—David Stromberg, Jerusalem
Listen here, children. Do you want to hear something you’ve never heard before? Then sit yourselves down on this bench, like good children, and I’ll tell you a story.
If you’ve ever studied geography, then you know that not far from Mount Hotzemklotzem lies a river called the Ampsel.
All week long, the river Ampsel spews a boiling sealing wax that makes it impossible to even get close. If you do, you instantly get sealed up—a package ready for the Angel of Souls, who stands by with an inkwell, immediately writes down an address, and sends you off to the World to Come.
But once in 666 years, when the Sabbath falls on a Wednesday, you can approach the river backward so it thinks you’re actually walking away. And when you’re just close enough, you throw a red onion over your shoulder and say three times:
Echepeche meche-merly.
Little river, it’s still early.
This scares the river Ampsel, and it freezes with trembling waves on both sides, like the angry lips of an irate person whose mouth has opened and can’t be shut. And that’s when you jump off Mount Hotzemklotzem, sitting on your hands—which you hold together under yourself like a little bench—and start flying wherever you want. You fly for a day and a night, and then another day and a night, until you fly into the very middle of Shortfriday and tear it into two halves. One half runs off to the left, the second to the right, and you end up standing just where you ought to be, that is: in Tearania.
This is obviously easier said than done. Before you break into Tearania, you have to first bathe in the Goldwater of Ashm, where the Ampsel flows into the Krikrama. When you come out, you look like a golden figure on a sign—completely gold and, besides that, not moving your feet. The Goldwater of Ashm has this quality that whoever bathes in its waters starts walking with their neck. That is, your feet stand or sit in place, while your neck stretches out on its own and your head goes wherever you want it to. That’s why all the inhabitants of Tearania have such long necks—except when their necks come back to them.
But the main story we want to tell you, children, is about the salt that doesn’t exist there and that, if it were to exist, would possibly make it the happiest place in the world!
It’s like this. The region around the Ampsel is very rich. The soil is not actually soil but rich, freshly baked bread. When you’re hungry, you tear off a piece of hot soil and eat.
Or when you want meat, you don’t need to spill any blood, the way we do, but what? You just unzip the hide of a cow or an ox. (Hides in this place are undone with zippers under the bellies.) You tear off whatever piece of meat you want—you just have to leave behind the end, and soon a new animal grows beneath the very same hide. And it doesn’t even feel that it’s a different animal.
As for rain—in Tearania, it rains wine. If you want to sleep, there are mountains made of cotton balls. Otherwise you just sneeze and geese come flying, stuffing themselves inside white pillowcases they carry in their little bills, and you sleep to your heart’s content.
But there’s one thing, children, they don’t have in Tearania: salt!
They have everything: gold and silver, coal and oil, iron and copper, brass and tin, bread and meat, honey and almonds, icebox cakes and malted milk shakes. And in short, it’s a place where you can live and laugh.
Laugh? No. I haven’t told the truth. In Tearania, people cry more than they laugh. That is, they could laugh in Tearania, and why not? Such a land! Such plenty! Such soil! Such animals! But what? It’s just the same thing again: salt!
Since there’s no salt, parents smack their children so that their tears salt the bread. And when children refuse to cry, they get smacked even more. And if they don’t want to cry straight onto the bread, they get a proper swat. After the children have cried out all their tears and salted their little lunches, the whole story starts all over again with dinner.
The mother says to the father:
“You have to cry out the bread today.”
The father says to the mother:
“Me? Why me? You can cry! I feel joy in my heart today—I’ve had some brandy.”
“Is that so?” says the mother. “You’re becoming a drunk on top of it all!” And she starts to cry.
The father rushes over and slides a fresh cucumber just under her eyes.
The mother says to the father:
“Take that cucumber away, you drunkard.”
The father says to the mother:
“Don’t be silly. I just said that because an unsalted cucumber has no taste.”
These kinds of scenes would occur in Tearania almost every day. Until one person—a wise man and watchmaker—invented a patent. Instead of smacking children or upsetting wives, people would be better off if, at every meal, they placed a lady near the table to grate horseradish, so that tears would flow from everyone and fall straight into their bowls of noodle soup—or onto their hot dumplings.
Translated by David Stromberg
Near the river there grew trees, and on the trees grew leaves.
The spring had colored the leaves green, and this is how they stayed all summer. But autumn didn’t like the green of the leaves, and when it arrived, it started to paint them, some yellow and some red. And then wild winds came and tore the leaves off the trees and whipped them to the ground—and also made them dance and spin like crazy.
“Woooo,” howled the wild winds, driving the leaves off the trees, “down from the trreeees….”
And the leaves pleaded with the wild winds:
“Why are you taking us off the trees? We leaves make shade, and people come to rest and cool themselves off in our shade.”
The wild winds kept howling:
“It’s getting cold, and people don’t need shade anymore….They want to warm up now, not cool off. Woooo…down from the trreeees….”
The leaves pleaded again:
“But have pity on the trees! They’ll be bare and naked, without a single leaf to cover them, and what will they do in the cold?”
