The Border is not believed to be completed. In the notebooks of the English investigator who accompanied the writer during his final years, certain notes are marked that describe how Joseph Roth delineated aspects of Miss Rosalyn Plinianson that specifically pertain to the development of this passage. It confirms that the woman created her academy by mistake. What the old woman sought to do was the opposite, to free the city of the scourge of dance. She failed to notice that in doing so, she was creating her own space for dance. The notes assert that Joseph Roth indicates that Miss Rosalyn Plinianson wanted to carry out a series of sessions that, feigning dance recitals, would enable, in reality, the construction of a golem, a traditional archetypal figure capable of quashing the invasion they were suffering. That is why she needed dance; she had even expressed it to the reverend MacDougal, her spiritual guide. But as the original pages of Joseph Roth remain lost, little can be done to understand the truth of what went on. It is only known that Miss Rosalyn Plinianson equipped a small property that the realtors Pliniak & Co. had abandoned as useless. That place, hidden behind a rock formation, similar in appearance to the one that saved the brother Abraham Pliniak from the holocaust that ended his village, had been used, during the times of slavery, as a maroon colony. As well as years later as a refuge for clandestine alcohol manufacturers. Rose Plinianson cleaned the premises herself and set up, atop a small table, an old record player that she had been storing in the basement of her home. Next to it she placed a modest collection of records of sacred music that she had bought from a traveling salesman that same afternoon when she’d decided to offer her life to her new religion. They went unused, seeing as precisely when she thought to debut them, the women’s committee, whose organization was still incipient, issued its first decree, prohibiting its members from listening to music of any kind. Rose Plinianson nailed on the door a notice seeking a painter who usually strolled the city. After that, she disrobed and put on a pair of high heels. She stationed herself next to the entryway, awaiting students. She had already left a handful of crumbs on the table, which soon became a mound of mud, with the intent — she later said in a whisper to the reverend Joshua MacDougal — that the disciples make a doll while they learned the dance steps. It serves our purposes to dwell on this point of the narration for the sake of considering the elements put into play by the author throughout these lines. We would have to take into account, in order to understand the meaning behind what Joseph Roth allegedly seeks to explain, the close relationship between mysticism and magic in the history of religions. It would appear that the figure of Rose Plinianson had been created solely to confuse certain theorists, who would never anticipate finding, in a character with the traits of this elderly woman, a teacher character, that is to say, a master of the Great Name of God, as the divine messengers are known in certain orders. Dance, nude body, sacred music, pedagogy, curse (symbolized by the unstoppable avalanche of dance academies). All these elements linked up, further more, in such a way that they only provide one possible exit: the construction of a golem, a mud automaton that possesses a kind of life of its own, capable of saving not only this captured town but the entirety of a religious tradition. Rose Plinianson’s act of switching out the crumbs for mud is, consequently, not arbitrary. The organ music, which begins to emit from the record player, does not seem to be loud enough to call anybody’s attention, the author writes almost immediately, as if attempting not to reveal his true intentions. Any sound is drowned out by that produced by the other academies. That may be why the first day is spent alone. Only after a week does it occur to Rose Plinianson to design some informative sheets to point out the exact place where the sessions will take place. At first she tried to make the maps herself. She traced them out in her living room at home. The mosquitos wouldn’t let her work in peace. She constantly had to spray the insecticide she kept beside her stove. She took two days to finish them. During this time, the newly founded academy remained closed. At a certain point she gave up. With such imperfect maps, nobody would be able to get around the rock formation that surrounded the shed where her academy was located. They were poorly drawn and none of them looked the same. The following morning she awoke early and went out to the street dressed in the habit of Sister Gertrude the Venerated, which she had not worn since her mother’s death. She previously had two holy outfits, that of Sister Gertrude the Venerated and that of Grace the Convert. Rose Plinianson had made her mother, Julia Pliniak, wear the Grace the Convert costume as a shroud. She dressed her when she was already deceased, despite her oaths made not to do so during the throes of death. Rose knew her mother was wrong. Before dying, Joseph Roth expressed ideas more or less similar to those professed by Rose Plinianson. He spoke — before converting to Catholicism himself — of the necessity of abandoning old customs. His speaker, the English investigator who followed him in his final years, transcribed them in the notebook she always carried with her (“a book of notes taken” would be a more precise name). Rose Plinianson was not willing to let her mother burn in the eternal flames of hell. To rectify that error, following the funeral she got rid of her adoptive father’s kippah and his copy of the Torah, with which the man had earned a good portion of his living. But unlike the old woman, Joseph Roth did not have many religious objects with which to part. Upon going out to the streets dressed this way, some neighbors looked at Rose Plinianson with awe. The surveyor who lived next door, the old pharmacist, and the seamstress who had her business on the corner all came out