142
PARTISAN REVIEW
shot up, and of the five hundred gulden only an ash remained.
Well, what purpose
will
be
served by telling you what he said
and what she answered? You can imagine it yourself. I leaped back
into Reb Paltiel's beard, and stayed there until-and I hate to have
to
tell you this--he was forced to take a sack and a stick and go
begging. Try to hang a flea! Try to run away from bad luck! Try
to figure out where the evil spirit is! . . .
When I returned to the Black Mountains and told Asmodeus
what I had done, he pinched my ear, and repeated the story to
his
wife, Lilith, and she laughed with such abandon that the desert rang
with the echoes of her glee, and she, herself, the Queen of Satan's
Court, tweaked my nose:
"You're really a first rate little devil!" she said to me. "Some
day you'll do big things!"
II
Where the heavens are copper and the earth iron, on a
field of toadstools, in a ruined outhouse, on a dung heap,
in a pot without a bottom, on a Sabbath night during the
winter solstice, not to be thought of now, nor later, nor at
night, Amen Selah!
The false prophecies of my mistress, Lilith, have been
fulfilled. I am no longer an imp, but a full-grown devil-and a
male, at that. I can disguise myself as a human, play my malicious
pranks, and make men's eyes deceive them. True, I can be driven
off by a holy spell, but these days who knows Cabala? The little
rabbis can pour salt on my tail. Their amulets are nothing but
waste paper to me; their charms make me laugh. More than once
I've left a souvenir of devil-dung in one of their skull-caps, or tied
knots in their beards.
Yes, I do frightful things. I'm a demon among demons, an
evil one among evil ones. One moonlit night I turned myself into
a sack of salt and lay down by the roadside. Soon a wagon came
along. Seeing the full sack, the driver stopped his horse, jumped out
and hoisted me onto the cart. Who wouldn't take something for
nothing? I was heavy as lead, and the ignoramus could hardly lift
me. As soon as I was in the wagon, he opened the mouth of the
sack and took a lick--evidently he wanted to fmd out whether I was