The wild winds howled:
“Woooo…Uncle Snow is coming soon and he’ll cover the trees with a white blanket and they won’t be cold….Woooo…down from the trreeees….”
No amount of pleading helped the leaves, and they had to come down off the trees one by one. One leaf, a yellow one, called out to another leaf, a red one:
“You know what, brother leaf? Why should we fall onto the ground and be cast off who-knows-where or get trampled by human feet or horses’ hooves—or, worse still, turn into dirt and mud? Since we’re near a river, let’s fall into the river, where no one will trample us with their feet. The river’s clean and smooth, and we’ll swim along. We’ll swim and swim until we come to Green Land, where it’s warm and green, and perhaps there we’ll become green again.”
The red leaf said to the yellow leaf:
“Right, let’s do it.”
They both landed on the river, and when they landed, the river didn’t ripple, the way it does when kids throw pebbles or wood chips. That was because the leaves were very light, almost as light as feathers. The river felt only a caress on its back or perhaps just a tickle, because it wriggled like someone who’s been tickled and said in its silvery voice:
“Hee-hee-hee!”
The leaves liked that. The yellow one called out to the red one:
“It’s great on the river, delightful, even better than on a tree.”
The red leaf said to the yellow leaf:
“Yes, it’s just a little wet.”
The yellow leaf said:
“Never mind that. We don’t have to be afraid of water. Do you remember how the rain would often soak us on the tree?”
Talking this way, the two leaves floated farther and farther until the wind came and started to drive them back toward the
bank from which they had just escaped.
So the leaves began to tremble, and the river itself trembled because the river, too, trembles from the wind. And the closer the leaves came to the bank, the more they shivered, because they did not want to go back to the ground and lie around in the autumn sludge.
But soon a wind came from the other side, and the two winds began to fight over the two leaves: the first wind chased the two leaves toward one bank, and the other wind chased them toward the other bank, so the two leaves never reached either side and continued floating in the middle of the river. The two winds fought and fought over the two leaves until they grew bored with the game and flew away, each to its cave, and the river became calm and still again. The leaves continued to float, as they’d intended.
They floated for a day, two, three, and four, and Green Land was still nowhere to be seen. So they floated on and on until the river flowed into a bigger river, and then they swam together with the bigger river until it began to flow into the sea. When the two leaves saw the vast sea with its frightening waves, which reached all the way up to the sky, they became very scared.
The red leaf called out to the yellow leaf:
“Let’s go back, brother, because the sea will tear us apart. See how it roars and rages and swells?”
The yellow leaf said:
“Right, let’s go back. I see now that it’s a very long way to Green Land and that we’ll never get there.”
So the two leaves swam back, and they swam and swam until they returned to dry land, where it was autumn and where the wild winds blew.
But just then, a little girl standing on the riverbank saw the two leaves as they floated along. The two leaves looked very beautiful floating on the river, and the little girl liked them very much.
“What beautiful leaves!” said the little girl. “I’d love to have them!”
A wind heard this and gave a strong blow, driving the two leaves to the bank, where she could reach them. The little girl brought them home and thought about what she should do with them. She thought and thought until she remembered that she had a cousin in Green Land, so she said to herself, “I’ll send her these two leaves, the yellow one and the red one, so that she can see what our land of winds and autumn does to green leaves. Mommy told me that in Green Land, everything is green, eternally green, and my cousin doesn’t see leaves like these there.”
So the little girl wrote a letter to her cousin in Green Land and enclosed the two leaves in the letter, the yellow one and the red one. The letter flew to Green Land over rivers and over seas. And when it arrived, it brought with it the two leaves, the yellow one and the red one. The little girl in Green Land opened the letter and saw the two leaves—and she called to her mother:
“Look, Mama, what kinds of leaves grow in Autumn Land!”
But her mother explained to her that the leaves hadn’t grown this way—this was how they fell.
The little girl in Green Land took the two leaves from Autumn Land and put them in a book as a keepsake. And the two leaves were pleased that at least they weren’t lying around on the ground.
Translated by Lena Watson
1.
Recently, Hershele has become very suspicious. He doesn’t ask anything or say anything, but goes around with his ears pricked up, his eyes anxious, and often looking expectantly into his mother’s eyes.
He doesn’t know for sure what it is, but his heart is telling him something’s going to happen to him, something’s gathering over his head.
He still plays all day long with the little peasant children in the village, near the wide, open river Seym. He runs around barefoot on the grassy bank, wades far into the overgrown, swampy ivy, or splashes for hours in the water and, using a small ball of bread tied to a thread, catches quivering silvery rudd.
Even now, he’s playing…but a sense of fear won’t let him go. A sadness sits in his heart as if a shadow has slipped inside, cooling and darkening his youthful joy.
It all started when at home they began mentioning his name too many times and paying too much attention to him. Mama says something about him to Papa, and Papa says something about him to Mama, all in a way he doesn’t quite understand. Mama, in particular, says a lot. With each stroke of his hair, with each “May your curly head be healthy,” she asks him:
“Do you want to go to heder, Hershele? You do want to go to school, don’t you?”
