The Book, II

II

I AWOKE one dark winter morning — in its depths, under layers of darkness, a gloomy dawn was burning, a black aurora — and indistinctly and convolutedly, in distress and with belated remorse, with swarms of misty figures and signs still under my eyelids, I began to have visions of the old lost Book.
    No one understood me, and exasperated by such stupidity, I began insistently, impatient and fevered, to plague and pester my parents.
    Barefoot and wearing only my nightshirt, trembling with agitation, I ransacked Father’s library. Disappointed and angry, I helplessly described before my astonished audience that indescribable thing — which no word, no image deliniated by my trembling, outstretched finger could ever reproduce. I exhausted myself remorselessly in tangled and contradictory accounts. I wept with impotent despair.
    They stood over me, helpless and confused, ashamed of their impotence. And at heart they were not blameless. My vehemence, the tone of my demand, lent me an air of justification, the advantage of a well founded claim. They came running with different books, and thrust them into my hands. I tossed them aside with indignation.
    One of these, a fat and heavy volume, my father urged on me over and over again with tentative encouragement. It was the Bible. On its pages I saw a great migration of animals, flowing along highways, branching out into processions over a faraway country. I saw a sky all in ‘V’ formations and flappings, and an enormous upturned pyramid whose distant apex touched the Ark.
    I raised my eyes to Father in reproach. ‘Father, you know,’ I cried. ‘You know perfectly well — don’t keep it a secret. Don’t be evasive! This book has betrayed you. Why do you give me this tainted Apocrypha, this thousandth copy, this inept falsification? What have you done with The Book?’
    Father averted his eyes.

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