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together
the waters of the sea as if in a water skin — felt the need to test Himself
using a slip of a thing like you.
    But why else would He need my renunciation?
    By then her legs were already so long that, crouching on the stool, she
could effortlessly prop her chin on her knees. Because of her marriage to the goy,
her grandfather sat shiva for her as though she had died. From then until his own
death a year and a half ago, she never saw him again. Her grandfather disowned her,
but even after this disowning, her life continued to go on and was still continuing
today. What rules governed this life — this life that for him was no longer a
life — was something she had no one to ask. From then on, her life was simply
her life, that’s all.
    12
    Once, they have to put on life jackets, because the ship is
traveling through thick fog, and there’s a risk of colliding with another ship; once
it is storming so violently that an old woman tears the locket from the chain around
her neck and throws it into the water with loud prayers, to reconcile God with the
ship; once someone is heard playing the violin on one of the lower decks — a
piece from the operetta
Die Fledermaus
— but the former civil servant
doesn’t recognize the music, even though he studied in Vienna. If he were to perish
of the nausea that refuses to leave him, who would get his pocket watch and the coat
with the gold buttons? The gentleman traveling with him shows a Polish child a
banana and explains how such a thing is peeled. The gentleman bites off the little
black tip of the banana himself and spits it into the sea. But the child doesn’t
want the banana. After two days, three, four, the young man’s nausea still hasn’t
subsided. Only after an endlessly long twelve and a half days does he behold one
morning, standing amid the throng suddenly crowding the deck, the Statue of Liberty,
and this is definitely better than never having seen it. On their voyage, the
gentleman told him of a German captain whose ship was so dilapidated that instead of
venturing across the ocean with his passengers, he tacked up and down off the coast
of Scotland, just far enough out that the land was out of sight. Nine days later he
unloaded the emigrants in a small harbor, telling them that this was America. In
both places, English was spoken, a language none of the new arrivals understood, and
the men wore skirts, as was no doubt the latest fashion in New York — so it
was nearly a week before the last of the emigrants understood that they were still
in Europe. But by then the dilapidated captain had long since vanished along with
the money they’d paid him for their passage to the New World.
    Now, men, women, and children are weeping, overcome, they keep pointing
out the gigantic likeness of the woman to one another, some fling their arms around
whoever happens to be standing close by; an elderly woman tries to embrace the
Austrian, but he fends her off. All he’d done before he left was send his father a
postcard. Why join the ranks of humankind now? Maybe he’s just a cold person, he
thinks for the first time ever, and wonders whether arriving in a foreign country is
enough to turn one into a different man in the same skin. A child points to the
statue and asks: Who’s that? And he says: Columbus.
    13
    The building she’s walking into looks no different from
other buildings. It is Wednesday afternoon, the front door is still gleaming in the
sun; she told her mother she was visiting a friend. She delayed her arrival by five
minutes to be absolutely certain she wouldn’t get there ahead of him. Before she
lifts her hand to knock on the apartment door, he opens it, having heard her
footsteps on the stairs. He draws her inside and immediately turns this drawing into
an embrace, then the kiss, then she touches his teeth with her tongue, then she
feels the corners of her mouth grow wet with his saliva, then she pushes him away,
then he grasps her firmly, pressing the