Translation

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Grushka, Reesa

When his heavy body, separate from the light one he'd created to replace it, was cleaned and dressed, he was wheeled to his study, and his chair was placed comfortably behind his desk. The sun through the window behind him was cold and brilliant. He was dressed in cool tones, a brown that was almost blue, with a dark red thread near invisible beneath the fabric. Inside the shell of his clothing, and then of the skull that encased his soft, grey brain, the scent of his son rose and opened for a moment like steam from the crust of hot bread, and he loved him, his son, his Raphael. While Rosenzweig's own name struck him as empty, emerging from nowhere, his son had been named for the connection with tradition that his father willed for him. Some days Rosenzweig wrote several letters in a row for Raphael, letters that would wait until the boy was old enough to understand them, and would stand in for the voice that Rosenzweig himself had never been able to offer him.

When the doctor came mid-morning, the curtains were drawn and Rosenzweig's shirt was unbuttoned down to his navel. He knew the doctor wouldn't need the stethoscope to hear the damp grind of the pneumonia taking its course. The doctor offered medicine for the coughing, but it would be a mistake to swallow it, Rosenzweig felt-he remembered this much from his medical training -because his lungs and heart would certainly collapse under the drug, and if he lived a little longer, it would only be in a state of feverish intoxication. But he must remain clear-headed, because there was the letter to Martin to finish as soon as possible, in order to explain the feeling that God had spoken to him in his father's voice, called his name, and Death had been waiting hours in the shadows by the door he could not turn to see, standing straight and quiet. Vaguely, he heard church bells from the city strike their hours, their clear sound muted by the snow and by the rose curtain draped partially over the study window. Edith flickered before him so that he could not be sure how long she had been there, or whether he had only imagined her, until she reached to smooth his hair back from his face or said a word to him, indistinct words, and between each syllable a strange humming in his ears. If only he could pick up a pen and explain to Martin how the past and present were flickering and crossing like two candle flames reflected in the convex of a spoon, why in his dream he had not felt sad but simply childlike beneath the swelling grid of birds, exposed to phenomena he could no more recreate than understand.

He strained to show Edith that he needed the letter plate, and she brought it towards him. The letters swam and bled together, so Edith began to chant the alphabet, and when she reached the letter that he needed, he blinked twice. Edith wrote each feeble letter on a small notepad from his desk. "AND NOW IT COMES," she read aloud. In the heat of this effort all the letters he'd ever written settled starchily over the one he was composing for Martin, aggregating to one dense letter of all the ideas and feelings he had ever addressed to the world out there beyond the curtain, snowfall, and quieted bells. "THE POINT OF ALL POINTS." It filled him with a shudder of emotion because now he was writing all the letters, all the ideas he'd ever trained to dance like little dogs, all the words of passion and remorse, and the wit of thirty years of letter-writing wriggled now between the simple words he'd meant for Martin, and all the tenderest words that fogged his eyes when he still was able to rub them clean, words to all the women he had ever loved or failed to love, who had opened themselves to him like museums or fortresses, and bestowed on him the Thou of recognition, practice for the final You which he could already hear forming out of the distant night. "WHICH THE LORD HAS REVEALED TO ME IN MY SLEEP": And then the letters that he'd never written settled over the amalgam of the ones he had, and he was overcome with grief for these.