There was silence again, and Mendel Berda-Stern was once again the object of every pair of eyes. He blew his nose again-he must have caught a chill on his way here-and then said very quietly: “I shall say something that I have been pondering for a long time, in the hope that perhaps your intellects can divine its essence, which has remained a mystery to me. The great Nostradamus, the king of prophets, wrote a prophecy that will not let me rest. This is how it goes:

Whence we await starvation,

Thence welcome we repletion:

The sea with the greedy dog’s eyes

With oil and corn shall us surprise.

“Once more, if you don’t mind,” said Lipót Stern.

He repeated the doggerel.

There was a lengthy pause in the conversation. Leopold Stern removed his pince-nez and wiped it on the edge of his smoking jacket. “This is a tough nut for me to crack,” he muttered.

For me too, thought Mendel Berda-Stern. We are not living in a barbarous age when people put others to the sword for no reason and raze people’s property to the ground. Now a lawful order reigns in society and if a bandit should upset it, the authorities will take the necessary steps.

The Rabbi went over to the window, his hands folded behind his back, and stared out for a while, then solemnly declared: “Within minutes it will be Shabbos. We must postpone our deliberations for twenty-four hours.”

The candles were left to burn all night in every house, since extinguishing them counted as work, as was their lighting. Food was brought in by Slovak servant girls. For the duration of Shabbos Móricz Stern thought it best not even to emerge from his bedroom, thinking it was most appropriate if the day He designated for rest was spent by man in sleep. No wonder that his belly had swollen into a watermelon and was testing his trouser belt to its limits.

Mendel Berda-Stern, Eleonora, and Hami were allocated two rooms on the ground floor of Móricz Stern’s residence. Their staff were lodged in the servants’ quarters. Mendel Berda-Stern gave an account of the discussion only to Hami, desiring to spare his expectant wife such unnecessary excitements. Hami did not understand: “Mendi, my dear, does that mean we should now be afraid?”

“Ach, stuff and nonsense. Every county has its handful of youngsters who have a drop or two too many and go on the rampage a bit. There’s no point in getting too worked up about that. Don’t you worry at all, my sweet.”

He himself, however, was not at all convinced that the fears of the Stern family were entirely without foundation. That night he set about completing his own computations on the basis of Morin de Villefranche’s methods, focused on a given geographical location and a specified period of time, on the basis of the ephemerides. When taken together with his own horoscope, the results had in the past often helped him to considerable winnings in the casinos. He knew that in this wise he could glean some indication of the direction of the future, only he was never certain whether it referred to the week, month, or year to come. Whether this way or that, the position of the stars boded no good. In the twelve houses the eight astrological bodies were rather unpropitiously arrayed: the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Especially Saturn, which formed a horrific quincunx with Mars, and all this in the twelfth house… O woe! If he were now on one of his money-raising trips, he would give the gambling dens a wide berth.

The candles gave off sooty eddies in the direction of the wooden inlaid ceilings. It was first light outside. Mendel Berda-Stern felt totally exhausted, but suspected he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. He took out the thicker of the two Books of Fathers, and read a page or two here and there, though to be honest he knew most of the text by heart.

He had a sudden hunch, which further multiplications and divisions seemed to support. He realized of a sudden that it could not be an accident that the ability to read the stars had fallen to him. He knew that his astrological sign was Libra, and his father’s, Szilárd Berda-Stern’s, was Virgo. Regarding the determination of the point where the ecliptic intersects the eastern horizon, that is to say, in determining the ascendant, he was also well versed. His was Scorpio, his father’s Libra.

It began to dawn on him that his ancestors’ zodiacal signs followed the pattern of the Ptolemaic duodecimal system: Otto Stern was Leo, Richard Stern was Cancer, and so forth. But while he was able to calculate the ascendants, these too followed in the ancient order of astrology, always one sign further on from the birth sign. That is why his ascendant had been Scorpio, and his father’s Libra. Following this rhythm his grandfather’s must have been Virgo. If that is so, that of any of the ancestors could be worked out mechanically, following the sequence of the zodiacal signs. So for example Kornél Csillag’s star sign could be only Aries, and his ascendant Taurus. It was not possible to support this by casting a horoscope, since only his father’s and grandfather’s exact moment of birth was known to him.

In the light of this, it is striking that his vision of the future is exactly right: his child, Sigmund Berda-Stern, will arrive on November 14, not by chance but in compliance with this mysterious rule, for the sign of Scorpio was the next one, which the astrologers of olden times still called Eagle. A Scorpio is a man of extremes, either very good or very bad, but at all events passionate, unreflecting, at war with his instincts-we shall have our hands full with him. At the same time, accepting the above, it is beyond question that his ascendant is Sagittarius, which can exercise a great deal of moderation on the qualities of a Scorpio.

He could scarcely wait to bring all this to the attention of the assembled males. His convoluted explanation of the unpropitious angles of light was not received as he had expected. He did not get even as far as the horoscope of the ancestors. Dumbfounded faces verging on the hostile stared back at him. Lipót Stern was the least impressed: “Are you seriously suggesting that instead of our ancient faith we should believe in the patterns that the stars form into in the sky?”

“It is not my suggestion, but astrology has for millennia looked on matters this way.”

“Do you not think that the matters of the sky are also moved by the Everlasting, and His will is not so easily divined?”

Mendel Berda-Stern had no answer to this.

“Our topic is different just now,” said Móricz Stern in a conciliatory tone. “Let us discuss what we should do!”

Mendel Berda-Stern was not prepared to say another word, so offended was he. I told them the truth and they have sealed up my lips with mud, he thought. When the Rabbi again brought up the issue of family participation in the conference, he volunteered to join him. He had firmly decided that independently of the gathering of Hungary ’s reform Jewry, he would certainly pack his bags and take the cart to Nagyvárad with his wife. No harm can come of that. He thought it natural that Hami would go with them. It was the end of October when they finally departed for Nagyvárad.

In Nagyvárad it was rain and shine together. The languid rays of the sun were bathed in heavy sleet.

Despite strenuous efforts by Lipót Stern, the conference came to no significant conclusion. The majority of the representatives of the Jewish communities feared that whatever organization they established, they would bring down upon themselves the wrath of the authorities and of the monarch. Better to keep quiet and lie low.

“Shall we just resign ourselves,” said Lipót Stern, “to the fact that from time to time we shall be struck by those who hate us? To the fact that despite the clear import of the letter of the law we shall never feel we have equal status in our homeland? To the fact that we shall have to be afraid forever because of our origins?”