The Leviathan

IV

THE DAY DREW nigh when the sailor Komrower was to report back to his cruiser in Odessa — and the coral merchant dreaded the prospect. In all Progrody, young Komrower is the only sailor, and God knows when he’ll be given leave again. Once he goes, that’ll be the last you hear of the waters of the world, apart from the odd item in the newspapers.

The summer was well advanced, a fine summer, by the way, cloudless and dry, cooled by the steady breeze across the Volhynian steppes. Another two weeks and it would be harvest time, and the peasants would no longer be coming in from their villages on market days to buy corals from Nissen Piczenik. These two weeks were the height of the coral season. In this fortnight the customers came in great bunches and clusters, the threaders could hardly keep up with the work, they stayed up all night sorting and threading. In the beautiful early evenings, when the declining sun sent its golden adieus through Piczenik’s barred windows, and the heaps of coral of every type and hue, animated by its melancholy and bracing light, started to glow as though each little stone carried its own microscopic lantern in its delicate interior, the farmers would turn up boisterous and a little merry, to collect their wives, with their red and blue handkerchiefs filled with silver and copper coins, in heavy hobnailed boots that clattered on the cobbles in the yard outside. The farmers greeted Nissen Piczenik with embraces and kisses, like a long-lost friend. They meant well by him, they were even fond of him, the lanky, taciturn, red-haired Jew with the honest, sometimes wistful china blue eyes, where decency lived and fair dealing, the savvy of the expert and the ignorance of the man who had never once left the small town of Progrody. It wasn’t easy to get the better of the farmers. For although they recognized the coral merchant as one of the few honest tradesmen in the area, they wouldn’t forget that he was a Jew. And they weren’t averse to haggling themselves. First, they made themselves at home on the chairs, the settee, the two wide wooden double beds with plump bolsters on them. And some of them, their boots encrusted with silvery-gray mud, even lay down on the beds, the sofa, or the floor. They took pinches of loose tobacco from the pockets of their burlap trousers, or from the supplies on the windowsill, tore off the edges of old newspapers that were lying around in Piczenik’s room, and rolled themselves cigarettes — cigarette papers were considered a luxury, even by the well-off among them. Soon, the coral merchant’s apartment was filled with the dense blue smoke of cheap tobacco and rough paper, blue smoke gilded by the last of the sunlight, gradually emptying itself out into the street in small clouds drifting through the squares of the barred open windows.

In a couple of copper samovars on a table in the middle of the room — these too burnished by the setting sun — hot water was kept boiling, and no fewer than fifty cheap green double-bottomed glasses were passed from hand to hand, full of schnapps and steaming golden-brown tea. The prices of the coral necklaces had already been agreed on with the women in the course of several hours’ bargaining in the morning. But now the husbands were unhappy with the price, and so the haggling began all over again. It was a hard struggle for the skinny Jew, all on his own against overwhelming numbers of tightfisted and suspicious, strongly built and in their cups potentially violent men. The sweat ran down under the black silk cap he wore at home, down his freckled, thinly bearded cheeks into the red goatee, and the hairs of his beard grew matted together, so that in the evening, after the battle, he had to part them with a little fine-toothed steel comb. Finally, he won the day against his customers, in spite of his ignorance. For, in the whole wide world, there were only two things that he understood, which were corals and the farmers of the region — and he knew how to thread the former and outwit the latter. The implacably obstinate ones would be given a so-called extra — in other words, when they agreed to pay the price he had secretly been hoping for all along, he would give them a tiny coral chain made from stones of little value, to put round the necks or wrists of their children, where it was guaranteed to be effective against the Evil Eye or spiteful neighbors and wicked witches. And all the time he had to watch what the hands of his customers were up to, and to keep gauging the size of the various piles of coral. It really wasn’t easy!

In this particular high summer, however, Nissen Piczenik’s manner was distracted, almost apathetic. He seemed indifferent to his customers and to his business. His loyal wife, long accustomed to his peculiar silences, noticed the change in him and took him to task. He had sold a string of corals too cheaply here, he had failed to spot a little theft there, today he had given an old customer no “extras,” while yesterday he’d given a new and insignificant buyer quite a valuable necklace. There had never been any strife in the Piczenik household. But over the course of these days, the coral merchant lost his calm, and he felt himself how his indifference, his habitual indifference toward his wife suddenly turned into violent dislike. Yes, he who was incapable of drowning a single one of the many mice that were caught in his traps every night — the way everyone in Progrody did — but instead paid Saul the water carrier to do it for him, on this day, he, the peaceable Nissen Piczenik, threw a heavy string of corals in his wife’s face as she was criticizing him as usual, slammed the door, and walked out of the house to sit by the edge of the great swamp, the cousin many times removed of the great oceans.

Just two days before the sailor’s departure, there surfaced in the coral merchant the notion of accompanying young Komrower to Odessa. A notion like that arrives suddenly, lightning is slow by comparison, and it hits the very place from where it sprang, which is to say the human heart. If you like, it strikes its own birthplace. Such was Nissen Piczenik’s notion. And from such a notion to a resolution is only a short distance.

On the morning of the departure of the young sailor Komrower, Nissen Piczenik said to his wife: “I have to go away for a few days.”

His wife was still in bed. It was eight in the morning, the coral merchant had just returned from morning prayers in the synagogue.

She sat up. Without her wig on, her thin hair in disarray and yellow crusts of sleep in the corners of her eyes, she looked unfamiliar, even hostile to him. Her appearance, her alarm, her consternation all confirmed him in a decision which even to him had seemed rash.

“I’m going to Odessa!” he said with unconcealed venom. “I’ll be back in a week, God willing!”

“Now? Now?” stammered his wife amongst the pillows. “Does it have to be now, when all the farmers are coming?”

“Right now!” said the coral merchant. “I have important business. Pack my things!”

And with a vicious and spiteful delight he had never previously felt, he watched as his wife got out of bed, saw her ugly toes, her fat legs below the long flea-spotted nightgown, and he heard her all-too familiar sigh, the inevitable morning song of this woman with whom nothing connected him beyond the distant memory of a few nocturnal tendernesses, and the usual fear of divorce.

But within Nissen Piczenik there was a jubilant voice, a strange and familiar voice inside him: Piczenik is off to the corals! He’s off to the corals! Nissen Piczenik is going to the home of the corals!. .