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When Samuel's mother went to the store to buy bread and flowers, she'd look at the trees or the display window as if those too were paintings by some genius artist. Her devotion to the beauty and glory of art was so great that she was afraid to deal with them in public. So as not to shame what she secretly called: that muse!
The universe, as she revealed to Joseph later on, chose to crush in herself her own great talent, a talent she was forbidden to waste for the pittance of small inauthentic theaters with an audience smelling of popcorn and fried onions. If only I had been born in Paris, she said.
The great love affair of her life began like every war, quite by chance. It was of course a moment that would later be described as unforgettable, and was preceded by steps that of course could not be changed. She was stand ing there in a flower shop and, as she put it, smelling the aroma of the distant rivers that watered those delicate flowers when Joseph Rayna, the aging lover of women, saw her reflection in the window and began wooing her with a courtesy that was splendid, wicked, but so tired it looked elegant and theatrical to her. He bought her all the flowers in the display window and five boys had to carry home the baskets of flowers and at the sight of them she laughed a wild laugh, which this time-uncriticized- came from within herself. The boys bore the flowers with lockjaw discipline. The secret had to be equally elegant and concealed. After acting Electra and Antigone all her life before walls crammed with plates and pictures, now she stood at the flowers and waited for a love letter from Joseph Rayna. Abrom Mendelstein, who would later be shot and laid diagonally on top of his two brothers and his father, with whom he would dig the grave, lent Samuel's mother his room. Since he couldn't carry on a real affair, he loved to see love flourishing in his friends. He was a teacher of Akkadian and Aramaic and his wife Frumka was such a free woman that she had had three lovers by then, and she didn't make love to them because of firm reluctance to yield to feelings that didn't throb in her. She belonged to a small progressive and stormy faction that seceded from the central section, and she also seceded from the general party in the Warsaw committee, whose sixty-two members split into six different trends and once a week, Samuel's mother was lent the small apartment and Joseph would arrive gasping from all the stairs he had to climb.
With him, Samuel's mother could declaim in French drenched in ancient and sweet idioms the ancient Medea, full of evil and passion, and plot against herself. In her late youth, as the mother of Samuel, whose miserable father was Joseph, she began to sing, and was cheerful even though a bit vague from so much life that had landed on her and she thought quite a bit of things she had seen as if they were written in a book and not really real.
Searching his father's naked body before he put it on the heap of corpses to be burned, Samuel was amazed at the sight of his parents' surprising nakedness. He succumbed to the profound feeling of disgust and gratitude when he found the diamond.
Lionel Secret once asked his mother Racheclass="underline" Who was my father? And Rachel Brin, Rayna, now Blau, said: I was married to a man named Nathan Secret, he died, I came to America because my friend Rebecca kept talking about the trees dripping gold of America. They didn't drip gold and she went to Palestine. Until I married Saul Blau who started selling his shirts, I worked hard. Today our trees are all right, she said.
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Lionel Secret, who was once called Secret Glory, was a frightened child and at night, to fall asleep he would sing Schubert lieder to himself and until the age of eleven, his voice was thin as a girl's. Rachel had two daughters and two sons with Saul Blau and Lionel grew up to be a tall fellow with an ascetic handsome face, his hair was black, somebody said he looked like a butterfly trapped and proud at the same time. A dimple of eternal pondering was set into his right cheek and made him look determined, but also thoroughly confused.
When the war broke out, Lionel enlisted and after training in England, he was sent to Europe and for seven days he shot at an enemy whose precise location was confused by the maps. When the mistake was discovered, half his battalion was taken prisoner, and the remaining soldiers stopped shooting at the empty hay loft and waited for Lionel, who was familiar with the impressive parades of the brown shirts on York Avenue, near his house, and he called to his comrades to flee. Three deigned to join him. They slipped away, lay in the rotten hayloft, and when the Germans came in with their prisoners, Lionel prepared an attack like the game he had once played in summer camp where he was assigned the role of the Indian. More soldiers who had previously thought they had no chance to escape came to help them, destroyed their captors and made their way to brigade headquarters, which had gone astray and was tramping in a direction not only imprecise, but also unknown. Lionel managed to deliver his prisoners, earn a salute of honor from an old commander who yearned for more successful and chivalrous wars, fight a few weeks in battles better prepared but still lost, see a British plane brought down, hear its pilot yelling Shema Israel under the parachute the Germans peppered with bullets, engage in diversionary operations in which he taught an aged commander how to smell Germans by the smell of beets and potatoes, and lead a unit of Australians and Canadians to a town completely different from the description in the briefing. In that operation, a British soldier was shot who lobbed a hand grenade and knocked out an armored car with a German brigade com mander and his Polish adjutant, the Pole tried to shoot and in his death throes, he hit a little girl standing there playing with her two dogs, and on its way to the little girl the bullet also passed through Lionel, who managed to destroy the armored car completely and to shoot a last bullet at the Pole, and at the end of all that he was taken to the hospital.
Lionel won two medals, which were awarded him by a brigadier general, who still remembered his fury at the sight of a Jewish tailor bent over in a small street in Liverpool.
By the time Lionel, the fifty-third son of Joseph Rayna, returned to America, he was an officer in the British army. After Pearl Harbor, the United States was forced to enter the war declared on it by the Germans. Lionel commanded a training school in the southern United States. After toiling for half a year training young men, he was sent to Europe to take part in the great Landing. After he was wounded again, this time by shrapnel, he was transferred to intelligence, to the division of interrogation and liaison. Aside from English, Lionel knew Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, French, and Sanskrit, and those languages, at least some of them, along with his profound knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek, helped him considerably to be considered an excellent interrogation officer. And indeed, he was promoted, and in 'forty-five, a few months before the war ended, he attained the rank of major, and General Eisenhower, in a letter of an efficient secretary, thanked him for his contribution to the war effort and awarded him a special medal for outstanding service, bravery, and model behavior.