There’s No Heaven for Slaves
Published in Issue #6 Translated from Russian by Yisrael Elliot Cohen(Excerpt from a Novel)
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“Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?”
The watchman said, “The morning cometh and also the night…”
– Isaiah 21.11
He dreamed that he was a woman, not just a woman but an old woman, not just an old woman but an infirm old Jewess in an absurd wig that stuck out in all directions like a porcupine and covered her small bird-like head. She wore a long, tattered calico dress and squared-toed, well-worn boots encrusted with filth from the market and laces as thin as her wrinkles.
Distant and alien, she stands not in fishmongers’ lane in the shtetl market next to her buddy, the pockmarked Haya-Leah, but in the spacious and empty-like-a-church hall of the provincial courthouse, located on the corner of Georgievsky Prospect and Gendarme Lane. She was standing to the right of the prosecutor, Aleksei Turov, shamelessly uttering guttural sounds and sniffling like a dried out birch-bark peasant flute. Her words were heated and incoherent.
Miron Alexandrovich tried several times to wake up or at least to shift from one dream to another, the way in childhood he clambered from the dark, dank courtyard where he was born and grew up into a bright one which smelled of cinnamon from a bakery. However, the dark courtyard constantly pulled him back. Every time he closed his enflamed eyelids that had clanged shut from fatigue, this old woman appeared again, speaking to Turov in a grotesque combination of broken Russian, Yiddish, which Miron Alexandrovich had practically forgotten, and an eloquent Latin, which was...
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