Bohu Stones

There's an image I once read in the Zohar, fairly near the beginning. Something with stones, something with the first thing, the foundation, the most ancient. Avnei Bohu. Bohu Stones. I imagined stones smooth like the ones on the seashore, elongated, smooth, but enormous, lying scattered. There are gaps between them. Through the gaps you see the primordial ocean, the waters of the deep, and in them the Leviathan swims. The water below is black. It feels like before the definitions of sea and land. Like film footage spliced with animation, the way Yuri Norshtein does it.

I see it all from above. As if I'm flying in a drone that came down from a spaceship to gather intelligence on a new planet.

But these stones don't remind me of the Zohar — they remind me of something else. In the Caucasus we called them лядышки — lyadyshki — large smooth sea-stones, elongated, the kind children sit on. This word reaches me before the word stones, before the word Zohar. It's a word from before my personhood was formed.

In Baku on the shore of the Caspian Sea, a child alone at home, the Soviet television on.

Further back still — Mama and Papa bathing me in a basin.

In my childhood I was sent to a Soviet sanatorium for children in Yevpatoria, on the Crimean peninsula. I was there for two months. We walked along the Black Sea shore, in autumn. Once there was the body of a dolphin on the beach, washed up with the tide. Children, autumn in Crimea, a dolphin, лядышки, галька, longing, hovering.

The Caspian Sea and the Black Sea are small compared to the waters of the deep in the Zohar. Those are living waters, primal. But I think the child who stood facing the dead dolphin on the Yevpatoria beach knew something about the waters of the deep that the adult who returns to it now does not know. He didn't know it in words. He knew it in his hands, in the stones beneath him, in the smell of a salt different from the salt of Baku, in the sense that something enormous had swallowed this dolphin and vomited it back to us, to the children, so that we would know.

I want to stroke these huge лядышки. To feel their smooth stoneness. To look through the gaps between them at the Leviathan.

Perhaps all the children who were sent from Central Asia to the shores of the Black Sea were in fact emissaries. Thousands of Jewish, Armenian, Georgian, Azeri, Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek children, dispatched by a blind Soviet system to two months of recuperation by the sea, so that someone would sit on the primordial stones and look through the gaps at the Leviathan.

Now, when I close my eyes and see the stones, I don't know if I'm in Yevpatoria in 1987 or in the sea before Creation. Perhaps there's no difference. Perhaps the Crimean autumn in which I was a child is the same autumn — and the second day of Creation, after the firmament has already been made but there is still no dry land, is exactly this time — when everything is still water but elongated stones are already rising up from within it, Bohu Stones, лядышки, and in the gaps between them, beneath, the Leviathan swims, and waits for his mate.