When Rebecca, the most beautiful of Secret Charity's daughters, was twelve years old and sister to eleven brothers and sisters whose number was to be great, the baker whose wife sang in the room next to the bakery died and the house collapsed on them. Rebecca went to the study house and asked some well-known saints who were steeped in prayer to tie themselves to the incense bowl and rise to heaven with it. They had to do that to challenge the Holy One Blessed Be He, she said, they tried to bribe heaven with anger, not supplication, their tears flow in vain and aren't seen there. Anger had always nested in her and the old men in the study house weren't embarrassed and tried to go back to their prayers. When she stood there her womanly fear was a soft and cunning loveliness and even the saints in their time couldn't resist the temptation and they thought forbidden thoughts about her body rustling with gloomy joy shrouded in dark ancient mold and steeped in passion. Rebecca's mother, who was busy selling challahs and bread and bagels, wanted to rid her daughter of the anger with a quick marriage. After refusing thirty-one fellows, some of whom even fled from her because of her venomous tongue, she saw her mother weeping. Her father had recently died and was buried standing up as he requested in his will, in a Christian-style coffin, and around her sat her fifteen brothers and sisters waiting to be married and she said: There's no point crying. Times were hard and because of concerns for livelihood and fears nobody went out then to pull out messiahs and Rebecca remained alone with signed and unsigned excommunications and declarations, many written by her thirty-one defeated suitors.
One day her mother took her to a distant city and gave her to some childless relatives. The old couple were dying in their room and Rebecca nursed them in their illness, started sewing in their workshop, and when they died, on that day and at that hour, she inherited the house with the little workshop next to it. Sitting in the workshop, Rebecca met one of the descendants of the converted messiah, nobody dared to get close to him even though he had returned to his faith long ago and grew cherries in a distant orchard. Rebecca betrothed herself to him and the city made a fuss. He was a quiet and strong fellow and was called Son of the Prostitute. Two days after the betrothal he vomited blood in the middle of the street and collapsed amid incomprehensible shouts. In death, his face was green and his eyes turned around. Rebecca carried him home on her back, took the washing implements and the shrouds from under the old folks' bed, washed his body, purified it, and wrapped it in a tallith. And then she wanted to marry her fiance. Nobody had heard of marrying a dead man and so they called for Rabbi Kriegel, Rebecca's uncle who went from the Land of Israel to a place called America and stopped on the way to visit his family and was an expert in Jewish customs in Yemen, North Africa and Persia, and Rabbi Kriegel, who would later come to Providence, Rhode Island, brought evidence and proofs and when the marriage canopy was set up in the cemetery the men trembled and the women hid behind the trees and the rabbi stood there, his face grave, and married the son of the prostitute to Rebecca. She broke the glass herself and then said to the rabbi: In exile we married the Shekhinah, said my father, my father your uncle, married, in the cellar, a dead nation to restore her to life, and the people said: Behold, here lives a seamstress whose wedding speech is bewitchingly beautiful and she's a virgin and a widow and a divorcee.
Then Rebecca sold her property and disappeared. Once again these were times of riots, and aside from the singed smell of Jews, thirty-four witches were also burned in the city square. Rebecca stood and looked at the fire. The women's eyes were laughing and when they burned they cursed and shouted, but they weren't afraid. A vindictive cold overflowed from them and singed the fire. What Rebecca saw, as she put it, was divine disobedience, she loved that sight, and felt as if she were looking in the mirror. Rebecca Sorka who came to the Land of Israel as Rebecca Schneerson would know that look inside her and would live with it all her life. Rebecca Secret Charity had curved, rounded cheeks, lips and some mysterious expression stamped in her gold-green eyes. She has a mute and ancient look, said one of the fellows who tried not to think of her body, she inherited that from the place where time was before it was created. In the cemetery she would eat her daily meal with her dead husband and feel close to her father, Secret Charity, with whom she could talk. He'd stand in the coffin and she'd sit on the edge of the grave and converse with him in a whisper.
