The Time of Dyed Hands

Everything is Illuminated is een geweldig boek van Jonathan Safran Foer. Het is ontroerend , grappig en het zette me aan het denken.

Hierbij een fragment uit het boek. Een verhaal wat zo geschreven zou hebben gestaan in een boek over een klein dorpje in Oekraïne.

'The time of Dyed Hands

Occurring shortly after the mistaken suicides, the time of dyed hands began when the baker of rolls Herzog J observed that those rolls that were not watched with a cautious eye would sometimes disappear, He repeated this observation numerous times, placing his rolls about his bakery, even marking their placement with a coal pencil, and each time he would turn quickly away and steal a glance back, only the markings would remain.

All this stealing, he said.

At that point in our historym the Eminent Rabbi Fagel F was chief executor of legal regulation. So as to conduct a fair investigation, he saw to it that everyone in the shtetl was treated like a suspect, guilty until proven otherwise, WE WILL DYE THE HANDS OF EACH CITIZEN WITH A DIFFERENT COLLOR, he said, AND WILL THIS WAY DISCOVER WHO HAS BEEN PUTTING THEIRS BEHIND HERZOG’S COUNTER.
Lippa R’s were dyed blood red. Pelsa G’s the light green of her eyes. Mica P’s a subtle purple, like the silver of sky above the Radziwell Forest’s tree line when the sun set for the third Shabbos of that November. No hands or hues were exempt. To be fair, even Herzog J’s were dyed, the pink of a particular Troides helena butterfly that happened to have died on the desk of Dickle D, the chemist who invented the chemical that couldn’t be washed off, but would leave smears on whatever the dyed hands touched.
As it turned out, a simple mouse, may his memory live close to a stinky tuches, had been sneaking away with the rolls, and no color ever appeared behind the counter.

But they appeared everywhere else.

Shlomo V found silver between thighs of his wife, Chebra, may her behaviour be unique in this and every other world, and said nothing about it until he’d painted her breasts green with his hands and then covered those breasts in white semen. He pulled her naked through the grey moonlit streets, from house o house, bruising his knuckles black-bleu on the doors. He forced her to watch as he cut off the testicles of Samuel R, who, with raised silver fingers, pleaded for mercy and cried, ambiguously, There has been a mistake. Colors everywhere. The Eminent Rabbi Fagel F’s indigo fingerprints on the pages of more than one ultrasecural periodical. The cold-lip bleu of the grieving widow Shifrah K across her husband’s gravestone in the shtetl cemetery, like the rubbing children do. Everyone was quick to accuse Irwin P of running brown hands up and down the Dial. He’s so selfish! They said. He wants everything for himself! But it was their hands, all of their hands, a compressed rainbow of every citizen in the shtetl who had prayed for handsome sons, a few more years of life, protection from lightning, love.

The shtetl was painted with the doings of its citizens, and since every color was used – except for that of the counter, of course – it was impossible to tell what had been touched by human hands and what was as it was because it was as it was. It was rumoured that Getzel G had secretly played every fiddler’s fiddle – even though he didn’t play the fiddle! – for the strings were the color of his fingers. People whispered that Gesha R must have become an acrobat – how else could the Jewish/human fault line have become as yellow as her palms? And when the blush of a schoolgirl’s cheeks was mistaken for the crimson of a holy man’s fingers, the school girl was called names.'