The other soldier was gaping at the withered sisters. His mouth opened and closed. From fear his knees knocked together. Despite his slight beard you could tell it was really Usher Flicker, who ten years before was just being born. He hugged his comrade-in-arms. “Hail! Hail!” cried the hags, capering this way and that before them. At last the dark-bearded swordsman, holding his weapon skyward, addressed the apparitions: “Speak, if you can. What are you?”

The gardener boy—people thought he was a deaf-mute, without any tongue at all—put his hand on top of his head. Then he said, in the same poetical Polish that everyone else was speaking, “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter!”

No sooner had he spoken than a whoosh of fog rose up about him and, to thunder, to sizzling lightning, he and his companions vanished inside it. Banquo ran here and there, slashing at the mist with his sword. But when the clouds lifted, the weird sisters were gone. The storm was over. Everything was clear and calm. The green eyes of the owl—there it was, on a limb of the tree—began to glow. Banquo approached his friend. He leaned by his ear.

You shall be king.

Do you want to know who it was kneeling down? It was only the left-handed Mann Lifshits. The clue was that the sheath for his sword was on his right side. He was like a rock, not moving, not speaking. Banquo, baffled, turned his back and stood by the trunk of the tree. All the lights on the stage were fading, fading. The eyes of the owl stood out, bright and green.

Just before the whole theater was swallowed up in fresh darkness, Lifshits, still kneeling, raised both his hands. His fists were balled up at the sky. Then—it was almost as if we were hearing his thoughts—he spoke these words:

Stars, hide your fires.
Let not light see my black and deep desires.

And then the curtains closed.

The Manchester of Poland, that’s what people called our town, with all its mills. It wasn’t a cultural center, like Bialystok. Sarah Bernhardt never acted here in a play. Therefore, don’t be surprised if not many in the audience understood what was going on. They didn’t know a lot about the great author, Shakespeare. They scarcely had heard of Macbeth. What impressed them was how lifelike the storm was, and the thick rolls of cottony fog. They also wanted to know how the owl’s eyes lit up, with electrical wires or what? There were many disputes about the witches. Did such creatures really exist? Some people took one side and some another. Finally a Jew said that in his opinion the three harpies were something the kneeling soldier had dreamed. In dreams it’s not only possible for women to wear beards, but the worst things you fear, as well as the joys that you long for, often come true.

All of a sudden a Gypsy, or it could have been a Negro woman, came from the wings. She walked up and down in front of the curtain, reading a letter. Her hair was woven into a rope-thick braid, which hung to her waist. Her tight dress had broad shoulders and buttons all down the front. Lipstick, wet-looking, was on her lips. Bang-bang, thump-thump, those were the sounds that kept coming from behind the shut curtain. As for the letter, it was about meeting the witches, and told what we already know.