by Daryl L.L. Houston
706: Reiter has (unspecific) nightmares his first night in the village in which he discovers Ansky’s house.
717: Ansky dreams (in 1929) of the white coat of a doctor his lover, Mary Zamyatina, is also sleeping with. She describes the doctor “as if he were Jesus Christ reincarnated, minus the beard and plus a white coat” (the white coat in question).
722: Ivanov, having become successful, sometimes pinches himself to make sure he’s not dreaming.
729: As Reiter reads Ansky’s papers, he reads “Names, names, names. Those who made revolution and those who were devoured by that same revolution, though it wasn’t the same but another, not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.”
736: Ansky dreams that they sky is a great ocean of blood.
737: Reiter dreams of Ansky’s mother being herded off with the other Jews toward death, and he dreams of Ansky walking across country at night, nameless and felled by gunfire. Reiter thinks he was the one who shot Ansky and has nightmares that wake him up and make him weep.
738: Reiter dreams he’s back in Crimea. He shoots his gun amid the smoke of war, then keeps walking and comes upon a dead Red Army soldier. He turns the soldier over to see the face, which he fears (with great dread) is Ansky’s. It turns out to be his own face, which relieves him. When he wakes from the dream, his lost voice has returned, and the first thing he says is “Thank God, it wasn’t me.”
741: Thinking of semblances and of his sister, Reiter considers Ansky, falls asleep, and (explicitly) doesn’t dream.
743: Reiter dreams that he escapes from the Russians into the Dnieper river, where he swims and floats for days and over some distance, into the Black Sea. When he finally emerges from the water to safety, he discovers that Ansky’s notebook has been ruined by the water. Upon waking up, he returns the notebook to its chimney hiding place.
760: Sammer, having been ordered to dispose of the Greek Jews he’s been sent and having begun creating the sweeping and gardening brigades, has a big sense of boredom over the next couple of days. He plays dice and listens with half-comprehension to peasant jokes. The days of inactivity pass, dreamlike.
763: Sammer is riding around in the back seat of his car after the purge has begun, and he falls asleep and dreams that his dead son is shouting “onward! ever onward!”
764: The drunken, soccer-playing boys whom Sammer has enlisted to dig a huge grave can be found huddled in the town square asleep, dreaming (he imagines) about liquor-fueled soccer matches.
766: Contemplating how many Jews he has left to exterminate, Sammer describes the weight of the task, suggesting that fifteen or even thirty wasn’t an insurmountable number, but once you reach fifty, “the stomach turns and the head spins and the restless nights and nightmares begin.”
