Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja, Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 16

When Shimon, the teacher, returned from a fund-raising trip and strode along the town’s weather-beaten buildings, I did not let him out of my sight. God lived in these side streets: Poland, Polyń, Polonia, Polania, po-lan-ya, here-lives-God, three Hebrew words that made a Promised Land for the Jews out of the Slavic Poland, and they all lived here, driven by language. I did not let him out of my sight while he was running through the narrow streets to his children, and then, behind the next corner, he took off from the earth and flew through the starlit sky over the little town. Why not fly, what with all the worries in the world, fly, besotted and wistful, so many children, one’s own and the orphans, like stars in the sky, like six hundred thirteen commandments, you can’t count higher than that on one walk, I’ve tried to, they fly toward tomorrow, parallel to time and space, sometimes crosswise, following their own trajectory and the wise and stern books that we will never read and understand, the paths in the towns shimmer, dark green, my evening stroll, my hunt for Shimon, the teacher, who stuffs small, colorful glass balls from Vienna into the pockets of his black overcoat, which is darker than the night, sucking candy from Lemberg, a tad tart, because a tongue needs to carry a tang, and he always has a pencil with him, a kościół, a church, a jug, a candlestick, chase after him, a whirlwind in the sky full of flying objects, another church with bulbous copper spires and a sloping golden cross, then a fiddle and blue flower of a boy with big, long-lashed eyes, taking a few more turns over the earth of their beloved Polania, their Promised Land of Polonia, the house of God, and it is here that the story of a family, of kin, can begin, and maybe even this story.