In Nissen Piczenik’s house, the beautiful threaders often worked far into the night, sometimes even past midnight. Once they had gone home, the trader himself sat down with his stones, or rather, his animals. First, he examined the strings the girls had threaded; then he counted the heaps of corals that were as yet unsorted and the heaps of those that had been sorted according to type and size; then he began sorting them himself, and with his strong and deft and reddish-haired fingers, he felt and smoothed and stroked each individual coral. There were some corals that were worm-eaten. They had holes in places where no holes were required. The sloppy Leviathan couldn’t have been paying attention. And reproachfully, Nissen Piczenik lit a candle, and held a piece of red wax over the flame until it melted, and then dipping a fine needle into the wax, he sealed the wormholes in the stone, all the while shaking his head, as though not comprehending how such a powerful god as Jehovah could have left such an irresponsible fish as the Leviathan in charge of all the corals.
Sometimes, out of pure pleasure in the stones, he would thread corals himself until the sky grew light and it was time for him to say his morning prayers. The work didn’t tire him at all, he felt strong and alert. His wife was still under the blankets, asleep. He gave her a curt, indifferent look. He didn’t love her or hate her, she was merely one of the many threaders who worked for him, though she was less attractive now than most of the others. Ten years he had been married to her, and she had borne him no children — when that alone was her function. He wanted a fertile woman, fertile as the sea on whose bed so many corals grew. His wife, though, was like a dried-up lake. Let her sleep alone, as many nights as she wanted. According to the law, he could divorce her. But by now he had become indifferent to wives and children. Corals were what he loved. And there was in his heart a vague longing which he couldn’t quite explain: Nissen Piczenik, born and having lived all his life in the middle of a great landmass, longed for the sea.
Yes, he longed for the sea on whose bed the corals grew — or rather, as he was convinced, disported themselves. Far and wide there was no one to whom he could speak of his longing; he had to carry it pent up in himself, as the sea carries its corals. He had heard about ships and divers, sailors and sea captains. His corals arrived, still smelling of the sea, in neatly packed crates from Odessa, Hamburg, and Trieste. The public scribe in the post office did his correspondence for him. Nissen Piczenik carefully examined the colorful stamps on the letters from his suppliers abroad before throwing away the envelopes. He had never left Progrody. The town didn’t have a river, not so much as a pond, only swamps on all sides, where you could hear the water gurgle far below the green surface without being able to see it. Nissen Piczenik imagined some secret communication between the buried water in the swamps and the mighty waters of the sea — and that deep down at the bottom of the swamp, there might be corals, too. He knew that if he ever said as much, he would be a laughingstock all over town. And so he kept his silence, and didn’t talk about his theories. Sometimes he dreamed that the Great Sea — he didn’t know which one, he had never seen a map, and so where he was concerned, all the world’s seas were just the Great Sea — would one day flood Russia, the part of it where he lived himself. That way, the sea, which he had no hope of reaching, would come to him, the strange and mighty sea, with the immeasurable Leviathan on the bottom, and all its sweet and bitter and salty secrets.
The road from the small town of Progrody to the little railway station where trains called just three times a week led through the swamps. And even when Nissen Piczenik wasn’t expecting any packages of coral, even on days when there weren’t any trains, he would walk to the station, or rather, to the swamps. He would stand often for an hour or more at the edge of the swamp and listen reverently to the croaking of the frogs, as if they could tell him of life at the bottom of the swamp, and sometimes he felt he had taken their meaning. In winter, when the swamp froze over, he even dared to take a few steps on it, and that gave him a peculiar delight. The moldy swamp smell seemed to convey something of the powerful briny aroma of the sea, and to his eager ears the miserable glugging of the buried waters was transformed into the roaring of enormous green-blue breakers.
In the whole small town of Progrody there was no one who knew what was going on in the soul of the coral merchant. All the Jews took him for just another one like themselves. This man dealt in cloth, and that one in kerosene; one sold prayer shawls, another soaps and wax candles, and a third, kerchiefs for farmers’ wives and pocket knives; one taught the children how to pray, another how to count, and a third sold kvas and beans and roasted maize kernels. And to all of them Nissen Piczenik seemed one of themselves — with the only difference that he happened to deal in coral. And yet — you will see — he was altogether different.
II
HIS CUSTOMERS WERE both rich and poor, regular and occasional. Among his rich customers were two local farmers. One of them, Timon Semyonovitch, was a hop grower, and every year when the buyers came down from Nuremberg and Zatec and Judenburg, he made a number of profitable deals. The other farmer was Nikita Ivanovitch. He had no fewer than eight daughters, whom he was marrying off one after the other, and all needed corals. The married daughters — to date there were four of them — a month or two after their weddings gave birth to children of their own — more daughters — and these too required corals, though they were only infants, to ward off the Evil Eye.
The members of these two families were the most esteemed guests in Nissen Piczenik’s house. For the daughters of these farmers, their sons-in-law and their grandchildren, the merchant kept a supply of good brandy in reserve, homemade brandy flavored with ants, dried mushrooms, parsley, and centaury. The ordinary customers had to be content with ordinary shop-bought vodka. For in that part of the world there was no purchasing anything without a drink. Buyer and seller drank to the transaction, that it might bring profit and blessing to both parties. There were also heaps of loose tobacco in the apartment of the coral merchant, lying by the window, wrapped in damp blotting paper to keep it fresh. For customers didn’t come to Nissen Piczenik the way people go into a shop, merely to buy the goods, pay, and leave. The majority of the customers had covered many versts, and to Nissen Piczenik they were more than customers, they were also his guests. They drank with him, smoked with him, and sometimes even ate with him. The merchant’s wife prepared buckwheat kasha with onions, borscht with sour cream, she roasted apples and potatoes, and chestnuts in the autumn. And so the customers were not just customers, they were guests of Nissen Piczenik’s house. Sometimes, while they were hunting for suitable corals, the farmers’ wives would join in the singing of the threaders; then they all would sing together, and even Nissen Piczenik would hum to himself, and in the kitchen his wife would beat time with a wooden spoon. Then, when the farmers returned from the market or from the inn to pick up their wives and pay for their purchases, the coral merchant would be obliged to drink brandy or tea with them, and smoke a cigarette. And all the old customers would kiss the merchant on both cheeks like a brother.
Because once we have got a drink or two inside us, all good honest men are our brothers, and all fair women our sisters — and there is no difference between farmer and merchant, Jew and Christian; and woe to anyone who says otherwise!