The Book, II

II

I ONCE awoke in the dark winter dawn — deep at its bottom, under layers of darkness, a gloomy daybreak was burning — and amid distress and belated remorse, with a swarm of misty figures and signs still under my eyelids, I began, unclearly and convolutedly, to have visions of the old, lost Book.
    No one understood me, and I, exasperated by that stupidity, insistently began to make a nuisance of myself, and to molest my parents in my impatience and fever.
    Trembling with agitation, barefoot and wearing only my nightshirt, I ransacked Father’s library. Heplessly, disappointed and angry, I described before my astonished audience that indescribable thing, which no word, no image deliniated by my trembling, outstretched finger could replicate. I exhausted myself remorselessly in tangled and contradictory accounts, and I wept with impotent despair.
    They stood over me, helpless and confused, ashamed of their impotence. At heart, they were not guiltless. My vehemence, the tone of my demand, impatient and full of anger, lent me an air of justification, the advantage of a well founded claim. They came running back with various books, and put them into my hands. I indignantly tossed them aside.
    My father pressed one of them on me over and over again, a thick and heavy volume. I opened it — it was the Bible. In its pages I saw a great migration of animals, flowing along highways and branching out into processions over a remote 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 reproving eyes to Father: ‘You know, Father,’ 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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