excited young friend.

“One might say,” said Shloma, after studying them, “that the world has passed through your hands in order to be reborn. To shed its scales like a marvelous lizard. Ah, do you think,” he inquired, “that I would stealand commit a thousand and one follies if this world had not fallen into turpitude and decay? … What else can one do in such a world? How not succumb to doubt and flagging spirits when all meaning is locked away, and you knock on the bricks as on a prison wall? Oh, Bruno, you were born too later.”

“To you, Shloma,” said Bruno, “I can reveal the secrets of these drawings. I always doubted that it was I who drew them. Sometimes they seem like unintentional plagiarisms. Something that was whispered to me, that reached my ear … as though a stranger had used my inspiration for purposes unknown, for I confess”—he added quietly, looking into Shloma’s eyes—“I have discovered the ‘real thing’ …”

So, in these words, Bruno spoke to me in the Age of Genius, from the book called Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. But what this “real thing” was I never learned, because Shloma son of Tobias, a slave of passion, and a coward and traitor besides, used the opportunity of being alone in the house with little Bruno to steal a coral necklace belonging to Adela the servant girl, as well as her dress and shoes, the patent-leather shoes which so fascinated Bruno (“Do you understand the terrible cynicism of this symbol on a woman’s foot, her provocative strutting on dainty heels? How can I leave you under the spell of this symbol? Heaven preserve me if I …”).

And we all missed the moment.

And I was Shloma son of Tobias.

Again.

For one moment I was released from prison. And I stood “Bathed, barbered, and scented on the threshold of Trinity Square in Drohobycz, utterly alone before the empty square, the blue sky flowing sunless overhead. This large, clean square lolled in the afternoon like a fish tank, like a new year not yet begun. I stood on the threshold, gray and hidden, not daring to shatter this perfect ball of a day with a decision.”

Up in the window I noticed a small thin boy, with a triangular-looking skull—a high, broad forehead, and a pointed chin. And at first it seemed to me that he was being reflected from one of the glass panes, but then I recognized Bruno, that wonderful child, always afire with precocious ideas.

He called to me and said, “We’re all alone in the square here, you and I.” And smiled gloomily, adding, “How empty the world is. We could divide it up between us and give it a new name … Come, come up a minute, and I’ll show you my drawings. There’s nobody home, Momik!”

[ 9 ]

AS SOON AS I ESCAPED from the gleaming expanse of Trinity Square and entered the dark vestibule of Bruno’s house, a crowd quickly filled the square, as if my leaving had been the cue for a tremendous cast of characters