Istanbul, Kingston Hotel

October 1, 1982

Dear Dorothea,

Our common father will help me, I wrote to you about the last time. My poor little fool. What do you know about our common father? When I was your age I didn't know anything either. But my new years have given me time to think. Do you know who your real father was, my darling? That Pole who had a beard like grass, gave you the name Kwaszniewska, and bravely married your mother, Ana Scholem? I don't think so. Do you recall the man we could not remember? Do you recall an Ashkenaz Scholem, the young man from the picture, with riding glasses on his nose and another pair of glasses in his vest? The one who smoked tea instead of tobacco and whose beautiful hair bit at his photographed ears. Who, they told us, used to say, "We shall be saved by our false victim." Do you recall the brother and first husband of our mother, Ana Scholem, allegedly nee Zakiewcz, Scholem by marriage, and Kwaszniewska by remarriage? And do you know who was the real father of her daughters, of you and me? You've finally remembered after all these years! Tour uncle and you're mother's brother could easily be our father to boot, no? Why couldn't he be the husband of our mother? Now, what do you think of that little equation, my lovely? Maybe Mrs. Scholem never had a man before getting married, and she could hardly remarry as a virgin, could she? Maybe that's why she appears in such strange ways, bringing horror with her memories. Anyway her old age has not been wasted, and I think that, if that's what my mother did, then she was right a thousand times over, and if I can chose a father, then I prefer it to be my mother's brother rather than anyone else. Misfortune, my darling Dorothea, misfortune teaches us to read our lives backwards.

Here in Istanbul I've already met quite a few people. Since I don't want to appear strange in any way, I chat with everyone, as though I were opening my mouth to the rain. There's a colleague here at the conference by the name of Dr. Isailo Suk. He's a medieval archeologist, knows Arabic well; we converse in English and joke in Polish, because he speaks Serbian and says he is the moth of his own clothes. His family has been moving the same tile stove from on house to another for a hundred years now, and he believes that the 21st century will differ from ours in that people will finally rise together against the boredom that today inundates them like putrid water. We carry the stone of boredom on our backs up a huge hill, like Sisyphus, says Dr. Suk. Hopefully the people of the future will stand up and rise against this plague, against boring schools, boring books, against boring music, boring science, boring meetings, and get this boredom out of their lives and work, as demanded by our original father, Adam. He talks like that, partly joking, he drinks wine but won't let his glass be refilled until it's empty, saying that a glass is not an icon lamp to be kept filled before it runs out.

His text books are all over the world, but he is not in a position to use them himself. He has to teach something else at the university. His extraordinary erudition is totally out of proportion with his minor reputation as a scholar. When I said as much to him, he laughed and explained, "The point is, you can either be a great scientist or a great violinist (did you know that all great violinists, with the exception of Paganini, have all been Jews? only if you and your accomplishments are supported and backed by one of the power internationals of today's word. The Hebrew, Islamic, or Catholic international. You belong to one of them. I do not, and that means I belong nowhere. All fish have long since slipped through my fingers."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him in bewilderment.

"That's a paraphrase of a Khazar text that is more than a thousand years old. Judging by the paper you'll be reading us, you most certainly have heard of the Khazars. So why are you so surprised? Have you never come across the Daubmannus edition?"

I must admit he baffled me. Especially with his story about the Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary. If such a dictionary ever did exist, not a single copy, as far as I know, has been preserved.

Dear Dotty, I see the snow in Poland, I see the snowflakes turn into tears in your eyes. I see the bread on the spoke with the wreath of onions, and the birds seeking warmth from the smoke above the houses. Dr. Suk says that time comes from the south and crosses the Danube at Trajan's bridge. There's no snow here, and the clouds are like arrested waves spewing out their fish. Dr. Suk drew my attention to yet another thing. Staying in our hotel is a fine-looking Belgian family, the Van der Spaaks. It's a family such as we never had and I never will have. Father, mother, and son. Dr. Suk calls them "the holy family." Every morning at breakfast I watch them eat; they're well fed, and I heard Mr. Spaak joke that fleas don't go for fat cats. He plays sublimely on a instrument made of white tortoiseshell, and his wife's preoccupation is painting. She paints with her left hand, and very well too, on everything in sight--on towels, glasses, knives, and her son's gloves. The boy is only just four. He wears his hair cut short, is called Manuil, and is forming his first sentences. As soon as he finishes his bun, he comes over to my table and stares at me as though he were in love. His eyes are pebbled with colors, like my own path, and he keeps asking me, "Did you recognize me?" I stroke through his hair as though I were stroking a bird, and he kisses my fingers. He brings me the pipe of his father, who looks like a zaddik, and gives it to me to smoke. He likes all things that are red, blue, and yellow. And he likes foods that are these colors. I was horrified to see that he has a deformity: he has two thumbs on each hand. I never know which hand is his right and which is his left. But he's still oblivious to his appearance and doesn't hide his hands from me, although his parents make him wear gloves. Believe it or not, at moments they look perfectly natural to me and don't bother me at all.

And, indeed, why should anything bother me, when at breakfast this morning I heard that Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia had arrived for the conference. "For the lips of a strange woman to drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. . . ." So says the Bible.