The Leviathan

VIII

AND HE WENT home, back to Progrody, and he discreetly looked up the travel agent Benjamin Broczyner, who sold boat tickets to people who wanted to emigrate. These were for the most part deserters from the army or else the very poorest Jews, who had to go to Canada and America, and who provided Broczyner with his livelihood. He represented a Hamburg shipping company in Progrody.

“I want to go to Canada!” said the coral seller Nissen Piczenik. “And as soon as possible.”

“The next sailing is on the Phoenix, which leaves Hamburg in two weeks. We can have your papers all ready by then,” said Broczyner.

“Good. Good,” replied Piczenik. “And I don’t want anyone to know about it.”

And he went home and packed all his corals, his real ones, in his wheeled suitcase.

As for the celluloid corals, he placed them on the copper tray of the samovar, and he set fire to them and watched them burning with a blue flame and a terrible stench. It took a long time: there were more than fifteen pud of fake corals. Indeed, all that was left of the celluloid was a gigantic heap of gray-black scrolled ashes, and a cloud of blue-gray smoke twisting round the oil lamp in the middle of the room.

That was Nissen Piczenik’s farewell to his home.

On 21 April, he boarded the steamship Phoenix in Hamburg, as a steerage passenger.

The ship had been four days at sea when disaster struck: perhaps some still remember it.

More than two hundred passengers went down with the Phoenix. They were drowned, of course.

But as far as Nissen Piczenik was concerned, who went down at the same time, one cannot simply say that he was drowned along with the others. It is truer to say that he went home to the corals, to the bottom of the ocean where the huge Leviathan lies coiled.

And if we’re to believe the report of a man who escaped death — as they say — by a miracle, then it appears that long before the lifeboat was filled, Nissen Piczenik leaped overboard to join his corals, his real corals.

I, for my part, willingly believe it, because I knew Nissen Piczenik, and I am ready to swear that he belonged to the corals, and that his only true home was the bottom of the ocean.

May he rest in peace beside the Leviathan until the coming of the Messiah.