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THE BACKGROUND (BESSARABIA, 1940)

Uncle Ferdinand chats about the phenomenon of time:

“. . . people these days are all excited about relativity, especially the relativity of time discovered by that Jew, that Einstein fellow—well, it’s something all of us have experienced—for example, you’re at some event and bored to tears, so you disappear with the wife of another guest and spend a little while with her in an adjoining room—well, for you it was a nice quarter of an hour—right?—but for her husband—right?—who can feel his horns growing the whole time, it was an eternity. . .”

But that’s a piece of shop-boy wisdom. I’m sure it’s not what what’shis-name—Einstein—had in mind. If that was his discovery, he wouldn’t be so famous. He must have been interested in something else, something to do with mathematics, which I know nothing about. But someone just as smart could have come along sometime and realized something else, namely, the way time suddenly shifts. What I mean is the way the quality of time, an era’s sense of life shifts. All of a sudden everybody experiences time differently than they did yesterday or the day before. You can’t tell exactly why it is: historical events, like maybe wars, revolutions? They didn’t touch it off, didn’t cause it. Not at all: they’re just the products of the shift. They never could have happened without that abrupt, mysterious change. Today’s experts are utterly nonplussed by it. Even the theologians can’t think of anything to say about it, for instance, that God must be in a bad mood or that He just inhaled and then exhaled. It’s something worth studying: what makes two eras different from each other? Do they return in some guise or other? Are their fundamental principles transformed into their opposites? At any rate, you can’t ignore it. Everyone’s felt how the world can change from one day to the next. The difficulty is that you don’t notice it right away. It takes a while to realize that since such-and-such a day, everything is different . . .”

• • •

I was born in the forest. My mother washed me in a spring, laid me in the moss, and covered me with her hair. Her face hung over mine as I blindly slept through the night. In the morning she took her hair from my face. The sun warmed my little body. The fragrance of strawberries penetrated my skin. I was a child. I played with the doves that came to drink from the spring. When I was a boy, the kingfisher was my playmate. My limbs grew like willow boughs. Sometimes when I was tired, my mother took my head in her lap and let her hair fall over me. Then I dreamed I found my father who was missing in action. “Hey,” he would say, “who’s this then?” And he would grab my locks with his hard hand and lift me up like a puppy to take a good look at me. But I would scratch and bite until he let me go. “So that’s the kind you are,” he would laugh and try to catch me again. I would run away. I was quick and knew the forest. I would lure him away from the spring where my mother lived in a hut of ferns. Then I would go to her and say, “I found my father and now I’m going off to war with him. Let your hair hang down over me once more and let your tears fall on me.”