42. I Become "Famous"

My good friends in Rakov were already wondering why they never saw me any more. They were baffled, and couldn’t understand what had happened to me. My mysterious activities were a particular item of speculation among daughters of the well-to-do, who looked for any kind of diversion to help pass the grey, monotonous winter days in that quiet, gloomy village. They somehow felt that this strange, shy boy, with his curly head of hair and with those dreamy eyes of his, must be hiding some kind of deep secrets, which they were determined to uncover....

They started to look for all kinds of ways to get close to me, and thereby catch a glimpse inside my "holy of holies". To this end, they made friends my landlady’s daugher, an odinary working-class girl whom they had, until then, only known from a distance. They starting showing up at the house, supposedly to spend time with the daughter....and in the meantime, to catch a glimpse, to steal a peek, to perk up their ears...looking and listening for whatever sounds might come out from the other side of that door, from the locked room where I had my place of refuge. Seeing, however, that from the "other side" there came not even a peep, they would try with a romantic Russian song, a longing melody, to see if they could lure me from my solitude.

But all this time, the mysterious boy was sitting locked up in his room, spinning his magical words from his heart, by the light of a small lamp. He never suspected and never guessed, that on the other side of that thin wall, female eyes were lying in wait for him...

And so passed several evenings...until one, from among that group, one girl....a hot-blooded one, with long black hair, and a pair of big, playful eyes, worked up enough courage to do something. WIth soft, quiet steps, like a cat, she came up to my room, opened the door, crept up behind my back, an managed to blurt out in one breath:

"Excuse me please, what are you writing?"

I quickly spun around...my astonished, confused glance met with a pair of smiling, long-lashed black eyes. I stood up suddenly in the tiny room, thereby bumping into her proud, firm bosom...like two doves! Her warm breath seemed to set my face on fire...

I stood there dumbfounded, my mouth wide open, not knowing what to do with myself or wth my un-expected guest. The cramped room grew unusually quiet. You could hear my heart pounding so heard that any minute it would leap out of my chest. In fact, at that moment, I must have appeared thoroughly comical in her eyes. Her cherry-red lips parted, and in the half-dark room her white teeth glistened. She made a motion with her hand to the one-and-only chair, from which I had so suddenly jumped to my feet, and asked casually:

"May I?"

I was just realizing that so far, not one intelligent word had passed my lips...quickly, I held out the chair for her, like a real cavalier, and said with a very polite tone:

"Oh, excuse me, Miss....please have a seat".

And I myself turned around awkwardly, looking for a where I could sit down myself. Finally, I found the only other place to sit, on the corner of my iron bed. The moment I sat down, the bedsprings gave off such a wild screech...I don't know if I was more embarassed or terrified! I found myself sitting right opposite the girl so that my knees bumped into hers. At that moment I felt an electric currentpassing through my whole body. It suddenly got hot and sticky, so I could hardly breathe. Once again, there descended upon the small room an un-earthly silence.

Finally she broke the silence. She leaned closer to me, as though she had long been a good friend of mine. She lifted her eyes towards me, and with a gentle, confident voice, started to ask me, if I wouldn’t read to her from my writings, my essays....

And although I had long been waiting for someone to read my writings, even though I had been dying to hear the sound of own words, now that the moment was at hand, I felt as though I were standing before a judge who held my fate in his hands. I hesitated, struggling with the choice: to read, or not to read? But when my embarrassed glance met with her black, long-lashed eyes, I had no strength left to resist.

It wasn't long before I was known throughout the whole village of Rakov as "the young writer-poet", who would some day be world-famous....and furthermore, the whole village of Rakov would one day be proud, that on her soil the Muse had first appeared to this "great artist". For a while, I was the center of attention among the town intellectuals, the hero of the beautiful daughters of Rakov, as though to irritate my friend, the former Novordoker yeshiva-boy, who regarded himself as the leading "cavalier" in the village, and who considered me to be most backwards in the ways of romance.

 But my un-expected acquaintanceship with this dark-eyed enchantress all but ended in catastrophe for me. Like a dark-haired, magical Lilith, she wanted no less than to take the place of the heavenly daughter...my Muse. And it was clear that for her sake I should become God forbid not a writer, a poet, but instead I should be transformed into an ordinary, week-a-day merchant of grain, pigskin, flax, cloth, and such....just like her father and her older brothers.

But once again, I was rescued by the same capricious fate which had already saved me from more than one disaster. It grabbed me with two strong hands, and hurled me anew on unknown soil. In this way I was saved, in the nick of time, from falling into the love-trap, which that dark-eyed small-town Lilith had spread before my feet.....

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