The night tightens its grip on Fanny, sinks deep within her and expands, imbuing her with the sudden realisation that she is free. Man was endowed with five senses to perceive Creation – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – and only one sense, the sense of freedom, was granted to Creation in order to perceive man. The Shechinah uses it to examine the human heart and distinguish between servants, masters, and those who are neither one nor the other – and right now, Fanny can feel Freedom probing her bones, making her soul sing and her heart throb. She has always suspected that the good God On High is not content with having only the blindly obedient among His believers.
Then, out of nowhere, she is assailed by pangs of guilt. Natan-Berl will be devastated by what she has done, and her children will miss her terribly. Who else will whisper in their ears the first words they hear each morning? Who will cook their food? Who will clothe their delicate bodies and shoo away their bad dreams? What freedom is this, if it is bound up with betrayal and tor-ment? Every day of their lives she has carved a path through her children’s bodies, into the nooks of their souls and the crannies in their hearts. She has woken and fed and dressed and bathed and frolicked and consoled, each time etching new signs of her motherhood into their flesh. Few words were ever needed; she could register their innermost secrets simply by listening to the tone of their voices. It was enough for her to observe how they poured their tea or ate their rice, as their souls quivered. They never told her things she did not already know or reported anything that was news to her; all they gave her were ever-sweeter memories. Her children were ageless in her eyes, eternal souls, from baby Elisheva to her eldest, eight-year-old Gavriellah, whose courage Fanny had recognised the moment her firstborn emerged between her legs at birth. Now her sudden disappearance will mark them with an ugly scar. She has derailed their routine and demolished their stability. Her freedom is their prison. What kind of a mother is she?
And yet, from the moment the idea that she should set out on this quest first flickered in her mind, she felt that it was her duty to leave her home. Just as in the moments of giving birth to her children, when her overwhelming desire to care for them merged with her duty as their mother, she now knew full well that freedom and necessity are intertwined. When she returns, she will explain to her children that she had decided not to think of her sister’s suffering as a divine decree. She had to gallop all the way to Minsk to bring Zvi-Meir to his knees.
Fanny disliked Zvi-Meir even before he married her sister. He had been thrown out of the Volozhin Yeshiva – evidently, he was no great scholar – and yet he never stopped dispensing the pearls of wisdom he had gleaned from the Gemara, and pointing out contradictions he believed he had found in the Bible. Whenever the family sat down for dinner and shared cabbage soup with noodles, pickled cucumber, kugel and rye bread, Zvi-Meir would also share his scruples: how could Adam and Eve have deserved punishment if they had received the gift of Knowledge only after eating from the Forbidden Fruit? And sure enough, the conversation would soon become a full-blown monologue, because Zvi-Meir had no interest in listening to anyone else and would anticipate anything he thought they might say before they had a chance to say it. If he ever condescended to listen to others, his ears would only pick up the words that his mind could assemble in support of his sermon. All conversations with him ended the same way: he would tell them that they should all read a little and study a little, and that he was probably wrong to have raised the matter in the present company in the first place.
Zvi-Meir deserved to have it all, and everyone else was to blame for the fact that he had nothing. The rabbis at the Volozhin Yeshiva were to blame for not cultivating his talent as soon as he arrived. Customers were to blame for not rushing to buy his wares in the market. And Mende was to blame, because, as far as Zvi-Meir the Genius was concerned, intimacy should consist of his tête-à-têtes with himself and nobody else.
All the while, she, Fanny Keismann, witnessing Mende’s embarrassment, had chosen to sit at the table and keep silent lest she heap further humiliation upon her sister, but Zvi-Meir never considered the silence that followed his sermons as a sign of hostility, rather as a victory. If only Fanny had intervened back then, perhaps she would not have had to abandon her sweet children and abscond from her home at an hour befitting brigands on the prowl.
Zizek takes off his army coat and places it over her shoulders. At first, she is alarmed by the uniform, which in her eyes represents the government’s crushing might; but then she huddles into the coat’s warm lining. As the wind picks up, she fastens the top two buttons and notices that Zizek is turning east, away from the first village on the riverbank. Fanny does not understand why this detour is necessary, but it does not make her in the least suspicious. Under any other circumstances she would have begun to plan how best to leap from the cart, but in his presence, she feels anything but intimidated.
With the first glimpse of sunshine, the emotion of the night fades, and glints of sobriety shimmer in the light that soon floods their eyes. The hazy mist evaporates completely. Now Fanny and Zizek are exposed. Zizek takes off his uniform, rolls it up and puts it in a large wooden box. This is the first time she has seen him without his uniform and the army cap that always shades his face. His age, she reckons, is probably close to sixty. His clothes, a peasant’s jacket over threadbare trousers, ooze a smell of fish, and receive the addition of a grey, gentile-looking flat cap. A red sash that the locals wear for good luck is tied around his waist, and his feet are encased in plain bast shoes.
Without further ado, he removes the army coat from her shoulders. Fanny shrinks back in her seat and looks imploringly into his bright-coloured eyes. Even though he does not respond to her gaze, she lets him undo two buttons in the collar of her dress and remove her headscarf. He pulls out a brown woollen coat like the ones that the local babushkas wear, and hands her a white kerchief adorned with a Polish emblem. When their transformation is complete, they look at one another: they are two locals, he is no longer a soldier and she is no longer a Jew, and a hint of contentment spreads across Zizek’s cracked lips, or so it seems.