DANILOKIS
109
another meeting, again in three months' time and at the tavern, and
sent Yeshua away with a list of books that included a handbook of
Hebrew orthography.
On the occasion of their third encounter, in February 1893, the
Master leafed through the manuscript with his divining-rod fingers
and saw, to his horror, that his suspicions had been well-founded:
the spelling error on page 72 had been corrected, but the manuscript
was otherwise intact. Driven by a sudden feeling of contrition and,
possibly, sympathy (because he realized or at least sensed that by his
example he had transformed an unfortunate lay person into a more
unfortunate Hasid and that there was no way out, no turning back),
the Master picked up the manuscript and went off with it. He spent
all that night studying
The Road to Canaan,
whose futility and sterility
reminded him of his own error: had he, on that night nine months
before, followed his ethical principle instead of his poetic one
(though who can tell where the exact border between them lies!), he
would not have had on his conscience a futile human existence he
was consequently forced by moral law to save from the abyss on
whose edge it now stood; and had that once healthy young man not
been infected by his teachings, no matter how misinterpreted or
misunderstood, he would not have sat up at night over an absurd
text written in a large, careful hand, a text informed by a vain desire
to justify the absurdity of existence - or the premonition of its absur–
dity-by a creative act of any sort . In a flash of illumination, Ben
Haas apprehended that it was his own vanity that had led him to this
pass, his vanity, his poetic eccentricity, and his passion for polemics;
that is, a desire to prove to his disciples that the story of Pygmalion
lacked the moral force of myth and was merely a common, scan–
dalous anecdote that had been endowed with the illusion of myth.
So as not to reject
The Road to Canaan
out of hand and abandon
the unfortunate Yeshua Krochal in a dangerous impasse at the age
of thirty-three (Frankel is correct when he discerns in the cryp–
tography the influence of cabalistic symbolism on Ben Haas), the
man called the Master purged the manuscript of everything in the
image of its author, in the image of his vanity, the only trait holding
his frail being together; he excised the ephemeral reflections, as in a
stagnant pool, ofYeshua Krochal's pockmarked face, the blue circles
under his eyes, his lethargic body; with a nimble pen he rid the manu–
script of malicious allusions to contemporary events and of biblical
disgressions, such as the one about Lot's wife, in whom he recog-
