It was the middle of June, a dry and hot summer. The wheat around Kolodetz was swelling with gold and rocked by the breeze in heavy waves. Sarah had some back pain and this was not the first time, either; her kidneys were not quite well and I was categorical, even obnoxious, and stood up against her submissive readiness to endure her suffering in silence just so there’d be someone to look after the old people, cook for the children, and water the dahlias in the garden.
In the regional hospital of Drogobych they wrote that Citizen Sarah Davidovna Blumenfeld needed sanatorium treatment and gave her a card for some mineral baths in the north, toward Rovno. She didn’t want to go, discomfited maybe by the fact that she had rarely left Kolodetz. Her heart sank with heavy, evil premonitions. But I, the fool, got upset and insisted. Eventually Sarah agreed halfheartedly because the children offered to accompany her. It was, as I said, the middle of June, and in our region summer vacation started early—because of the harvest and such reasons—so Schura and Susannah went about getting her settled in the sanatorium. You’d be wrong if you thought they were doing it most altruistically; though they loved their mother, their scheme still included a visit on the way back to their aunt Klara and her husband Shabtsi Krantz, to get a taste of big city life in Lvov, with its theaters and concert halls. You remember, I believe, that my brother-in-law was an assistant pharmacist and as such he was an indisputable family authority on all issues concerning human health and medicine, just like the renowned and expensive Jewish doctors, who if they are in Austria prescribe medication for which you have to mortgage the inherited real estate of your grandmother, including her engagement ring, and if they’re in Russia, recommend to you an infusion of Irish moss, a remedy that, after you’ve been to all the pharmacies in the region, you learn was last imported during the time of Nicholas II and is nothing more than a sentimental memory of bygone times. So, like them, I mean, our family pharmacist Shabtsi Krantz most heatedly agitated on behalf of a substitute for the mineral baths and other grannies’ foolishness in the form of fresh lemon juice, which we hadn’t seen for a long time in Kolodetz, mixed with pure Greek olive oil. The only ingredient available to us for this doubtlessly miraculous medication was the Soviet geography atlas with the most precise location of Greece. This fact to a large degree tipped the scales of hesitation on the side of the sanatorium mineral water treatment.
At the railway station Sarah’s eyes filled with tears and our two Komsomol activists, pressing their heads to hers at the window of the car, were gently, but with the unconcealed self-confidence of the young guards of the working masses, caressing her and explaining to her that a human being would soon land on the Moon, while Rovno was a good deal closer. I, standing on the platform, trying to lighten the atmosphere, told a catastrophically old joke about Rosa Schwartz, who was leaving with her children for the mineral baths when her husband, Solomon Schwartz, who was seeing them off at the railway station, said, “If it starts raining, come back. Come back immediately!”
“Why should we come back?” said Rosa Schwartz. “If it comes down there, it will come down here too.”
“Yes, but here rain is cheaper.”
The children looked at each other, Sarah smiled lightly; apparently my joke had breezed by their ears and splashed on the wall on the other side of the compartment.
The three minutes passed—this is the length of the stop of the fast train to Lvov—and the train took off silently. I waved, they waved, I met Sarah’s grayish green eyes and in them I read deep apprehension, which nothing could explain.