He doesn’t reply. For some reason, his mother’s questions make him sad. He doesn’t know what to say. Why shouldn’t he want to go to heder if, as Mama says, it’s so good there? An angel throws kopecks, and children put on new shoes and pants with pockets and grow bigger. If the heder were in the village, he wouldn’t let anyone rest until they took him there, and if they wouldn’t, he’d run there all by himself….And he’d show the angelic kopecks to Styopka and Mikita every day. They can’t have them. He knows he’s a Jewish boy and only Jewish boys are allowed in heder, but heder is some faraway place—where Uncle Elkanah lives. Hershele has seen his uncle only once and still remembers his beard, a strange big beard. Uncle Elkanah brought him a toy, and he remembers it well: a horse on wheels. He took it to the river for a drink and let it swim—just as old Mihalka does with his horse, Steely—and it floated away. He cried and screamed, so he was promised that when Uncle Elkanah came again, he’d bring him another horse. He asked every day, “Where’s Uncle Elkanah? When is Uncle Elkanah coming?” Hershele was told that his uncle was already on his way.
But it’s very, very far away, so he hasn’t arrived yet.
His mother sees that he doesn’t respond and understands him and looks at him with both pride and sadness.
“You’re a smart boy! You want to go to heder. Will you go to Uncle Elkanah’s? Do you want to go to your uncle’s?”
“Yeah….”
“Will you sleep at your uncle’s?”
“With you in the same bed.”
“And by yourself, in a good, soft bed?”
“No.”
He doesn’t leave his mother’s side. When he’s stuck at home because of bad weather, he trails after her from their home to the shop and from the shop back home. He goes behind the counter with her and follows her every move, often getting in his father’s way. His father gets angry:
“Following her like a sheep! A five-year-old boy, who’s starting heder soon, and still holding on to his mother’s apron strings! Why are you always at our feet?”
But his mother always takes his side:
“What do you have against the child? He has to be somewhere….”
At the river, he wades even farther into the swampy ivy and feels so strange in the tall, overgrown green flagroot that fully conceals him. It’s cool and green there, green and cool—wonderfully green. At his slightest rustle, green frogs leap every which way—plop!—into the murky green water. And the smell of the flagroot is so strong, so sharp, so moist….The water below bubbles up and gurgles. He places his bare feet carefully on the cool, swollen reddish-white ivy roots and, like a little hunting dog, scares colorful wild ducks and black moorhens.
He forgets about everything. His eyes light up: he’ll catch one. Yet he’s frightened every time a couple of ducks shoot up loudly from under his very feet and fly off lopsidedly across the river.
Here! A moorhen has sunk to the bottom like a pebble. He holds his breath. The ivy bends toward the water with him, the water bubbles up and gulps. His heart is pounding. He’ll wait—he knows that the moorhen has to come up. The ivy leans closer and closer toward the water with him. Amid the bubbles, he sees another boy, and the water bubbles up, gulps, pulls—and he leans over closer and closer….
But suddenly his heart trembles. He lifts his head and listens. It’s as if someone’s called him from the ivy:
“Hershele!”
J
ust like Mama….
Sadness and longing take hold of him. He forgets about the moorhen and leaps out of the green-water world as quickly as possible.
Panting, he runs into the house.
“Where’s Mama? Did you call me?”
“No, but I’ve been wondering where you were.”
“Mama, I could’ve caught a moorhen….”
“Just look at him!” grumbles his father. “The boy’s going to heder soon and still has such nonsense on his mind.”
Hershele catches his mother’s sad gaze, and his heart sinks again in the face of the unknown.
2.
Overjoyed, Hershele runs into the shop and shouts in one breath:
“Mama, I’ve caught a pike hatchling, this tiny! I let him out in a little pool of water….”
“May your curly head be healthy!” His mother showers him with kisses. “My darling boy, you.”
“Come here, Hershel,” his father interrupts. “Go to Mihalka and tell him to bring the wagon early tomorrow morning. Mama’s taking you to your uncle’s.”
Any other time, going to see Mihalka—who’d mount Hershele on Steely and lead him back and forth across the farmyard—would make it a great day. From Steely’s back the whole farmyard looks different, nothing like from down below. Now his heart sinks again: he senses his mother’s wistful look beneath the kisses, and he keeps glancing anxiously, now at his earnest father, now at his mother.
“My smart boy, wait and see what a new pair of shoes we’ve bought you!”
3.
Dressed entirely in new clothes, Hershele sits with his mother on Mihalka’s wagon and revels in the journey. It’s a sunny day. On both sides of the ditch, the road stretches out like a string, together with the colorful autumnal forest. Colors play before his eyes: red, green, yellow, purple. Birds fly past, unlike any he’s seen near the river. It smells of tree resin. There, from the depths of the forest, a mystery peeks out. And here, from time to time, they come across a wild pear tree with fruit, or a tree with unripe winter apples.
In the Land of Happy Tears Page 2