Joseph Rayna's lips were seared, he couldn't think. All he had left in the world was painted on the amulet around his neck and on the back turned to him. Rachel went into the house, asked the musicians to stop a moment and announced with a choked and giggling laugh that her bridegroom had apparently drunk too much and with all due respect to the guests was already in bed and snoring like a slaughtered bird and please excuse him, and the musicians started playing again and Nehemiah looked into Rachel's eyes and was silent and pale and Rachel went up to her room, shut the door, locked it, lay in her bed and instead of crying, she burst out in a laughter that was quite different from the laughter that choked her before; she laughed so wildly she had to bury her head in the blanket.
In the attic of the old house sat Rebecca Sorka. For one moment she turned her face and looked at the handsome man sitting there. She found a sooty old lantern, Joseph gave her matches, and she lit it. He held out the amulet to her. She looked at it a long time and said: That's me? And he said: Yes. She touched his hand and said: You've got a wife in bed, Joseph, and we're brother and sister. Because she knew Joseph's face so well and he knew her face so well, there was no point talking. When they held hands, they felt the guile of the loving couples who had toiled for generations to permeate the two of them with that longing, destruction, and disgrace, the profound and sublime loathing they felt for themselves. The lamplight moved in the wind winding in the frozen room. Outside the snow went on falling. Rebecca said: Now go to Rachel, tomorrow night I'll wait for you at the bridge.
The next day she waited for him wrapped in a coat. The cold was intense. Rebecca told Joseph about the river. Holding hands and walking along the path covered with blackened snow, they felt that their distress didn't humiliate them enough. I don't want any child from you, Joseph, said Rebecca, why did you come and kill the river for me?
Joseph returned to Rachel, who knew how to accept him with untormented betrayal. And the next day, Joseph and Rebecca went to the small station on the outskirts of the city. Trains would slow down when they passed our town, only one small train a day would stop at the station that didn't even have a name. After the big curve, beyond the poplars, the trains would speed up and fly to unimagined distances that Joseph knew and Rebecca didn't. When Rebecca was a fourteen-year-old girl she saved the son of the stationmaster from being trampled. She didn't mean to save the child. The guard was a drunken lame Ukrainian called Jewish Death. The ant has five noses, said the Ukrainian to Rebecca and Joseph who had come to the station and gone up to the room of the bats, upstairs, and lovers he said, have only one limb. Then he sat in his chair, laughed, and drank his brandy. Joseph and Rebecca sat upstairs and held hands. Downstairs, the slow trains moved and the Ukrainian would bring them cookies and wine. A few days later, Rachel came. She found the two lovers holding hands and looking at one another. To translate the distress of the silence, she moved toward them stunned, hunched up in the pincers of their hands holding one another, and said: What dependence, Rebecca! That silence! And she put her head on Rebecca's lap and stroked her own womb and looked into Joseph's face and her cold heart was calm. Rebecca looked toward Joseph's son in Rachel's womb and thought of the dead children she had packed in the suitcase. Joseph looked at Rachel trying in vain to remember who she was. Rebecca pushed Rachel off her and said to Joseph: If you really love me, give your wife what she deserves, I have to know… Joseph said: I want you, but she laughed in his face, felt Rachel's womb, and said: First be a father of your son, beget him for me, too, and she left. Rachel got up and stood facing him. She said to him: You don't have to pretend anymore, Joseph. But to save something that died in me, at least embrace what you left in me. They hugged and then Rebecca shouted: I've got to see love, and they hugged again and then Joseph saw Rebecca in front of his eyes and was with her. Rebecca stood in the next room in the window bay overlooking the tracks and the avenue of poplars and looked at them. With all her might, she pitied Rachel's love for Joseph, but along with love a profound contempt was anchored in her that had always been embedded in her and now found a correct spelling. She said to herself: an ancient contempt came to me from a distant grave, and then the river laughed in her.
And the city concocted rumors. The mothers of Rachel and Rebecca locked their houses, put down the shutters, sat in Rachel's house, and wept. Together they sent their husbands to the rabbi of the island, delegates went out urgently to sages in other cities, and Nehemiah Schneerson leading his group of youngsters would try not to hear, not to know, to console himself with love of the Land of Israel, and at that time the three would walk in the forest, pick blackberries and red berries, and in an abandoned hut that Rebecca knew from her torments in the forest, Joseph and Rebecca would love in silence, Joseph trying to embrace Rebecca, press her to him, kiss her, and she let him but only a little and Rachel pleads with Rebecca to give Joseph herself and Rebecca despises Rachel and says, Why? Why?
One night, Rebecca's father came into her room and hit her; she slipped away from him and escaped. Rabbis wrote excommunication decrees and Rebecca returned to her hut. Rachel sat outside and Joseph was inside and made a fire of pieces of wood he had previously gathered. Rebecca let him undress her and stood before him naked. The fire enhanced the beauty of her body. She shut her eyes and let him stroke her. She didn't want to see the sight of her body in his eyes. I won't allow any love to confound the high price I set on the beauty I feel, she said. Shutting her eyes she could have been destroyed by gods Joseph said were in another location, and returned to the grave of her disappointments that were always her life itself. I'm part of the night, witches burned in fire, sleep, dreams, the pallbearers of Rebecca Secret Charity, she said, and Joseph was willing to die just to be borne by her, but he was afraid of the lofty words buzzing in his temples. Rebecca knew there wasn't even one corpse who would be ready for love like Joseph. Suddenly she abandoned her body, a wild joy she didn't know except from dreams came to her, Joseph's hands came, his body came close to her, blood started flowing when he came close to her, seasonal blood, she said, seasonal blood, Joseph, and he didn't see a thing, a forbidden woman, said Rebecca. And suddenly a tremor went through Joseph, Rebecca laughed in his face, he saw the laugh, hit her, and she dropped down, laughing, Rachel looked on hypnotized, and the blood still flowed and Rachel thought to herself: Who do I love, Joseph or Rebecca, and she knew that the hatred she felt for them was a kind of irreparable love. So she didn't know who she wanted to kill, and she hugged her son in her womb and called him to herself Secret Glory and Rebecca dreams, despicable in her own eyes, hugged in Joseph's arms, looked into his eyes and he is in her and her blood flows, and she gives birth to dead sons, all of them in her suitcase, and he still doesn't see the blood, and then Rebecca gets up and Joseph is still writhing on the ground, and she says: You're a fool, Joseph, you're the most beautiful man I ever met in my life, you kill you in me, and she started getting dressed. When she was dressed, Rachel came in and Joseph looked at her with the pain of his tormented body. Rebecca looked at Joseph and Rachel and they looked so distant, so threatening in their soft words.