Tseyna Reyna and the Maaseh Bukh and I gobbled up like shnecken everything in the shop from Shaikevitch to Aksenfeld.…” She was speaking, Ruby understood, as the heroine of a story, “Shprintze the Bookpeddler’s Daughter,” who lived in her papa’s library and was every girl in every story she read.
“Then came in an evil hour the shretelekh, the devils in their helmets and boots that they piss green worms, and dragged me out of my books into Sitra Achra, the Underworld, where even God don’t go. There they put on me their mark so that always I would belong to them.…”
Before she’d been abducted, however, Shprintze had hidden a bag of treasured titles in a space under the floorboards in the shop. Her father, who lacked his daughter’s presence of mind, was still selecting books for the journey when the Germans burst in, and as he lingered too long in choosing, they stove in his satin-capped skull with their rifle butts. Broken heart notwithstanding, Shprintze was shrewd enough to swallow the shop key before being marched to the depot, and in the boxcar that transported them to perdition she voided her bowels and dug the key from her own filth. After the liberation, she made her way back to Vilna, whose desolation proclaimed the news that the Underworld now held dominion everywhere. She returned to the shop late at night, used the key that still miraculously opened the lock, and crept inside. Bereft of books, the place was an apothecary’s, its shelves boasting potions that for all she knew gave to the devils the saberlike erections upon which they spitted young girls. In haste she pried up the floorboards fearing a vacancy, fearing the discovery of her father’s bones, and reclaimed her bag of books from their cache. She hurried back into the street, where she stopped beneath the first lamppost and opened a volume at random, hoping to plunge without prelude into that element from which she’d been cast out. But the words lay on the page like flyspecks, refusing to give up their meaning, so that it seemed her exile was to be everlasting.
Transferred from one DP camp to another, she wound up on Cyprus, whence she was swept along on the current that ultimately washed ashore in the Promised Land. But the Bible was never her book, and by the same token the Jews from that epic—the kings, seers, and harlots that haunted the born-again landscape—were not her people. Then she surprised Ruby by appending to the end of her confession, “Now you.” And when he hesitated, “A mol iz geven…”
“Once upon a time,” he offered at length, feeling obliged to tender his own demonic credentials, “Ruben ben None burned down his papa’s parnosseh, his livelihood, with his papa inside.” But saying it didn’t make it a story; it would never be a story. “Since then” he added, “murder is all he knows.”
But the truth was that he wasn’t murdering anybody these days, and the anger he’d once been able to conjure for the task was no longer available to him. Now he was wholly occupied by his concern for Shprintze, who inspired sensations he couldn’t even name; though one of them was accompanied by physical symptoms—chronic bellyache, full-throttle heart—that might be ascribed to fear. Never before afraid on his own account, Ruby feared for the girl’s fragility, for the welfare of her blistered fingers, the pulse that stirred the numbers on her wrist, the russet hair which, grown out of its featheriness, was whipped into a brushfire by the desert simoom.
In the meantime Shprintze and her association with the counterfeit shepherd were the subject of much gossip among the population of Tel Elohim. Leery of the Baal Shatikah, they speculated on his pernicious influence over the girl, who was becoming if possible ever more remote herself. They observed with disapproval the way the ill-matched pair conspired over books in the company of a defective dog and a dingy flock, their hind legs matted from the runs. But nobody dared to interfere with them, as they sprawled amid spear grass or sat beneath the canvas cover of a mired truck regarding a sunset, which looked to Ruby like a hemorrhage behind a gauze dressing, to Shprintze a bedsheet after a wedding night. Then the girl would go back to her walking part among the settlers and the shepherd would return his sheep to their wattle. He would retire to his tin-roofed hut on the chalk ridge overlooking