She didn't stay very long in our city either but took off and opened a sewing shop in a nearby town. She learned to weave and embroider in a form that would match her father's phrases. She captured the melody for which the embroidery could have been a mantle, as if she was wrapping webs of dream on tree trunks. One day a Jew came to the city who was neither young nor old. Around his neck hung a sign that said: "Jew son of Jew, tortured and saved, please help this mute man who saw horror and returned from it," and it was signed by five well-known rabbis. Rebecca saw him walking in the street from the door of her workshop and the Jews read the sign, looked into his eyes where dread was frozen, tried to approach, and he repelled. Rebecca put on one of the wedding gowns she had just finished sewing and went outside with her assistant. Her dress dazzled the man's eyes. He came to her as if some force were drawing him to her. Tears flowed from his eyes and melted immediately. She saw Secret Charity and took pity on her father. The gown she wore was the gown of the daughter of Rabbi Yakub the Mountain. The stranger entered her workshop and the assistant brought him a glass of water. He looked at Rebecca and she felt he saw through her. The rhythm of his movements was like the melody that would bubble up in her when she sewed. Thus she understood that the man knew the melody of the holy books and the combinations of letters he may have inherited from her father. Since he wanted to speak he opened his mouth wide but no sound came out and then he again drank the water he'd been given. Rebecca, who had put on the wedding gown that wasn't hers, said: I'll call you Secret Charity after my father, his memory for a blessing, and the stranger nodded as if to say: that was, is, and will be my name. As a sign of gratitude, he fixed on her a tranquil look whose dread was dimmed for a moment; the look had a boldness that shook the folds of her gown and for the first time in her life she felt her body cling to the gown she was wearing, his look was demanding, soft and without pressure, and she saw his bitter despair, quiet and sure of himself. After they married they moved to our city to be close to her father's grave. She left as Secret Charity and returned as Secret Charity.
On the day she returned the man started speaking. He stood at the grave of Rebecca's father and suddenly words came into his mouth. At first he stammered, then he spoke fluently. Since for many years he hadn't talked, he couldn't tell exactly what had happened to him and after he mourned for the fate of the nation, he started seeing his wife with the same eyes others had seen her and he started longing for her. But he knew how to muffle his longing to intensify the malice and terror she sought in him. She gave him two living children and two dead ones. The two living ones were Rebecca and Joseph de la Rayna. She got special permission to name her daughter after herself, and she named her son Joseph de la Rayna. She wanted her son to be named after a bold sinner. Her son studied fervently with the persecutors of the messiah, refused to think of messianism that still filled hearts with savagery, lusted for the restrictions he imposed on himself and changed his name to Joseph Rayna and after he touched his mother and felt that like everybody else he also saw her as a naked woman, he went to another city, studied with a strict and handsome rabbi who spat whenever the name of those abominations was brought up by one of his students and forbade Joseph to mention his grandfather Secret Charity and his mother. Joseph married a young woman who brought a considerable dowry and a debilitating kidney disease and served as rabbi in a small town where he almost reluctantly inducted young men into the army of the Lord, put sticks in their hands, and even though he knew he was committing a grave sin, made them swear to wage heroic war and also added a formula of miracles he had learned from his rabbi; they had to learn to be defeated heroically, he said, but in his heart he dissented. When he was scolded for the sticks he gave the lads, he claimed he had a dream and in it he was told what to do, and he repented and to the day she died he didn't see his mother who poured into his soul the savage passions he wanted so much to suppress in himself. His wife groaned in her illness, his children were thin and pale, and he'd go to his sister Rebecca, sit with her, hold her hand, and fervently speak evil of his mother and his grandfather and say, Mother's damned sorcery. His sister bore in her heart the memory of the nights when they would adjure angels and devils and call on Satan. Since she was also afraid of his passions, she married a man so short and anonymous she could barely have remembered his name if he hadn't been killed a year later by a group of bored priests when she was in the last months of her pregnancy. She gave birth to a son and sat with her brother who had meanwhile become a widower and asked on what day did Our Rabbi Moses die? When she found out that Moses died on the seventh of Adar, she measured the days and the hours, went to her mother, asked her to sew her a beautiful wedding gown and her mother didn't ask a thing and sat down and sewed her daughter a wedding gown, and on the seventh of Adar at one o'clock in the morning, Rebecca, daughter of Rebecca Secret Charity, died wearing the wedding gown her mother made her and that looked like a shroud more than a gown. Rebecca Secret Charity lived many more years, her husband died as he stood at the window and saw somebody who may have been the messiah Frank whom Rebecca's father once saw at that window riding a horse. Even as she was dying, Rebecca looked as beautiful as in her youth. A thin channel of malice was stretched on her face. She didn't die like other people but became transparent, and one day she smiled to herself, lay down in bed, and died. In her death she looked like a dead butterfly stuck with a pin on white paper. That was a winter day and rain sprayed and her son, who stood next to her, wept, and when he wept people saw the tears stop and stand still in the air between his eyes and the open grave. Jews said they didn't remember such an event since Secret Charity stopped the moon for three whole nights. The tears, said the Jews, looked like wooden birds; both birds and fixed, not moving. From the grave rose a tune. People thought it was the song of the choir of the Temple. Not far from there, Secret Charity was buried standing up. On his tombstone stood a crow, and that's how Secret Charity could have seen his daughter's grave.