A Slow Fuse

Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka. “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air for certain customers, the pigeons erupting.” Handsome, clever, but with little actual schooling, she, a Jewess, kept a shop in Moscow, stocking horse- and battle-gear, bustling all day long. Powders, braided with his laboring breath, still prickle inside his nostrils; like the wayward flickers cast by lazily swimming, naked limbs, leathers polished, buckles, gleam; and the oats banked in their bins, heavy August winds drowsed in them, at one glance, a single sniffing, bloom; the harnesses and bells, by gaslight starred, send out appeals, while sleighs collect for midnight junkets. He smitten with it all, like those officers of the Czar who, admiring her wit, her seasoned gaiety, forever jammed the shop. “Even the city’s metropolitan, young despite his full, black robes, took to dropping in on her, his jagged, bushy beard awag with chat. One balmy summer evening, I remember, the three of us, laughter brimming like wine (he turned his glass to the lessened light), relaxed in her snug flat. The next morning at breakfast, talk going on as if we’d never stop”— he, a startled look lit on his face, breaking in upon himself, exclaims, the pigeons crackling through the air— “My God, he spent the night with her!” He, sipping the last drop, sits back, as much as he’s amazed amused to see this special virtue of old age, the oats ripening only in slow time.