I opened it. It was the Bible. I saw in its pages a great wandering of animals, filling the roads, branching off into processions heading for distant lands. I saw a sky filled with flocks of birds in flight, and an enormous, upturned pyramid on whose flat top rested the Ark.

I raised my reproachful eyes to Father.

"You must know, Father," I cried, "you must. Don't pretend, don't quibble! This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?"

My father averted his eyes.

III

Weeks went by. My excitement abated, then passed, but the image of The Book continued to burn in my memory with a bright flame; a large, rustling Codex, a tempestuous Bible, the wind blowing through its pages, plundering it like an enormous, petal-shedding rose.

My father, seeing that I had become calmer, approached me cautiously one day and said in a tone of gentle suggestion:

"As a matter of fact, there are many books. The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older."

At that time I already held quite a different opinion. I knew then that The Book is a postulate, that it is a goal. I carried upon my shoulders the burden of a great mission. I did not answer; I was scornful and filled with bitter, dogged pride.

In fact, I was already in possession of some tattered remnants of The Book, a few pitiful shreds that by a freak of fate had fallen into my hands. I hid my treasure carefully from everybody, distressed by the utter downfall of that book and knowing that I could not expect anyone to appreciate those mutilated pages. It happened like this:

One day during that winter I surprised Adela tidying up a room. A long-handled brush in her hand, she was leaning against a reading desk, on which lay some papers. I looked over her shoulder, not so much from curiosity as to be close to her and enjoy the smell of her body whose youthful charms had just revealed themselves to my recently awakened senses.

"Look," she said, submitting without protest to my pressing against her. "Is it possible for anyone to have hair reaching down to the ground? I should like to have hair like that."

I looked at the picture. On a large folio page there was a photograph of a rather squat and short woman with a face expressing energy and experience. From her head flowed an enormous stole of hair, which fell heavily down her back trailing its thick ends on the ground. It was an unbelievable freak of nature, a full and ample cloak spun out of the tendrils of hair. It was hard to imagine that its burden was not painful to carry, that it did not paralyze the head from which it grew. But the owner of this magnificence seemed to bear it proudly, and the caption printed under the picture told the history of that miracle, beginning with the words: "I, Anna Csillag, born at Karlovice in Moravia, had a poor growth of hair. ..."

It was a long story, similar in construction to the story of Job. By divine will, Anna Csillag had been struck with a poor growth of hair. All her village pitied her for this disability, which they tolerated because of the exemplary life she led, although they suspected it could not have been entirely undeserved. But, lo and behold, her ardent prayers were heard, the curse was removed from her head, and Anna Csillag was graced with the blessing of enlightenment. She received signs and portents and concocted a mixture, a miraculous nostrum that restored fertility to her scalp. She began to grow hair, and'what is more, her husband, brothers, even cousins were covered overnight with a tough, healthy black coating of hair growth. On the reverse of the page, Anna Csillag was shown six weeks after the prescription was revealed to her, surrounded by her brothers, brothers-in-law, and nephews, bewhiskered men with beards down to their waists, exposed to the admiration of beholders in an eruption of unfalsified, bearlike masculinity. Anna Csillag became the benefactress of her village, on which the blessing of wavy heads of hair and of enormous fringes had descended, and whose male inhabitants, henceforth, could sweep the ground with their beards like broad besoms. Anna Csillag became the apostle of hairiness.