to see her walk by. Some made the sign of the cross at her passing, while, at the same time, they turned their backs to her. It might have been necessary to stop at the point of signing the cross and turning their backs, because this far into the story, evil seems to have lost any meaning. Rose Plinianson knew where she was going. She wanted to find the painter who had made the signs on the boardwalk. She knew of potential places where she could find him. More than once she had seen him in the city square drawing the surrounding trees. Or on the beach, ecstatic, facing the waves for hours on end. But where he was most often to be found was on the hill that rose above the central bay. She walked there. Just as she predicted, the painter was there in front of his easel. The palette lay on the ground. The painter therefore had to crouch down every so often to continue the seascape he worked on. That plateau was one of the few places that generations past remembered. From there the old highway could be gazed upon. As well as the beach and the boardwalk. You would have to walk to the edge of the esplanade for the modern buildings to come into view. From that spot two buildings were visible, whose windows shone bright with the sun. All its floors were occupied by dance academies. The rooftops served as enormous dance floors. From the hill the town could be seen in all its splendor. One could never be sure of its true dimensions. From a certain spot it seemed to be a modestly important city, and from another, merely a forgotten ghost town, nothing more. It was situated among farmlands planned out by the area’s colonists who, since the earliest times, had considered themselves obligated to decimate the native inhabitants of the region. Abraham Pliniak’s deals had been with those colonists, who over time had become a sort of aboriginal people. One member of the women’s committee knew that the original settlers, the original inhabitants, had based their social life on the worship of dance. Rose Plinianson interrupted the painter without an introduction. She had little concern for how engrossed he may have been in his work. The artist reacted, leaving a blob on the cloud he was painting. Rose Plinianson asked to go to his house to make the maps. She knew that, in his state, that man could not refuse her offer. It is not known — there is nothing recorded in the English investigator’s notebook regarding this detail — whether or not Joseph Roth was conscious of how unusual the meeting was, on that esplanade, between an elderly woman dressed in a religious habit and a man in the midst of a creative trance. Without a word, the painter began to pack his tools. They included a small wooden box. He put away the palette and brushes, after having washed them with a liquid that he poured from a bottle. He then covered the unfinished painting with blotting paper. He then put the canvas and the paper under his arm. Rose Plinianson asked herself how, taking into account his physical features, he could carry so many things. She wanted to help him, at the very least with the easel. The painter agreed and they took it apart together. Rose Plinianson put on comfortable shoes. Maybe they weren’t specifically made for the elderly, but they were made with worn leather. The painter began to walk quickly. He walked a few steps ahead of her. They went down to the city together. Rose Plinianson wasn’t bothered by the ever-approaching sounds of the academies. She even tried to make sense of them. That practice was similar to the one she attempted when she was silent beneath her wall clock. She always ended up finding some melody. In Korsiakov, before going to sleep, Jacob Pliniak grew accustomed to performing a parallel activity. When his wife Julia left him alone in bed to go tend to the tavern with the young Anselm, he lulled himself to sleep listening to the old clock’s tick-tock. In those moments he recreated in his mind the song that every Orthodox mother used, at least until the sixteenth century, to put her children to sleep. A thousand-year-old song accompanied by the rhythm of the clock was perhaps motive enough to ask a series of questions: Where could Jacob Pliniak have gotten that clock from, which lulled him to sleep when his wife left him alone? And if we start to ask questions of that sort, why did his wife, during her period of infidelity, insist on leaving clues so clearly pointing to her relationship with the young Anselm? Along another line of thought it would be fitting to ask about the possible link between Jacob Pliniak’s interest in the pogroms and his probable hindrance from having children. It has to do with questions whose answers will perhaps never be found, although perhaps the rest of the narration can shed some light. As is known, the painter walked ahead. Rose Plinianson followed one pace behind. While she tried to avoid tripping over the rocks that covered the face of the plateau, she thought of suggesting to the painter that aside from the drawings of the map he also create illustrations for the lessons she thought to offer. Moments later she stopped in her tracks. They had already reached the urban zone. She suddenly placed the easel in the middle of the sidewalk and asked the artist to meet with her in the shed an hour later. Before taking her leave she asked him to bring, aside from his tools for painting, two-dozen white eggs. It was then that she went to visit, after not having done so in several weeks, her old religion teacher, Reverend Joshua MacDougal. They had met years prior, when she was a sort of old little girl and her adoptive father, Jacob Pliniak, had recently disappeared. In those times, they spent long hours seated in front of the church door. As they heard the music from the academies, they seemed to ask themselves how it had been possible for the adopted daughter, Rose Plinianson, to have become the honorable madam, Rose Plinianson, just like that. More than once they questioned, likewise, the true existence of a town like Korsiakov, which Jacob Pliniak spoke so much about up until his final immersion.