SEKURIANY, 1923; TASHKENT, 1944 1. When my great-grandfather Leib-Kolman was asked if he really could write in five languages with never a single error, he said not so, it was simply an error on the part of those who are not on speaking terms with grammar. He worked at the post office, identifying and sorting mail from Moscow and Odessa, Warsaw and Bucharest, Paris and Kishinev, America and Palestine. He could read any address but didn't know a single addressee. His gaze was downcast-- at the ground or a book; the ground was soft, lilac-grey, and the book was old, with yellowing pages and a massive leather binding. It was a total waste of time to greet him on the street, and fruitless to take offense when he made no reply. They greeted him anyway and took offense regardless. Neither one nor the other mattered in the least. He read the Talmud, sorted letters, and prayed, rocking under the white shawl bordered with black stripes. 2. If any problems came up Malka, his wife, dealt with them; she didn't need an address in order to locate someone. At the critical juncture she donned her claret velvet dress, her rhombic gold brooch with twenty garnets and one modest ruby, seated herself in the cabriolet and made an exit. She made three of four of these little excursions, not more, resulting in a new job for her husband, a draft deferment for her first-born, Yakov, release from prison for nephew Zeev. Her trip to Beltsy in regard to the investigation of David, her youngest, who ran away from home, was the first time her excursion ended in failure. Never again did she don the claret dress; the time had come for other excursions. 3. In forty-two, in Tashkent, where dissolute David wound up, finding himself to be a major in a tank division, a Communist and a husband to several wives, Leib-Kolman was an old greybeard increasingly isolated from the world, increasingly lost in an otherness that found expression in rocking and muttering, though he no longer read the book, wore the yamulka, or covered his head with the shawl. All that belonged to another life (which no one but he would call a life) jettisoned during flight-- attempted flight, actually-- failed, like all other attempts. He questioned no one and asked for nothing, except, perhaps, in prayer. But who cares what it means-- the slow diminishing montonous rocking of somebody's body, a withered stick? 4. Rabbi Yitzkhak Levi said, "Rocking during prayer, while seeming to be a conventional outward show of piety, nevertheless maintains an erroneous point of theology: rocking, returning back to the beginning, is uncharacteristic of the spirit, of a steadfast adherent to the Law and one who can tell the beginning from the end." They say that Rabbi Yitzkhak Levi couldn't stand to be in the same room with a pendulum clock. © 1996 Boris Khersonsky. All rights reserved. Translation by Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson.