Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780060529703
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2002-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

been illuminated by a wink of lightning that night of Yankel’s death, who had explained to her the nature of her first period, who had awoken early and returned late only to provide for her, who wouldn’t lay a finger on her but would too often impart the might of his fist, now looked eighty.

His hair had grayed around the ears and fallen out on top. Pulsing veins had risen to the surface of his prematurely wrinkled hands. His stomach had dropped. His breasts were larger than her own, which is to say little of their size, but volumes of how much it hurt Brod to see them.

She persuaded him to change his name for the second time. Perhaps this would confuse the Angel of Death when He came to take the Kolker away. (The inevitable is, after all, inevitable.) Perhaps He could be tricked into thinking the Kolker was someone he was not, just as the Kolker himself was tricked. So Brod named him Safran, after a lipstick passage she remembered with longing from her father’s ceiling. (And it was this Safran for whom my grandfather, the kneeling groom, was named.) But it didn’t work. Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran’s condition worsened, the years continued to pass in days, and his grief left him too weak even to rub his wrist with enough strength over the blade in his head to end his own life.

Not long after their exile to the rooftops, the Wisps of Ardisht realized that they would soon run out of matches to light their beloved cigarettes. They kept a chalk-line count on the side of the tallest chimney. Five hundred. The next day three hundred. The next day one hundred. They rationed them, burned them down to the striker’s fingers, trying to light at least thirty cigarettes with each. When they were down to twenty matches, lighting became a ceremony. By ten, the women were crying. Nine. Eight. The clan leader dropped the seventh off the roof by accident, and proceeded to throw his own body after it in shame. Six.

Five. It was inevitable. The fourth match was blown out by a breeze — a gross oversight by the new clan leader, who also plunged to his death, although his nosedive was not of his own choosing. Three: We will die without them. Two: It’s too painful to go on. And then, in the moment of deepest desperation, a grand idea emerged, devised by a child, no less: simply make sure that there is always someone smoking. Each cigarette can be lit from the previous one. As long as there is a lit cigarette, there 136

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