How It All Goes Down
The Dial, 1941-1804-1941
- As you can tell from the chapter heading, this one is going to jump in time a bit.
- An unknown woman takes off her panties and gives them to an unknown man.
- It turns out the man is Safran (i.e., Jonathan's grandfather, whom Augustine saved from the Nazis) and it is his wedding day.
- He goes to the Dial, which is a statue in the town square, as part of a "sacred ritual that had been fulfilled by every married man in Trachimbrod since [Safran's] great-great-great-grandfather's tragic flour mill accident" (16.8).
- We get a quick glimpse of great-times-three grandpa before the accident: he's the Kolker, and he married Brod, but he's frustrated that they never seem to talk.
- He gets a new job when Brod is seven months pregnant at the flour mill, which is cursed! ("May your bread never rise again!")
- One day a saw blade spins off its bearings and embeds itself vertically in the Kolker's skull…
- But somehow, he lives. (Like the dude with the railroad spike in his head.)
- Sadly, he has brutal mood swings, and abuses Brod (and others) verbally and physically.
- He ends up exiling himself to a bedroom, and Brod can only see and talk to him through a hole in the wall.
- They even have sex through the hole, as though this is a skeevy public bathroom in the 70s.
- His health declines fast. The doctors say he has consumption, although we're wondering if the hole in his head doesn't have something to do with it.
- Brod gets the clever idea to change his name from the Kolker to Safran to trick death, but it doesn't work and he dies on the same day the baby is born.
- She doesn't know that he's dead when the baby is born, so she names the baby Yankel, "like her two other children" (16.270). (It's Jewish custom not to name the baby after a living relative.)
- After Safran's death, she does what any mourning widow does: she has his entire body bronzed and erected as a statue in the middle of the shtetl.
- They call it the Dial because it tells time by the sun pretty accurately.
- People rub various parts of his body for luck until the bronze wears off and they have to rebronze over the corpse.
- By the time Safran (back to where we started the chapter. Whew) kneels in front of the Dial 150 years later, it barely looks like the same man.
- Anyway, Safran gets married (this is the womanizer Safran who likes to get with all the shtetl ladies), and there is much rejoicing.